I have to get up for work in about 4 hours. It’s been a crazy day today, a busy day. A morning radio show, 3 voice over jobs, a couple hours of freelance work for World Vision, a trip to my dad’s, 1 fire call and laundry… I can’t forget the laundry. I tried to fit in everything but there is one thing I didn’t have time to do. Write my blog.
Each evening I sit down to write a few thoughts, and then I set them to automatically post at 12:01am. So many people, hundreds, to my surprise, visit this blog daily. I feel compelled to share. I love to share.
As I’ve sat here for the past 20 minutes trying to come up with something to write about, I found an article that really touched me. I’d grab a portion of it, but in order to truly appreciate it, I think you need to take a couple minutes to read the entire thing. Here is the link… http://is.gd/kad0
Sports used to be fun. It used to be about a group of people getting together, enjoying each others company, having a good time and getting a little exercise. At some point in time though, and I’m not entirely sure when it was, there was a shift in societies thinking.
Now it’s about competition. It’s about win at all cost. The story of the girls basketball team from a couple of weeks ago that hammered their opponents by 100 points is evidence to this. The fact that professional athletes are being caught in droves taking performance enhancing drugs is evidence to this.
This summer I was walking through a local park and was watching some kids play T-Ball. They couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old. It is supposed to be a cute, fun, innocent thing. But I watched a coach, most likely a father of one of the children, actually getting on these kids for not hustling and for not paying attention. It made me sick to my stomach! At 5? Really? That is simply not the way it was intended to be!
Then comes a story like the one linked above. It’s a story that like that restores my faith in sport. For all the wrongs, for all the obsessed coaches, for all the cheating players, for all the bad attitudes and win at all cost mentalities, every so often somebody gets it right!
It is possible to play the game, and play it well, while still having the utmost respect for your teammates, your opponents, and the purity of the game! To the coaches and players of Milwaukee Madison and DeKalb High, I commend you for your integrity, and for protecting the purity of sport! Many an athlete, professional and otherwise, could stand to learn a lesson from you all!
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