due also to anxiety disorders, scads of missed classes, and drug use, quit football and dropped out of school.
Still, the Oakland Raiders---Marv had once been the team’s strength and conditioning coach---picked Todd in the first round of the 1990 NFL draft, and he signed a $2.25 million contract. But by then his lifetime of football genetic engineering must’ve caused some kind of synapse misfire.
And, after a shaky start to his pro career, it quickly became clear that both (A) his less-than-stellar skill set, which was often hidden by the potent USC offensive system and (B) his off-field partying lifestyle, were astoundingly ill-suited to the NFL level. He finally snapped, left football for good, and spiraled down a rabbit hole of drugs, booze, and arrests. And can you blame him? He was the Danny Bonaduce of sports: a freckle-faced, rambunctious child prodigy who finally just. Had. Enough.
So while I will never, ever push Harper that way, if she does end up being a tad more gifted in a certain sport or activity than other kids, and those kids’ parents subsequently try to curtail or ostracize her for being too good or too dedicated, honestly, I can’t promise you that I won’t hurl a chair at them.
Because as I get ready to dive headfirst into this strange, fascinating, somewhat frightening subculture known as Youth Sports, I don’t like the direction in which we appear to be recklessly careening.
I fear that in twenty years, Harper could end up being like those Gen-Y kids at whom Human Resources managers often marvel these days—the ones who throw indignant tantrums when they don’t get a job they want, or whose parents call to harangue bosses because little Sally or Jimmy feels invalidated or rejected or unchallenged at work.
I can just see my little girl now. It’s the year 2030. She’s twenty-four-years-old, just out of college, job-hunting, and collect calling me from her apartment (that, hopefully, I’m not paying for).
Harper: Why didn’t they hire me, daddy? Why?!
Me: Because even though you’re the smartest, sweetest, most beautiful little girl in the world, there were a hundred other applicants for that job, right?
Harper: Yeah...but I wanted it! I showed up for the interview! I should get the job for just showing up, right?!
Me: Uh, not really, hon’—there are no certificates of participation in real life. You don’t get a ribbon just for having a central nervous system and opposable thumbs.
Harper: Can you or mommy call them for me?
Me: Yeaaaaaah, not gonna happen.
Harper: Why not?
Me: Because that’d be certifiably insane.
Harper: So what do I do, daddy?
Me: Well, sweetie, do what I did in Little League, when Scott Lodgek kept striking me out. Just dust yourself off, get back up to bat, and...
Harper: Oh, gawwwwwwd, not the home run story again!
Me: (pause) Guess I’ve told you that one before, huh. Daddy’s senile now, honey. And a tad incontinent.
And so on and so forth...
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Maybe I’m oversimplifying. Maybe this newest generation won’t destroy the world, which would be awfully nice of them. But I just worry that we’re launching a massive armada of kids who have been so coddled, hyper-validated, over-hugged, and under-challenged in this nationwide Self-Esteem Building initiative that they get out into the real world and, like Red in “Shawshank Redemption” (and Brooks before him), just can’t cope, having been institutionalized in their bubble worlds for so long.
Not that I’m advocating putting our children into the MMA octagon after starving them for two days, tossing in a stick of string cheese and a juice box and watching them fight to the death (although I’m sure that was the next phase of entertainment at Mike Vick’s house).
I just find it troubling that we seem to be creating an entire generation who doesn’t quite understand the concept of losing because, in that safe, insulated bubble world, losing doesn’t exist. There’s no learning to get back up when you’re knocked down. There’s no truly savoring victory because defeat, in its truest sense, is not even an option.
Which brings us back to the whole apocalypse thing. Someday, these kids—maybe even my little 4-year-old Harper—will be running the world. She might even be, say, President. And she’ll inevitably think that her executive decision to continue the top secret genetic experiments at Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control is a sound one, as was her signing of that amendment to add a super-duper-futuristic-high-powered version of a nuclear facility right next door to the CDC.
And since her cabinet—peers who also grew up with bizarre mercy rules and incessantly coddled self-esteem—will have been woefully untrained in the art of challenging someone else’s opinion, no matter how moronic, for fear of invalidating that person, everyone will simply nod and smile and go off to Tweet about only positive things, ignoring the fact that nuclear power and genetic experiments are probably not the best neighbors.
So when the inevitable happens (core meltdown, exploding drainage pipes, escaped mutants, human race devoured and/or enslaved, nuclear winter, locusts, pestilence, Old Testament, Cormac McCarthy, et cetera), I hope you remember this little screed and recall that I pre-placed the blame squarely on the egregious wussification of sports.
Particularly, on that one dad-turned-referee who blew his whistle after the shameful “five goal lead” goal, stopped the soccer game, and automatically awarded the win… to the losing team.
♦ ♦ ♦
Mark St. Amant's essay "The Not-So-Dolce Vita", a humorous look at a newlywed couple's struggle to stay married while in a foreign land, appears in The Good Men Project: Real Stories from The Front Lines of Modern Manhood. On sale here. Want to learn more? Here you go.
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About Mark St. Amant
Vocalyze
I said it when they banned aluminum bats in little league and I’ll say it now; It’s a competition. A game. There will be winners and there will be losers. As long as the rules are applied equally, it’s as fair as it’s going to get. Some kids are bigger, stronger and faster. Get over it.
