UGLY BEHAVIOR TRACKS BACK TO US.

Byline: Steve Bisheff Orange County Register

Call it the common sporting malaise of the '90s.

Everywhere you look, professional athletes seem to be going off, producing ugly, violent scenes, bizarre, uncontrollable behavior, often acting childish or churlish, if not both.

Dennis Rodman delivers a series of head butts to an official. Mike Tyson, only recently released after serving time as a convicted rapist, whines that he is underpaid after earning $30 million for less than seven minutes' work. Cedric Ceballos selfishly deserts his Lakers team and teammates in the middle of a season.

Albert Belle rails at a female reporter and later harasses a group of kids on Halloween. Any number of NBA players can be seen bashing somebody over the head on a nightly basis. Barry Bonds goes after an opposing catcher in an otherwise tranquil spring training game.

OK, so the public's basic question is, what exactly has gone wrong with the jocks of today?

The answer is probably simpler than you think.

You want to know who is really responsible? We are.

We created these athletic monsters, with their swollen heads and bloated egos. We have coddled, cajoled and nurtured them, almost from childhood, making them think they are special, convincing them they are different, telling them they do not have to play by the same rules.

And then when they do grow up - chronologically, anyway - and act like this, we seem shocked. We shouldn't be.

We are responsible. We are the guilty parties.

We are the ones who take the 10-year-old with a blur of a fastball and allow some coach to cheat to get him on the best team in a Little League draft.

We are the ones who let a gangly eighth-grader who just happens to have the ability to dunk a basketball get recruited by a collection of ambitious high school coaches, as if he were some hotshot college prospect five or six years older.

We are the ones who look the other way as college boosters lavish well-paying offseason jobs and under-the-table gifts to athletes on our alma mater's football or basketball teams.

``There is absolutely no doubt that we created all of this,'' said Thomas Tutko, the noted sports psychology expert and author at San Jose State. ``What we have really done is dismissed athletes from the responsibility of their behavior.

``The fact of the matter is, they haven't been living by rules because there aren't any. We'd like to believe sports is an area of sanctuary. What it may have become, instead, is a breeding ground for pathology.''

Picture, if you will, the average professional athlete of the '90s. He is maybe 25 years old, meaning people have only been making a fuss over him for, oh, probably the past 17 or 18 years of his life.

He was the star in Pop Warner or the local boys' club basketball league. The kid who got all the attention, the one whose name was in local newspaper headlines before he graduated from elementary school.

In high school, the acclaim would only magnify, from teammates, from coaches, from neighbors, and yes, from members of the opposite sex. He was the chosen one, the envy of everyone in his class.

College recruiters would come swarming, taking him to dinner, driving him around in expensive cars, making promises many of them could never keep. By the time he actually enrolled in a university, the focus would spread to larger newspapers, radio talk shows, ESPN SportsCenter.

Most of these kids are now celebrities before they finish their freshman year in college. And they are multimillionaires long before they would ordinarily be receiving degrees.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many arrive in the pros with a built-in attitude to go with their megabuck contracts. Or why they have a jaded view of how the rest of the world works?

They think they are special because, for so much of their sheltered lives, that's what we have been telling them. That is how we've been treating them.

How does all this allow them to fit into a modern team concept? The answer is that it doesn't.

They don't think ``we.'' They think ``me.''

``We have given players more money and power than their bosses,'' Tutko said. ``We've backed ourselves into a corner and we don't know how to back out.''

So when a Rodman gets irritated, feeling officials are picking on him, he walks over and casually head butts an official, not caring that it will result in a suspension, not concerned that it could have a major effect on an otherwise spectacular Chicago Bulls season.

Or when a Ceballos apparently gets irked over his playing time or his reduced role on the Lakers, he promptly takes a hike.

Sadly, as much as we might not like or endorse any of this, we'd better get used to it. The spoiled, self-centered athletes of today are only doing what we have molded them to do.

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Photo: The public may be responsible for the self-centeredbehavior of athletes such as Cedric Ceballos.