Dylan Hernandez Since Hernandez gave in
to peer pressure and didn’t write about boxing this week, he
welcomes any comments regarding last weekend’s big fight. He can be
reached at [email protected].
A pair of high school basketball players scored 100 points in
separate games last week and the sporting press went crazy.
The media didn’t go nuts praising these kids, Cedrick
Hensley of Heritage Christian Academy near Houston and Dajuan
Wagner of Camden (N.J.) High, who had 101 and 100 points in their
respective games. Rather, writers took the opportunity to spout
self-righteous rants regarding sportsmanship.
Hensley’s scoring run came in a 178-28 trouncing of The
Banff School, which didn’t have a player over 6 feet tall.
Hensley is 6-foot-4.
Wagner, meanwhile, was able to get 100 points against Gloucester
Township Tech because Camden used a full-court press until their
All-American point guard reached the century mark.
How wrong, everyone cried.
Concerning the two blowouts, the Dallas Morning Star’s
Kevin B. Blackstone wrote, “It had nothing to do with the
spirit of competition, sportsmanship or teamwork, which a couple of
high school kids hopefully will realize years from now when they
look back at their exploits.”
To that, I ask: Why? So what if they ran up the score?
I’m not necessarily advocating the needless humiliation of
opponents. Running up the score, in my opinion, isn’t worth
the effort. If I were a coach, I probably wouldn’t do it.
It’s not worth the risk of injuring your starters, and I also
think guys at the end of the bench will practice harder if they are
given some playing time.
But running up the score certainly isn’t evil and nothing
to be remorseful over, as some suggest.
These days, it seems as if we believe that every person is
entitled to unconditional happiness, which, of course, is a load of
crap. If anyone is the least bit uncomfortable ““ even without
good reason ““ we’re quick to apologize. When
we’re in their situation, of course, we expect them to do the
same for us so that we can go through life without any emotional
distress.
These complaints about the two routs are ridiculous. It’s
not like anyone forced the losing teams to go out there to get
blown out of the water. Anyway, what’s wrong with losing by a
lot? Everyone has to lose at some point in their life. Might as
well get used to it.
“It was disrespectful to badly overmatched
opponents,” Blackstone wrote. “It was an affront to the
ideal of athletic competition.”
No, it’s not.
Sports are barbaric.
I think it’s stupid how people try to moralize sports.
I’m not much of a moralist to begin with, and even if I were,
I wouldn’t be able to find anything moral about sports (by
the way most people define “moral,” at least). When I
think about two athletes competing against each other, I picture
two giant pandas in the bushes fighting over a female giant
panda.
In sports, the goal is to win. Your purpose as an athlete is to
beat your competition and prove yourself to be the better giant
panda (or if you’re part of a team, you want to be part of
the better group of pandas). Many athletes say they compete just
against themselves, but most of them have to tell themselves that
because they’re not good enough to win.
This barbarism, though, is what I like about sports. People get
to release these savage impulses in an environment where no one can
get really hurt. In “real life,” too, these impulses
are released all the time in various forms, but people are
pressured into masking them by society’s code of
morality.
Sports offer a venue in which a person doesn’t have to
hide his ambition and aggression. We as fans see this and are
touched because we want to let out these aggressions ourselves. The
bold aggression becomes beautiful.
If one feels like figuratively pounding the living bejesus out
of someone else in a game, let them. It’s better that the
bully comes out in a game than at your workplace.
I’m sure some will argue that the need the winner has to
annihilate his opponent isn’t healthy. If this were real
life, I would agree. Why drop an atomic bomb when your enemy is on
the verge of surrendering?
But this isn’t real life. It’s sports. A blowout
loss won’t kill anyone. You can lose badly and still wake up
the next morning to find you still have a pair of legs.
One of my colleagues said that some athletes who were taught
that embarrassing their opponents was fine would become people
without compassion. I agree. But such individuals, who maintain the
same mind-set regardless of the situation, are lost causes. They
don’t reason very well and will take any ideology to the
extreme.
I quite vividly remember the last time I was on the receiving
end of a thrashing. I was 11 or 12 and my soccer team lost 8-0. I
went home that day and cried for an hour. I felt bad for awhile,
but within a week, I was over it. And thanks to that loss, and a
string of others that followed, I realized losing wasn’t that
big of a deal.
And as my dad says now, “At least you found out what you
were no good at.”
So here I am writing. And someday the next big hit will come,
and then I’ll do something else.
When that happens, I’ll know how to take it.