This column by David Aaronovitch seems apposite to something we were talking about the other day – the cult of celebrity, or in Leo Braudy’s memorable phrase, the frenzy of renown. It’s not just a matter of electing conspicuously unqualified people to powerful jobs on the basis of nothing at all apart from pure Fame, though that’s more than bad enough. It’s also what fame, or perhaps a certain kind of fame, can do to the people who have it.

an American sports sociologist, Jeff Benedict,…had been asked by sports authorities to collect data to contradict the perception that many athletes were committing crimes against women. Benedict interviewed 300 athletes, victims, lawyers, cops and groupies and discovered that, unfortunately, the perception was correct. In 1995 and 1996, he revealed, there were 200 cases of college and professional football and basketball players arrested for abusing women.

Could that have anything to do with the exaggerated hero-worship of athletes that is, surely, one tributary of the cult of celebrity.

Redmond has pointed out a common feature in many of the cases that she has dealt with. “At some point the athlete has said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He feels he’s entitled to her, and if she says no to him or embarrasses him, he puts her back in line.” We can do what we like, say the young footballers. There is nothing that is forbidden to us. We are gods. And our perception of ourselves as gods is endorsed by the purblind fans, by the groupies, by the amoral administrators who only care about what we do insofar as it affects their investment.

Just so. All the drivel that gets drivelled about football players and basketball players as ‘heroes,’ all the sweaty exhortations to athletes to be good ‘role-models’ – why? Do we exhort pharmacists or real estate agents or insurance peddlers to be role-models? Why athletes? Is there some connection between skill at throwing or catching a ball and, say, ethical responsibility or consideration or generosity? Not that I can see. Do correct me if I’m wrong, but the connection seems entirely arbitrary to me. Maybe instead of reasoning that because we make such a big deal of athletes, therefore people look up to them, and so we should beg them to use their influence well, we should stop making such a big deal of them (or at least a different kind of big deal), so that people won’t confuse them with real heroes. Fame and human decency are unfortunately not the same thing, they’re not even particularly close neighbours.