Though the drive to get attention may always have been present in high school and college sports, in other years the athletes have at least kept their mouths shut on the subject in order not to appear to be “hoggish” and, at least in some instances, to sublimate their ambitions into a framework of teamwork in order for their entire team to be successful. In hogging the show, a selfish athlete can engineer defeat for his team, since one guy usually can’t bring off a victory alone. Witness a flashy open-field runner in football – though never deigning to do any blocking himself – amounting to much if the linemen in front of him don’t spring him loose consistently. Or, there’s the hotshot in basketball with a good eye for the basket, but who doesn’t bother playing defense or passing-off to an open teammate who has a much better position for a shot. They may shine but their teams may lose.
Here is a segment in the Lexington Herald-Leader Sports Section of 05 January: While applauding Crawford's breakout game, [Ramel] Bradley acknowledged his desire for recognition. "I want to get more limelight out there," he said. When asked why he wanted more attention, Bradley flashed his infectious smile and asked, "Doesn't everybody? I think everybody wants to shine." Oh really? Limelight? When players make remarks like this – not an infrequent happening – a coach should cringe, take stock of what he’s allowing his players to do, and then make some decisions relative to whether or not he should allow a teenage/immature player to talk to the media. The same holds true for the Evening News sports segments on TV that invariably feature athletes speaking before the cameras, with every possibility of their placing their feet squarely in their mouths, both substantively and with respect to their use (or misuse) of good grammar, thus exhibiting their school’s disdain for actual education. One wonders how Bradley’s teammates feel, after seeing his remarks spread all over the state. Limelight, indeed!
Bradley’s remarks exactly mirror the overall atmosphere of sports on both the amateur and professional levels. Though it may sound discriminatory or even racist to say so (and few sportswriters/sportscasters have the guts to handle the subject), this breast-beating, skip-walking, duck-waddling, chest-banging, helmet-thumping, soft-shoe-shuffling and general hamming it up for the crowd even if after only a very routine play is made (like merely tackling an opponent or catching a pass) comprise an atmosphere brought to the games, for the most part, by African Americans some years ago, with a lot of whites now copycatting in the same “hey, look at me” fashion, “I’m the greatest.” Perhaps Cassius Clay (aka Mohammed Ali) helped to set the tone when he pronounced himself the greatest. These are simply facts, however, with no racist twist in mind. A worse facet is the fact that African Americans are excellent athletes; they should be discouraged from cheapening their accomplishments with this abominable grandstanding. Can one even conceive of Jackie Robinson, a former army officer and one of the greatest second-basemen ever – with great class breaking the color barrier – engaging in such silly and degrading buffoonery?
The villains in this piece are the coaches. There was a time when a football player, after making a touchdown, simply handed the ball to the referee and trotted off the field. This is what the coaches taught him to do, or he may have done it simply as a natural instinct, boastfulness and braggadocio culturally unacceptable in his society, both things considered beneath contempt for a gentleman/sportsman. Coaches can stop this self-promoting egotism and teach their young athletes how to act. They don’t bother, probably because they don’t care…or maybe they’re afraid of seeming to be politically incorrect. Television has helped by its usual corrupting of nearly everything it touches. For example, where cameras were once panned away from the athlete making a fool of himself in his celebrating mode, they now home in on him, making him into a “survivor” icon, just part of the current meat-market in TV entertainment.
By contrast, young men and women the same age as college athletes function in the military on a disciplined life-or-death basis every day (not fun and games) in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but, when questioned about their duties and whether white, black or any other nationality, simply shrug and insist that they’re just “doing their jobs, Sir,” or “Ma’am.” Unlike the egotistic athlete who jumps up in the stands after making a play so the spectators can tell him how great he is or runs ten yards past a tackle he’s made so everyone can see his hop and skip or his duck-walk and recognize his superiority, these GIs, far from calling attention to themselves, just call facing bullets and bombs all in a day’s work and expect nothing in return.
It’s all up to the coaches. They’ve let the games turn into circuses instead of the serious business of honestly winning – and sometimes losing – humbly and magnanimously. They consider taunting and teasing and making fun of the opponent all in a game’s play…and this, too, is disgusting. The coaches are disgusting. Sport is now disgusting, no matter how fine a face the TV and print “analysts” try to put on it. They, too, are disgusting, not least because they don’t have the guts to tell it like it is…and how it should be.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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