The National Nightmare of the 100-0 Girls Basketball Game
With regards to the great national prop bet of “How many days after the historic, world-changing, life-altering inauguration will America go back to the business of getting its panties all in a bunch over some meaningless, inconsequential horseshit?”, if you bet “5 days,” then bring your ticket to the window and come collect your winnings.
In this case, the unimportant nonsense in question that was turned into a national crisis involved Texas high school girls. And this wasn’t even one of the good Texas high school girls stories; the kind that involve cheerleader murder plots or lesbian orgies (much to my dismay). This was the basketball one. Where the Christian Something School beat the girls from Dyslexia High 100-0, and all hell was unleashed.
Within two days, a girls basketball game that probably had 20 people in the stands became the focus of the universe. The cable sports channels jumped on it. It hit the news channels. Every sports columninst in the country chimed in. The Big Show on WEEI did two hours of it. It was the middle of the build-up to the Super Bowl and it pushed all the “Kurt Warner used to stock shelves in a grocery store” stories into the recycle bin.
Why? Because this story has everything. Sports. Greed. Meanness. Our deteriorating society. And most of all, America’s favorite pastime: Obsessive, irrational, disproportionate panic over What About The Children?
In the fallout after this story broke, I could just hear the collective voice of every sports mom I’ve ever met. Or whose kids I’ve coached. Or that I’m married to, for that matter. “The winning team’s coach is a jerk. Their players are the mean, popular girls who pick on the weak. The losing team are victims who’ll never recover from this horrible trauma.” And that’s exactly how it played out. The coach got fired. Christian Whosywhatsis School forfeited the game. And the girls who got beat are media sensations. They’ve done more reverent, sympathetic interviews than if they’d been called “hos” on the radio. Because they’d suffered the worst kind of horrible trauma imaginable; they got routed in a high school girls basketball game. And the only cure for that is sanctimonious hand wringing by the whole country.
Look, I’ve coached and witnessed enough kid’s athletics to know one thing. No one cared less about Dyslexic High’s losing that night than the players themselves. In my first year of coaching kid’s football, I had an epiphany on the sidelines. We were playing like crap and getting beat about as handily as you can at that level. (There aren’t a lot of teams running precision offenses at 8 years old.) And the guys I was coaching with were more or less losing their minds over it. The head coach turned to the bench after one play went horribly wrong and said “We worked on that ALL WEEK!” in a purple-faced rage. The nanosecond he turned back around the kid next to me looked at the kid next to him and said “I wonder what we’re having for dinner.” To which he responded “Well we’re having spaghetti...” Everything I know about kids’ sports is summed up in that story.
Kids are a lot better at handling stuff than we give them credit for. The hue and cry over the 100-0 game had a lot less to do with how actual kids actually respond to actual events than it was a reflection of the rampant paranoia and pervasive worrywartism that’s turning America into a nation hovering, meddling mother hens. We don’t want our kids to grow up, we want them protected. From everything. From life. We want them hermetically sealed in sanitized, air conditioned, cushioned, supervised little cocoons, free from germs, harm, ridicule or anything that will properly prepare them for life on planet Earth. Getting your ass kicked in a basketball game, for instance. Our kids are so unexposed to anything even remotely harmful that the No. 1 public enemy in our schools is the humble, delicicous, life-sustaining peanut. You can bring a iPhone with 1.5 gigabytes of hard core porn downloaded on it into a school, but a PB&J in your backpack gets treated like anthrax.
Of course it’s natural to want to protect your kids, but bad stuff is supposed to happen to them. It’s the only way to prepare them for life. That’s why every culture in the history of the world has had some kind of Rite of Passage. Some ritual where you prove you’re old enough to come out of your room in the cave with the Spongebob paintings on the wall and go out and hunt saber toothed tigers with the big boys. Whether it’s the Jewish Bat Mitzvah or the Catholic Confirmation or young Leonidas in “300" being sent out into the cold to kill a wolf, kids need to be told it’s time to put on your big boy pants. Otherwise you end up with a generation of 20-something slackers who do nothing but lay around the campfire all day asking when mastodon will be ready.
So to try to shelter your kids from any and all hardships, any setbacks, any drubbing at the hands of a superior opponent, isn’t just ludicrous. It’s abuse. Show me a kid who’s never had their ass handed to them at something and I’ll show you a kid destined for a future of maladjusted dysfunction and probably rehab. You want examples? Who has a better, easier, pain-free upbringing than your average Hollywood child star? To be making millions being on movie screens when you’re a kid is to have everything a human being could possibly want. Toys, attention, adulation, and best of all, no one ever saying “No” to you. And how’s that usually turn out? Dakota Fanning is already washed up, having lost all the “precocious waif” roles to Abigail Breslin. Can a Dakota slumped against the wheel outside an LA nightclub with no undies on be too far behind? And as we speak, some 4 year old is poised to take Abby’s spot and some fetus now in utero will take hers. And no doubt all will end up in the rehab bed that Mylie Cyrus will be warming up shortly. The bottom line is a kid who’s been on the wrong end of a few of life’s 100-0 scores has a much better chance to handle real life than one who hasn’t.
Of course it gets hard to see that when you’re raising your own kids. Your first instinct is to protect your kids, not expose them to hardships. That’s only natural. But the vast majority of parents now see their little darlings as precious little snowflakes, unique and delicate and who need to be preserved in controlled environments forever. Last week I came across a story about a housing complex that was so worried about kids being hurt they hired 24 hour security to keep watch over this one potential hazard on the property. The source of the threat? It was a slide.
I mean, if you’re going to be so ridiculously paralyzed by the harm a high school hoop game or a piece of playground equipment can cause to your children, why procreate in the first place? The death rate is still 100%, no matter how much you hover. I have to believe that a large percent of us aren’t having kids out of some instinct to perpetuate the human race or to raise them right to make the world a better place. They’re doing it to have someone around who’ll love them, period. Like buying a pet.
I find it ironic that the same week the country went into apoplexy about some teenage girls getting trounced on a basketball court, a woman who already has six kids gave birth to eight more. Let’s not kid ourselves. She took fertility drugs because she wanted a litter of kids. And while I hesitate to presume to speak for God, you know how many kids He intended for anyone to have at one time? The answer is right in front of you. Look down and count your nipples. That's how many. OK, once in a great while some woman who's not on fertility drugs might have triplets, but as a general rule the Almighty built you to have twins, max. If he wanted your legs to open up spew out eight peope like an elevator, he would've given you four rows of two nipples like a cat. So a woman with six kids who bangs out eight more isn’t doing it for anyone other than herself. It’s certainly not for the kids. Because a baby is a little, pink nonstop poop factory. All they want is to eat, sleep and be changed. A baby can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until it is fed. And no human being was meant to give birth to fourteen of them. A vagina is not a clown car.
But at least this woman’s little victims of neglect are going to learn from the outset what too few kids are being taught now. At the risk of making a Shaughnessy-like archaic reference, my philosophy is to teach kids what the Rolling Stones said 40 years ago. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Life sucks sometimes. You fall off the slide. Your dad isn’t Billy Ray and he’s going to say “No” to you. Sometimes the wolf bites your ass. And sometimes the other team runs up the score on it. You can complain to your overprotective mom about it or hit the talk show circuit, but you’re probably better off going back out on the court and throwing a couple of elbows,committing a couple of hard fouls and staying in the game. I know what will make you better off in the long run in this life, and it’s not having Matt Lauer make you out to be national hero.
And to all the concerned parents worrying about the irreversible damage to these girls, it’s like that part in “Finding Nemo” where Dory tells Marlin, “If nothing happens to him, then nothing will ever happen to him.”