What Ever Happened to Sportmanship and Teamwork?

Parents, schools and recreational programs have always encouraged our youth to play sports. The benefits are: exercise, learning to follow rules and of course sportsmanship. Professional and college athletes are admired for their athletic skill sets, however the social benefits are now questionable, due to the bad behavior we have witnessed from famous athletes, sportsmanship seems to be passe‘. 

One athlete that has displayed poor sportsmanship is Kyre Irving from the NY Nets basketball team. In order to field a full team, without risking team members getting Covid, the team was required to be vaccinated to play during a game. Kyrie, chose not to take one. He only played in 33 games for the season. He was penalized monetarily, but his non action hurt a team that was forecasted to be the NBA world champs this year. 

As a result, the team‘s performance was inconsistent. Other team members had to pick up the slack and as a result the.team sustained many injuries. James Harden, who was another top round pick for the Nets, seemed unhappy with the team and was looking to get traded. It is possible, due to Kyrie‘s selfishness, that Harden felt this team with a good shot of winning a championship was not going to happen without Kyrie playing. Harden got traded to Philly 76ers and in exchange we got Ben Simmons, but he was too injured to play this season. The Nets got into the first round of the playoffs and got swept in all four games by the Celtics. The old saying, “teamwork makes the dream work“, was not happening for the Nets. 

Phil Mickelson, a respected pro golfer on the PGA tour had a career changing bad moment. He spoke badly about a pro tour that would be started in Saudi Arabia. In a statement Mickelson criticized the PGA for this partnership and said, ” the PGA Tour ‘s greed was beyond obnoxious“. He went on to talk about Saudi Arabia‘s repressive regime and pointed out the country‘s poor record on human rights. From this bold statement, Mickelson lost KPMG one of his sponsors. He decided to give himself some time away from golf to take time to reflect and spend time with his family. 

Although there are many incidents of inappropriate behavior by athletes, in comparison one rarely sees this bad behavior from coaches. At the end of a basketball game between the U of Michigan and U of Wisconsin the coaches got into a confrontation during the postgame handshake. The U of Michigan lost 63– 77. 

Juwan Howard the Michigan coach tells Gard the Badgers coach during the handshake“ I‘ll remember–––, Gard reached out to touch Howard and Howard yelled, “don‘t touch me.“This verbal attack was followed by an open hand slap to Wisconsin‘s assistant coach‘s face and then the team‘s players got involved in a physical altercation where police were needed to break it up. What caused all of this is unknown, but one thing for sureit was an embarrassing display. Athletics are great for our youth, but this poor show of sportsmanship needs to be admonished. Athletes you are so treasured by our culture, don‘t tarnish this treasure with bad acting behavior. You are our heroes that get to do a job that is admired. Remember that, because otherwise we say, WTH.