"Family football fare ends with no show of remorse" from the November 2, 1976 Door County Advocate
JIM ROBERTSON
JIM ROBERTSON
Family football fare ends with no show of remorse
Our family reached the end of an era last Friday night when the third of three sons played his last high school football game. Nine years of high school football were over.
My wife and I weren't a bit sad. In fact, we were glad it was over.
I supposed if we had been the Novaks in Kewaunee we would have felt differently. They also had three sons, all of them on winning football teams.
Southern Door has been just the opposite of Kewaunee, a comparatively small, rural-oriented school in one of the toughest conferences in the state. A small fish in a big pond.
Although it was competitive in the Packerland's first round robin season in 1971, four lean years followed. If you consider wins and losses this year was also lean. But Southern Door was competitive and had regained respectability this year, at least until Friday night.
You'll say that's why we were glad it was over, the bad last game that summed up Southern Door's troubles in the Packerland. Not really. Nine years, nine games to a year, is a long grind. It would be fun to know how much gas alone cost. No, if sports were based only on victory and defeat, you wouldn't find many teams to play. Schools would drop sports and only the strong would be left. And who makes winners anyway? The losers.
Football, especially, is dominated by the big and the strong. Call it a bully sport If you will. Consider all the uneven games even in college and pro ball where players are supposedly matched in size and strength. Then consider the big, bruising high school players who go against much smaller kids. In maturity alone it's often men against boys.
Unfortunately even basketball is getting that way. Big musclemen under the boards are taking the finesse out of the game.
So not only beating but pulverizing an opponent is common. Algoma Coach Steve Mayheu said in his post-game radio interview Friday night that he wanted his seniors to wind up their careers with a "pleasurable experience." But what about the unpleasurable experience of the losers?
Too often high school games are becoming more and more a reflection of the pros. Fear of losing, fighting and "pouring it on" are on the increase again in line with the winning is the only thing philosophy.
And not just in boys' sports but in girls' as well. It was only a few years ago when girls' sports were just starting to flower that Southern Door Administrator Lloyd Jilot predicted to his school board that "it won't be more than a few years when girls will be worse than the boys." We're already hearing reports of losing girls tearing up locker rooms.
Maybe we can get sports back to the proper perspective but I don't know. It's a little hard when we hear an august body like the WIAA editorializing that "we should resolve that we will emphasize LESS our effort to make winners, which we do by concentrating on only some of our students, and emphasize MORE our effort to make sports a reality for most of our students" and then emphasize winning even more by instituting the tie-breaker in football, something the colleges don't even have.
But maybe it was ever thus. I became a fan of Sturgeon Bay high school sports as a grade schooler back in the late 30's. I guess it was just as much dog-eat-dog back then as we all grew up hating the big schools like Two Rivers and our rivals down the pike at Algoma.
Maybe that's why I'm glad the personal involvement is over. Enjoyment of a game as a two-hour interlude of entertainment is one thing, emotional and temperamental involvement another.
We're too much like little kids in our games - angry when we lose and not all that happy when we win.
Jon Gast said he waited and waited to see a smile break out on the face of Jim Adams when his Sevastopol team was beating Manitowoc Lutheran for a share of the Bay-Lakes championship. The smile never came until the game was over. So is the enjoyment only in the triumph and not in the game itself?
Could it be that sport isn't really the character molder we like to think it is but rather a reflection of an affluent society that not only grabs all it can when it can but often at the expense of the have-nots?
And really, for what? I once compared a victory to an expensive steak dinner. No sooner is it eaten than you start thinking about the next meal. Even a bad game is no worse than the stomach flu which passes in the night and by Monday is forgotten. Good and bad seasons alike have already given way to basketball and wrestling.
I'm reminded of what Southern Door Principal Tom Van Lieshout said after Southern Door's opening loss to Sturgeon Bay this year. A person should always keep his mouth shut after a game because it's easy to say something you don't really mean. I said that maybe Southern Door should just drop football. Tom said no way, that he had just been talking to Butch Arneman, an old college teammate, and they had been reminiscing over the fun they had — even if they had played on a lousy team.
I'm also reminded of a longer time ago then Tom Walker was Sturgeon Bay principal and he said how too many people see green and gold instead of red and white out on Memorial Field. Too many people associate high school football with the pros, while Chuck Lane, public relations director of the Packers, waned up in an interview when he said, "It is all a reflection of the world. People are more cynical. We have billed this (pro football) as a holy war for so long...we may be getting some of it back."
Still, maybe I should think back to what our oldest son said when Van Lieshout was talking about his college days. He aid, "we didn't have much of a team, either but I still think of it as a good time in my life."
Maybe that's the answer. Let the kids play their games and the rest of us act like adults. Which is easy to say now that I'm no longer a football parent.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive