[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
 |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|
|
|
12.30.2001 00:08
Bill Reynolds
Sports offers glimpses
into the game of life
Sports teaches us many things, lessons reaffirmed countless times during this difficult year that's about to end.
Here are three of them:
• SPORTS CAN HUMBLE:
It was a night last December in the FleetCenter, one of the waning moments in Rick Pitino's tenure with the Celtics. After another loss
,
he sat in his small office off the locker room, and it was as if all the defeats, all the frustration, had become a bas-relief on his face.
All his past success? All his money? All his celebrity?
None of it seemed to matter that night. His run with the Celtics, which has started with such great expectations, now seemed to lie in ruins at his feet. In a few days
,
he would officially announce he was leaving the Celtics, but what was so apparent was how crushed he was, how defeated.
In an amazing career that had taken him to the heights of American sport, he had never failed before. Now he had.
In time, Pitino would emotionally rebound, would resurface as the coach at Louisville, back in the college game. Yesterday, he was back in the spotlight's glare as his team played Kentucky
at
Lexington.
Still, it was impossible to watch Pitino that night in the FleetCenter and not realize that sport
s
has the power to humble all of us. Be it the Little League kid who first realizes he's not the player he wanted to be, or the high school players who have come to realize they're not good enough to play in college, or even the the NFL quarterback who gets hurt only to come back to discover he has lost his job to Tom Brady. Not even the celebrated coach who always had turned water into wine.
The dirty little secret of sports?
Dreams don't always come true. As if sport is always a fickle lover, always with the reminder that eventually we will have to pay for all those sweet caresses. Sport has the capacity to humble all of us.
• SPORTS CAN ELEVATE:
There are few things better in sports than a team that comes out of nowhere to give us a season we didn't expect.
The Providence College basketball team did that last winter. Making it better was the year before had been such a desultory one for the Friars, a losing record, a dead Civic Center and an off-campus fight that brought ugly headlines. It seemed as if the Friars were simply wallowing in the mire, the cheers on hold.
Last year, the Friars changed all that, and it came at the right time, too. Once, Providence was a great college basketball town, the Civic Center the spiritual center of New England college basketball. That's not always the case anymore. The Friars compete with the P-Bruins, movies and everything else. More and more, we are a pro town now, a sports suburb of Boston.
So it was wonderful to see the Friars bring the crowds back again, wonderful to see the interest start to return. Winning is the great antidote, and as the Friars continued to win, it began to resemble the old days, back when a PC ticket to a big game was as tough as it gets around here. Back when the Friars' success seemed to bring a community together like few things do.
We see that with the Patriots now.
For there's something about a team doing well that makes us all feel a little better. Maybe it's because a team is one of the few things that cuts across race, class, ethnicity. Maybe because a successful team has the power to bring us all a little closer together, like some unexpected gift.
• SPORTS CAN SOOTHE:
Sept. 12th, the day after.
It was sunny, beautiful. And if you didn't know better, you could sit and watch a high school girls soccer game between Exeter/West Greenwich and Cranston West and never think the the world had changed, that something irrevocable had not happened the day before.
I was looking for something to write about that day. But what? Everything seemed to have stopped. The television was alive with gruesome images of Ground Zero, the horror replayed over and over. Sports seemed so insignificant, so trivial, so much of what our world used to be, but no longer seemed to be.
At least for me.
So I wasn't sure what I was going to find at that girls soccer game. Kids feeling guilty about playing? People trying to win a high school soccer game? What? I had no idea. But never did I have less interest in sports, in writing about them.
For two hours I sat in the sunshine and watched high school kids play a soccer game. On an adjoining field, a boys team was practicing. On a far field was a youth baseball game. It all seemed timeless, so far removed from the day before and those images on the television screen that could break your heart.
And, as I watched those teams go back and forth that September afternoon, playing with all the passion of kids, I began to envy them their youth, their ability to lose themselves in a game, if only for a couple of hours. In one sense, it was a reaffirmation of how sports have the potential to heal, to soothe, sports as balm to a troubled psyche.
Eventually, I began to realize what those kids already had figured out: Life does go on. Not always the way we want it to. Sometimes not without a heavy heart. But go on it does. And we have to go on with it. It's a lesson I've tried to take with me from that afternoon, a debt I owe those kids.
A lesson from which we all can learn.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
Printer-Friendly Version
