Russel Baker called American sports “the opiate of the masses”
in a 1967 New York Times column. In 40 years, the situation
certainly hasn’t improved.
I love high school sports and think they are a vital way to
teach young people important lessons about values and hard work.
But as we all know, and as Ryan Lucas’ article “Whatever It Takes,”
points out about abuse of steroids and other performance-enhancing
chemicals among high-school athletes, sometimes it is possible for
the wrong lessons to be learned. The wrong lessons are, of course,
winning at all costs, cheating is OK and the ends justify the
means.
Locally, it is probably not the problem that it is in other
locales, but in the modern American landscape, the overemphasis of
athletics over academics is something to worry about. At the
college level, the importance of teamwork, fair play and winning
and losing gracefully have been overshadowed by the tendency toward
commercial spectacle and a focus on entertainment. Athletics need
to be maintained as a useful, important part of the educational
process rather than, as Allen Sack put it in the Chronicle of
Higher Education, ” … as an arm of the entertainment
industry.”
We need be sure that the fingers that have gripped college
sports in that manner don’t get any kind of handhold in our high
schools. We do that by showing it won’t be tolerated.
Rob Carrigan is a third-generation Colorado native and
publisher of the Courier View and Tribune. He can be reached by
e-mailing rcarrigan@ccnewspapers.com.