Notable players going pro, or somewhere, before their time.

This is Myron Rolle in high school, in Princeton, NJ:

I'm not going to get all Thom Brennaman here about Rolle, because I've never met the guy, and Jeremy Schapp already put Brennaman to shame, anyway, with his "Outside the Lines" piece comparing Rolle to Deion Sanders, Einstein and Mother Teresa rolled into one (I'm assuming Schapp does not subscribe to the Christopher Hitchens view of Mother Teresa, although that would dramatically change the tone of that fluff piece). Rolle has been properly feted already.

But: After graduating in two-and-a-half years with a pre-med degree; spending his summers studying overseas, working with stem and cancer cells as well as obesity awareness in Florida's Seminole tribe; being named All-ACC; and, right, earning the world's most prestigious academic scholarship (you may have heard about that), the New York Times reports Monday night that Rolle is foregoing his final year of eligibility and delaying a shot at at the NFL to earn a one-year master's degree in medical anthropology in Oxford, England, oldest university in the English-speaking world and alma mater of Hugh Grant, among others. Rolle will then enter his name in the 2010 NFL draft, resume his football career, attend medical school, open a clinic in the Bahamas, purchase the island and sire a utopia of freakishly talented, self-actualized Olympian scholars between mediations with world leaders on ritual pilgrimage for Rollean enlightenment.

Some things Rolle is not: Prime Time, the smartest man of the century, a saint to the poor. He's not the first great athlete to earn a Rhodes Scholarship, not by a long shot. He's just an ambitious kid using his time and prodigious talent very wisely, which, it turns out, is all it takes to become a real action hero if you don't mind the paperwork. So congratulations, Myron, and word to the wise: I know you know the drill over there, but you don't have to tell them you're Canadian anymore.