The other day there was a story that was popular for a few minutes on the sports talk stations I listen to. A high school student from New York scored 113 points in a game, setting a new record for girls basketball. The previous record was held by Cheryl Miller, a star at USC who played her best games before there was a WNBA.
The final score of the game was 137-32.
My girls are too young to play competitive sports, but I hope that no punk coach has the audacity to do that in any game they might ever play.
The girl had 58 points at halftime. The game was over. She should not have been playing the game. The coach decided instead to let her go for the record. The coach for the other team said her kids simply stopped playing defense in the second half – the losing team is having a bad season, with only four wins thus far, and the coach likened the feat to picking on a disabled person. The winning coach should have thought about not humiliating the other team instead of thinking about getting a record for his star player.
I would not have blamed the losing coach for doing what the coach of South Torrence (CA) High did, when Morningside High’s Lisa Leslie scored 101 points in the first half of their game, in 1990: not send the team out for the second half of the game (that coach was suspended for doing so). What’s the point of being little more than a punching bag for someone else’s big night? High school basketball is not Division IA college football, where blowing out your opponent is the key to your standings in the coaches’ poll. You’re supposed to learn about sportsmanship and teamwork and all of that stuff. The message is: “it’s okay to humiliate your opponent if you’re going for a shot at history.”
I saw one editorial that talked about how the kids from the young girl’s school could have a great day to celebrate something historic, that they would talk about this event for the rest of their lives? What about the kids from the losing team and their school? Well, apparently it’ll be “cool” for them, ten years down the road, to be a part of sports history. Right. I’m sure it’ll rank up there with all the other embarrassing moments that will happen to those kids just by being in high school.
Again – this is high school. This is not the pros, where men (and women) are paid lots of money to take whatever comes. Everybody on the Toronto Raptors is getting a decent salary in giving up 81 points to Kobe Bryant. They’ll move on. It’s part of the job description. Most of the kids playing in that game are not going to make a living playing pro sports. And, hopefully, none of them will ever be as shown up on the job as the Raptors were.
Full disclosure: I’m a competitive nut: I hate to lose, so much so that I am banned from playing Monopoly in my house. The last time my wife and I played I wanted the game to go on and on until I owned every property and she had nothing. We’re teetering on the brink of not being able to play Scrabble, too (but I think we might try not keeping score next time to see how it goes). I would give Monica from Friends a run for her money in the category of Highly Competitive.
But as a parent, I want my kids to learn the value of playing, the importance of practicing, and the pleasures of the process, and not the result. This kind of thing seems very much out of fashion.
The truth is, we love winners. We value bottom-line numbers. We deify coaches who give us pithy expressions like “nice guys finish last” (Leo Durocher), “you learn nothing from losing” (Bobby Knight, a man who once threw a chair out onto the court in anger at a referee), and Vince Lombardi’s famous “winning isn’t everything: it’s the only thing.” All these men have their supporters, including their former players – and many of those players have become great citizens. But these obsessions with winning at all costs and shooting for records at the expense of overmatched teenage opponents also contribute to things like the Enron and Tyco scandals.
I want my girls to grow up in a world where fairness has at least some meaning.