It was decades ago, a missive targeting a bus driver sitting at the press table at a high school basketball game and showing that he knew little about the sport he watched.
The headline: Two bucks for the right to be an idiot.
A few days later, there was a quarter-page of letters to the editor, including from the guy’s wife.
That memory returned when a friend said he had started umpiring at a local youth league.
Another recollection came back, two years in college as the umpire in chief of a 13-15 baseball league. That experience led me to believe that attendees to youth sporting events should be carded, and if you’re older than 21, sorry.
Add to that the years of stories of Parents Gone Wild at games, leading to Kids Gone Wild at games, and the tons of video, and my friend’s first story of simpletons in the stands at his first game of the year inspired an idea -- FanCam at youth baseball games, everywhere, and charging adults admission to games to pay for it.
The camera would be attached to the backstop, and it would be electrically charged, so any yahoo trying to disable it might be shocked into reality and sensibility. It would have a sensor that directed it to the loudest and most obnoxious vocal sound and then focused in on said poster child for birth control.
Youth leagues would have a “Yeah, you’re making your kid and your mom mighty proud” link, and there would be video snippets of the embarrassment, with the game and date.
It’s safer than having a human aim a phone or camera at somebody, because then the clown/clownette is caught, and then they go off as it hits them that they’re humiliating their kid and offering nothing remotely worthwhile, which is supposed to be the point of kids playing sports: lessons.
There’s something about youth baseball/softball and the buffoon gene taking over for too many adults. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s about some sort of compensation.
That we have the level of violence, antagonism, ignorance, bullying and downright offensiveness as common occurrences all over where kids play ball is astounding and frightening.
Yes, it cuts across economic lines, racial lines and geographic lines. Stupidity always does, especially when it comes to sports. Why learn rules or actually try officiating or umpiring one time -- and not get kicked out because one is a fool -- when it’s easier to sit and yell and live the “ignorance is bliss” dream?
How glorious it would be for leagues to start punishing parents for their actions. How much protection would league officials need if they started keeping adults away -- proper ID required -- from games because of their actions?
Maybe one penalty is matching T-shirts: “Tim’s Dad” for Tim’s Dad and “I’m with stupid” for Tim’s Mom, and they must sit together.
Rather than encourage, quietly bemoan the missed call made by a mere human being loaded with imperfections and just enjoy an evening outside watching kids have fun -- or try to -- it’s overly serious stuff.
How ridiculous.
When a kid wants to stop playing a sport, it’s often more because they’re tired of the problems handed out by adults rather than the sport itself. Nothing takes the fun out of a game like Mom or Dad.
The joy of a sharp hit to right-center or a swishing net on a shot tends to lose out to the iron-lunged pinhead screaming at the other team or officials.
Sure, winning is still part of the equation, but the younger the player, the smaller the part of the equation it is.
And yes, all this tends to be amped up the higher the age. High school basketball might be the worst.
The primary hypocrisy? If the kids act at home the way parents act at a youth game, Junior gets no ice cream and may not want to sit down for an hour.
Yet as this nation is wont to do, idiots are enabled and penalties for PGW (Parents Gone Wild) are lacking. My dream that child services budgets expand by one or 40 billion bucks so we can build quality youth homes with quality personnel and yank poor kids out of some of what they’re forced to deal with -- inevitably turning too many of them into their parents -- is indeed just a dream.
Doing what it takes to have a kid ain’t the same as being a parent. Unfortunately, we’re reminded of that with the shout of “play ball” each spring and summer.
If only it was merely about playing ball.
Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com
