The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell
There is some kind of irony in coming home full of the pride and
perspective and inspiration New York City provides these days to find
that the biggest story to hit the Pilot while I was gone was the agony of
Newport Harbor High School cheerleaders who didn’t make the squad and
whose parents were threatening the system that stiffed them.
Is it possible that when our leaders were urging us to return to
normalcy after the events of Sept. 11 this is what they had in mind?
When I settle in after a trip, I pile all the accumulated newspapers
carefully by date and read my way through them; thus I followed the Great
Cheerleader Caper with the same avid attention as the search for Bin
Laden. The mindless quotes from children (“I think something like this
could provoke a school shooting like the one in Santee”). The quite
remarkable waffling of the principal, who changed his position as often
as a political candidate sniffing the wind of polls. The outrage of
cheerleader parents who apparently regard any sort of rejection of their
children as a lifelong trauma.
I know this is an easy target. I know there were rational comments
mixed with the vacuous. I know that comparing the hurt of teenage girls
with a national tragedy is consummately unfair. But it also seems to me
there are some roots to this nonsense that need to be identified and
pulled out.
The Cheerleader Caper hit pretty close to home for me on several
counts. First of all, I went through this same wringer with my youngest
daughter more years ago than either of us cares to contemplate. She tried
out for cheerleader at Corona del Mar High School, then waited to see if
she would be anointed.
At that time, a carload of those already chosen would pull up at the
front door of the winners, who would then pile joyously into the car to
help notify the next winner.
My daughter paced our front hall for several hours waiting for the car
to arrive. This gave me a lot of time to contemplate how much it was
going to cost for uniforms if she won and to wonder how parents without
the means dealt with this problem. It also gave me time to ponder what I
would say to her if the car didn’t arrive.
Well, it did. But I am quite certain that if it hadn’t, she would have
gone to her room, cried, and then gone about her school business the next
morning. If there had been prolonged agony and sour grapes, I would have
been surprised, disappointed and concerned that we had failed to put the
successes and failures normal to any active life in some sort of workable
perspective for her. And also that what she might see as injustice is not
a conspiracy to do her in but choices seen as legitimate by others that
will balance out over the long pull.
Where do kids get the idea that when they enter competition in any
activity at any level there are only two possible results for them:
winning or somehow being cheated? Or that losing means living with a
permanently injured psyche? The adults who pander to this kind of
nonsense perpetuate it by watering down the joy of competition and the
satisfaction of winning into the mush of giving a trophy to everyone.
That doesn’t mean everybody wins. It means nobody wins.
That apparently was the thinking of the Newport Harbor principal when
at some point in his peregrinations he offered the solution of expanding
the cheerleader team to include all those who tried out.
This redefines winning in a way that might, indeed, traumatize the
contestants because it denigrates individual skill and effort. The only
thing that makes a winner of everyone is knowing that he or she gave
their best effort -- and certainly not that they were added to what has
become a meaningless team by spineless administrators.
I can remember with absolute clarity the knot in my stomach more than
60 years ago as I approached the bulletin board posted outside the office
of my high school basketball coach and scanned the list of names that
comprised the final cut for the team. Sometimes I was on it, and
sometimes I wasn’t. Sometimes there may have been personal favoritism
involved, but I didn’t tell that to my parents, use it as an excuse or
consult a lawyer.
Then there was standing in front of a schedule board after a check
flight early in World War II waiting to see whether the arrow beside my
name would point up or down -- with my future in the Navy riding on this
decision. In all these competitions of life, we win some and we lose
some. But, mostly, we give it our best shot -- and then move on. The
moving on part seems to have been lost in the Cheerleader Caper.
On the same day the Los Angeles Times carried its cheerleader story,
the sports section -- where ultimate wisdom is most likely to appear --
included a quote from Drew Bledsoe, longtime quarterback of the NFL’s New
England Patriots. Aftera terrible beginning this year, Bledsoe was hurt
and replaced by his backup, who turned the team around and led it to the
playoffs. When Bledsoe recovered, he was forced to watch someone else
leading his team.
Asked about his feelings, he said: “It’s real simple. It’s the way I
was taught, the way I was brought up. Handle yourself with dignity and
self-respect regardless of what the situation is. That’s always the
choice you have. You look at it and do the right thing.”
This means living up to contracts signed and moving on. It doesn’t
mean referring the matter to committees or the vote of participants or
spreading the largess until it is meaningless.
If one incipient cheerleader learns that lesson from this experience,
I suppose it will have been worthwhile. But it shouldn’t have been
necessary.
* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column
appears Thursdays.
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