I'm sorry, that's not who I am

Its the middle of the week and we've been treated to another athlete apologizing for whatever offensive words, gestures or behaviors he was involved in over the weekend. Now, a lot of the national media outlets feel these apologies are disingenuous and half hearted. Hey, maybe they are. But, we all know these athletes are urged by their respective organizations to go do damage control. The disingenuous apologies don't bother me because I understand they do it because they have to. I don't necessarily agree with it, because I don't think you should apologize if you can live with your actions. Why apologize just to make someone else feel better? If you can live with yourself it shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks. Having said all that, I do have a problem with the athletes playing the "that's not who I am" card. Yes dear, that is exactly who you are. It may not be who you are all the time, but it is who you are in certain situations and that's not always something you should feel bad about. There are things that can happen to all of us in life that will cause us to do things we may not do under normal circumstances. If we feel threatened, or violated or just frustrated by someone, they could provoke us to do things we may not be proud of one day. Most of us have the luxury of not having it be scrutinized in the media because let's face it, we're not "famous". Some of the things these athletes get lambasted for are just completely ridiculous because most sane human beings might react the same way if they were in that situation. But unfortunately for professional athletes, image is everything and a lot of media personnel tend to take the "Holier than Thou" route when covering these stories rather than the empathetic route. If you athletes genuinely feel you did nothing to be sorry about, don't waste your time or mine coming on television reading something your publicist wrote. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the wrong time and nothing you say can make amends for that.