By Charles Coursey, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
In a feature here on KERA I heard that a consortium of student athletes, coaches and educators in Maine recently discovered what today seems to be an ancient relic: an ideal of sportsmanship.
They didn't have to dig deep. Facilitated by the University of Maine, the group simply got together and talked candidly among themselves, taking stock of the insanity surrounding certain youth sporting events - bands of parents pressing for the removal of coaches short of wins; athletes abusing drugs and alcohol; out-of-control parents and fans screaming at coaches, athletes and each other, embarrassing their children and setting poor examples.
Eventually they came to consensus on a nugget of ancient wisdom: that sports CAN instill useful social values: discipline, respect, responsibility, fairness, trustworthiness and good citizenship. They wanted this for themselves. So they drafted what amounts to a sports constitution - an inspirational guidebook to govern community sports activities. They call it "Sports Done Right."
Personally, I believe we Texans could benefit from some of this ancient wisdom. Of the many I'm aware of, I offer these two cases in point:
A friend was coaching Little League in Carrollton, delivering a pep talk on sportsmanship that he hoped would inspire his young players. Suddenly the soft spring air cracked brittle with expletives. One parent conked another with a lawn chair. Inspirational, indeed.
On another occasion an umpire asked my coaching friend to help ratchet down the verbal abuse his assistant coach was spewing. When approached discreetly, the assistant coach offered this sportsmanlike solution: "Well, if the ump doesn't like me yelling at him, maybe I oughtta just kick your " (expletive deleted).
The origin of this attitudinal cancer seems easy enough to trace. It metastasizes from that huge tumor on our public consciousness that we call "professional" sports - where the lowest drives of human nature collude to perform taxidermy on sport, then sell us the animatronic spectacles we see on TV.
Given the economic stakes riding on every game, no wonder the emphasis on winning. And given the pervasive influence of "professional" sports on workplace culture, no wonder some parents get carried away. Still, "no wonder" is no excuse. The sooner we recognize that the "professional" model actually has more to do with carnivals than with sports, the better off we'll be.
What's best in a culture so often gets buried this way, suffocated by clever exploiters who claim they're only giving consumers what they want. The crying shame of the matter is, they're right. We'll have to decide we really want something better for ourselves and for our kids before the time-tested benefits of sports can be reclaimed.
To this end, adopting a program like "Sports Done Right" might provide a good excuse - and the disciplinary framework - to recapture the "ancient" soul-filling sense of sport that lies within us, buried beneath layers of soul-killing lowest-common-denominator acculturation. From at least the time of ancient Greece, sports have been practiced as a means to lift civilization above the more brutish aspects of human character. Surely we don't want to be the ones to lose the wisdom and reverse the trend.
Charles Coursey is a writer from Mesquite.
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Listen to the April 6, 2005 Morning Edition story, "Maine Aims to Ease Pressure on Student Athletes"