February 12, 2015: Say It Ain’t So

Another example of how the world seems to be nowadays hit close to home this week.  The Chicago Little League team was stripped of its US Title because they cheated.  The coaches, the adults, negatively impacted the great kids of Jackie Robinson West by breaking the rules… by grabbing kids outside the boundary to play on the team.  It’s sad, but it doesn’t surprise me.

It doesn’t surprise me because you see it all the time.  Not only do you see it all the time, but you can just imagine how much this kind of stuff happens in today’s world that DOESN’T get caught.  With the importance placed on winning, and when money is involved, people’s vision gets blurred.  People make bad choices.  The problem with these bad choices is that the people who make them are not the only ones who suffer.  These bad choices impact innocent people.  In this case, the kids who played their hearts out on the field in this year’s Little League tourney, those kids who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes, those kids who gave us all something to be proud of, were affected.  Guess what, we can still be proud of those kids.

We won’t even get into examples of this in the world today… that would be too long of a post.  We’ll focus on the subject at hand here:  cheating in sports; even that would be too long to capture everything, but I’ll take a quick swipe.  Baseball gives us examples of this, with the steroids, the PEDs, the cork bats, doctoring the baseball; all different forms of cheating.  What is the motivation here?  Why do people feel compelled to cheat the system in order to win… in order to get the fame, the fortune.  Why can’t people resist the urge, and try to do things the right way.. try to accomplish things the good old fashioned way, through hard, honest work?  Just because other people are doing it, doesn’t mean YOU have to.  People are always looking for the easy way to success, always looking for an advantage, regardless of it’s legal or not.  I’ll tell you what… it starts early.

I remember playing Little League at Harrison Park back in the day.  Looking back, I don’t remember any stuff like this with our team; we practiced hard, we played hard, and yes, winning was one of the objectives, but having fun was just as important; there were other teams that didn’t feel that way.  I remember facing some pitcher with a mustache in one of our Little League playoff games.  Obviously, a 12 year old kid with a mustache is not normal, so our coaches & parents started questioning.  The questions continued when he seemed to throw 15-20 mph faster than any other pitcher we have ever seen.  Yep, he was way past the age limit, his birth certificate was pulled, and he was kicked out of the league; honestly, I can’t even remember what the result of the game turned out to be.  It was an early example to a group of young kids on what people will do to win. 

As the level of competition gets higher, the desire to win gets greater.  Just look at all the college football scandals… and those are just the ones that get caught..  And do I have to even mention Bill Belicheat and his band of merry cheaters?  These are the examples we continue to see. 
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But wait, what about the rule itself?  Is the rule being broken a stupid one?  The other countries we had to play in this Little League world series get to pull from their entire country for their team, and we’re limited by boundaries within a CITY!  Maybe some rules ARE stupid in ALL levels in EVERY sport.  Maybe rules SHOULD change.  Maybe some rules are NOT as serious as others.  But…. they’re still rules, and they should be followed as long as they are rules. 

And let’s not make this a race issue either.  Far too many times, when something happens, the first thing we look at, is race.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that race is not an issue in this country, but everything is NOT about race.  This is a case of breaking a rule and getting caught. 

There is still something to be learned from this… something positive can still come out of this.  Mistakes were made, people were hurt… KIDS were hurt.  How do we make this right?  Well, for starters, why don’t the people who made the mistake stand up and take accountability.  Everyone makes mistakes, EVERYONE… it’s what you do after those mistakes are made, it’s what you learn from those mistakes, it’s how you handle yourself, picking yourself up after a mistake, that is a telling sign.  This would be a GREAT example to all these kids, and frankly, people everywhere, to see people actually stand up and say they made a mistake.  We see plenty of “mistakes” nowadays, but not so many people owning up to them…

I will choose to still remember these kids as a great team; that will not change.  What THEY did for the sport of baseball, little league baseball, and how they got the city behind them, will be what I choose to remember.  Unfortunately, I’ll also remember another example of cheating in sports… an example of dishonesty that these kids, and the rest of the country, were shown.  Say it ain’t so… why do we have to continue to show kids the WRONG way to do things?  It’s all about the kids at the end of the day…  it’s about what they see, the examples that we set, that will impact their decisions in their lives going forward.  We’ve all seen another bad one, how about we start showing some good ones?