CLASS ACTION

Go to most college sports message boards and you'll see something that would have been unfathomable before the Age of the Internet: Miss Manners is kicking Vince Lombardi's ass seven ways from Sunday.

Few coaches have reached the iconic place that Lombardi holds in American sports history. Tough, gritty and demanding, he knew the high price of victory. "Winning isn't everything," he said. "It's the only thing." And Lombardi won by dedicating himself and his players to that brutally reductive maxim.

But now victory has company in the triumphal chariot. Sports fans are insisting that teams --more specifically, victorious opponents -- win with class.

This doesn't mean that State U. should hire Christopher Plummer to be the head football coach and insist he wear a tux on game day, nor does it mean that Maggie Smith should represent the team at the post-game news conference. It apparently means that games should be played with the emotion of a Soviet chess tournament.

It's not easy being a college sports fan. We often wed ourselves to teams at young ages, before we really know who we are. And before we know it, it's 15 years, four blown title games and two recruiting scandals later, yet we just can't seem to break away. We've given so much money to booster organizations that we can afford to send only one of the kids to college (which one depends on who wins the family kickboxing tournament). We give and we give and we give and all we ask in return is a 200-game winning streak and 15 national championships. Oh, and the head of the coach of our top rival placed on a spike at the stadium.

Instead, more often that not, what we get is a free throw that inexplicably bounces out of the rim and a pass that is just beyond the outstretch fingers of a diving receiver. We get a series of body blows that we don't deserve, but that those bastards who cheer for other teams definitely do.

So, in a way, being a sports fan is to drink deep from the cup of powerlessness. Aside from taking out a second mortgage on the house so you can bribe recruits or putting your 5-year-old son on a steroid drip so he will become a stud middle linebacker, there's not much you can do to help your team.

But that doesn't mean you have to sit there and just take it when a rival team is pounding yours. Oh, no; you can deny the legitimacy of the rival's victory, if not by saying "we wuz robbed" then by wailing on a message board that the rival players were unworthy of their triumph. They won, but they did so rudely. And any display of youthful joy, any hint of enthusiasm, anything that shows that playing sports might be fun and winning feels good is a sign of deep and discrediting "classlessness."

(OK, this does not mean that I condone taunting or anything else that is deliberately aimed at humiliating an opposing player or team that is getting its ass kicked. But I don't see the harm in a player punctuating a dunk with a feral howl or a similar display.)

Simply put, this is etiquette run amok. Celebrating a big play or a game-winning shot is natural and good. It reminds us of the payoff that can come from shared sacrifice and collective effort.

And excessive deference is perhaps not good for society. Where would Genghis Khan have been and what would he have accomplished had this been his philosophy:

“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters. And to do so in a way that represents the courteous and gentlemanly qualities of our tribal forefathers.”

But if you insist on demanding this sort of class, that's up to you. And so I give you your true enemy, a team that won big, but did not do it with "class" as defined on college message boards.



What a bunch of punks! Can't they act like they've done it before. The Russians would have been more "classy," no?