The following column is ostensibly about professional sports. Please stay tuned to the end of the column for an axiom on pro sports as they relate to everyday life.
Sorry about the disclaimer. I just know that professional sports are such a polarizing topic that, without a preface, I’d lose half of you before we even began.
Last week, a camera spotted a couple of Milwaukee Brewers baseball players pushing each other around in the dugout. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Given the amount of butt-slapping in professional sports, you had to know one thing would eventually lead to another.
But this wasn’t friendly, “doggy get off my leg” pushing. They were angry.
Generally questions are asked when people start pushing each other around, sometimes the police are even called. Our office, for instance, has a strict no-pushing rule.
So it made sense that following the game, a reporter, bored with the Wisconsin Rockies coughing up another game, asked Brewers manager Ned Yost about the incident.
Reporters often ask imposing questions, sometimes we even write stories. Yost, apparently not familiar with reporters, didn’t like this at all.
First he sang a line from a Sister Sledge song.
“It’s not a big deal,” Yost said. “For eight months a year, we’re a family.”
He declined to say whether he had all his sisters with him.
Unable to soothe the cretins, he used a Sopranoish mob reference.
“At times things happen, flare up, but it’s between the family. It’s in the family.”
At that point, I don’t know if you say fuggedaboutit or holler for Edith.
But the penultimate line came when Yost further explained why it was no consequence to anyone but “the family.”
“It’s a little bit rude when your neighbors are fighting next door for you to go knock on the door and ask what happened. We handle it ourselves. It’s between us and it’s nobody’s business. But it wasn’t that big a deal.”
But herein lies the problem.
I don’t normally go knock on my neighbor’s door and ask why they’re fighting? But my neighbors normally don’t charge my family 50 bucks a head plus $11 for a dog and beer to sit on their couch and watch them fight.
It’s a horrible cliché to say fans pay athletes salaries. If I cut the checks for athlete’s salaries, I find a way to keep Matt Holliday in a Rockies uniform and ship Carmelo Anthony to Seattle (yes, I know they lost their team).
Greedy businessman with television deals and skyboxes pay athletes salaries. Fans have been lost in the equation. We are spit on, given the finger or pummeled to a pulp if we stop by Detroit.
Still, as a fan, I take my child to baseball games then I have to explain to her why grown men are fighting each other in the dugout. Perhaps I shouldn’t bother. Maybe Yost could pen his “good fences” theory in children’s prose.
Changing the focus from Wisconsin where the brats are delicious and the quarterback is confused, I thought Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones made a great point a couple weeks ago when he suggested educators, not athletes, be our children’s role models.
Of course, it would never work. What with teachers working long hours to educate our kids and begging for a little of our respect while pro athletes shower fellow night club attendees with champagne and then deride us for not knowing how much pressure they really endure.
Plus have you ever seen a teacher try to dunk a basketball or run a respectable time in the 40? Good luck.
But, hey, who wants to hear about sports again anyway?
