When I was growing up, sports stars were just people.

Sure, we looked up to them, but only for their ability, not for their personal lives.

Football players would regularly go for the biff – it was almost expected when they were on the field.

Cricketers were admired during the summer – but really, if you didn’t follow the sport, chances are you didn’t know their names (outside of the obvious, of course)

Swimmers were respected when the Olympics rolled round, but weren’t the superstars we see them as today.

Tennis players spat the dummy and were laughed at for it.

While sports stars were people to look up to if you played that sport, or someone to be proud of when sport hit the national agenda, they weren’t people who dictated our behaviour.

And then suddenly, we all wanted to be like Mike.

The Dream Team was the biggest thing to hit our shores – at least in my primary school – even if it belonged to another country.

Everyone was wearing Chicago Bulls singlets, pressuring their parents for Nike Airs, picking up basketballs and dreaming of being the next Michael Jordan.

Back home, we started paying more attention to our own sporting heroes

While football stars used to have day jobs to support their families who came to cheer them on while they played on the weekends, making a life out of running with a ball was becoming easier and easier.

Super League may have left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, but it was really inevitable.

I mean, who can begrudge someone trying to make as much money as they can in the limited time they have to play the game before getting out of bed in the morning starts becoming impossible?

The money and the sponsorship deals seemed to start sprouting up everywhere and suddenly, sports stars were fair game as celebrities.

Some of them started living like rock stars, so it was only a matter of time before we put them on pedestals.

It’s still a struggle for many of our top athletes to get the sponsorship they need to follow their dreams to the top.

But for a select few, the money is there before they have even finished high school, and with it comes all the recklessness of a kid in a candy shop.

And we tend to paint all athletes with the same brush and just assume they are all living the high life.

Which is one of the reasons we tsk while watching them crash, shake our heads at the latest indiscretion and feel a little superior that even though they make trillions of dollars, at least we are not on assault charges/drink-driving charges/entering rehab/insert other indiscretion here.

Except we are.

Hundreds of Joe and Jane Blows are going through the courts every day on those sorts of charges and we don’t bat an eyelid.

But put sporting hero in front of the alleged offender’s name and all of a sudden we all have an opinion and the lines between right and wrong, black and white are clear-cut and easy to determine.

We created the celebrity culture surrounding sport, we fed the monster, but we still smugly rejoice when one of its stars is brought down in a blaze of glory.

Just because someone is particularly talented at something doesn’t mean we should treat them differently when it comes to following the rules of society – which includes judging them.