Appropriate Seriousness

12-11-89

Perspective: Appropriate Seriousness

It was a pretty good week for Cobber sports. The Lady Cobber basketball team went to 3-0 in the MIAC with two key wins. The hockey team won two of three. And the wrestling team had another solid performance. Each of these Concordia teams carried on their athletic endeavors with what seemed to be an appropriate amount of seriousness.

What they were engaged in was not a matter of life and death. But neither was it trivial. They exhibited a level of seriousness which was appropriate for the occasion.

Matching the level of seriousness with the context of the competition is not easily achieved in sport. When it happens, sport becomes almost worthy of its lofty status. When the level of seriousness over a competition is out of sync with the context, sport becomes an ugly arena which diminishes all those involved.

The sporting world offers nearly all gradations of seriousness. The spectrum runs from the "everybody-gets-to-play" ethic of junior high sports to the "sports-is-a-business" mentality of the professional athlete's world. In between there is often "sports-is- war."

The biggest problems which arise on the sporting scene stem from conflicting views of seriousness as to what we are playing for. Fights, cheating, half-hearted play and disillusioned players are the result.

Part of this confusion stems from our collective ability to ascribe noble characteristics to whatever coaching mentality we are witnessing.

If a coach is a chronic workaholic who treats his or her players like dirt then we say the coach is intent upon getting the best from the players, striving for excellence against a world far too willing to settle for mediocrity. If our coach-in-question is laid back and lazy (or incompetent) and just hanging on to collect his pension then we say he is keeping things in proper perspective, willing to let the kids just enjoy the game for its own sake, wise enough to avoid the win-at-all- costs mentality.

Our interest in being flattering and polite keeps us from discussing the serious questions as to what is right and what is wrong with how our coaches are teaching life's values and realities. The closer it is to home the less we are inclined to ruffle feathers.

Long ago, when I was playing buckets for that bastion of excellence and integrity, the Minnesota Gophers, I got into a serious tiff with the local news media about how college sports should be thought of. I suggested that thinking of college sports as war was both a trivialization of war and a sad distortion of the artistic and athletic beauty of the game we were trying to play.

I babbled on by saying there may be more important things going on the world than our little games.

Getting bent out of shape about the outcome of our games required one to ignore some truly disgusting events which were indeed worthy of getting angry about, starting with a real war that was going on in Southeast Asia.

All hell broke loose.

It was never clear which was my biggest transgression; my supposed lack of patriotism for opposing a war or my suggestion that many basketball players were something like ballet dancers, more interested in athletic grace than the point-spread.

In either case, it was made clear that I was out of the mainstream. I was hired to be a warrior in a serious competition, and now I was spouting heresies.

I was terribly effective in what I was trying to get across; the idea that there is more to sports than mini-wars, that athletes relish the artistic beauty of their performances and that excellence is not always measured by a scoreboard. The Gophers went out and hired Bill Musselman as the next coach.

I chose to watch from a distance as he led my friends, and a contingent of paid-in-full gladiators, through a frenzied war-like ("losing is worse than death")

campaign which included a sick Gopher-instigated brawl against Ohio State and a soon-to-be-tarnished Big Ten title. He was loved by the fans and loathed by his soldiers. A school that had grown frustrated with being honest and mediocre became addicted to cheating and winning.

Through successive NCAA probations, from Musselman to Luther Darville, my old school laughed at integrity, worshipped winning, and said to hell with being an educational gem the state could be proud of.

Now, as the U of M tries to crawl out from another round of NCAA sanctions, Musselman is back, coaching the NBA Timberwolves. He is lauded for his tenacity and intensity, called colorful for his use of the English language, and considered just the right guy to humiliate a bunch of over-paid black guys into playing their best each night. He is a caricature of much that is out of whack in sports.

His team will find some initial relative success. But then, like the energy that's been unleashed in Eastern Europe, there will be an explosion of opposition against a twisted set of tyrannical values and priorities. It will end in ashes, only to be rebuilt with more human values at the core.

As we watch this spectacle unfold from here at the "bottom" of the sport's coaching ranks we will, I trust, try to keep our seriousness about winning in a slightly better perspective.

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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