Behavior among pro athletes

Can it get any more maddening?

It’s bad enough to hear everything that is going on with the steroid catastrophe in major league baseball these days.

It was bad enough watching Mark McGwire drown in his own humiliation a few years ago, and now it’s Roger Clemens fighting for his storied career. Don’t even bring up the Barry Bonds stuff anymore. Everybody knew from the start what that was all about.

Yeah, steroids have wreaked havoc on several of this nation’s multi-millionaire athletes for well over a decade now.

As bad as this steroid thing has become, I’ve been even more incensed at how these so-called heroes continue to act on the playing field.

I don’t watch many NFL games these days and don’t watch any NBA games, but what I saw Sunday in the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants football game really made my skin crawl.

Anyone who attends a high school or college football game knows that the players are under close scrutiny by the officiating crews when it comes to unsportsmanlike conduct -- taunting, trash-talking, excessive celebration, and everything else involving a disrespectful attitude.

Time after time, you see high school and college players flagged for such, yet these same young men sit before a TV on Sundays and watch older and supposedly much mature men play the game like it was invented for them and them only. These professionals not only get away with it, but the officiating crews mostly seem totally oblivious to it and the coaches seem to think nothing of watching their players act in such an absurd manner.

It’s ridiculous to watch an NFL player make a routine tackle and then rise from the turf pounding his chest and expecting the entire stadium to know exactly who it was that made such an outstanding play. It’s like if he had not made that stop, the entire stadium would have collapsed and casualties would have run into the thousands.

It seemed like on every other play in Sunday’s Cowboys-Giants game that players wound up facemask-to-facemask long after the play was over saying no telling what.

In some cases, they were taking swings at each other and getting by with it.

I won’t even try to bring up all the mess that Terrell Owens has brought to the game with his end zone antics, because as far as I’m concerned, that in itself practically ruined the NFL.

What really got my goat Sunday came when Giant running back Brandon Jacobs scored on a short touchdown run and then ran as hard as he could out of the end zone and threw the ball as hard as he could at the play clock. He left us no other reason to believe that he was attempting to inflict serious damage and was given the right to so by scoring a touchdown.

If that wasn’t as flagrant a violation of sportsmanship, (not to mention the law) as I’ve ever seen, then let’s just let these extravagantly paid professionals officiate the games themselves. Nobody else seems to want to be in charge of them.

I think it’s very sad when these same men were in high school, people tried their best to teach them to be respectful toward others and to always hold themselves accountable.

In college, they supposedly learned about what lies ahead for them in the real world.

Unfortunately, the NFL and other professional sports are not the real world.

Some people say the junk fills up the stadiums ... that it’s what a lot of people want to see. If that is the case, then it’s becoming totally out of control.