For Athletes, We Make Exceptions
Now I get it.
Like a lot of people, I was concerned when an arbitrator last week ordered the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors to reinstate guard Latrell Sprewell next season at full salary. I didn’t get why the arbitrator reduced Sprewell’s one-year suspension for choking and, 20 minutes later, trying again to attack coach P.J. Carlesimo following an argument.
Then a story right next to Spre’s photo in the newspaper boosted my appreciation of the ballplayer. After their argument, Sprewell showed enormous restraint and presence of mind by not whipping out a pair of nail clippers and trimming his coach’s fingernails - an act for which he could have been seriously punished.
Sprewell merely attacked Carlesimo, so he’ll get paid $16.3 million over the next two years.
But Carol Comstock, a fourth-grade teacher in Yorktown, Va., dared to trim one of her 9-year-old student’s pink-polished nails, which she deemed were too long. She was charged with assault.
Is this a cool time to be alive or what?
Comstock didn’t get the parents’ permission to provide the impromptu manicure - she’d sent a letter home with the girl complaining that the nails were a distraction, and still felt they were too long after the child’s mother trimmed them.
“She took my little girl’s hands in her own and cut her,” said the girl’s mom, who - upset when she couldn’t reach the school system’s superintendent over the weekend - informed the sheriff. “To me, that’s assault,” the mother said.
To me, that’s a crock. Putting two hands around somebody’s neck and squeezing hard is assault. Cutting a child’s nails without permission is an act warranting investigation, a scolding, a serious warning from the principal. But an assault charge? (The charge was dropped Friday for lack of evidence.)
As for Sprewell, some feel he was “punished enough.” He apologized - a week later. He won’t play this season and has lost $6.4 million. He missed 68 games, poor thing.
Poor us, living in a world where everyone - even a coach-throttling ballplayer and a child whose nails are clipped by an overzealous teacher - is a victim whose view should prevail.
Ed Smith runs Leaders for the 21st Century, a weekend tutoring program for at-risk youngsters in Silver Spring, Md. When he saw Spre’s smiling photo beside the nail-clipping assailant story, Smith guffawed. All he could get out was: “And people wonder why we’ve got problems in the school system?”
Smith says sports trickle down to real life real fast. Each time an athlete gets token punishment for smacking somebody or being caught with drugs or a gun, he says, his job gets tougher. Recently, a third-grader in his program kicked a seventh-grade girl in the leg “and had no explanation,” he said. “She then tried to put him through a window. … The idea ‘I’m above the rules’ doesn’t just affect the NBA.”
William Lindsey, coach of girls varsity basketball at Montgomery Blair High School, says it’s clear that “with all the things high school players copy from NBA players, such as styles of playing, walking, talking and dressing, actions are copied, too.”
At first, Lindsey felt “torn” about the Sprewell decision. “I thought it was kind of steep, to lose $6 million. … But if I were to punch my principal, I’d lose my job and salary. … We tend to treat it differently if it’s $6 million as opposed to $60,000.”
What infuriates Julian Okwu is how some people automatically “give the benefit of the doubt to a young African American man who reacted violently.” Okwu, 32, created a gorgeous picture book, “Face Forward: Young African American Men in a Critical Age,” that highlights brothers making positive contributions. “Unfortunately, kids identify with (Sprewell) more than any of the 39 men in my book,” he said. “We must shift that focus.”
“Face Forward” proves that “despite all the negative statistics … our lowest common denominator will never define who we really are.”
No matter what color you are. Take the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey players, who trashed three apartments in Nagano after learning they couldn’t party hearty and defeat athletes who took the Olympics more seriously. I’d remind them, and the Sprewells of the world: Your millions, paid by the fans whom you disregard, allow you to provide beautifully for yourselves, your families and myriad hangers-on, people who might otherwise live like the rest of us - worried about bills, mortgages and paying for college. You are adored, pursued, emulated. These blessings are yours because you’re good at playing a game - one that you love and that, quiet as it’s kept, you’d play for pennies if you had to.
And if you keep making me mad, you’re going to force me to clip all of your nails.
xxxx