Good Sports

The two teams were vying for the top spot in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, and Central Washington needed to win to stay in the race for a berth in the NCAA Division II championships. Thanks to Tucholsky, Western Oregon would go on to win the game, 4-2, and secure the conference title a week later. Thanks to Holtman and her teammates, no one cared about the score.

You can watch a clip of Holtman and her teammate Liz Wallace carrying Tucholsky on YouTube. The video, filmed through a chain link fence by a player's mother, is shaky and washed out. Excited whoops give way to quiet confusion as Tucholsky fails to follow her teammates around the bases. But then the cheers grow louder, edged with astonishment, as Holtman and Wallace appear from behind the line of Western Oregon players, all of them standing, and carry the diminutive Tucholsky around the dirt diamond. The two girls, their white jerseys flanking Tucholsky's red one, pause at each base and gently dip, to let the injured player tap her good foot on the bag. It looks a little as if they're bowing.

Sportsmanship is easy to praise and hard to practice. The rhetoric of fair play is deeply entrenched in organized sports—there's hardly a league at any level without a sportsmanship award—but the spirit is less so. What makes Central Washington's action so extraordinary is that it was so unexpected and spontaneous. It went beyond the normal rules of the game and came at the cost of the team's own success. Manufactured shows of sportsmanship—the lackluster handshakes with the other team at the end of the game or, more spectacularly, the deal cut between opposing coaches to allow the injured Nykesha Sales to score a basket uncontested to break the University of Connecticut's career scoring record in 1998—have a stale air.

Sportsmanship, Creed said, "is to be permitted to grow and spread of its own accord." The end of war, he believed, would surely follow. Alas, neither universal sportsmanship nor world peace has come to pass. But Creed was right about one thing: true displays of sportsmanship are infectious. YouTube videos of Tucholsky's home run have been viewed more than 300,000 times over the past two weeks. Watching it may not bring about world peace—but it may just give us a better sense of what brotherhood means.

© 2008