Sports, Violence, and Video Games?
By: Craig Clifford and Randolph M. Feezell

The horror of a school shooting leaves all of us asking, "Why?" As we watch the bench clearing brawls, chest bumping, and ear biting on the evening sports highlights, it's impossible to ignore the parallels between violent and disrespectful behavior in sports and youth violence in our schools and on our streets.

We need to be careful not to jump to conclusions here. It's tempting to see simple causal relationships where there are, as there always are with human beings, immensely complex ones. It may well be that violence in sports and violence in our schools are both effects of underlying cultural forces. It would be absurd to say that Dennis Rodman's antics on and off the basketball court caused the school shooting in Colorado. But something, at some level, is going wrong, and we need to ask why? If participation in sports does have the power to "build character," it stands to reason that it can build or shape character for better or for worse. If competition comes to mean no-holds-barred warfare, if athletes are taught that opponents are mortal enemies who deserve no respect, enemies to be despised and destroyed, then wouldn't they see competitive situations off the playing field in the same light? To the extent that athletes do transfer the character sports build into the rest of their lives, we must continuously ask ourselves: what kind of character are we going to build on the playing field?

The truth is, though, how the character that's formed on the playing field transfers into the rest of life is not at all clear. Sometimes bad character all too easily does transfer, and sometimes good character does not. Even if we do manage to shape good character on the playing field, there is no guarantee that young athletes will see the necessity for carrying that character into the rest of their lives. How often have those of us who teach in the classroom as well as on the playing field encountered student athletes who, at least from all appearances, seem to be courageous, fair, honest, disciplined, and self-controlled on the playing field, but cowards in the face of difficult ideas, cheaters in their academic classes, incapable of getting themselves to read their class assignments, hair-triggered bullies when things don't go their way off the playing field?

If what they learn is that only sports matter and that everything else is just something you have to get through in the most expedient way possible, without the slightest concern for whether you do it honestly and fairly, then all of the talk about building character with sports is empty self-serving rhetoric indeed. The second question, then, is: even if we do succeed at building good character on the playing field, how do we get young athletes to carry that character into the rest of their lives? Everything else is just something you have to get through in the most expedient way possible, without the slightest concern for whether you do it honestly and fairly, then all of the talk about building character with sports is empty self-serving rhetoric indeed. The second question, then, is: even if we do succeed at building good character on the playing field, how do we get young athletes to carry that character into the rest of their lives?