Tag Archives: athletes

What’s Wrong with Having Fun?

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By Jason Menard

Sure looks like the NFL is doing nothing to shake that No Fun League moniker, especially in light of the latest decision to restrict the scope of allowable celebrations in the end zone following a touch down. But what they’re forgetting is that what makes sports so appealing to us all is the fact that it’s a game – and we, as fans, love those who know how to play it.

In its typically convoluted way, the National Football League okayed celebrations as long as the participant remains on their feet, but doesn’t use anything as a prop. Spiking, spinning, and dunking the ball over the goal posts are still good. However, Cincinnati Bengals’ wide receiver Chad Johnson’s cheerleader proposal? Gone. Getting down on one knee and removing one’s helmet is now a no-no.

Call it the fallout from Sharpiegate. In recent years noted pigskin choreographers like Johnson and malcontent wideout Terrell Owens have made the end-zone their personal stage for animated celebrations of their scoring prowess.

Interestingly enough, part of the rationale behind restricting these demonstrative celebrations is the feeling that they focus on the player, not the team. San Diego head coach Marty Schottenheimer went so far as to say, “The game is about the team, not the player.”

Oh, how quickly we forget… Why, was it not just a couple of seasons ago that the Indianapolis Colts’ kickoff team were threatened with unsportsmanlike conduct penalties should they engage in their pre-kick sway. That was an example of a team coming together in a show of unity. The fact that it came from special teams – often the most underappreciated third of the game – made it even more special.

What’s forgotten by these leagues that want to legislate the fun out of sports is that most fans appreciate these gestures. Looking back historically, we remember those players who stood out for their celebrations. Whether it’s Tiger Williams riding the stick after scoring a goal, Barry Bonds admiring his own home runs before slowly trotting off, or Michael Jordan’s wayward tongue hanging out on his way to the rim, these images stick in our mind long after the memory of the game or the event has faded into the past.

Many reading this won’t remember the game, the score, or the event, but the image of Theoren Fleury bulging the twine and racing across the ice in a fit of youthful exhuberance, arms raised, before falling to the ice, spinning out and crashing into the far boards is indelibly etched in our minds.

Many more don’t give a wet slap about rugby. Yet how many of us are familiar with the New Zealand All-Blacks Maori-inspired Haka? Is there any harm in engaging in a pre-game ritual designed to pump up the team? No. These displays can even make an otherwise-to-be-forgotten player a lasting touchstone for a generation. Ickey Woods anyone?

Football’s got it backwards. The CFL frowns on obviously choreographed routines featuring more than one player, yet the fans love the image of six players falling in unison around a ball that’s symbolically transformed into a bomb.

Sports are supposed to be about fun. They’re also about diversity and personal expression. We admire these athletes because they can express their bodies and talents in ways that we can only dream. For every person who is offended by Steve Smith’s diaper-changing football routine, there’s another fan who was bored to tears by retired Detroit Lions’ running back Barry Sanders’ handing the ball back to the ref. In many cases, Sanders is deified for his display of class, while modern players are pilloried for their excesses.

The thing that people forget about sports is that the players themselves find a way to establish accepted limits. They don’t need outside help. If a football player is hamming it up too much, someone on the sidelines will make it abundantly clear that the behaviour shouldn’t happen. In hockey, an over-the-top celebration that has the effect of belittling an opponent will be dealt with in a future shirt – either with a stiff check or something more nefarious.

But is there anything wrong with having fun? Was not what made the 1985 Chicago Bears so appealing at least, in part, inspired by their Super Bowl Shuffle video? But as fast as Jim McMahon’s ego was inflated, was it not just as rapidly deflated by fan backlash? And that’s the great equalizer in sports – the fans will determine what they want to see and what they don’t. If Joe Horn jersey sales spiked after his cell-phone touchdown celebration, would that not indicate that fans enjoyed the spectacle. When fans tired of the Dennis Rodman sideshow, is it any wonder that he slipped into obscurity?

These games are played out in the field – not the boardroom. If the fans wanted to watch stuffed suits, they would. In the meantime, let the players play. After all, it’s only a game, so what’s wrong with having fun?

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Jealousy Colours Our Perception of Athletes

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By Jason Menard

At a time in our history when it’s often more and more difficult to call oneself a sports fan, there are stories like Robert Edwards’ to help you keep the faith. But instead of celebrating our triumphs, we prefer to shove them aside and focus on the negative. And the reason behind this? Jealousy.

For every Terrell Owens in this world there are a thousand more quality players out there who are fulfilling their contractual obligation. For every story of a player beating his wife, committing a crime, or getting busted with drugs, there are countless other stories of players that are good family men, dedicated to their community, and going the extra mile to help those in need.

Instead of focusing on the good in the game, we hungrily devour the most salacious news reports involving players, which then send the truly pompous among us to their respective pulpits to admonish the sins of excess that modern sport has bred. Yet while we’re so ready at hand for a ritual stoning, why do we not have an equal passion for lauding those who merit it?

Percentage-wise, the number of people who commit crimes while playing professional sports is no different than that of the society as a whole. However, due to their high-profile nature, athletes will find themselves in the newspapers much more than the local pharmacist or salesman who commits the same crime. Yet, while people are willing to chastise athletes as a group as lawless thugs, where are those same generic cries against lawyers, doctors, garbage men, or any other profession? The number of miscreants is the same for all groups – a small percentage – but those few bad apples seem to spoil the whole bunch a lot easier when the increased exposure is factored in.

