Bits & Pieces

Sports Reality As Painful As Reality TV

By Kim J. Harmon

You know, sports used to be an escape – an escape from reality. Now, only too often, reality creeps in and ruins everything.

Whenever I think of football I can hear John Facenda in my head and see the clips of NFL Films from the 1950s and 1960s but then, like a film strip that gets tangled in an old projector, the whole thing gets screwed up with thoughts of Rae Carruth (arrested for conspiring to kill his girlfriend in 2001), Ray Lewis (a suspect and material witness in the murder of two men in 2000) and now Sean Taylor of the Washington Redskins, who was murdered this week at his home in Florida.

Whenever I think of basketball, I always remember my old NBA Bas-Ket game with the cardboard backstops, the two plastic rims, and the holes on the cardboard court where a ping pong ball would sit over a metal arm until you tried to flip it into one of the hoops. But those memories are stained as the reality of what the NBA has become and what my favorite team, the New York Knicks, have become seeps in like raw sewage.

Whenever I think of baseball, I can remember being there when Dave Righetti of the New York Yankees tossed a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox (actually, I wasn’t watching the final strikeout of Wade Boggs because I was outside playing baseball) and I remember Bucky Dent hitting the home run into the screen at Fenway Park and now those memories are tarnished with plague of steroids and human growth hormone that have taken over the game.

I suppose that’s why I still play video games and Strat-O-Matic© baseball. It’s the escape from a sports reality that is becoming harder and harder to avoid.

1 1 1

Sorry if I’m going to be boastful here, but if one of your kids does something you’re proud of, then you should shout it out.

My son Ben, 15, is a sophomore at Wilby High School and this week he and one of his best friends, Julio, tried out for the basketball team. Now, Ben played in middle school and last year played on the Wilby freshman team and scored maybe 60 points on the season and figured he had a pretty good shot to make the jayvee squad.

I did, too. I thought he had a great shot.

But he didn’t make it.

Of course, that’s not why I’m proud of him.

When he came home that night, he was angry (as anyone would be who thought that some lesser kids were picked over him) but he was also reasonable and – gasp! – adult about it (that’s right – he was adult about it). The first thing he said after telling me he didn’t make it was, “I’m happy Julio made it.” And then after talking it over for a few moments he said, “I’m going to talk to the coach tomorrow and ask him what I need to work on.”

Ben didn’t stomp his feet. Ben didn’t curse out the coach or call him an idiot – even though he spent several weeks during the fall doing off-season weight training with other team members.

Ben didn’t ask me or his mom to call the coach, either.

What he thought about was trying again as a junior.

And that’s why I’m proud of him.

Ask any athletic director at any high school and he or she will tell you that the few days after cuts are made are probably the worst, what with the endless phone calls with irate parents and the handful of certified letters raking the offending coach over the coals because, apparently, he or she wouldn’t know talent if it came up and bit ‘em on the ear lobe.

Now, I certainly know my son isn’t the only one to take being cut from a team so responsibly and so reasonably, but – sadly – it is the kind of behavior I don’t hear a lot about.

1 1 1

Now I’m sorry to be shifting gears. Watch that transmission!

Last week I came to the realization that humanity, collectively, has gone insane and the ones responsible are those who fuel the rampant commercialism of the holiday season.

This is really not about Black Friday – when many retail shopping centers opened at 3 or 4 am with throngs of people lining up outside their doors; where some shoppers had the unmitigated gall to tell a teenage girl to look for a particular gadget down some aisle knowing full well it was behind the counter and only a few were available; when I-87 in New York was a veritable parking lot on both sides of the highway because of the high volume of cars attempting to exit at the Woodbury Commons stores despite the fact that there was a two- to three-hour wait just to get into the parking lot.

No, this is about an Associated Press item tucked into the upper left corner of a daily newspaper. It was the story of a kidnapped seven-year-old boy who was killed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, because his family was unable to come up with the $680 (about half what the average family manages to make in a year) the kidnappers demanded and U.N. peacekeepers warning that kidnappings are expected to increase in the very impoverished country in the next few weeks as gangs seek money to pay for Christmas gifts.

Is that lunacy, or what?

I apologize for bringing that up, but that makes me sick. It should make everyone sick.

1 1 1

The downhill slope got a little bit slipperier recently when I turned 45.

It is not so disconcerting realizing how close I am to 5-0, but it is disconcerting realizing how many times I have been saying, “When I was a kid …”

I say that a lot and it troubles me.

I used to laugh at my parents and my grandparents when they would cluck about something – the games we were playing, the toys we wanted, the clothes we were wearing, or the stupid haircuts we wanted to get.

It has become a cliché to remember one of your grandparents saying, “You know, when I was a kid we used to walk two miles in the snow to get to school.”

I say stuff like that.

When my kids want to get a PSP I tell them about Pong.

Remember Pong?

And whenever Waterbury cancels school because a snowflake dropped on a street somewhere and took too long to melt, I tell my kids, “When I was a kid we used to go to school while it was snowing and come home when there were three or four inches of snow already on the ground.”

That’s the truth. Of course, those were in the days when many kids walked to school. These days, kids get bussed across the street.

I can’t believe it. I’m only 45 and I’m already crotchety.

1 1 1

You know what, I would hate to be the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles or Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

With Boston and New York in the same division, those three other teams now have no chance at all at making the playoffs ... ever.