In North Carolina, one in four children go to bed hungry, the infant mortality rate is nearly four times that of Ireland, and the parlous public school system is ranked 38th in the nation.
With all that going on, it’s a wonder three local politicians found time recently to address the obviously pressing issue of giving participation trophies to kids in youth sports. But they did.
State senators Timothy Moffitt, Eddie Settle, and Bobby Hanig worked together to introduce legislation to ensure boys and girls playing games will only be awarded prizes based on “identified performance achievement”. Whatever that is.
“It’s past the sports,” said Hanig, a Republican. “What we’re not teaching our children is to be prepared for life, be prepared for failure. When kids are growing up, they’re being taught it’s okay to just be okay. You don’t have to be the best.”
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Welcome to 21st century America, a demented place where the handing of a cheap plastic bauble to a six-year-old at the end of a baseball or soccer season is somehow blamed for much greater societal ills.
Apparently, children are so coddled by receiving participation trophies in primary school that the United States military can’t meet its recruitment targets anymore.
Generations grow up wanting to survive on welfare because they once took home a piece of ersatz marble with a tiny basketball on top. The type of formative experience that turned their spongy minds towards thoughts of entitlement at the age of eight, and made them eventually unfit to work. Amazing the impact these shiny objects can have.
Like everything else around here, the issue is yet another front in the culture wars, with various Republican politicos blaming participation trophies for softening up generations of boys and girls, stymieing entrepreneurship, and promoting socialism. No less.
Never mind that these little plaques end up being briefly held aloft for a gap-toothed photograph parents will use to embarrass the kids later in life, before being quickly forgotten, discarded into wardrobes and drawers. Yet their very existence is still perceived as a serious threat to the national wellbeing.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s the team that has the most fun,” said Mike Leach, a beloved college gridiron coach.
“All the stuff that’s contaminated America where they give everyone a trophy and don’t keep score in Little League anymore. I think that entire thing has retarded the competitive spirit of America.”
Leach’s thoughts were similar to those expressed by James Harrison, a fearsome linebacker in the NFL, who took to Instagram some years back to vent about his sons coming home with undeserved silverware.
“These trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy,” he wrote.
“I’m sorry I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best . . .’cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better . . . not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut you up.”
Harrison and Leach were briefly lionised by the right-wing outrage industrial complex for taking a stand against the perceived wussification of society but this tiresome debate and the inference that all of this is uniquely un-American has been going on for decades.
Once used as a stick to beat millennials with, these days it’s deployed to explain the shortcomings of Gen Z (too many meaningless trophies conditioned them to want something for nothing!) and, somewhere down the line, flaws in Generation Alpha will no doubt be blamed on them possessing a raft of kitschy fake gold cups long since consigned to the dark corners of their bedrooms.
Everybody ignores the fact that the very politicians attacking the practice just now grew up with participation trophies as part of their sporting lives yet managed to not embrace communism or, in some cases, gain any basic grasp of fairness or equality in society.
Around the time of the Harrison brouhaha, Stefan Fatsis, author and journalist, explored the history of the concept for the excellent Slate Hang Up and Listen podcast.
He discovered that, contrary to popular belief, these were not actually modern inventions. He traced the first mention of the phrase “participation trophy” to a newspaper in Ohio in 1922 and found plenty more evidence of their use in the most unlikely of places.
“Military bases handed out participation trophies during and after World War II,” wrote Fatsis. “Schools and sports leagues picked up the practice, for individuals and teams. In 1942, each member of the winning team in the Western Division Class B of the Montana state boys’ basketball tournament got a miniature gold basketball while ‘all other players received participation trophies’.”
In response to the North Carolina bill, the Wall Street Journal, traditionally the newspaper of the right-wing establishment, mocked the proposed legislation, with columnist Jason Gay labelling participation trophies a fake crisis.
He pointed out that the far more real issue affecting kids’ sports is declining participation numbers, something caused by the rising cost of pay to play pricing too many American children out of games, and the abhorrent behaviour of adults on sidelines causing more youngsters to quit prematurely.
“We’re not rewarding youth sports too much,” wrote Gay. “We’re forgetting to prioritise the fun.”
A simpler truth but there’s no political capital in that.
