Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player -- too good, it turns out. a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.
Officials for the three-year-old league, which has eight teams and about 100 players, said they will disband Jericho's team, redistributing its players among other squads, and offered to refund $50 sign-up fees to anyone who asks for it. They say Jericho's coach, Wilfred Vidro, has resigned.
But Vidro says he didn't quit and the team refuses to disband. Players and parents held a protest at the league's field Saturday, urging the league to let Jericho pitch.
"He's never hurt any one," Vidro said. "He's on target all the time. How can you punish a kid for being too good?"
The above story from ABC News just goes to show how life in the USA just gets stranger, and stranger. It appears that it is OK to be good-you just cannot be TOO good. Can you imagine telling a gifted football player not to score , or a good youth wrestler to not try to pin his opponents? What the so-called adults are doing to this kid out in New Haven, Connecticut is just flat-out wrong. What does it teach kids by just telling them can fold up their tent and quit if they run into dominant opposition?
If you have a great opponent, you simply have to raise your game. I remember when Venus and Serena Williams hit the pro tennis circuit and started to win, people thought that they would totally take over the sport, that no other woman could POSSIBLY hit with the two sluggers from Compton California. A funny thing happened. Other women worked on their game, people like Justin Henin, Maria Sharapova and others came along and were able to not just compete with, but beat the Sisters Williams. For people who remember the "Dream Team" in Men's basketball from the 1992 Olympics, the dominant American performance by legends like Bird, Barkley and Jordan did not make the world just quit. The rest of the world went back to the gym, worked on their basketball game, and got a helluva lot better to the point where the US Men had not won a World title in 2002 and 2004, and took 3rd at the Athens Olympics. The "Redeem Team" that played well at the recent Olympics won-but barely against a very game Spanish side. Again, competition dictates that you must raise your game in the face of excellence by your opponent. You don't just quit.
If what happened in New Haven starts to happen in other sports in the USA, where excellence is penalized, then Americans better get used to a whole lot of other teams smoking us in the Olympics besides just the Chinese. (Yeah, we won more medals, but look at how many more gold medals that they won) Not celebrating excellence, and indeed, penalizing it is not only just flat out wrong-it's un-American.
The three ring circus and theatre production of angst surrounding the seating/unseating of Illinois Senator non-Senator Burris reminds me of an old Mills Brothers' Tune, called Indecision~
