Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Shorter

Shorter’s sentence stumbles in a way that actually strengthens its message: irony is hard to say cleanly when you’re talking about real consequences. The repetition - “The irony of that is, what makes it kind of ironic” - reads like someone circling a thought they’ve lived long enough to distrust the easy version of. He’s not delivering a punchline; he’s trying to pin down a moral glitch in the celebrity-athlete machine.

The intent is cautionary. Shorter is pointing to the gap between what success feels like from the inside and what it looks like from the outside, especially to kids. “Professional athlete in particular” matters: sports fame is sold as meritocracy with a highlight reel, a rare arena where talent + work supposedly equals destiny. That story is irresistible to young people because it’s simple, visual, and constantly replayed. The subtext is that success doesn’t just reward you; it recruits you. The moment you “become successful,” you’re drafted into being an emblem - and children “emulating these stars” aren’t copying a training regimen so much as absorbing a worldview about status, shortcuts, masculinity, consumption, and what a good life looks like.

His last clause - “do have a different perspective” - is understated on purpose. It implies a soft alarm: their perspective isn’t merely “different,” it’s distorted by distance, marketing, and the unnatural scale of fame. Coming from Shorter, an endurance athlete from a pre-social-media era, it also reads as a generational warning about how the athlete has shifted from competitor to brand - and how kids inherit the brand’s values before they’re old enough to question them.