On the TUNNEYSIDE of SPORTS February 24, 2014 #477 Up next…Practice Sportsmanship!
After further review…Coming up soon – March 4, 2014 – is Sportsmanship Day. Do we really need to designate a day to remind us all, not just athletes, to be good sports? How do we measure the value of Sportsmanship Day compared, say, to the recent Presidents’ Day? Or Valentine’s Day? How about later in the year as we honor out parents with Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. And let’s not forget Grandma and Grandpa; they have their day too.
The thinking here is that sportsmanship ought to be observed 24/7. As legendary Norte Dame football coach Knute Rockne often said, “One man practicing good sportsmanship is far better than fifty others preaching it”. Got it, coach. Those words apply to all the above; practice what you would honor on that special day, every day. Sports can help us put into practice what we believe.
One of the intrinsic values of playground sports that many of us played as kids is that we played without referees/umpires or even coaches. During our playground basketball games, we called fouls on ourselves. In our sandlot baseball games, when disputes arose between runners (“I was safe!”) and fielders (“Nuh-uh, I tagged ya!”) we had to settle them ourselves. And we had to do it quickly since we were usually running out of daylight. Arguing at length was not tolerated.
The value of playing sports cannot be minimized, if just for that reason. English, Math, and Science offer few opportunities to practice sportsmanship. The greatest value of sports is not in proclaiming how talented you are or how many games you won, but the opportunity to practice playing fair. Maybe it’s the only classroom that can teach that virtue.
But that virtue needs to be practiced in all our daily activities. It is civility at its best. We ignore the merit of sportsmanship when we cut into a line unfairly or cut someone off in traffic, or belittle others for the sake of our own egos. True sportsmanship, no matter where it originates, is an ethos, an underlying sense of character, which we all need in our daily lives.
Will you model good sportsmanship and help others understand its value?
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