Does fighting make people respect you?
By Fred Northup

The batter charged the mound and attacked the pitcher. He had been hit by a pitch, but on the way to first had been insulted by the pitcher.  “I had to fight,” he was quoted as saying, “or people would not respect me.”  Wrong. I lost respect when he charged the mound. Anyone can call a person a name. The easiest thing to do when someone calls you a name is either to call them a name or fight. But doing either shows not a real toughie, but a real child.

A person who lets their emotions get out of control. A person who cannot do the harder thing which is to ignore the comment and play the game as hard as they can. It takes courage to do the difficult thing. That’s what Jackie Robinson did. Robinson never would have played a single game in the major leagues, if he had started a fight every time someone called him a name. He did the harder thing: he walked away, and then tried his hardest to prove them wrong. The only thing harder, perhaps, than walking away from an insult, is saying you¹re sorry when you overreact in the heat of competition. Because it takes courage and humility. Humility is the opposite of arrogance and begins with the understanding that we all make mistakes.  Courage is finding the internal strength to do the right thing. Even, and especially, when it means acknowledging and taking responsibility for those mistakes. After Roger Clemens let his emotions get the best of him, and he threw the bat in Piazza’s direction he could easily have said after the game, “I’m sorry I did that; it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it.”  How honest and clean that would have been. Refreshing. The myth which needs to be eradicated is that doing the right thing somehow makes you some sort  of spineless pansy. What Clemens doesn¹t seem to realize is that if he had apologized, his slider would not be any easier to hit. We grow up in a culture in which the idea lingers in many of our major sports that behaving like a bully somehow makes you more of a “man” than playing with what used to be called “class.” Together, we can change that.