Re: Coaching Joe Hillshoist
Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2006 2:26 am
Bringing troubled kids into the fold is a noble cause and I can only imagine how good it must feel to make a person's life better. I've done just a little mentoring myself and it feels great to be able to share the wisdom of your years with a younger guy who needs a surrogate family and a positive perspective. But this is positive only as long as that surrogate family is the human family and not just 'your team.'<br><br>What you wrote above about your attachment to your team reads exactly like what soldiers feel for their battle field buddies.<br><br>And in a fit of synchronicity, here is an article that just turned up online about sports as war and how Europe and America treat it differently with a quote from General-turned-president Dwight Eisenhower.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0620-23.htm">www.commondreams.org/views06/0620-23.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>Published on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 by The Nation<br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Hey Guys, It's Just A Game</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>by Dave Zirin & John Cox<br><br><br>More than half a century ago, Dwight Eisenhower famously said, <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>"The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war."</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> This is the undeniable downside of sports: the way teamwork, camaraderie, and competition can be used to desensitize a population to the horrors of war. And it is particularly part of the sporting DNA of what Americans call football, where games are routinely referred to as "battles" or "wars," and NFL quarterbacks are "field generals" who throw bullet passes and bombs for the purpose of advancing on enemy territory.<br><br>Consider the bellicose posturing of American striker Eddie Johnson at the World Cup, a few days before his team managed to tie the favored Italians in an ugly match featuring three ejections.<br><br>"We're here for a war," Johnson said a few days before the game, after visiting US troops at Ramstein Air Base. "Whenever you put your jersey on and you look at your crest and the national anthem's going on, and you're playing against a different country, it's like you do or die, it's survival of the (fittest) over ninety minutes-plus. We're going to go out there and do whatever we've got to do, make tackles, do the things when the referee's not looking...to get three points." Johnson concluded by saying, "It's do or die.... I don't want to go home early." Ironically, most of the American troops Johnson thinks he's supporting would like nothing better than to "go home early" from combat duty in Iraq. <br><br> The World Cup has historically aimed to be a counterweight to the passions of war. But Johnson's comments are consistent with the militaristic spirit that some US fans have brought to the games. Without question, England, Poland, Germany and other teams have their share of fringe hooligans, some openly racist. But Team USA's most prominent fan club calls itself "Sam's Army." While the fan club explicitly rejects racism and soccer hooliganism, its website is replete with martial imagery and belligerent anthems.<br><br>Johnson's comments illuminate <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>a crucial difference between how Americans and Europeans think about war--and sport. Europeans are not quite so blithe on these matters, having seen the continent decimated twice in the past century by war.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> It is not surprising that a number of Italian players were alternately bemused and repulsed by Johnson's war talk. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>more...<br><br> <p></p><i></i>