In the wake of the NBA and NHL championships taking us by storm thanks to incredible individual (Lebron being considered as GOAT, Ovechkin finally getting Lord Stanley’s Cup) and team-based (the improbable Celtics run, the Warriors domination, and the Golden Knights being #VegasStrong all year) narratives, there’s another underlying storyline to professional sports that cannot be ignored.
Anyone who has ever watched professional sports, or sports at any level for that matter, is familiar with the following scenario:
The whistle blows or the call is made. The offending player looks incredulously at the official making the call: “Who? Me? No way! I didn’t touch him.” In many cases, before or after this verbal commentary, the player is demonstrative in their disbelief over the call.
Of course, in most cases, he did commit the foul. In fact, had the same scenario played out on the streets, we would have classified it as a mugging. But, no, of course he didn’t touch him! For the sake of hyperbole, I am not certain, based on their individual reactions, that a single NBA basketball player has ever committed a foul.
Let’s not only fire lasers at NBA players. Have you ever seen a defensive back in the NFL agree with or accept a pass interference call that he committed? Yeah, I can’t think of one either. It’s rare.
It’s not fair to only pick on players, you say? OK, have you ever seen an NHL coach agree with an interference call or something as blatant as a high stick? I haven’t.
And let’s not pretend our international brethren and the “beautiful game” is immune. With the World Cup finally upon us, take stock when watching at the level of demonstration and “Who me?” when calls are made.
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We have a crisis of personal responsibility; a crisis that permeates every proverbial square inch of our existence, and in many ways it is at the core of many of our greatest problems. Whether it’s our neighbor who refuses to stop watering her lawn during a drought, a politician decrying “Fake News” despite overwhelming evidence (and indictments) to the contrary, or a male collegiate athlete sexually assaulting an unconscious fellow student, I repeat that we have ourselves a crisis of personal responsibility in this country.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting a causal relationship between professional athletes and their refusal to accept their transgressions on the playing field and our country’s crisis of personal responsibility, but it is one of many individual instances where we subconsciously send a collective message to the next generation that responsibility is not theirs to accept.
Let’s take that last example and focus on sexual assault and harassment. If the culture on the court or the pitch is one where no one accepts responsibility, why would it be any different at a party or in the bedroom where inhibitions are at least on par with the forces at play in a competitive sport environment, if not wildly skewed (i.e., adrenaline/will to win vs. substance-fueled judgment/sexual arousal)?
If we take it a step further and use basketball as the setting, what’s the one instance where we see players regularly accepting responsibility for a foul committed during play? When a star player who is in foul trouble is in the vicinity of the foul alongside a reserve player, it is accepted practice that the reserve player (whether he committed the foul or not) will raise his hand and walk toward the referee while the star player walks the other way.
Going back to the party or the bedroom, consider the rape culture that has been fostered widely across the world. Maybe not causal, but it’s hard to argue there’s not a correlation.
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What can we do about it?
We can use sport as a vehicle to teach children a different way.
For those who believe that sports is hopelessly lost in helping to make a difference in our culture, I fully understand the skepticism, but I counter that sport is so ingrained in our worldwide culture that sport must be a part of the solution.
And thankfully, we have a head start along those lines. There are many organizations out there fighting to help make a difference through a different model of sports. Sports-based youth development (SBYD) organizations have been quietly taking hold around the world over the last 20+ years. International, national, and regional organizations like Right to Play, Peace Players, The First Tee, Girls on the Run, Street Soccer USA, America Scores, Mini-Mermaids, and the organization that I work to support, the Junior Giants.
Through SBYD, we teach all the favorite life skills like work ethic, leadership, educational achievement, confidence, teamwork, effective communication, courage, anti-bullying, and health/nutrition.
But I believe that we can also teach those tougher and not as popular messages like personal responsibility and empathy for others. It is only through an empathetic orientation that we can begin to chip away at our own selfishness and begin to take command of our lives, and these are critical lessons that absolutely can be learned through participation in sport.
Yet, it must be intentional—meaning, the curriculum and mission supporting the sport organization must be fundamentally based and grounded in that type of approach, one that promotes a greater message than winning alone. Unfortunately, most of our sport environments are not grounded in that mantra. Most are ones that give rise to that “Who me?” mentality or even go a step further in subconscious promotion of performance-enhancing drugs or ball-deflating advantage.
By promoting more broadly an SBYD-grounded approach in all sport environments, we can and will make a difference that will hopefully help to lead us out of this crisis of personal responsibility.
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Photo by Nathan Shively on Unsplash