March 29, 2024
Column

A Labor Day contemplation of rare pieces of work

You may have been around the track a few times, and you may believe you have seen or heard of many strange occurrences, but I doubt that one of them was a major league baseball brawl precipitated by a pair of glittering diamond earrings worn by a relief pitcher.

The ludicrous situation can pretty much be summed up in two paragraphs from an Associated Press dispatch from Seattle reporting on a game between the Cleveland Indians and the Seattle Mariners: “Seattle reliever Arthur Rhodes was ejected by third-base umpire Tim McClelland in the ninth inning. Rhodes, who had not thrown a pitch, started yelling at Cleveland batter Omar Vizquel, who had complained that he was distracted by the bright sunlight reflecting off the reliever’s right earring.

“Players from both benches came onto the field and Rhodes had to be restrained by Manager Lou Piniella from going after Vizquel…”

Thank God Vizquel had the good grace not to complain about Rhodes’ matching diamond-sequined purse, or the brawl would most likely still be raging.

Call me an old fogy, but when it comes to guys wearing earrings you may put me squarely in the camp of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Commenting on a local school board policy banning earrings on boys, the governor recently declared, “If God had wanted you to wear earrings, He’d have made you a girl.”

As well, if God had wanted girls to play in boys’ golf tournaments, He would never have invented the ladies’ tee and shortened the fairway for them. A recent AP news story out of Haverhill, Mass., supports my thesis.

The story reported that the Haverhill Golf and Country Club was back in court to face charges that women are still treated as inferior members there. The club had already been fined $1.9 million in 1999 for discriminating against female golfers, and scolded by a judge in March for continued violations.

Nine women who are suing the club claim that a woman was denied a tee time during a men’s tournament. They want a judge to rule that excluding women from the men’s tournaments is discriminatory. Never mind that several paragraphs later the president of the golf club’s ladies division acknowledges that even as the Haverhill Nine are demanding to be allowed to play in men’s tournaments, women at the club have voted to prevent men from playing in ladies’ tournaments. If you don’t absolutely love the logic you obviously have no sense of humor.

So what else is new in these double-standard gender-neutral times? You ask. And the answer, of course, is nothing. When it comes to negotiating the minefield that once separated the gender that wore earrings and blow-dried its hair from the gender that chewed tobacco and scratched itself in public there are no surprises left.

Some jurisdictions have dictated that girls may play on boys’ ice hockey teams, but boys may not play on girls’ field hockey teams; others have ruled that female sportswriters may invade male athletes’ locker rooms but male sportswriters cannot venture into female athletes’ locker rooms. In a world where some are more equal than others, one person’s equal opportunity is another person’s reverse discrimination. And not just in sports.

Out in the real world on this glorious Labor Day weekend of 2001, the blue-collar working stiff knows the sting of reverse discrimination on the job, as does the white-collar climber passed over for that management promotion because such a move would have screwed up the corporation’s diversity index. Elsewhere, old soldiers fairly weep in disbelief and embarrassment when they contemplate the discrimination inherent in lowered physical standards in a gender-neutral army. And so on, and so forth.

Monday’s pending celebration of labor brings to mind such plights of the working man and woman. But one has to toil extra hard to hold on to the thought in competition with the mental picture of a major league baseball brawl sparkled by one millionaire’s diamond earrings out-dazzling another’s solid gold necklace as they play a little kid’s game for more money than you’d find in a Swiss bank vault.

On this Labor Day these guys qualify as truly rare pieces of work.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.


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