Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Wide World of Bad Sports



I was listening to some disembodied voices on ESPN radio this morning, talking about an incident involving a star athlete.  What happened was, Star Athlete did something not very sportsmanlike. 

Now, before I launch into the meat of the story, let me take a little side trip to address these talking heads.  Who are these people?  Why do they demand my respect as “experts?”  For the most part they are not athletes, but reporters who have made the move from newspaper to the more lucrative radio and TV, and yet they speak as though the world is waiting on the edge of our collective seats to hear them spout their irrefutable wisdom and prophecies on all things sports.  

Now back to our regularly scheduled rant.

So, one of the talking heads says he doesn’t believe that what Star Athlete did or said was all that bad, because as he put it, “Look…(they always say “Look…” before erupting in uncompromising intellect)…it was just Star Athlete being Star Athlete.”  And it struck me that what he was saying was that because Star Athlete is a jerk, it’s not bad sportsmanship.  Because, after all, that’s just the nature of Star Athlete. So he defines bad sportsmanship as actions coming from someone who is not a star athlete. 

How pitiful are we that we must accept childish, boorish, rude, offensive, unsportsmanlike behavior from someone because they are a Star Athlete?

The other talking head read an email from a listener.  “This guy asks, ‘Is this the sort of behavior you want your kids to model?’”  And the first talking head (quickly establishing himself as the Alpha Talking Head) responds, “Look…these aren’t kids…they’re professional athletes…let’s treat them that way…”

Huh?  Wait, he went on to admonish parents to be better at parenting and to tell their kids, “Look…these are professional athletes…and professional athletes act differently than you do.”

At the risk of being redundant—again, Huh?

Are we so enthralled by Star Athlete and all star athletes, that we are to ignore bad sportsmanship—no, not ignore, ACCEPT bad sportsmanship, because these people are, after all, Star Athletes?  And it’s up to us to simply teach our kids that what Star Athlete did is NOT bad sportsmanship, it’s just Star Athlete being Star Athlete, and they act differently?  Seriously? 

Look…(see what I did there?)…it’s not about Talking Heads and Star Athlete.  It’s about what we are willing to put up with in the name of professional sports entertainment.  It’s about what we want our kids to learn.

I remember not long ago when another star athlete with a reputation for bad sportsmanship was asked about being a role model.  He said, “I am NOT a role model!”

Yes you are, Star Athlete.  Whether you like it or not, you ARE a role model.  

You’re just not a good one.

Friday, May 18, 2012

40 Years...It's Apparently Official.

In honor of my Class of 1972, I've put together a bullet-point list of what was going on our senior year, from September, 1971 to June, 1972.  With the help of Wikipedia, which, if we've learned ANYTHING from Michael Gary Scott, we know is faultless, here are a couple of bullets from each month of our senior year.

Our last couple of years in secondary education were momentous times for the world in general.  We were truly part of an amazing generation; the tail end of what is now referred to as the "Baby Boomers."  For a time, we ruled marketing and television programming.  Then came Y.  And they ruined everything.   I don't even want to TALK about X.

But we had our moment in the sun.  For we were seniors once, and young.

(Disclaimer: I've chosen not to dwell on the negatives, and focus more on the less dark moments from that year.)


September 8, 1971 (Wednesday)
•        In Washington, D.C., the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is inaugurated with the première of Leonard Bernstein's Mass

September 12, 1971 (Sunday)
•        A concert by Funkadelic is recorded, to be released 25 years later as Live: Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan – 12th September 1971

October 13, 1971 (Wednesday)
•        Born: Sacha Baron Cohen, British comedian, in Hammersmith, London

October 16, 1971 (Saturday)
•        John Lennon and Yoko Ono move to 105 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, New York City.
November 8, 1971 (Monday)
 •        Led Zeppelin release their officially untitled fourth studio album; it goes on to become the biggest selling album of the year (1972), the band's biggest selling album, and the fourth best-selling album of all time

November 24, 1971 (Wednesday)
•        During a severe thunderstorm over Washington, a man calling himself D. B. Cooper parachutes from the Northwest Orient Airlines plane he hijacked, with $200,000 in ransom money, and is never seen again (as of March 2008, this case remains the only unsolved skyjacking in history)

December 4, 1971 (Saturday)
•        The Montreux Casino burns down during a Frank Zappa concert. The event is memorialized in the Deep Purple song "Smoke on the Water". The casino is rebuilt in 1975

December 28, 1971 (Tuesday)
•        In the final of the 1971 Tangerine Bowl, held in Orlando, Florida, the Toledo Rockets of the Mid-American Conference defeat the Richmond Spiders of the Southern Conference 28–3

January 4, 1972 (Tuesday)
•        The first scientific electronic pocket calculator, the HP-35 was introduced by Hewlett-Packard and priced at $395. Although hand-held electronic machines, that could multiply and divide (such as the Canon Pocketronic) had been made since 1971, the HP-35 could handle higher functions including logarithms and trigonometry

January 25, 1972 (Tuesday)
•        In a nationally televised address, President Nixon revealed that Henry Kissinger had been secretly negotiating with North Vietnamese leaders, and announced "a plan for peace that can end the war in Vietnam". North Vietnam rejected the proposal the next day

February 12, 1972 (Saturday)
•        TIME Magazine won the right to publish excerpts from Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, a day after cancelling declaring that it was a hoax. TIME had discovered also that much of the work had been plagiarized from author James Phelan

March 10, 1972 (Friday)
•        Broadcaster Larry King was cleared of charges of grand larceny that had been brought by a former business partner. His arrest in December 1971 nearly ruined his career, and King would work at various radio jobs before getting a nationally syndicated talk show in 1978. In 1985, he would launch Larry King Live on CNN

March 11, 1972 (Saturday)
•        Carnival Cruise Lines made its very first voyage, as the Mardi Gras departed Miami for an 8-day cruise ... and ran aground on a sandbar. The 530 passengers, most of whom were travel agents and their families, continued to enjoy themselves until tugboats dislodged the ship the next day, and the new company received national publicity from the incident

April 12, 1972 (Wednesday)
•        The table tennis team from the People's Republic of China arrived in Detroit to begin their tour of the United States

April 25, 1972 (Tuesday)
•        Photographs that developed "right before your eyes" were introduced when Edwin H. Land of the Polaroid Corporation demonstrated the SX-70 film and camera

May 13, 1972 (Saturday)
•        Weeks after the Apollo 16 mission had departed, an 1,100 kg meteorite crashed on the Moon and left a crater "as large as a football field"
•        Died: Dan Blocker, 43, actor ("Hoss" in Bonanza)

May 27, 1972 (Saturday)
•        The Opryland USA theme park was opened in Nashville, Tennessee. The park, which attracted more than two million visitors annually at its peak, operated for 25 years before closing at the end of 1997

June 1, 1972 (Thursday)
•        459 Seniors from Jefferson City Senior High School in Jefferson City, Missouri, completed the walk around the track bordering the fabled football field of that high school to receive their diplomas.