Friday, July 25, 2008
Sports columnist Aaron McFarling: Move over softball, it's trampoline time for Olympics
Aaron McFarling
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Let's see synchronized swimmers pull this off. Or handball stars. Or a team of water polo champs.
Can those athletes stack 'em up five deep against a makeshift fence in a town like Salem? Can they send jerseys and hats and funnel cakes flying out of tents? Can they prompt little girls to crawl atop their daddies' shoulders, cameras and autograph pads in hand, stars in their eyes?
Softball did that Thursday night. The game between the U.S. Olympic team and a squad of regional talent lured a sellout crowd of 4,000 to Kiwanis Field. It probably could have drawn double that, had there been more space. The contest wasn't close -- won 9-0 by the Stars and Stripes -- but nobody seemed to mind. This was a special night, and folks felt lucky to be here.
Especially considering it won't happen again -- at least for another eight years.
We can thank the sore losers for this. Three years ago this month, a group of international sports officials decided that softball didn't belong in the Olympics beyond 2008. They decreed this via secret ballot and gave no explanation, but you can bet the Americans' 51-1 aggregate score in the '04 Games had everything to do with it.
In the process, these weasels cut off a growing sport right at the knees.
"It's hard," U.S. coach Mike Candrea said after Thursday's game, as kids pressed against the outfield fences to secure autographs from their heroes. "I think that's the thing that's more frustrating than anything: It's taking away dreams.
"We've worked so hard to get the sport at this point where young kids had a role model and an idol that was a softball player. ... All of a sudden now, we're going to be fighting to make that happen again."
No other Olympic entity has created more grass-roots goodwill than Candrea's softball team. Kobe Bryant's not coming to the Salem Civic Center tomorrow. Michael Phelps won't be swimming laps at the Gator Aquatic Center this weekend.
But there were Jennie Finch and Cat Osterman and Crystl Bustos at Kiwanis on Thursday, making the penultimate stop on their "Bound 4 Beijing" Tour. They've been to Alabama and Wisconsin and Kansas and more than 40 other places. Today, they're on their way to Irvine, Calif., to play their final warm-up game against somebody called "Team Intensity." That one's sold out, too.
But the fact that this is doubling as a farewell tour for U.S. Olympic softball is a joke. Good grief, they added a sport called "trampoline" to the Games this season. And there's no room for softball?
But that's the price the U.S. paid for being too good. The first question Candrea fielded after his team captured the gold in '04 was, "How do you think this will affect softball's future in the Olympics?"
"I felt that the Olympics are about excellence," Candrea said. "And if we get penalized because we put on an excellent performance, then something's wrong."
Baseball got the ax in '05, too, by the same International Olympic Committee members, but that's different. The top baseball players in the world are in the thick of their professional seasons during the summer months. Drugs were rampant in the sport. As much as our nation loves baseball, we won't miss Olympic baseball much.
Softball, meanwhile, needs the Olympics. And it only has them for another month. There's a chance it could return in 2016 -- and Chicago or Tokyo getting the bid would increase those odds -- but a lot of political minds would have to change. A lot of sore losers would have to grow up.
Until then, young softball players will grow up wondering what-if.
In the fifth inning Thursday night, Sarah Ling and Lindsey Wagner -- a pair of 12-year-olds from Buckhannon, W.Va. -- began making their way to the outfield to get in line for autographs. Sarah wore a T-shirt that her mother made specifically for this event. It read: "I WANT TO BE COACHED BY CANDREA."
Lindsey's shirt had a shorter -- and sadder -- message: "OLYMPIC HOPEFUL."
Hope she's good at handball.
