How soon they forget. A high school jock who gradually left three athletic fields behind for grass of a different kind, I am living – mirabile dictu – proof that sports do nothing of the sort. (Ice hockey lasted longest; in those days, women’s games moved pretty slowly, and playing high was part of the fun.) I’m not sorry. College sports take up a ton of time, and in their place I accumulated a range of friends and experiences I might not have encountered as a serious athlete; I even managed a magna cum laude. All that’s left to me from my glory days are a good arm and complete disdain for walking as a form of exercise.
So why, twenty years later, do I find myself in Dick’s Sporting Goods, purchasing pink cleats and a tiny mitt? Em wants to be a manga artist and El wants to go to rock camp. Why subject them to the treadmill of tryout and practice and game and icepack and injury and JV and varsity and home and away – and myself to thousands of dollars in registration fees and equipment – only to have them figure out at the end of their freshman year that they’d rather paint, or sing, or do bonghits and read Mysteries of Udolpho ten times? What’s the point?
I remembered the point when I read this essay about how an exceptional field hockey team from a small liberal arts college rallied after the tragic death of a leading player to win two national championships. These young women used their sport to turn a senseless loss into a win, on several levels: a narrative of accomplishment, memory, and transcendence. This type of story has become all too rare in sports, where the focus is usually on misbehavior ranging from the fatal kegger to lockers full of guns. Is it a coincidence that the vast majority of these incidents involve men?
My ice hockey coach at that same college once told the team that we – meaning women – played the game as it was meant to be played, with an emphasis on grace and finesse, as opposed to speed and violence. I would argue that women play most sports this way. (OK, not ALL women, but most.) When the crowds are small, the press almost nonexistent and the professional possibilities beyond the WNBA are nil, there’s nothing left to glory in but the game itself. You never hear jokes about how much ass a field hockey MVP is going to get, or that time the women’s softball team assaulted a male stripper, because they don’t exist. All too often, it seems, the simple ideals of “mens sana in corpore sano,” camaraderie, and achievement for its own sake, are forgotten, drowned out by stories of boys gone wild, entitlement and exceptionalism: “If you are great at playing this game, other rules don’t apply to you.”
These separate strands of sports mentality collided violently in the death of Yeardley Love at, possibly in, the hands of her former boyfriend, fellow University of Virginia lacrosse star George Huguely. Love was a first class athlete at a first class school, and, until May 3rd, 2010, I’m sure that her parents, like mine, believed that sports had enriched their daughter’s life, had helped her become the person teammates and coaches described as “a good soul” and “an angel.” They could not have predicted that her skill might place her in the path of Huguely, who was once tasered for resisting arrest for public intoxication, after hurling racial and sexual epithets at the black female officer who apprehended him. According to the Charlottesville, VA police, 22% of Huguely’s teammates had been charged with alcohol-related offenses at some point during their college careers.
What percent of the women’s team were similarly charged? I’m guessing … oh … zero.
In the words of UVA president John Casteen, Love “deserved the bright future she earned growing up, studying here, and developing her talents as a lacrosse player.” To a non-athlete, ball-handling skills might seem out of place in an obituary. Just weeks away from graduation, Love had only a few games left in her lacrosse career. Equally bizarre is the suggestion in the ACC Insider that men’s coach Craig Littlepage should “pull the plug on the season.” Ending the hopes of the 78% of the team who have done nothing wrong - that we know of - won’t bring Love back. (As of now, both the men’s and women’s teams plan to play their championship games as scheduled.) This complete intertwining of life and sport, individual and team, may be incomprehensible to those on the sidelines. But for better or for worse, sports dictated how these young people lived – and, perhaps, why one of them died.
