Have we jumped the shark with professional and college sports? It’s a question that has frankly been brewing in my mind for some time, but the aftermath of Sunday’s biggest college basketball story begs the question that much more.
And if the answer is “yes”, pencil me in as someone who is deeply saddened by that and concerned by what it indicates about our culture.
For those who don’t follow college basketball, the story of the day came right after Wisconsin’s 77-63 win over Michigan. The teams were getting ready to shake hands, and after the exchange between the head coaches, a brawl ensued. Reasonable people can talk about consequences for all involved, and there was much talk about that on social media as can be expected, but in the grand scheme of things that is unimportant. Something else became a popular idea in all the talk about it, and that’s of more interest.
A seemingly trendy idea espoused in much of the discussion is that having teams shake hands after a game should be a thing of the past. Plenty of well-known figures in sports media said we should just do away with it, with one even saying that this is done so people can talk about it on Twitter – perhaps an unintentional implication, but one there nonetheless. (We won’t get into how post-game handshakes predate Twitter by a mile.) The idea of stopping this because of what happened on Sunday is, to put it mildly, a terrible idea for so many reasons.
First and foremost, at the end of the day this is a game. As one former head coach said when his team’s season ended and his locker room was not in a good place, “nobody died here tonight.” Indeed, while sports occupies an elevated place in our culture, at the end of the day there are far more important things. You compete to be the best, but neither world peace nor World War III will happen contingent on the result of the game. Cancer will not be cured if one particular team wins. It’s not a life-or-death matter, where the losing team is put to death.
So when the game is over, there should be an expectation of sportsmanship – at least at all levels before professional. Even at the professional level that should be expected, although it’s a little more understandable. After all, it’s unlikely that Bill Gates ever got a phone call from Steve Jobs any time someone chose a Mac over a Windows PC saying, “Good job Bill,” the way players and coaches on opposing teams would shake hands and say, “Good game guys.” But that’s not at stake in youth sports, or even college sports.
That brings us to the next point: sports are also a vehicle to teach larger life lessons. A college coach is, among other things, in the position to mold young men; in the case of Juwan Howard, he is in the position with enormous influence since he was a great college player and had a long professional career. When he talks, kids listen, because they would all like to play in the NBA and make big money like he did.
Having seen sports from every conceivable angle – player, coach, game official, fan, impartial observer, media member – I’ve gained a tremendous amount from the experiences. There are very few situations in life where I can’t think of a sports scenario that doesn’t serve as an analogy to help guide me. This is why my own son will play sports – to learn the values you get from it like being part of something bigger than yourself, working with others for a common goal, constantly working to improve and competing fairly by a set of agreed-upon rules.
It’s at this point that someone will surely point out that this is all idealistic. This is not what college sports is now, with big TV contracts, coaches making millions (although the majority don’t make seven figures) and players now making money via marketing deals. All this money means there’s so much more pressure and so much more at stake.
To that, I say: So what? Does that mean we throw away basic decency and view sports as life-and-death matters, no questions asked? Do we now view our opponents not as opponents, but rather, mortal enemies and act accordingly? Should we accept less from people just because there is money involved?
If the answer to those questions is “yes”, then there are no winners in all of this. All of us lose, and lose big given the aforementioned place that sports occupy in our culture. No one summed this up better than Chris Spatola, a former Division I basketball player at Army who is now an ESPN college basketball analyst and is also the son-in-law of legendary Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. In a tweet early Sunday evening, he said, “We need to lower the temperature on sports overall. Cause we’re losing the fundamental value of playing sports.” Later, he shared a video talking about the bad idea that we should stop handshake lines altogether because of this.
You compete like crazy, lay it all on the line, and then you shake hands. pic.twitter.com/u7ZOQXAl1C
— Chris Spatola (@Chris_Spatola) February 21, 2022
One can understand that emotions may be running high after a hotly contested game, especially if it’s between arch rivals. In the case, a handshake line might not be such a great idea, and if so, then the participating teams can make the decision not to do that. Let this be something done when the situation warrants it while not imposing that on everyone else. I covered a game once where that happened, and while it was a bit jarring at the moment it happened, especially since I know both coaches involved, you could understand why it was done even if you disagreed with the decision. But the idea that we should just get rid of it because of an incident like this, when thousands of times a season we have them without incident, makes no sense at all.
There are good recent examples to the contrary. When Texas Tech knocked off Texas on Saturday, Texas head coach Chris Beard shared a good moment with his opposite number, Mark Adams, who was an assistant on his staff in Lubbock before he went to Austin. Late Saturday night, Oregon and Arizona played a tremendous game, a back-and-forth affair with plenty of physicality, lots of emotion on both teams who gave it their all, and while it ended without a handshake line that could be seen on TV (it doesn’t appear one happened, but TV may have cut away before it formed), it did end with a few opposing players openly embracing and coaches shaking hands even though everyone on the floor was undoubtedly quite emotional at that point.
Perhaps nothing shows this to be such a bad idea as much as the rationale, either stated or implied, in all of this. The rationale is that even adults like college coaches are simply unable to be mature adults after a game, and because of that, we should just give in and expect less of people. The handshake line has nothing to do with this; it is incapable of affecting people. It’s like when people say, “The Internet kills relationships” or something similar – the Internet is an inanimate object. People kill relationships; the Internet is only a medium. Similarly, the handshake line doesn’t make ugly incidents like Sunday happen – the people in those lines do.
We should reject this idea that we should expect less out of people. We’re supposed to be better than this and have more of a sense of personal responsibility. If we can’t do that, then Chris Spatola never said truer words than when he said that we have bigger problems, because it would mean that sports are officially a lost cause.