Word: sportingly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crowd of over 11,000 tee-shirted lacrosse aficionados and an ABC Wide World of Sport's team (the announcers in ugly yellow blazers) were waiting just before 2 p.m. Saturday to answer the question of why anyone with their wits about them would be in Providence, R.I. over a sunny spring weekend. The answer came from the two teams, though at first it looked like Bud Beardmore's Terrapins were going to take the plaques and trophies back to the Chesapeake for a second straight year. By halftime, it was 7-2 Maryland and Cornell had to have wished...
...hero is hardly new. Such disaffected jocks as Dave Meggyesy and Jim Bouton have uncovered more clay feet than there are statues. The facile comparison of football and the Viet Nam War was one of the shibboleths of the '60s. Even the littlest leaguers know that professional sport is hard, fast and punishing. But now there is something more than imagery at stake: a danger that the whole perception of games is being altered...
...fans. A report commissioned by the Ontario provincial government on hockey violence in Canada concluded: "When the evidence strongly indicates that there is a conscious effort to sell the violence in hockey to enrich a small group of show business entrepreneurs at the expense of a great sport (not to mention the corruption of an entire generation's concept of sport) then one's concern grows to outrage...
...outrage is well placed. Few fans weep for the professional athlete, even when he is hospitalized. He is young, heavily muscled and even more heavily compensated. A six-figure income does much to assuage pain and indignity. The essential concern is with that "entire generation's concept of sport." A fan, an owner or a player who comes to be lieve a pitcher has the right to injure a batter may as well believe that Bobby Fischer has a right to kick over the chessboard when he is threatened, or that order itself is an outmoded idea...
When moral rules are bent, more than sport is mangled. In the end, it is not the players who are cheapened and injured, nor even the event itself. It is the children and adults who watch and then repeat what they see on the playground and in the stands - and perhaps in their lives. The Bad News Bears is not yet a sports documentary. But what if it be comes one? Would any title be more fitting than that of another movie: End of the Game? Stefan Kanfer