a sandwich at the deli shop

Ah...the good ol' days when I wore my HS jersey to "Bernie's" and he would give me a chicken platter.

or

sign a picture at the "Esso" gas station and would get a free fill up.

For those of you that think young athlete's get perferential treatment, it's nothing like it used to be. Oh...the stories I could tell!!!!!

I do have one story I want to share and think about the hypocracy! This one college coach suspended one of his players for underage drinking. OK, it was the right thing to do. But the coach wouldn't let it lie. He continued to castigate the young man to the press saying how much "he let his teammates down" and "we will not tolerate these actions" and was considering kicking him off the team.

Now, to the public he came across as a noble, no nonsense coach. The public opinion was saluting him with his actions. They loved the fact that he had a "zero tolerance" in bad public behavior and were behind him in his thoughts of not giving a young man a 2nd chance.

But, while I ws reading his comments and the public's support for him, I was thinking......Coach, what would your fans think if they knew when you were a college student that you jumped on top of a bar...naked...and drowned a pitcher of beer on your head. That you got into a drunken fight and the cops let you go because who you were. That you and a couple of your teammates beat up a student because you "thought" he was trying to steal your girl.

The point being is that maturity is not bestowed by age alone. But if you don't give young men a 2nd chance to succeed, they may never get an opportunity to become a college coach at a fine university or go on to something more noble.

 

I would like to know how many of the adults out there could do the things we did as kids and be able to get away with it in todays world? My guess is not many. Growing up is a process and unless mistakes are made you don't learn. Everyone deserves a second chance, kids even more so. Discipline is a great thing but as the saying goes the punishment needs to fit the crime.

I know that in my day if you were caught drinking while playing the best thing that could happen to you was to be suspended from the team, otherwise it became a very long season of practicing. You only thought two a days were tough. Of course the underage drinking thing was not a big issue back then, it was New Orleans and the drinking age was "tall enough to see over the bar or eighteen whichever came first"