<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

If you want real reality TV, just watch sports

Commentary: Greg Jayne

The Columbian
Published: March 21, 2010, 12:00am

It was about free throws and the human spirit and all the reasons we love sports.

But it wasn’t solely about Union and Chris Morgan. It wasn’t solely about sports being all triumph and rainbows and unicorns.

Eight days ago, Morgan made two free throws with 8.4 seconds remaining in the Class 3A boys state championship game. The shots provided the decisive margin in a 51-50 victory, giving nine-loss Union a Buster Douglas-type victory over previously unbeaten Enumclaw.

It was the kind of moment you dream about, the kind that countless aspiring basketball players first start practicing on the Nerf hoop in their rooms.

But to actually find yourself in that situation? To actually be standing at the free-throw line with a possible state championship in your hands? To actually deliver in that situation?

“He’s relentless,” Union coach Maco Hamilton said of Morgan. “He’s tough as nails.”

Yet while everybody connected with Union will forever remember Morgan’s free throws, and Mitch Saylor’s game-winning 6-footer the previous night, and the Titans’ serendipitous run through the tournament, I will always remember a player for Mercer Island’s girls team.

Friday night at the tournament in the Tacoma Dome, after Union had won and I had filed my column, I wandered over to the girls court to catch the end of the Islanders’ semifinal game against Cleveland.

I got there just in time to see a Mercer Island player standing at the free-throw line with 2.7 seconds remaining, her team trailing by one point. Her first shot was short, barely grazing the rim and virtually guaranteeing that overcompensation would render her second shot long. It did.

And as the heart-wrenching scene unfolded, you knew you were witnessing the kind of naked emotion that sports can so often deliver, a visceral moment matched only by birth, marriage and death in our human experience.

The Mercer Island player pulled her jersey over her face. She doubled over in grief. She was greeted by her parents, who delivered postgame hugs and words that likely couldn’t salve the wounds.

And in the days since then, I have often thought about that girl and her parents.

Being a parent myself, I can imagine what they were thinking as their daughter stepped to the line — how they gladly would have traded anything, up to and including world peace, in order for her to make those free throws. But I can’t imagine what they said to her afterward, because I can’t imagine what I would say to my child.

Sometimes, all you can do is hug them, knowing that it’s inadequate, but it’s the best you can do at the moment.

From Mercer Island’s despair one night to Union’s elation the next, the Class 3A state basketball tournament represented sports at their finest. And it reminded me of my Reality TV Hypothesis.

I have never understood the appeal of reality TV. You have people acting unrealistically because they know the cameras are on them, and you have editors controlling the product in order to manipulate the audience.

It has nothing to do with reality; it’s wholly contrived and exploitative. And I don’t understand why anybody would watch when we already have a plethora of the original reality TV — sports.

Whether on TV or in person, sports consistently offer the full range of human emotion. They offer conflict and resolution. And joy and desperation. And struggle and triumph, with an occasional failure thrown in.

And through it all, there is the understanding that it takes guts to put yourself on the line and risk losing. It takes courage to test yourself against others in a public forum, knowing that your best might not be good enough.

For all of the controversies and all of the pageantry and all of the peripheral things such as salaries and shoe contracts and complaints about officiating, sports at any level always come back to this — an individual’s test against themselves. And the Class 3A tournament reminded me of why I love them so.

Greg Jayne is Sports editor of The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4531, or by e-mail at greg.jayne@columbian.com. To read his blog, go to columbian.com/weblogs/GregJayne

Loading...