I hadn’t seen as many overhanging, bulging bellies at a sporting event since our entire Lamaze class attended the Sumo wrestling world championships in Seattle. Yet there they were, punctuating the field in my twelve-year-old-son’s soccer game. The best player, when he wasn’t gasping for breath, red-faced and bent over (which was about 75% of the time), had a belly that would have caused any decent wage earning obstetrician to immediately induce labor. That is, if the boy had the excuse of pregnancy. But he didn’t. No. He had the excuse that has evolved to be the most important yet pernicious ritual of all little league sports--the team treat roster.
Watching him and several other chunkers bouncing up and down the field almost made me nostalgic for days when not only was there no team treat roster, there was strict water rationing--an invention of the Bataan death march survivors. And who knows, maybe introducing them to waist reducing Marlboros would be, in the long run, just as healthy.
Well, then again, perhaps watching the kids prematurely wearing out their knees sustaining their burgeoning girths is better than watching them die from cancer or pass out from heat stroke like a few did in my day, but do you see my point? The pendulum has swung a bit too far and is sagging, getting heavier daily, and may just snap before it can swing back.
I mean miss a few practices, no big deal. Blow off a couple of games, okay, we’ll let it pass. But forget to bring the treats on your assigned day, and you will be blindfolded before the goal box, and stripped naked with one hundred soccer balls drilled at your defenseless body. All of this with no line of teammates in a groin-protecting stance, providing a small wall of hope. Such public punishments would certainly make soccer more appealing to the masses.
What, then, is the result of our society gone mad with team treat rosters, Sunday school bribes, Dads and Donuts Day, bring a treat to work on Fridays and plug-the-school-budget-with-soda-sells? Hint, it ain’t Twiggy. So, for the love of Pete, as a first step back from the blubbery brink, let’s trash the team treat rosters.
Loren M. Lambert
© May 18, 2006
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