A string of penalties and punishments associated with unsportsmanlike behavior, both locally and nationally, has crossed our news feeds recently, sparking spirited debates in backyards, school parking lots, and online forums. The point of discussion: Are school systems and professional sports organizations going too far in penalizing individuals and teams for showing emotional expressions of pride and elation?

Let’s get one thing straight right away. It’s not about you, Opponent. The fist pumps, the Bernie dances, the high fives — They have absolutely nothing to do with any of you. The winning team (have we forgotten that there will be a winner and a loser in such games?) is excited because they succeeded in a tackle, a score, a win. It’s not about you. It’s all about them.

This is yet another case of the establishment of a rule losing its original focus and purpose and falling into the hazy, gray area of interpretation, largely swayed by emotional parents and community members of opposing teams at the local level, and by over-controlling, power-hungry officials at the professional level.

A Little History Lesson on Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NFL

• 1984: A rule was established in the NFL to curb individual or group celebrations that were “prolonged, excessive, or premeditated.” This was often referred to as the “Mark Gastineau Rule,” as it was believed by many that the rule was created to stop him from performing his signature “Sack Dance” every time after he sacked an opposing quarterback.
• 2004: NFL owners agree to institute an excessive celebration penalty in an attempt to eliminate premeditated celebrations. The excessive celebration infraction, considered unsportsmanlike conduct, carries a 15-yard penalty. Such choreographed performances like Terrell Owens pulling a Sharpie marker out of his sock or Joe Horn uncovering a planted cell phone are the target of the new rule. Any infraction ruled flagrant will constitute immediate ejection from the contest.
• 2006: Individual players are prohibited from using foreign objects or the football while celebrating. They are also prohibited from engaging in any celebrations while on the ground. A celebration shall be deemed excessive or prolonged if a player continues to celebrate after a warning from an official. Previously, players were not prohibited from using props or celebrating on the ground. Reason for the change: Promotes sportsmanship. [New NFL Rules for 2006]
• According to the NFL Digest of Rules, rule no. 32 defines unsportsmanlike conduct as any act contrary to the generally understood principles of sportsmanship.

Just last week, Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens was tagged with the same penalty for flexing his muscles after a spectacular run against the Arizona Cardinals. Apparently, the refs believe such acts are excessive taunts that are antithetical to the “generally understood principles of sportsmanship.”

So let me get this right: In the game of football, it is sportsmanlike to talk smack on the front line, grind my opponent into the turf with full force, push and shove after an intense tackle, and go helmet-to-helmet spewing insults and threats, but it is unsportsmanlike to flex my muscles after I did something I’m proud of?

At the local level, it is even worse. Earlier this week, the Perry Hall High School boys soccer team (Baltimore, MD) celebrated at the end of the game after scoring a winning goal. Parents of the opposing team (Dulaney High School) complained that the celebration was both “lewd” and “inappropriate.” The principal agreed with the parents of the opposing school and suspended the team from playing in any more games for the season — including playoff and championship matches. (Read/view the complete report HERE from the Perry Hall Patch.com site.) He announced yesterday at a press conference that he decided to reverse his decision about forfeiting the rest of the season (the team plays the semifinal championship game today against Blake at 2 p.m.), but he stands behind his original statement regarding disciplinary action against the team for “inappropriate behavior.”

Now, the Baltimore County Public Schools website provides the following statement from the Office of Athletics regarding sportsmanlike behavior:

The Baltimore County Public School Interscholastic Athletic Program is committed to promoting the proper ideals of sportsmanship, ethical conduct and fair play at all athletic contests. We oppose instances and activities which run counter to the best values of athletic competition in order to insure the well-being of all individual student-athletes. We support high standards of good citizenship and propriety, along with regard for the rights of others.

I agree with this statement. I hardly think anyone can find fault with such a general statement that promotes sportsmanship and strong athletic competition. Nowhere in this statement does it suggest or infer that players cannot be excited about the successes they experience on the field.

As a father of a child who has played team sports, however, I have seen winning teams making it personal, thrusting their arrogance into the faces of their 9-year-old opponents and focusing on the losing team’s weaknesses and challenges. Any act that is directed toward an opponent in a derogatory manner or that is focused on the failures of an individual player or team is, in all ways, unsportsmanlike and should be called as such.

