MORGANTOWN — I’m not quite sure where it began. I believe I can put my finger on it even though it was many years ago in a far different world than the one in which we now live.
The central character was 10 or 11 years old at the time, one of those cute little squirts in the Little League uniform, but on this day our future major leaguer wasn’t feeling very well. He had a slight temperature, maybe 101, and a cough and a runny nose.
His Little League team had a practice scheduled that day, but he pretty much knew he would not be there, feeling the way he was.
Then his father came home.
“Are you going to let a little cold keep you from practice?” his father roared. “Get dressed. You have teammates out there who are depending on you. You don’t miss practice unless you can’t go.”
And so it was that he stuffed himself into his uniform, tied on his rubber spikes, pulled his baseball cap on and went off to practice, not because he needed to be at practice to better his own performance, but because he had been taught one of those life lessons about responsibility.
I know about this story because the little kid in the story was me.
That is why the events of the past week hit me so hard, events that led to the West Virginia Mountaineers having to play against Florida State on New Year’s Day in the Gator Bowl without two of their starting players.
As you undoubtedly know by now, bandit safety Nate Sowers and defensive tackle Scooter Berry were declared academically ineligible to participate in the game.
Surely this hurts them on a personal level, publically embarrassed, in Sowers’ case missing what should have been his final collegiate game. No trip to Florida, no bowl loot.
But that is not what is sad. You make your own choices and if just you are involved, you live them, just as Berry and Sowers will.
Their teammates, however, were not involved in the decision making, in the act of failing to qualify, yet they will have to go out onto the playing field at the highest level and work even harder than they would have to try and cover up the defects in the defense that comes from the absence of two starters.
See, we all tend to personalize everything that occurs in our life. It is always about us, yet far too often our shortcomings penalize others, people we think we care about, people we don’t want to hurt or disappoint, people who have done nothing to inherit the burden we place on them.
No one’s perfect. We know that. I know that. While I’m preaching about a pair of football players letting academics get away from them, I’m doing it from a makeshift pulpit.
In my college days, French and I did not get along. Oh, I could handle French toast and French fries, even a French kiss … but as for the language: Well, I never got far beyond oui, oui. I took 10 hours of F and five hours of D out of French before I finally got past the mandatory 13 hours.
But by then I was only hurting myself, not a team and I’d like to think that if I were a scholarship athlete in those days, if there were others depending upon my ability to “parlez Francais,” I’d have found a way to get it done.
That is what makes a team sport so much more meaningful than an individual endeavor, for you learn to be a responsible, contributing member of a society.
Screw up as a boxer and you get your teeth knocked out, but screw up as an offensive lineman and your quarterback gets his teeth knocked out.
People fail. Failure is as much a part of life as is success. It is unfair to put the knock on Sowers or Berry for the simple act of failing.
However, if that failure was a result of their own lack of a sense of responsibility, if it came from failing to go to class or study for tests or not turning in work, then they must carry the burden of having let their friends and teammates down.
In the end, you will see that their teammates will forgive them, for that, too, is part of this team culture.
The tougher part of it will be being able to forgive themselves.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN: Ineligible starters let teammates, themselves down
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