Everyone remembers their first year of high school. Most people were shy and slightly intimidated, and just trying to find somewhere to fit in. Garrett Watterson was, in many ways, just like any other 14-year-old boy. He was a freshman at Sandwich High School (which is not the Subway equivalent of McDonald's Hamburger University in Illinois) and was on the frosh football team.
High school can be a hard adjustment for some kids. There is one thing that made things a little harder for Garrett than for everyone else, he was legally blind in one eye. This prevented him from playing most other sports. He wouldn't be able to be a hoops standout or a star pitcher for the baseball team, but he found a home on the defensive line of the freshman football team. The 5-10, 145-pound, spectacled lineman had found his sport.
That all changed at practice last Tuesday after a speech by the varsity team captain. Now, this wasn't the traditional speech by a captain. There were no motivational words or a great show of leadership. This wasn't a movie-esque "let's win one for the sick coach" or the injured teammate, not even a "Ducks fly together" kind of speech. This was far more profound.
This riveting speech consisted of merely a "Freshmen beat down on thee. One, two, three!"
The speech inspired the varsity team to begin attacking the freshmen, and ended with a player grabbing Watterson's ankles and slamming him on the ground so hard that it "obliterated" his spleen. His pediatrician told the Boston Globe Garrett will have to get routine immunizations and regular antibiotics to combat the bacteria normally filtered by the spleen.
"He is at risk of dying from bacterial infection for the rest of his life," the doctor said. "It has a permanent effect on his life."
This definitely replaces Todd Bertuzzi's cowardly attack from behind on Steve Moore as the most cowardly attack in history, just ahead of John Wilkes Boothe giving Abraham Lincoln the "Jayson Williams" treatment.
Seriously, how awful is that, attacking a partially blind kid from behind and slamming him so hard his spleen ruptures? Two kids have been kicked off the team as a result, and nine have been suspended. The students aren't talking, but one student athlete defended the attackers.
"They're good kids," he said as he drove off.
Good kids? They are the best. I would think any team would want a captain who can organize an attack of that nature. After all, not every football program nearly kills a member of the team to initiate them into the program. Nothing says unity like sending a small freshman into the ICU. Nothing says team toughness like blindsiding partially blind kids.
I know some ex-jocks (who still, 15 years later, talk incessantly about the big touchdown they made in that huge, earth shattering win over Valley) probably think that is hilarious, the little freshmen getting chased around the field and getting clobbered. Unfortunately, these are the Toys-R-Us kids who not only dislike growing up, but they refuse to.
Frankly, these are the same people who still follow professional wrestling and refuse to believe it's fake, even when a wrestler becomes engulfed in flames and falls 100 feet into a pile of "bricks" after being run over by a truck, or even when Hulk Hogan wins. These are the people who only read books if they are less than 50 pages and 49.67 of those pages are covered with pictures (and not hard to decipher pictures either, they have to be simple, like a monster truck).
One of the worst things about this whole situation is that the perpetrators probably were decent kids who just thought what they were doing was okay. Some of the blame lies with the kids, certainly, but does it end there? I refused to accept that hazing is this bad everywhere, so I asked someone I knew who played for my high school football team if he had even been hazed.
To get an articulate answer, I talked to the man who was captain of the team my senior year, Nick Early. I asked him what he thought about hazing.
"I am not for hazing," he said. "I could tolerate it as long as it never harmed anyone physically or mentally with long-term effects."
He separated hazing into two categories; hazing to build unity on a team (with no lingering physical or mental damage) and then the kind of hazing we see in the news lately, the insanely abusive and sick things that go on when kids take it too far.
Most parents and principals think all hazing is wrong and evil, but I think the first kind can serve a purpose and bring a team closer. Either way, Nick said he nothing severe ever happened, and most things were just trivial incidents. I asked if he, as a captain, had ever arranged any sort of hazing and what the solution was for keeping hazing under control.
"Hell no, (our coach) would've killed us, literally," he said. "The coaches have a responsibility to instill team values about what is alright and what is going too far."
Which is what, I think, is one of the biggest problems with hazing. I think the majority of the blame is with the coaches. Too often they look the other way when something like this goes on. They need to take control of their programs and let the players know what they expect from them, and they can't tolerate crap like this.
They know what goes on with their programs. Ultimately, when those kids are at practice, they are the ones responsible. Instead of trying to hide when something like this happens, they need to lay down the law. Players wouldn't be organizing freshmen beat downs if they weren't victim of a freshman beat down in the past.
This coach needs to be fired, but he won't be. Maybe if these coaches would take control of their teams, Garrett Anderson's biggest concern would be next week's game, not fighting for his life.
Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].
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