Sports Violence

Unpublished letter to the Editor, The Boston Globe, January 30, 1994.

In the past few weeks we have watched as the drama of the attack on Nancy Kerrigan transformed from an apparent incidence of random violence to a deeply personal attack. We sat in our easy chairs watching the television describe this sordid affair and wondered to ourselves, "How could this happen?", "How could anybody be so twisted that they would perpetrate such a crime?". The answer is all around us. In our culture, the answer is everywhere. The answer is excessive competitive drive.

I can see readers of these words saying to themselves, "Perhaps that's true, but it doesn't happen here." However, the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, like the earlier attack on Monica Seles, is not just an isolated incidence of craziness. As a society, we nurture this type of response. We are growing it all around us. The truth is that it is in our homes, schools, and playgrounds. Parents sit around watching professional or college sports on the television and their children sit on their laps watching with them. The parents extoll the virtues not of the exceptional athletes, but the winners, and the most deadly hits, while reviling, or worse, ignoring the losers. When the outcome doesn't meet our needs, we yell, "Kill the Ump!", as if the outcome could, and should, be different. Children watch sports and their parents reactions to them and learn; learn to idolize the winners, to revel in the most damaging hits, and to believe in the sanctity of violence within and without sports. As children move to the athletic arena, through school or through community leagues, they carry these values. Sometimes they are tempered with sensible talk about sportsperson-like conduct, sometimes they are reinforced with careful coaching on all methods of winning, including the illegal ones, and with chants of "we're number one!" and the upthrust hands with index fingers extended in defiant claims on being the best.

We see it in the news throughout the country. There are certainly the more publicized events, like the attacks on Nancy Kerrigan and Monica Seles, and the Texas cheerleader's mother. However, the telling facts are evident throughout all our sports culture. We idolize the winners and ignore the losers, despite their extraordinary effort and success. We remember the '86 Red Sox not for winning the American League pennant, but for inglorious defeat in the World Series. We remember the '90, '91, '92 and '93 Buffalo Bills not for winning four consecutive AFC titles but for having lost four consecutive Super Bowls. We idolized Nancy Kerrigan as our national champion and for her efforts in the 1992 Olympics, and we ignored Tonya Harding.

There are also local events which observant readers will see as symptoms of the same problem. For example, the events in Wilmington in the fall of 1992. The problem came to public attention when the principle of Wilmington High School suspended from classes, and disqualified from competition, 14 student-athletes for participating in a hazing at a spring training camp. We learned that the hazing was sufficiently severe that it was investigated by the local police for criminal charges. Yet to some, the most important aspect of the problem was that the punishments threatened to prevent the players from participating in the traditional Thanksgiving Day football game. At a subsequent school board meeting, where the problem was discussed, the two school board members that allegedly leaked the story to the media were pilloried by the parents in an atmosphere that was described as being like a lynching. A town selectman threatened to instigate a recall election against the two school board members. In the end, even after the victims of the hazing were threatened by the perpetrators, the school superintendent reduced the punishments, allowing the students to participate in the apparently all-important Thanksgiving Day game. As with hazing problems that have reached national attention, like those at Vermont's Norwich University in 1991,and South Carolina's The Citadel in 1992, nothing substantial seems to have changed at Wilmington High. Hazing and violence are as much a part of sports as they ever were.

Whether or not Tonya Harding herself had anything to do with the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, her competitive ferocity has darkened this year's figure skating national championship. Her entourage fed on that darkness and spawned and executed a plan to promote their idol to her "rightful place", being number one. However, Tonya's personal hit squad were merely the agents of destruction, our culture provided the agar in which the darkness could grow. In the larger view of social responsibility, we all helped bash Nancy on the knee.

Excessive competitive drive is a disease, like alcoholism or compulsive gambling. As the recent news illustrates, its devastates individuals and erodes our country's moral integrity. That it is not recognized for what it is tells us that, as a society, we don't want to know about it, that, in some sense, we would rather live with the consequences than deal with the problem. We are an entire country in denial about a problem that diminishes our overall well-being and the lives of many of our people. As long as we continue to ignore this problem, incidences like the attack on Nancy Kerrigan will continue to occur, and from our easy chairs we will continue to be surprised and shocked.