Good guys do finish FIRST
It was a story that hit home to me and to millions of others who read or heard it. And now it has a happy ending:
- A middle school honor student who was humiliated when his basketball coach gave him a "Crybaby Award" last month was feted at a school assembly Friday with applause from his peers and an apology from the coach.
Ousted Pleasantville Middle School coach James Guillen presented Terrence Philo Jr. with a certificate, a trophy and the first-ever Terrence Philo Jr. Award.
"I would like to extend a special apology to the Terrence Philo family," Guillen told the boy in front of about 250 of his cheering classmates. He blamed his error last month on "my lack of experience as a coach and as a teacher."
There much more here. And you'll see as you read what the coach totally ignored and shunted aside was the fact that this kid was persistent.
I was raised sort of in the "never complain, never explain" tradition of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and others who mainly got something accomplished, kept their mouths shut, and rarely replied to criticism.
So prizes wouldn't have meant anything to me even if I had earned any for athletic deeds. (I ran intermural track for a while when I was a skinny kid and could go fast. Nothing to write home about.)
So the kid didn't or couldn't make the team. Who gives a shit? It might have propelled him to invent a better type of computer memory, or a vaccination for herpes, or figure out a more ingeneous way to screw investors out of millions and get away with it. Most real changes in the world, either for better or for worse, are caused by the socially maladjusted.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Never complain, never explain? How about: give me what my farking tax dollars are paying for. How about, deal with my presence and start making room for me because I have as much a right to be here as you.
Yeah, it's nice to think that people who don't fit in will all retreat to their basements and channel their hurt into a cure for cancer and retire richer than God. But I expect most of them crawl into a cubicle and take it up the ass in Corporate America, never quite sure why they never feel fulfilled.
I will never mock someone who stood up for himself.
Actually, the kid DID make the team. And he did get playing time--he just wanted more. He's just the shortest; the coach (remember this is middle school people, 6th 7th and 8th graders--VAST differences in physical maturity)--was hell-bent on winning the championship. Which the team did. But isn't the point of sport to instill--well, sportsmanship? And didn't the coach flunk that?
I mean, calling a kid a crybaby in the team bus on the way back from a game is one thing. Getting a whole trophy made up, calling the kid to make sure that he's there at the awards banquet so that he can be the only kid humiliated....what is sporting or inspiring about that, Mr. Harris.
What got me steamed about this teacher is that his regular assignment is teaching Special Ed. Wonder how he humilates THOSE kids, behind closed doors?