But we’re not talking about such acts here. This is about end-of-game joy, personal-best celebrations, and emotional shouts of YES! for a job well done — none of which have anything to do with the opponent. Not a single one.

In our everyday lives, we celebrate personal accomplishments all the time, don’t we? A promotion, a personal best for a 5K, even answering the right question in a trivia game. We recognize and encourage demonstrations of pride and elation as strong contributors to personal wellness, self-confidence, self-esteem, and overall happiness.

Our cheerleaders promote and encourage emotional outbursts from our fans. Million-dollar scoreboards and video displays in our larger stadiums rally us to chant, cheer, and get involved. Even in other sports, like golf and baseball, fist pumps are expected, anticipated, and enjoyed by their fans. Yet, the very players for other sports who are on the field making the plays are restricted from doing anything that even resembles a fraction of such elation. It just doesn’t make any sense.

We are sending the wrong message to our sports teams, both professional and at the local level. Instead of discouraging and penalizing pride and celebration, we should be telling the refs and the parents on the losing side of the field to realize that this is part of the game. This is what you sign up for when your child plays a sport where there are winners and losers.

It’s not about you, folks. Leave the winners alone and let them celebrate their successes. Your time will come soon enough, and when it does, I hope you celebrate with the same pride and elation.

Now, of course all news sources large and small are clinging to every whispered syllable that Rowling shares publicly (which is why King said he felt like he and Irving were just warm-up acts to the “big show,” a.k.a. Rowling); they are anxious to glean any new clue to who will perish in the final book. Will Harry die? (Both King and Irving pleaded with Rowling to “do the right thing” and let him live) Who will be the two who don’t make it?

Rowling did little to share any new info, much to their disappointment. What she did share, however, was thrilling to me as a writer and a teacher of writing.

The anonymous AP reporter, in her/his article syndicated nationally to papers like Baltimore’s Sun, writes: “In talking about the writing process, both Irving and Rowling said they worked their plots out in advance so that they knew going into the writing whether they would be killing off characters, something which made writing the death scenes somewhat easier.” Said Rowling, as reported by the author of the article: “I don’t always enjoy killing my characters. I didn’t enjoy killing the character who died at the end of book 6. . . .But I had been planning that for years, so it wasn’t quite as poignant as you might imagine.”

How I love to see writers discussing process. I think it’s a good idea to do this for many writing projects, and she is right; in the pieces of writing that I have done when a character has died, my advance planning has allowed me the opportunity to reflect on that death so that my writing can serve the needs of my audience a little less dramatically — at least from my point of view. It allows you, as the writer, to focus on what your reader needs and not necessarily what you are feeling at the moment you are writing the scene or chapter.

With that said, there’s a particular scene in my latest book that took me by such surprise that it totally derailed my entire outline and forced me to turn the story over to the characters to see where they were going to take the plot and resolve the conflict. That book, The Journey to Cold Rock (still in revision), was written in one month during NanoWriMo last November, and there was no time to think about whether this new direction was good or bad for the story. I’m glad that I trusted the process, as i think this novel is the best piece of writing I’ve ever produced.

Does that mean I’ve abandoned the outline? Absolutely not. Another story of mine that is still in draft stage, Fourth Strike, is so complex that it requires a strong outline to keep the storyline from straying in any direction. In that thriller, I already know the outcome, all of the twists, turns, and surprises that, hopefully, will leave my readers turning the pages faster than they can read them.

That’s what makes the writing process such a beautiful thing. There are countless strategies that you can select from with each new writing project. All you have to do is consider your goals and the needs of your audience.

Oh–and to write the damned thing once you pick a strategy!

I just finished reading a Solomons Island article in the Sun by Rona Kobell. It’s well written, and I think Kobell does a fine job of capturing the way of life on Solomons. To a reader who has never been there, I believe s/he will leave the story feeling a little sad for this small community that has lost two of its friends earlier this spring to fire.

