Rarely have I ever observed one individual to be the sole reason behind victory or defeat for an entire team. That doesn’t stop some people from making accusations when someone pulls a boner on the field. I don’t ever remember an individual being singled out for letting the team down during my football years. I do remember it happening on more then one occasion in PE though.
You’re right, and schools need to work on making physical education a more positive experience for all involved.
Marc
Obviously you never say that sort of thing around the testosterone-addled monsters. They routinely roughed up kids for far less.
When one of their teammates got drunk, drove into a toll booth and killed himself and his passenger, they went on a rampage when we had the gall to print what actually happened, as based on eyewitness accounts and the police reports, instead of the hagiographic version they preferred. They thought they could get away with anything, and by and large the school let them. They certainly could have gotten away with kicking my ass for talking back at them.
Sports gave those bad people a supportive outlet for their aggression, and made them more aggressive. It made them physically stronger and more capable intimidators. It gave them an excuse to pick on the kids who’d “blow it for the team” during stupid, worthless PE classes. It gave them an inflated sense of self-importance by lauding their meaningless, utterly irrelevant talents.
Sports makes bad people much, much worse people.
I never saw kids get hit too hard in math class just because they were “dorks” who weren’t popular. I never saw kids have to endure the humiliating, utterly HUMILIATING, process of “picking teams.” Oh look whose always the last person picked, because he’s a worthless klutz and loser, and be sure to hit him extra hard and yell at him for not being good.
I would have been a far healthier person, both physically and mentally – particularly mentally – had I been spared the humiliation and evil that was high school PE and athletics. That we require our kids to suffer through such a hell is unthinkable.
Again, you are incorrect. Sports did not provide a supportive outlet for their aggression, it did not make them more aggressive, it did not make them more capable intimidators, nor did it give them an excuse to pick on people during PE. An atmosphere where athletes get away with murder is the result of bad coaches, administrators, and parents. To blame it on sports in general is just plain silly.
Could it make good people much, much better?
Maybe the vast majority of people involved in PE didn’t have such a hellish experience. The same might be true of athletics.
Marc
Whine, whine, whine. Boo-hoo. Just because you were too incompetent to walk and chew gum at the same time is no cause to slam sports. You are showing yourself to be an amazing hypocrite.
Irrelevant talents? Those talents are going to make some of those kids millions of dollars. What can you do that people will pay that amount of money for?
Oh yes, it’s MY fault that the sports kids bullied kids in my high school. I wasn’t really bullied much in high school, actually. More in middle school. In high school the sports trash left me alone because I was “cool” for being on the varsity swim team. Whatever. Such nonsense.
The fact that someone gets paid a lot of money does not make what they do meaningful or important.
spectrum, with all due respect, it’s pretty clear that you have a significant psychological condition that is the result of a unique and traumatic series of experiences in your formative years. I would seriously suggest psychological counselling because you are really not being rational. Take a moment to really think about sport in a general way, and you might just come to realize that your experience is not reflective of sport, but of humanity at its worst.
That said, I think it is important to reinforce some points that others have been making. Sport, in and of itself, has no real value (positive or negative). It is just regulated competition. Sport applied in certain ways takes on value. Here’s where the OP’s original question (do any of us remember that thing? We should get back to it) comes into focus. Having sporting programs in a school can be good or bad, depending on the application of the program, so the real focus of debate needs to be how to apply sporting programs properly.
One can learn a great deal from sport, whether one is good or not. How many golfers do you see going out all summer on the weekends to play a round? The vast, vast, vast majority of them suck big time, because golf is an incredibly hard sport to play well. But they still do it, because they enjoy it (presumably) and take some value from it despite their suckiness. Why? Because the environment is right.
Should football, for example, be funded at the expense of other programs? I would argue no, because it would not be fair. However, should football be scrapped? Again, no, because despite the experiences of some people here, it can definitely be a positive force for those who play and even those who watch. The difference always comes down to the administration and coaches. Same goes for PE. Should it be scrapped to spare some uncoordinated kids from embarrassment? No, definitely not, because that is unfair to all those kids who enjoy it. Better that the school effectively monitor the class and create a culture of acceptance and goodwill, then eliminate PE from an already overweight society. Perhaps the answer would be to get rid of team sports in PE and concentrate on individual sports, skills building or actually physical exercise, like running and callisthenics. Ultimately, though, it is up to the teacher to keep people in order.
It has been brought up a few times that we worship people for useless skills like throwing a ball. Personally, I don’t think that’s so useless, but I also don’t support the worship aspect. But you can’t make people think like you do, and what matters to some will not matter to others. It is important to note, however, that the general human admiration for physical skill is primal, and inherent I believe, in our psychological make up. Intrinsically, those who were gifted in throwing, running, coordination or whatever where better hunters. This mattered, and we still have that part of our psyches telling us to be impressed with athletic skill. Personally, I think a body in motion is one of the most beautiful works of art humanity has ever created, and I truly love seeing real athletic skill expressed in a moment of greatness (like when Maradonna took on the whole English team to score in ’86, or when Gretzky and Lemieux combined to score in the Canada Cup in ’87). That is as much a work of art as a Monet or a Picasso (who’s work I both admire – so much for being a dumb jock, eh?). People also want to have heroes, and it is natural to admire those who are more physically gifted than others, so athletes are a natural choice in an era when warriors and hunters are few and far between.
And, to add to the dumb jock part, like some others here have said, just because one does sports does not mean they will be asshole jocks. I am athletically gifted, because I’ve played sports since I was old enough to walk. I can throw (that useless skill!) quite far and accurately, I can run fairly fast, I can hit a baseball or golf ball farther than your average person (though I need to work on keeping that golf ball straight!), and I can control a soccer ball well. I play soccer in the local city league, my girlfriend and I play tennis often, and I generally love to get out and be active. Funny thing is, I was in gifted classes all throughout my school life, I love history and read about it for my own pleasure, and while I have no musical or artistic talent, I love Renaissance art and classical music. So maybe not everyone who does sports becomes an asshole, and maybe (more importantly) it is possible to have sports be a positive influence on one’s life no matter what their skill level.
Well spoken, scule.
Thanks. I feel for spectrum and anyone else who was bullied, I would just hate to see all those great moments from my life gone because sports were taken out of school to prevent any potential bullying. Maybe going to a school with uniforms tended to homgenize us all and prevented people from being singled out. I don’t know.
MGibson and spectrum make some good points.
No, sports does not make kids monsters. It can’t do that. The lax coaches and administrators who allowed bullying to happen (and who let the athletes think that they could get away with anything) did that.
Yes, there is a lot of “you let down the team” BS going on in gym class. I should have clarified it was gym class more than an organized sports team (well, at least that was where I saw it). When they’re playing volleyball or badmitton or softball in gym class and one of the clutzy kids messes up, you can damned betcha the other kids made a stink, groaned and yelled and got mad. Day after frickin’ day, I dreaded that. To be honest, the constant complaining, yelling and abuse only made me more nervous and more apt to mess up. It was just a damned gym class, and yet those kids took it so seriously and got so upset, I wanted to yell at them, “Lighten UP you morons! It’s just a game!” They really took it to heart.
Funny, it happened to my dad too, some 40 years earilier, in his gym class. He sucked and the kids griped about him. It happened to my older sisters, it happened to some friends of mine who were 10 years younger than me. It happened a lot. Did it happen all the time, in every school? I sure hope not. But it wasn’t just some isolated incident that people like me and spectrum suffered. (And think about it—spectrum and I are probably years apart and probably went to high schools that were over a thousand miles apart, and yet we had similar experiences. Coincidence? No.)