Edwards offers a feel-good story. Injured in a freak accident in a National Football League Beach Bowl during the 1999 Pro Bowl in Hawaii, he has come back from suffering severe nerve damage that had the potential to cause him to lose his leg. After being told that he’d never play football again and would be forced to walk with a cane for the rest of his life, Edwards chose to persevere. Since that proclamation of a career death sentence, he enjoyed brief stints back in the NFL before coming to the Canadian Football League. Becoming the Montreal Alouettes’ starting tailback six games into the season, Edwards enjoyed a season that saw him rush for one yard shy of 1,200. And now he’s on the cusp of playing in a game that could see his team earn a trip to the Grey Cup.

Yet all we hear about is the continued exploits of Terrell Owens. An inspirational story like Edwards doesn’t get the time of day, but the petulant, puerile demands and antics of the Philadelphia Eagles’ wide receiver dominate sports talk radio, publications, Web sites, and newspapers.

But far be it for us to blame the media. Too often the press is the made scapegoat for delivering us exactly what we want. If bad news didn’t sell and we weren’t so hungry for negativity, then the press would reflect that in their reporting. Simply put we’ve created a culture where if it bleeds it leads, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

We want to admire our athletes from afar. We are awed by their displays of athleticism and ease of ability in performing feats the likes of which we can only dream. Yet, tempering that awe is a sense of jealousy. We are incensed by the sheer volume of money that these athletes pull in for playing a game. As we plug along, trying to make ends meet, we find it hard to relate to athletes who wear jewellery that costs more than our car.

So instead of congratulating them on their good fortune and accepting the fact that they’re better than us athletically, we need to regain our moral or intellectual superiority. We know we can’t compete on the field of play, but in the fabric of society we can assume our elevated mantle. Like politicians or, more appropriately, the entertainers that they are, athletes are subjected to inflated expectations of being above-average in all aspects of life.

We don’t ask the same from any other segment of our society. We don’t care what our doctors do once they’re out of their practice – all we care about is how they treat us when we’re on the operating table. Yet we expect our athletes to be the same paragons of society as they are of sport. And it’s an unfair expectation.

As a society, we need to treat our athletes just the same way we treat each other. We need to recognize our extraordinary gifts as just that – a gift. We must look at a hockey player’s prowess on the ice with the same reverence as an artist’s skill on the canvas. And, just as we don’t begrudge an artist’s ability to create neither should we begrudge our athletes’ ability to perform. Jealousy of another’s gifts is a deficiency in ourselves.

Celebrating the good in everyone would be a nice place to start – which is why we need to know more about Edwards and less about T.O. The world, sporting or otherwise, would be a better place.

2005 © Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Hanging On for Dear Life

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By Jason Menard

Those of us who sit back and dwell on whether or not a player should hang up their skates, cleats, or shoes should take a moment and realize that we’d have to be pulled, kicking and screaming from the game we love.

As fans, we enjoy a love/hate relationship with our sporting icons. Many of us envy the fact that they’re getting paid to play a game we’d do for free, and then we turn around and have the audacity to want them to hang ‘em up before they’re ready. We refer to athletes as being selfish, when it’s really us who are only thinking of ourselves when it comes to where, when, and how our favourite athletes should play.

And, in the end, we forget that many athletes are only doing what we, ourselves, would do – find a way to get into one more game, on more team, for one more moment in the sun.

Sports fans and pundits alike are fond of deciding when an athlete’s finished, over-the-hill, or past his prime. We sit back in our easy chairs, passing judgment on the very same athletes that we cheered wholeheartedly for “when they were good.” We’ll look on with pity at poor Jerry Rice, desperately signing on with the Denver Broncos for a shot at a fourth or fifth receiver position, all the while lauding Barry Sanders for going out on top of their game.

Personally, I think we’re pretty darn hypocritical, because you and I both know that we’d be willing to sign as a water boy at minimum wage for a chance to stay close to the team if those were the only options left.

Yes, sports have become big business, but at their very heart they remain a game. The same game that we played on local rinks, fields, and courts – only on a much larger scale. And the pro athlete we look up to once had the same dreams – if not a tonne more talent – that we did back when we were kids and going to the pros wasn’t just a fantasy – it was a certainty.

If we made it to the bigs, we’d be holding on to our position for dear life. Milking every second of it for as long as we can. But we don’t offer our sporting icons the same opportunity. We look down upon their efforts, make them the butt of jokes, and then state that they’re tarnishing their reputations.

And some folks are offended by the idea of a player signing an essentially bogus contract just to retire in their old jersey, after a few years in free agent purgatory, exorcising their athletic wanderlust.

In the end, time softens all the hard edges. Joe Montana is no lesser a quarterback for hanging on with the Chiefs, just as, for many of us, Wayne Gretzky will always be an Oiler. The fact that he had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Blues is just an afterthought. Mark Messier? His legacy will be that of a Ranger or an Oiler – his sojourn with the Canucks relegated to a footnote.

As we look back on the sporting icons of our past, time has a chance to make the good things greater and the bad things out of focus. I grew up idolizing Guy Lafleur, but the fact that he played for the Nordiques and New York doesn’t change the fact that I’ll always see him in the Bleu, Blanc, et Rouge. And hoops fans will never be caught referring to that Wizard’s legend Michael Jordan. He will be forever a son of the Windy City.

So let the players sign their one-day contracts and retire with teams with which they’re synonymous. Where, in the end, is the harm in that? However, robbing anyone of the opportunity to play the game that they love, just one more time, if they have the interest and there’s a team that wants them – that’s just selfish on our part.

We build up our icons to untenable positions, either to watch them fall or tear them down ourselves. Their athletic superiority is unmatched by the airs of superiority that we put on in passing judgment. But this superiority just isn’t justified.

After all, we may take the high road from the comfort of our couches – but, when push comes to shove, we wouldn’t do anything different ourselves.

2005 © Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved