Kids’ play
Don Coldsmith
Monday, April 16, 2007
NOT LONG AGO on the TV, we watched a team of youngsters who couldn’t have been older than middle school playing soccer. There’s nothing wrong with the way we’re looking at the sports. These two soccer teams were using hundreds of dollars’ worth of uniforms and equipment. Multiply that by how many soccer teams, as well as basketball, baseball, football, etc., are making this the most important effort in their lives.
To what useful purpose? There was a time, a generation or two ago, when athletic competition was used to teach sportsmanship and honesty. This becomes hardly a recognizable factor when we watch “athletes” who are paid millions of dollars to play kids’ games revealed as drug users, perhaps sellers.
Of course, there has always been admiration for good, honest performance, all through history. Also, pride in accomplishment for such activity. Consequently, growing youngsters, especially boys, were urged into athletic competition. When I was a kid, Babe Ruth was the hero to whom every boy looked. Not just because of his skill at baseball, but that he was a nice guy. And, the great Indian athlete, Jim Thorpe, at football or any other sport, was a hero.
There were also some fictional heroes, such as “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” (and a skilled athlete). His picture was found on cereal boxes, with suggestions that he had achieved his success by eating their brand of breakfast food. It also came on the radio, advertising with a song. One flaw that I noticed, even as a kid, was their punch line: “Every fella can be a champion.” Even I could figure out that there’s only one champion and the rest will be also-rans. The goal was, or should have been, the benefit of competition, in learning not only skill, but sportsmanship.
To back up a few years before that, on the playground at grade school, there were some pretty intricate games. For boys, it was usually marbles, but maybe mumblety-peg, played with your pocket knife (carried by nearly all boys and men).
Girls, except for “tomboys,” played hop-scotch on a diagram chalked out on the sidewalk. Some school yards might have a swing.
But sooner or later, it would come around to baseball, more accurately, softball, but it all depended on what equipment was available in the neighborhood where you lived. Most games were not at school, but in a vacant lot. Usually, somebody would have a baseball and bat, or more likely, a softball. It didn’t matter much to the kids involved. The game was the same. Eventually, an old softball was more like a handful of rags and somebody’s mother would try to stuff it back together and stitch it shut. (That didn’t work on a baseball, though).
In one place where we lived, there was only one bat available. It was important to use a wooden bat with the insignia straight up, because if it struck wrong, it might break the bat. There was only one bat in that neighborhood and the theory proved true. We managed to (roughly) shape a two-by-four to approximate the dimensions of a baseball bat, which served until Christmas time, when Santa Claus took pity on the pitiful “team” and brought one of us a baseball bat.
But, back to my original thought, here. I still approve of competition in sports and it can be useful in teaching sportsmanship. In most of the schools it is serving this purpose, especially in our part of the country. Maybe that’s partly our rural background.
But, I really begin to balk at the level where honest sportsmanship is neutralized by the dollar sign and things degenerate to the point that terribly expensive seats are filled by a small segment of our population: Those who can afford to buy tickets to watch millionaires play kids’ games, in facilities costing billions of dollars. There are some, of course. But it does seem like a shame.
A long way from Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth.
See you down the road.
Author and columnist Don Coldsmith lives in Emporia.