Morality in Sports: Everybody's Problem

I really haven't spent very much time worrying about the moral ins-and-outs of athletics in general—perhaps because using so much "body English" to reverse the W & L fortunes of the Cardinals has used up most of my energy.

But the request to address this represents a challenge—and I will give it my best shot, so here goes:

Let's Start at the Beginning

Starting from when we are very young, why do we play games (including sports)?

Short answer—"Sports are 'pretend life.'" Youngsters can learn life's lessons from day-to-day involvement in games of various types without losing their jobs or risking their lives or futures. (For example, be a poor teammate and see how long it takes for you to be picked in choose-ups).

Leave it to Adults to Screw Things Up

Don't get me wrong—there are terrific people involved in coaching who have helped kids.

But too many parents (often wanting to reverse mistakes they made in their earlier lives) live vicariously through the athletic exploits of their children. So they send their Little Precious to gymnastics or ballet class in the hope she'll turn out to be the next Margot Fonteyne or Nadia Komenich.

Or they'll encourage their 10-year-old strikeout artist to throw a splitter (regardless of the risk to his young arm).

When I was a kid, our youth sports leagues were tied to our nearby elementary school. Every baseball player got a T-shirt and cap. If we were short a right fielder, we'd congregate under Richie's window and beg his Mom to let him play in that morning's game.

That was it. Now we have "tag days."

Every time a parent is forced to invest time and effort to hang around shopping mall entrances with canister in hand, it somehow gives them a sense of "ownership" in the team. It entitles them to scream at the refs or demand that the coach play his kid, or encourage a coach to act like Vince Lombardi.

Add to this, the incentive—especially in low income homes—to turn an athletic kid into a future "cash cow" and you've got a million individual disasters waiting to happen.

Bad Habits Move Upward

Values in the home when kids are young move right up the food chain into junior high and high school.

I live in an affluent high-tech community where you'd think athletics would be kept in proper perspective. Instead, we recently had a top-to-bottom change in school administration—from the Supe all the way down—as the direct result of a coach-to-player incident.

How could that happen?

Well...a coach felt that one of his players bucked team policy so he suspended him from the football team. The parents bitched through political channels to the school administration, and the player was reinstated.

The coach and his entire staff resigned in protest. The teacher-coach and other school staffers who supported the coach were demoted or reassigned to marginal educational positions.

Political infighting among school administration and staff became the norm. Things got so fouled up that the school board finally stepped in, reinstated the demoted staffers and cleaned house from the top down.

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