Worst Seat In The House: Controlled emotions

Over the years I’ve seen a real change in sports when it comes to celebrations and emotional breakdowns. For whatever reason it seems to me that every first down in football or three point basket or dunk leads to an emotional outburst, such as flexing of the muscles or a scream as if they’ve just won a 50 million dollar lottery.

I chuckled a few weeks ago at an EWU football game when my good buddy Ken looked on the field and noticed a few of the players doing a little dance to the music prior to a kickoff. Ken said, “When I played here Coach Holmes wouldn’t put up with any of us dancing. We couldn’t even celebrate!” Old school coaches pretty much expected every player to save their energy for the game. If you wanted to celebrate you waited until the game was over.

Celebrating can be fun to watch but I fear that someone will get hurt when they body bump and sprain an ankle or when they slam arms together and they tear something in the bicep area. An injury like that actually happened in a college football game about a month ago. I’m not sure if the player was out for very long or not but he did go to the locker room to be checked out.

I remember in 2010 when Kendrys Morales hit a walk off grand slam home run when he played for the Los Angeles Angels against the Seattle Mariners. When Morales got to home plate he jumped in the air to emphatically hit home plate and landed awkwardly and fractured his lower leg. He missed the remainder of that season.

I have noticed that since that happened, players crossing home plate are a lot more careful about how to safely score. Getting hit in the head with a Gatorade bucket or icy concoction hasn’t led to the disabled list yet.

Speaking of baseball, I’ve often wondered how the guy on the bottom of the pile in those World Series celebrations hasn’t ended up in ICU. It seems to me that once you get tackled to the ground in excitement and twenty other guys pile on top that bad things could happen especially if you are in a bad position to start out with.

Watching some of the bowl and playoff games lately the players on the field seem to have a lot of pent up energy and want to release it on a tackle for a five yard loss, knocking down a pass, stopping a team from getting a first down, or catching a pass for a first down.

The emotions in a game are all over the place and a game lasts a long time. One should never get too excited four minutes into a game. Sometimes the other team notices this celebrating and would like nothing better than to get even so to speak.

As a fan I have been a bit rambunctious and started high fiving the people around me after the Eagles score a TD only to see a flag on the field and the touchdown is called back. I’ve learned to first check the playing surface for random yellow flags before the high five is delivered. Call it teaching an old dog a new trick.

My greatest enjoyment at EWU games in the last few years is to stick around until the clock hits 0:00. The teams shake hands in the middle of the field and then the Eagles football players congregate at the sideline facing the remaining fans and sing the school fight song. You can see the emotions, relieved smiles and laughter at this time. This is better than any body bump, muscle flexing or maniacal scream on the field during the game.

I’m a bit old school I guess because so were the coaches I had. We learned to control our emotions because we didn’t want to be embarrassed by a player from the other team that may have taken offense to premature celebrations.

We showed our appreciation to our teammates as did the other team. I guess it was a much simpler time then which isn’t so bad. And I needed every ounce of extra energy to finish the game!