Deion Does Kids Disfavor

Deion Sanders surely understands there are hazards to his brand of celebrating, such as earlier this football season when he intercepted a pass against the Atlanta Falcons at the end of the second quarter and raced down the sidelines, looking over his shoulder and taunting the opposition bench, and cakewalking into the end zone, where he embarked on a little soft-shoe, and in the process pulled a groin muscle.

It put him out of the game for the entire second half.

It didn’t keep him, however, from being named the NFL’s defensive player of the year, a rare honor for a cornerback, and from helping lead the San Francisco 49ers into the NFC’s championship game against Dallas Sunday. It also didn’t keep him from going ahead with a hiphop video and CD album he cut, “Must Be the Money,” and a single of the same name that is being released this week.

In the video, it is obvious why he doesn’t do even more dancing on the field. He might break an ankle. Deion Sanders is a sensational athlete, but dancing and singing, he makes painfully apparent, are not his game, regardless of how otherwise convinced he seems to be.

Sanders’ foray into show business would simply be a humorous curiosity, or another reminder of his exhibitionism, if it weren’t for the negative message he sends.

“Must Be the Money” is a paean to Neon. That is, it exalts the gaudy and trumpets the ostentatious. It is one thing to do it for its own sake, or for Neon Deion’s, but it is another to diminish some important cultural goals, such as education.

Seen on the video, Sanders is tooling about in fancy cars, fawned over by slinky damsels and immersed in the glitter of night life. He raps the lyrics, “Hey, my library card gone change into credit cards.” And, “Diamond Rolex with Gators on my feet/I got a pair for every day of the week/(And my hair) My hair is done my fingernails too/Six buttons down and I don’t know what to do/Must be the money.” And, “You know I can’t go wrong - must be the money.”

Not all people or athletes are required to be role models on the level of Arthur Ashe or Bill Bradley, but in an age when young people need positive reinforcement, it seems the least some of the most visible and followed of our citizens can do is not be hurtful.

If Sanders wishes to, say, unburden himself of his library card and replace it with commercial plastic, that’s his business. But is it necessary to announce this to school kids he expects to buy his music?

In another sense, our lives are made more colorful with colorful characters, like Neon Deion. Not everyone can or should be quiet or unself-serving stars like Barry Sanders or Troy Aikman. And not everyone has to make a video with a message as important as Shaquille O’Neal’s “Biological Don’t Bother,” in which he praises his stepfather for raising him and spurns his biological father, who abandoned him and his mother when he was an infant.

Like others, Sanders has given some of his time for community causes. Like others, Sanders may be a role model for the hard work and the thought he has put into becoming one of football’s finest players. On Saturday, for example, the Chicago Bears, those supposed Monsters of the Midway, were so fearful of Sanders they ran virtually no plays to his side of the field, a case of the Bogyman Cometh.

But it is yet another thing to have riches, and flaunt it in this fashion. How, in fact, are most of the kids who buy the videos going to get that Diamond Rolex? Or Gators? Or, as he says, “My Drop Top Benz?”

By dint of schoolwork? By working in stores after school? In almost every case, it won’t be by becoming a professional athlete, a one-in-a-million occurrence. Are the streets, then, the answer?

Over the years, I have attended such moving events as “Operation Breadbasket,” started by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and minority church groups with young people, in which they sought self-esteem by proclaiming, “I Am Somebody.”

Neon Deion, however, chooses a different tune, that he is Somebody because he has Some Things. It may be hip-hop, but it is no soul.

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COMMENTARY BY IRA BERKOW NEW YORK TIMES