It's Embarrassing

It is embarrassing, sometimes, to be an American. It's bad enough to be perceived as arrogant bullies in international politics, but, for goodness sakes, do we have to be obnoxious in international sports as well? A friend told me that the Japanese newspapers have been filled with articles about the behavior of the USA in the recent World Baseball competition. Not only did we request to avoid playing Cuba in the early rounds -- because we thought they were too competitive -- but American umpires gave the appearance of making biased calls to help America win. The world saw us as projecting a "win at any cost" attitude. And then finally, after the USA's elimination, Japan's winning game was given small coverage in US newspapers. "If the USA doesn't win, who cares" was our apparent attitude. So, once again in sport, the concept of play was sacrificed on the altar of winning-is-everything.

That belief, of course, fuels the recent steroid controversy. Win, earn the big bucks, and break records by pumping up your body. Money, fame, domination -- these are the values our professional athletes model for our young.

It seems as though every week we read of a new sports scandal -- drugs, crimes committed by athletes, rapes and assaults perpetrated by professional and even college athletes. And not just football thugs, but heavens to Betsy, members of the Duke University Lacrosse team who have been accused of sexual assault and rape at a party. Often colleges, students, college grads, and pro-athletes (who went to college for at least a while) will be interviewed and it is shocking to listen to their inability to handle the English language. Few of them seem capable of putting one sentence together without three internal "you knows."

But is this surprising? Not really, when universities bring athletes to college as semi-professionals who are clearly there to play ball and not to waste time attending classes or writing papers. The colleges are subsidizing their tuitions in order to have winning teams. Winning, winning, winning. And it often, starts at the elementary school level with fanatical coaches and parents yelling at their kids to win, win, win. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Last week my daughter Julie, a surgeon in Portland, told me of her son's kiddy league basketball game. The coach's son is the team star, but toward the end of the game the coach noticed everyone on his team had scored except Julie's son and one kid on the other team. The coach quietly spoke to the other coach and both teams began looking for ways to enable these two kids to score. When each boy had scored, the crowd went crazy; everyone was cheering -- not for anything to do with winning -- but for the joy of a game being treated as a game; for sportsmanship; for encouraging everyone on the court; for the satisfaction of seeing every kid succeed. Julie's eyes got misty as she told me the story. Would that the world of sports offered such stories as the norm rather than an exception.