Not Just Fiddling

4-10-89

Perspective:

Not Just Fiddling

It was a pretty good week for Cobber sports. Lady Cobber basketball star Jillayn Quaschnick was named a Kodak All-American. The softball team swept a doubleheader with Moorhead State. And the baseball team finally got in their first home games of the season.

But the games and meets scheduled for this past weekend struggled against their context.

In our little corner of the world there was a flood. It was accompanied by record cold and snow, another case of mother nature trying to keep us humble. Unlike most natural disasters, there were no deaths to mourn. Wet basements and tired sandbaggers were about as serious as things got. But still, the athletic events we had scheduled seemed a bit silly. The flooding Red River after all, runs just a few blocks from the college.

Local students seemed everywhere on the news, helping the elderly save their homes from flooding and feeding the crews out on the dikes. Some Concordia students pitched in. Others didn't. Some sporting events were cancelled, but more because of the cold than the flood.

Sports programs, like colleges themselves, often struggle against seeming trivial in the context of a world stricken with natural and man-made disasters.

It's a continuing challenge. Some feel fiddling while Rome burned was only slightly more tacky than our current habit of playing games while children starve and the homeless freeze.

Games have their place. But it is a narrow place, the size of which is easily overestimated by their participants.

When our nation has been at war the games we play have seemed simultaneously irrelevant and essential. A Yankees-Dodgers series never carried quite the significance of an Allies vs Hitler battle.

But, as a counterpoint, there is the famous World War II story of two U.S. soldiers spending a night in a foxhole near the German line. They are listening quietly to the World Series on the radio. The pitcher is trying to protect a one run lead in the bottom of the ninth with runners on second and third and just one out. With German mortars falling around them, the first soldier turns to the second and says of the pitcher, "I'd sure hate to be in his shoes."

Players and coaches usually don't tout their game by referring to its escapist dimensions. They talk of building character and testing their metal and learning life's lessons.

Winston Churchill raised forever the stature of sport when he said that World War II had been won on the playing fields of Eton. He was referring to the character that had been learned through sport by the aristocratic officer corps at England's private colleges.

The same lessons were, of course, learned by the working-class soldiers who did most of the fighting and dying. Those soldiers had also learned character from their childhood games. But their games had been played on mean ghetto streets rather than manicured lawns.

Same lessons, different contexts.

If the lessons we learn from sport are to be of any lasting consequence there must be a way of translating them to life's more serious challenges. We don't need a new war to find out whether sport's lessons have been well learned. As our seniors here at "Eton" get ready to head out into the post-graduation world there is no shortage of Hitler-like cruelty in the world to test their character.

We like to think we are teaching them more than just how to fiddle. Only time will tell if we have succeeded.

These pages are maintained by Jerry Pyle pyle@cord.edu. These articles are copyrighted © and may not be published or reproduced without the express permission of Jerry Pyle.

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