But for me, as a local to Solomons Island for several years in the early nineties, it means so much more to me. Reading her piece brings backthe breeze off of the Patuxent, leaving the heavy, brackish scents of the bay in my hair. I replay the Polaroids of sunsets over the bridge, the walking along the shores kicking up sharks’ teeth during low tide, the pairs of pileated woodpeckers around my wooded cabin when I would return home from a good day of teaching.

Mostly, though, Kobell’s article makes me mourn the loss of the Bowen Inn and the Lighthouse Inn, both destroyed by fire on the Ides of March. It makes me grieve a little more in regret that I had not returned to the Island more after I left, and it makes me look a little more critically at how I spend my days now, not seeing friends and family as often as I want or should. I know, unfortunately, how I might feel should tragedy take them as well, especially after so many missed opportunities to just visit, drop a card in the mail, find them online, or give them a call.

Those were peaceful days in Solomons, and I believe we are given those times in our lives to help us through the tougher challenges we often face. It’s that peace that got me through last night’s workout. I was approaching mile three on the elliptical, and I felt as if I just couldn’t go on. How easy it would be to just stop pedaling and be happy with what I had already accomplished. But in my mind, I visualized that peace, that beauty, and the strength of those images helped carry me to my goal and hit the three-mile mark.

Pull your strength from such peaceful days from your past and use that energy in a strong, positive light…I believe the results we receive will become our new peaceful days for tougher times ahead…

Yet, the Sun finds no problem in breaking almost every rule in publishing such a piece in their Saturday morning edition. “He Was the First and Closest Target” is about the death of –no, that’s not it. It’s about the family suffering –uh-uh. Not that either. Let’s see….It’s about where the shooter lived, the fact that an ironing board in an unblinded window prompted a neighbor to speak up about issues of privacy, and that a .357 can fire off five shots.

Yeah. I think that’s right.

Maybe.

The writers of this piece (that’s right; it took two writers with two others contributing) open with a misleading headline, with no explanatory subhead following. I was drawn into this piece because I thought these were the killer’s words, and so I thought, well, looks like they scored an interview with the suspect, or, at the very least, captured a statement or confession that he’s made already.

No such truth there.

The headline quote is from the police spokesperson who, in a press conference, said that the shooting was completely random and the suspect was simply the “first and closest target.” We learn this in paragraph 22 of the story. In the Internet post of the story, this falls on page two.
Why mislead? The shooting is already relevant enough that tricks like this are not necessary to lure readers into the piece. We all go to movies, right? When we learned of this senseless killing, we all thought, even if briefly, that could have been me–or worse, that could be me the next time I go see a movie.

By giving us a misleading lead, you set us up for disappointment, and breed mistrust. It’s a cheap shot that offends in this piece; we are obviously sympathetic to the wife and her family for the tragedy that has changed their lives forever. The Sun alienates itself, and the writers of this piece make the paper look insensitive and cheap.

The article gets worse. For some reason, the writers meander on to a side story of the 1.6 million dollar home of the shooter, and the small details of wealthy neighbors being peeved that they took long to put up blinds (they could see the ironing board through the open window, for goodness sake; “it was very bothersome,” said one neighbor).

Only four paragraphs toward the end of the article are about the victim. The article ends with the wife describing how, at 1:30 a.m., she drove to the theater to see her husband’s car among several police cruisers. She discovered that her husband had been murdered when she approached one of the officers and said that the Chevy Malibu was her husband’s car.

The officer’s response, “You must be Mrs. Schrum,” ends the article.

Now, if we are going for dramatic effect, this is a great way to end a chapter of a book, whether it is fiction or creative nonfiction. You are driven to turn the page and read on. Of course, you can’t do that here. And besides, you feel sick to want to do that in the first place. You’ve been mislead by a headline quote, you’re scratching your head about the significance of blinds and ironing boards, and now you’re wanting to be entertained by a story that is much too fresh to be told in this dramatic and random fashion.

Bottom line: The bigger the subject, the less you use to convey your point.

And in this case, it’s best to know your point before you even begin. Otherwise, you end up writing (and in this case, unfortunately publishing) a piece that offends not only the family that has been struck by this tragedy, but your readers as well.