2232 Sportsmanship

Friday, January 23, 2009

A friend is all het up over the Covenant School/Dallas Academy high school girl's basketball game. Wants the Covenant coach fired. Briefly, the Covanent School stomped the hell out of Dallas Academy, beating them 100-0. Dallas has a total of 20 female students (120 male), and only 8 on the girls' team. They haven't won a game in four years. At halftime, the score was 59-0. The Covenant coach kept the starting players, and they continued to push throughout the second half. Their supporters were also rather loud.

Ok, it wasn't very sportsmanlike. In fact, it was pretty much nasty and unnecessary. The Covenant school authorities and the coach have apologized, and have voluntarily forfeited the game.

I think I know what happened. In girls' high school basketball, 100 is rare, and I think they just saw their chance to "steal the baby's lollipop" so to speak. Temptation is a bitch.

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This all reminded me of the first, last, and only sports event I attended at my college. The college won the state wrestling championship year after year. Nationally famous for wrestling. It was THE sport at that school.

No other college in the state had come anywhere near them - until this particular year. This evening was the final evening of the state championships, and it was being held at our school, and the other team was very very good. It wasn't going to be the usual walk in the park.

So everybody went to the gym that afternoon. I didn't want to go but got talked into it. Things went back and forth, tied, until it came down to the last match. The winner of that one would win the championship for their school, they could take it away from us for the first time in more than a decade. (Or something like that. Anyway, it was a very big deal.)

The guys faced off, and grappled a bit, and then the kid from the other school landed on the mat awkwardly, and we all actually heard his forearm snap.

A timeout was called, the kid went to the side with his coach, there was a lot of fuss and discussion, some kind of pneumatic splint was put on his arm (like a balloon, somebody said it was chilled), and then the kid went back out to the mat!

I couldn't believe it! He was going to continue!

So then they started again, and the wrestler from our school went straight for the kid's arm. And that's the way it went. Our guy grabbed the arm and twisted, pulled, bent, and pounded it. He wasn't even wrestling - he was just attacking the arm. The referee didn't stop it. It went on and on, and the kid screamed with every twist. "Our side" of the stands was chanting "Work on the arm! Work on the arm!" It was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my life.

I was also standing and screaming, but I was screaming "Leave his arm alone! Stop! Stop it! Not the arm! Not the arm! If you can't beat a one-armed man fairly you don't deserve to win!"

When it went on and on I got hysterical, and friends dragged me out - with me still screaming the whole way.

For a long while afterward, there were people who wouldn't talk to me in the lounge. I was a traitor. Didn't I understand how important it was? They seemed to feel that the important thing was to win - that HOW didn't matter. There were very few people who agreed with me, and that troubled me for a very long time.

I blame first the kid's coach. The coach should not have left it up to the boy to make the decision, because the amount of pressure on the kid was enormous. The coach should have pulled the kid and taken the forfeit. He should not have allowed the torture to continue.

I blame our wrestler and our coach second. There's no reason that our wrestler could not have won without torturing the arm, because if he couldn't beat a one-armed man he didn't deserve to win anyway.

I blame the referee (or whatever he's called). He had the power to stop it, and didn't.

To this day, I wonder about the kid, and whether his arm healed ok. Or whether his arm has been messed up ever since. And I don't know or remember who won. It never was important to me.

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The worrisome registered letter waiting at the PO, that I worried about yesterday, turned out to be from an acquaintance in Australia. I don't know why it was registered.
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