After finishing up my workout in the gym this morning, I prepared for my flights today (sitting in O’Hare right now on a delay), and ended up watching some SportsCenter in the locker room. The top two segments mentioned: the NFL and its fine on hard hits over the weekend and Vancouver’s Rick Rypien hitting a Minnesota fan during an NHL game.
I found both stories to be a bit ironic. One of the commentators went into depth on the hypocritical nature of the NFL–how the league has sold “Hardest Hits” DVDs on its online store and also replays hits over and over again in replays or in pregame montages. The commentator basically said that suspension might be a solution, but fining players for the very thing it profits from seems hypocritical. Soon after the NHL segment aired. It opened with a fight from earlier in the game. My friends and I always joke about hockey fights. It’s the only sport (that I know of) that allows players to flat out punch each other for a few minutes. The officials skate around it and wait for someone to fall to the ice.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Rypien had any right to punch that fan. He was definitely in the wrong in that situation–his own teammates admit that. Still, I find the partial support of violence to be interesting.
In the case of the NFL, I believe there needs to be some space for safety, but I do see how the league benefits from the hard hits.
And this got me thinking about what we allow and how that shapes our experience.
When I was in high school, my PE teacher, Coach Smith, didn’t allow anything negative in his classes. While girls PE always had the idea time to swim in the beginning and the end of the school year, guys PE always seemed to swim in December or January (Did I forget to mention that 99% of all HS swimming pools are outdoors?). Yes, the pool was heated, but the outside wasn’t.
Coach Smith had a simple rule: behave like gentlemen. If you were on his basketball team (which I wasn’t), this meant you wore a shirt and tie on game day and you tucked in your shirt. If you saw him in the hallway, he’d smile and say “Hello, Mr. Maurer” and you would respond “Hello, Coach Smith.” In his PE class, it meant one major thing: no profanity.
This was especially tough during the swimming unit. Guys would come outside and freeze (hey, 40 degrees is cold in California). Coach Smith would do a quick attendance and let us hop in the warm pool…. unless… someone cussed.
Unfortunately, this was often. A guy would use words to describe exactly how cold it was. If you were already in the pool, Coach Smith would have the whole class get out as he discussed the beauty of the English language and our ability to utilize it to its fullest extent. Yes, it was cold, but I never felt like I was in any threat of my healthy. This exercise tended to last the first 5-10 minutes of the first three class periods of the unit with the same few guys running at their mouth. Coach Smith never pointed out which guy had used the profanity. The class never turned against one guy. The guy simply realized it wasn’t a smart thing to do. Within three days, profanity was eliminated from a PE class because it simply wasn’t allowed.
After swimming, we’d end up doing some other sport, but even in football or softball or soccer or basketball, we didn’t use profanity and guys treated one another with respect.
I think professional sports need to decide what they want to be and streamline what they allow and what they promote. The NBA began to crackdown on some of this a few years ago. The NFL and the NHL need to potentially follow suit depending on what they want to be.
Honestly, I think baseball needs to look at things as well–not the violence, but the game itself. Baseball games have become increasingly long. My childhood team, the San Francisco Giants, are currently in the playoffs and I could honestly care less–the game is too slow on TV. The league allows batters and pitchers to take too many calls or practice swings. It’s pace needs to be increased.
And then there is us…
What do we allow in our organizations and schools? What do we permit and is this helping or hurting our desired environment and image? What do we allow in our own personal lives? What we permit affects who we are and how we interact… let’s make sure it is something we actually want to put forth.