I signed my son up for football in a Pop Warner league as soon as he was old enough. He ended up playing as the quarterback on a team that was, on average, shorter and younger than every other team in the league. During the first season, his team lost ten out of the eleven games they played because the kids on the other teams were older, bigger and faster.
It was a good lesson for both of us. Life is not fair. I always encouraged him to do better next time and only criticised when it was constructive.
They played the next season with almost the same roster and they won seven out of the eleven games because they were bigger, stronger and faster than half of the other teams. My son celebrated every win and graciously accepted every loss. I don’t want to get all Neitzsche on ya, but sometimes, in order to truely appreciate a win you must first know what it’s like to lose.
Participation awards encourage mediocrity.
I played Little League baseball for one season, the summer of 1963. We lost our first game … a fielding error of mine led to us getting clobbered. We hung our heads and slunk off the field as best we could.
Every single day of the next week we held practice … 2-3 hours at a whop until our tongues stuck to our lips and we were near to passing out. We went home when we had to go home. Not before.
There were no adults anywhere near.
We never lost another game in regular season and swept the playoffs as well.
Look it up … “Wagars Market”, Flat Rock, MI 1963
The point? When kids need their parents permission or a ride or anything else beyond the minimum equipment for the sport to excel, they are being held back. All a kid really needs is the ‘want to’ and a place to let it happen.
My solution is to just get your sons involved with boy scouts instead of sports. They’re never going to be professional athletes anyway!
Consider the possibility that we’re all looking at this the wrong way, or should I say (so nobody will be offended) through a different lens. The issue, rather than the wussification of youth sports, is the organization of youth sports by adults. Games, for children age 4/5/6 are meant to be games of imagination, trial and error, naturally occuring, with intense physical, emotional skill development. The beauty of soccer is…put a gaggle of kids on a field with a ball and it happens naturally. Let em play, run around, keep score, do whatever comes naturally. Lets take the “organized” out of youth sports and return the playground to kids, let them play. Plenty of time to exoerience the organizing principals later.
My son Jake, now 24, grew up skiing and snowboarding. I used to push him to race, join a race team and train. “Nope”, was his standard response, if there was a response at all.
One summer day we were out riding bicycles, he was maybe 8 or 9, we’re riding side by side and I said, “How about thinking about joining the race program this winter?” What’s wrong with me that I’m talking to him about this in July?
Jake slams on the brakes, comes to a tire srubbing halt, looks up at me and says, “Dad, skiing is not about racing. Skiing is about having fun!”
Shut me up good.
BTW, Jake went on to become a competitive snowboarder in high school but more importantly he is an absolutely awesome freerider, one of the great people I know to go out and tear up a mountain.
I was raised by a father who was more of a coach than a breadwinner. He was a real life high school coach and brought his work home. I used to say “we’re not a family we’re a team”. The training began young in hockey, skiing and swimming. My two brothers and I started in each sport at about age 5 but as we grew older became stars in our own rights in one of them. I was the swimmer. There was no swim team for me to join in the town I grew up in so dad just enrolled me in swim meets around the state as an individual. At 8 years old I stood shivering in a wet bathing suit on a block in front of a hundred people I didn’t know eyeing up the competition. When I dove into that pool it was win or lose. The lessons I learned from this have proved invaluable to me in life. I discovered my fierce warrior spirit but also a compassion for the loser. In college I tried for the nationals. It was throw-up scary to be swimming against the best and I had to reach deep to gather all of my strength and mental focus in order to even compete. The point of all this is that if my dad had not entered me in those do or die meets, put me up against the better athlete then I’m wondering where I would have developed important skills like risk taking, embracing challenge, realizing that you have more strength than you thought, winning, losing..real life stuff.. I don’t have children so didn’t know about this “mercy rule” until reading this but am dismayed at a trend that will only give children a false sense of how life works..that one they’re destined to play in as adults. Hail Mark for firing up this conversation on how our children and society are evolving. It us up to us what happens next.
Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. That’s the point of pieces like this, and of this entire magazine: to start and ongoing (and, if possible, coherent) discussion. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to a piece about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s sudden & hypocritical wussification of pro football via his new anti-”illegal”-hit policy…
I think the outrage over not keeping score and handing out participation trophies for little kids’ sports is one of the more comical blips on our cultural landscape. If anyone can persuasively argue that one of the great empires of history was laid low by little kids’ participation trophies, well, go ahead. My guess is that the Romans were simply relieved anytime a youngster reached his/her fifth birthday. “Wussification” was a later, secondary concern.
I’ll second the argument that we should not assume that organized sports are good. My dad did not once suggest that I participate in something like that, although he led by example with his interest in “lone wolf” sports that didn’t necessarily focus on a score: mountaineering, distance running, and the occasional ocean swim. Mom once suggested that I sign up for Little League so she might meet the eligible dads of my team-mates. Gotta love the ’70s! Dysfunctional as hell, but no helicopter hockey soccer parents.
In my experience with my two boys and organized sports, I’ve seen good and bad. Mini-riots over questionable umpire calls? Check. Parents yellow carded at soccer games? Check. Stacking of teams? Check. But I also remember some beautiful cameraderie and the thrilling climax of my oldest son’s baseball career, a Minors championship. But basically, I’m glad to see they’re into the “lone wolf” or “extreme” sports that have descended from surfing and skateboarding. They both love rock-climbing, hiking aimlessly in the open desert behind our house, and b.s.-ing while shooting baskets in the street.