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Thanksgiving, Sports, and The Rules of the Game

By Theresa Camoriano

We had a very authentic Thanksgiving this year at our house.  For example, along with our turkey, we had a fruit salad with apples, pears, bananas and pineapples, just as the Pilgrims did many years ago.  Some of you may not know that the Pilgrims grew bananas and pineapples up on Plymouth Plantation back in the 1600’s, but I’ve been told that they used them as their cash crop before they got started on tobacco!  Of course, that was before global cooling, global warming, and all that stuff.  These days, the Plymouth area has become much more successful at growing elitist snobs than bananas and pineapples.

After dinner, we followed the usual Thanksgiving tradition and watched sports on TV.  Many Americans follow this tradition, because it is well-known that sports and TV were also favorites of the Pilgrims, although, in those days, the Pilgrims only had those small screen, black and white television sets.  I am told that the Pilgrims were particularly fond of field hockey.  As you may know, field hockey also has become a very popular sport in the Louisville area, where the NCAA National Field Hockey Championship tournament was held last weekend. 

Sometimes, in field hockey, the team that dominates the game is not the team that wins, because, in a low-scoring game, sometimes scoring is just a matter of luck.  When the team that dominates the game ends up losing, there are two ways to deal with it.  One way, that was favored by the Pilgrims, is to accept that it was a fair game because the process was fair – since both teams played by the rules.  Another, more modern way, is to whine and moan that the game was not fair and to make up new rules while the game is being played in order to achieve the “right” outcome. 

For the whiners, rules are convenient when they lead to the “right” outcome, but they are readily expendable when they don’t.  That’s why you hear people like Betty Baye happily trashing the Constitution one day to get her desired outcome in the area of states’ rights, for example, while crying about its demise the next, such as when the constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure are threatened by new anti-terrorist policies.  For these whining-type sports fans, the Constitution is just one of those readily-expendable, readily-bendable rules.  The whiners would have you sloping the hockey field to favor the “right” team, counting the yards gained by each team and adding that to the score, multiplying the score by the number of ethnic minorities on the team, and then applying a fudge factor to each side’s score, with the factors being supplied by a panel of politically correct judges from New Jersey and Florida, in order to determine the winner of the game.  The whiners call this “leveling the playing field”.

The whiners think they are doing the world a favor by ensuring the “right” outcomes.  But what they miss is the fact that, once the rules have been eroded and trashed, there is no game left, so nobody wins. 

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