By Jason Pike, Reporter
The Sports Page NL
Over the last few days, I’ve pondered and struggled wondering if I should even respond to or even acknowledge the actions of certain individuals and their response to recent articles. Some an angry display on our Facebook page.
As someone who grew up Gen X and grew up in what some arguably consider the last great generation of the 90s, things were different. If you had problems, you settled them one-on-one. If you were offended by something you shut your mouth and agreed to disagree instead of creating a cancel culture to try to destroy a person based on your inability to accept a different opinion.
And the same has happened with sports. Unfortunately, everybody gets a participation medal or acknowledgement because they were there these days. The whole concept of earning that medal or ribbon went out the window in the early days after the millennium it would seem.
The whole concept of sports is and always was derived from the art of competition dating right back to the Greek and Roman ages.
Mind you, now we have more stringent rules these days and things are far less violent but at the end of the game the goals still remain the same in that we are chasing the feeling of victory.
The camaraderie that arises out of the competition forcing us to be our very best selves. But somewhere along the way we lost sight of that and it became less about being our very best selves in competition and became a need to be acknowledged for mediocrity.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about inclusion but inclusion in sport needs to come with some guidelines. Yes, everybody should get to play. But there are levels to this.
Not everybody can be a winner first and foremost. That idea needs to be accepted and acknowledged but I feel that we’ve strayed a long way from that.
Once upon a time you had to tryout to make a team. Growing up in the knowledge if you try out for a team there was a set amount of people allowed on a roster and if you weren’t in that set amount of people you didn’t get to play on that team.
Well, we adjusted for that, rightfully, and we created different levels or tiers so if you didn’t make the A team there was a level two or three team you might be competitive in. All good. The more that get to play the better.
How ever many people want to play can play but you do so within your own skill level cohort. High performance competitive sport isn’t always fun for everyone. It’s a lot of pressure. Even some very talented athletes can’t take the pressure of high performance competition.
It requires hard work and a drive to win. Those who have what it takes, talent, skill, dedication and the desire to win …win. And someone loses. That’s how sport and competition work. The winners celebrate.
Ironically, people learn more by losing. If you don’t win you reflect, learn what went wrong and work on that for next time. To be better. There are many cultures that profess you win by losing. But that’s philosophy.
This brings me to my most recent article in which small town mentality reared it’s ugly head.
I recently reviewed every game of the annual Dunne Memorial Academy senior boy’s varsity basketball tournament. The story came to the eyes of several different parents who chose to turn the comments on our FaceBook page ugly, questioning my character and suggest that I should be ashamed myself.
I read back the article to myself on five different occasions trying to figure out what was so wrong and offensive to them. I know what I had written so with the idea that maybe I was too close to the article I asked other sports minded folk to read my article and ask them if they felt I have written anything offensive. All of them said no.
No, because it wasn’t a personal article. It was an actual breakdown of all the games of the tournament.
The more I read the comments the more I realized what it was all about.
Some of the host committee felt that my article wasn’t positive enough, there wasn’t enough sunshine and rainbows. I didn’t booster how good of a job the hosts of the tournament did with this event.
No offense is intended here but that wasn’t my goal nor my job as a reporter. I was there to do a simple game breakdown. Game for Game. Not review the organization.
Then others, from another small town school, implied that it was offensive when I said that the school had a good team but as games went on the weakness in their fitness or training regime may be an issue as game play became increasingly challenging for them and ultimately their undoing.
They twisted my words to make it sound like I had been body shaming them which wasn’t the case in any way shape or form.
My comment was strictly the observation that there was a good team here but if they applied themselves a bit more to the fitness portion of their game training, they would be a threat and not a pushover. This is a legitimate observation and fair comment in any sports reporting.
See; Dunne Memorial Basketball
The childishness was taken to a whole new level when these parents(?) went out of their way to call my child’s schools principal to let their thoughts be known about my article telling her that I was body shaming high school kids and she, having not read the article in question, was severely concerned.
Here’s where things often go bad in our society these days.
Our “Karen Culture”, a sense of unjustified entitlement, rears it’s ugly head for no good reason. Just someone’s misguided sense of privilege and entitlement with a touch of self aggrandizement. They thought they could get back at me by causing trouble for my child his school principal. That’s fucked up.
I’ve done many game reviews over time and a comment was made that had I been reviewing Gonzaga versus Holy Heart that nobody would bat an eyelash at any such review.
I don’t understand why people take things so personally and get so butthurt over a game review.
There are two teams. One team wins and one team loses. Accept it because that’s reality and that’s relative to everything in life.
I think the biggest problem is that too many people have too much time on their hands and the only thing they can do with that time is be offended, insert themselves into other people’s business and get on the internet to express how offended they are …and everyone else needs to know it.
For that I make no apologies. The funny part is it’s not the players that feel offended. It’s the adults. They are offended on their behalf about not only what I wrote but also what I didn’t write. I didn’t write what they wanted.
I am a writer. I, as a news media representative, exercising my right of free speech and the right of the freedom of the press to speak and publish.
I will continue to write my game reviews and articles from my point of view as I see them so my best suggestion is to everyone out there in Sports Page land if you can’t handle the truth, you should maybe find another source of material to read.
