Fathers’ rage changes game into tragedy

The ultimate sports-rage story being played out in the national media would be much easier to stomach if we didn’t have to read about the children.

Without the children, who were forced to witness the terrifying spectacle of two fathers fighting at a youth hockey game until one of the men was fatally injured, the ugly incident might read like just another barroom brawl in the police beat of any newspaper in the country. Without the children, the incident might not seem nearly as tragically poignant.

But the children were there, of course, a dozen or more 12- and 13-year-old boys who wept as they watched the gruesome confrontation unfold.

“It’s my daddy,” one of the boys cried out as the savage battle between the fathers escalated into what has become a grim symbol of the very worst that can happen when overbearing parents lose sight of what youth sports is supposed to mean.

And now a group of kids who just wanted to have some fun in a pickup hockey game are the traumatized witnesses in a high-profile manslaughter trial in a Massachusetts courtroom. Thomas Junta is accused of beating to death Michael Costin when the two men argued over whether the game was becoming too rough for the boys. How’s that for irony? Junta, the much larger of the two combatants, allegedly beat Costin so brutally that the man later died of severe neck and head injuries.

“Think of your children,” pleaded a grandmother of one of the frightened young players as the men went at it.

I suppose it would be simple to dismiss the deadly hockey incident as an extreme case of parental madness that has no relevance for the rest of us who enjoy being on the sidelines of our children’s athletic lives. After all, only the craziest of parents would ever think of getting involved in an altercation as violent as the one that took place in Massachusetts. Yet the sad truth is that this kind of lunacy is not so uncommon at youth sporting events around the country. Over the last several years, there have been numerous accounts in the media of overwrought parents assaulting one another, with words or fists, as their worried and embarrassed children looked on.

The only difference between those ugly outbursts and the one in Massachusetts is that for the first time a parent has been killed in the sickening process. Rather than shrug it off, perhaps we should all be thankful that it hadn’t happened long before this.

Reading about the death at the ice rink, I was reminded of a seminar held last year at the University of Maine that was intended to educate the state’s coaches and athletic directors about how best to deal with the growing problem of “ugly sports parents.” While Maine has yet to experience the kind of fan violence that had flared up elsewhere, the seminar director said, the abundant verbal abuse leveled at coaches and officials throughout the state was forcing many of them to abandon the playing fields in disgust.

The ADs all had stories about the ugly sports parents they’ve encountered over the years. They spoke of parents in their towns who had angrily confronted coaches after games to complain about something they didn’t like. The AD at Gorham High School, in fact, said he knew of coaches who had received threatening letters and phone calls from parents who felt their children had been treated unfairly. One coach had even gotten bomb threats at his home.

“Parents are beginning to have an increasingly greater involvement in the outcomes of their games,” explained Dr. William Gayton, the director of the Sport Psychology Institute at the University of Southern Maine. “We’re not talking about enthusiastic parents. We’re talking about parents whose self-esteem is almost totally connected to their kids’ performance in sports.”

What a painful revelation that must have been for those poor kids in Massachusetts, who once were innocent enough to believe that it was supposed to be just a game.