28 for 28

Feb 28, 2023 Boom, just like that — 28 days, 28 posts. (It’s on to March Madness.) Hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Well, I made it… 28 entries in 28 days. 

I was going to write about an incident from just before the pandemic. I wanted to let some time pass to get my thoughts down. To my way of thinking, it remains one of the most absurd yet instructive exchanges I’ve ever encountered. 

The particulars go something like this: It’s January, 2020 and I’m serving as president of the booster club for the high school boys basketball team. The world hasn’t yet fallen off its axis, which is still six weeks away.

My twins are juniors on that team, made up of kids of every stripe (parents too). The team gets along great and is enjoying success on and off the court. The coaches are good people. 

Each season, the girls’ and the boys’ varsity squads create giant wall posters. There are variations such as individual photo portraits of each player, but typically, schools hire a photographer who will pose an entire team in a single, group shot with some school or team nickname identifiers.

An enlarged poster of this team image, one for the boys and one for the girls, is then hung in the gymnasium where they play.

In each, the kids are posing, typically in basketball-centric mode.

An individual (parent) on the girl’s side took offense with the girl’s team poster (far as I know, the boys’ team poster was spared any accusations). A complaint was lodged.

The girl who specialized in hitting “three-pointers” for the girls’ varsity was holding up three fingers in the poster photo; the offended party claimed that the gesture found here was going to “risk encouraging” something.

I keep up on most day-to-day activities and stopping basketball players from flashing the three-ball sign with their shooting hand has to be about the silliest, biggest waste of time I can imagine. 

You can guess what happened next. 

Both of the posters were removed. The coaches, parents and players from both teams were “invited” to attend a meeting because the offended party escalated the claim past the coach, above the school principal, to the school District level.

It’s all spelled out in the above link. This symbol had been appropriated; it began as a hoax. 

“Use caution,” the definition reads, as it has many uses and applications.

In the absence of contextual evidence, you can’t assume. However, here in this instance, the gesture had an extremely clear context.

The young lady wearing a basketball uniform, the one who specialized in three-pointers for the team, had held up three fingers in the poster.

And yet here we all were — about 80 of us — in the gym having to go through this exercise for an hour. 

Parents did not hold back. Their reactions at the meeting were 100 percent in support of the basketball context. [Okay, 99 percent. All agreed, save for the one parent who’d been offended. And was the reason we were all assembled.] To all who spoke, the girl, her gesture and the context all were crystal clear within the culture of basketball. 

Of course, the issue was resolved with the District guy saying, I’ll pay for new posters to be created. 

There is a grievance culture, an element of society who feels their views should be the only view. And anything they either disagree with, or that they can find an offensive angle to — never mind that it’s far out of context — well, “It Must Stop.” 

And all the rest of us rubes must be re-educated as to the possible connotations.

This was an attempt by a single offended party to connect an utterly normal behavior (of a kid playing a game, no less), within a clear context, to something incredibly NOT THE TOPIC AT HAND. Not even close!

Why?

Sports are unifying, not divisive. Distortions in media and the incremental lunacy of social media are among the reasons some act in this manner.

All of this was washed away five weeks later when the world came to a halt. The arrival of COVID-19 put this wasted hour into proper perspective.

But I haven’t forgotten it.

During the recent unpleasantness in our world, I made two decisions: I would strive to understand all sides of an issue so as to clarify my own understanding, and I would continue to be as optimistic and positive as I could be under the circumstances.

Each of us is dealt a hand, like a hand of cards. The question we all must answer is, how are we going to play it? It is up to us to make the best of any situation we encounter, navigating between logic and hysteria. Playing a hand well when challenged with circumstances beyond our control, we can strive to understand context, rather than escalate.

Making assumptions about a gesture’s meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

You can disagree in what it means if you like. But a school basketball player holding up three fingers after hitting a three-pointer in basketball is communicating that he/she has just hit a three-pointer in basketball. That’s it.

If you don’t agree, seek understanding. No District-level mandatory parents’ meeting is necessary.

In this case, the resolution in favor of the basketball context was a victory for common sense. But I still want my hour back.