Posted: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 12:00 am
High school sports are a great thing in lots of ways. But one of the downsides is that some of us get so emotionally involved that we abandon our usual courteous ways, at least for a time, when we get involved as part of the crowd.
As reported in the sports section Saturday, emotions in the stands boiled over during Friday night's basketball game between South Albany and Mountain View high schools in Bend. According to accounts from people who were there, the home crowd heaped scorn on the visitors until somebody could take it no longer and a fight erupted. Our reporter covering the game, sports writer Jesse Sowa, said the taunting was going both ways before the shoving began.
We've all been to high school games where the crowd - at least some in the crowd - got out of hand. This is nothing new. It has been going on for years in professional sports, where the other guys have always been bums and the umpires idiots who don't know up from down, much less in from out. But when the teams are made up of under-age kids, that kind of boisterous boosterism is very much out of place, even if the boosters are pretty much the same age as the players.
But it's tough to stay calm sometimes. It is tough even for even-mannered parents to sit there and endure the razzing and the denunciations that seem to be much more common now than they were a generation or two ago.
The Oregon School Activities Association has rules against name-calling and such from the stands. But that doesn't seem to stop very much of it.
One of the goals of an education is to learn how to behave as a civilized person even if - and especially when - under considerable stress. In that sense, attendance at a school ballgame might be considered a test, severe though it be may.
The schools' job in this department has been made very much tougher by the culture in which they operate. From bumper stickers and politics to talk radio and the shout fests on TV, where is it that the average citizen sees a model of civility and respect? (hh)