ESPN has a great article about athletes and the military. Pat Tillman is a true hero:

A member of the elite Army Rangers, Tillman presumably is on the ground somewhere in the splintered country of Iraq. Deployed in early March along with the rest of the 75th Ranger Regiment, he and his comrades are working to liberate Iraq from the grip of Saddam Hussein.

Tillman, at 26 years old, left a three-year, $3.6 million contract on the table to enlist in the Army with his brother Kevin after the 2001 season. Tillman will make no more than $17,000 this year. He is believed to be the first NFL regular to leave the game for military service since World War II, when 1,000 players served and 23 were killed.

I love this quote:

Like Reynolds, Dennis Mannion has seen both sides. He is the associate head football coach at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prep school in Wallingford, Conn., and a former player at Notre Dame. He also won two Purple Hearts with the U.S. Marines for his heroic work in the 1967-68 Siege of Khe Sanh, in South Vietnam. Sixty of Mannion's fellow Marines died in that extended battle.

"I think there was such a backlash to those Hollywood a-- h----," Mannion said. "I mean, it took us three weeks to get it done over there and it takes, what, nine weeks to pick an 'American Idol' or vote somebody off the island? Maybe more people, athletes included, will decide to do their part.

"Saddam has been a tyrant, and we're the only people willing to deal with him. If Sean Penn loves him so much, let Saddam go live at his house."

And of course your idiot quote:

And while there has been an outpouring of support for the U.S. troops from athletes in all sports, no other high-profile professional athlete has followed Tillman's selfless example. In fact, former Cardinals teammate Simeon Rice, now a member of the Super Bowl champion-Tampa Bay Buccaneers, disparaged Tillman in an interview on Jim Rome's radio show last month.

"He really wasn't that good, not really," Rice said. "He was good enough to play in Arizona, [but] that's just like the XFL."

After several more promptings from Rome, Rice allowed, "I think it's very admirable, actually. You've got to give kudos to a guy like that because he did it for his own reasons. Maybe it's the Rambo movies, maybe it's Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, whatever compels him."

Simeon Rice would've done nothing for the Bucs this year, if not for Warren Sapp. The True pampered athlete, Simeon Rice.