On a Saturday morning earlier this month, I woke up frustrated. For the next few months, Saturdays are the busiest sports day on the island and I wasn’t looking forward to it because something I had witnessed the night before.
On a Saturday morning earlier this month, I woke up frustrated. For the next few months, Saturdays are the busiest sports day on the island and I wasn’t looking forward to it because something I had witnessed the night before.
When I cover a basketball game, I like to sit in the stands. I like to be in the middle of the energy and hear every cheer, jeer and chant. I feel like it helps my stories if I can sense what the crowd is like. I enjoy the enthusiastic support each fan base has for its team. Of course, there are times when the crowd chants turn negative, most of the time toward a ref, but for the most part I’m able to put up with it. After all, who hasn’t been to a sporting event and not complained about the refs? Some of it’s warranted, most of the time it’s not. But it’s a part of the game.
But what got me irked that Friday night was something that’s not part of the game. It was something that should never be part of any game at any level.
It was fans openly cheering the injury of a player.
In this game, things started to get rough in the closing quarters. The players weren’t doing anything wrong, they were just increasing the intensity as the game called for it. Bodies flew all over the court in pursuit of loose balls. Jostling for rebounds sometimes got physical, with the occasional elbow flying around.
One of those elbows smacked an opposing player in the fourth quarter and she went down to the floor with her face in her hands.
As most of the crowd hushed for a moment, making sure she was OK, a few of the fans I was sitting around started to snicker. They laughed at the injury. They insinuated she had it coming.
Only when the player stood up and a trickle of blood ran down her face, did the fans reconsider their comments.
“Oh, she’s bleeding,” one of them said, before quieting.
Would it have been OK if she wasn’t bleeding?
No.
The most maddening part of this was who it was coming from. It wasn’t adolescents that didn’t know any better. It was parents. It was full-grown adults making light of a teenager being injured.
There’s a fine line when it comes to cheering. Yes, you should be loud and proud of your team and kids. Yes, you should want them to win. But when it comes to a point where you’re laughing at another parent’s child rolling around the ground in pain, something is wrong.
I’m a sports reporter and nobody has to tell me how much sports can mean to people. Afterall, I get paid to watch games. But in the long run, that’s exactly what they are. Games. But a game is no longer a game when the entertainment comes at the expense of an injury.
