Sunday, July 13, 2014

Great/Sad Article About Murder On Soccer Field

From the Detroit Free Press:
We’ve all been there.
We’ve had a moment, an incident, an accident that led to a rage we didn’t know could exist in us.
For a mom, it might be when someone hurt your child.
For an attorney, it might be losing a big case on a technicality.
For a driver cut off in traffic, there’s even a name for it: road rage.
But none of those instances — and none of that level of rage — should exist on a sports field. And none should rise to a level that leads to a death.
That is why the trial of Bassel Saad should be required viewing for athletes, particularly adults in leagues across the state, perhaps the nation, leagues where they sometimes forget they are adults.
Saad, a 36-year-old Dearborn man, punched a soccer referee who was about to eject him from a game. That referee, 44-year-old John Bieniewicz, a married father of two, later died.
He died.
He DIED....
But the greatest tragedy is that some people might dismiss what happened, feel sorry for Saad because they’ve felt that same anger on a softball field, shared the same frustration at a swim meet, and question how much he should be punished because he didn’t mean to kill anyone.
For those people, I implore: Don’t miss the point.
Saad may not have planned to kill Bieniewicz. But he did plan to hurt him.
That his action went further than he planned is a lesson for anyone who thinks violence is an appropriate response to anything.
Sometimes, rage can blind you to what you’re doing, and hide what you’re capable of.
Saad killed a man, and the remedy for a killing, even an involuntary, unplanned, oh-my-God-I-didn’t-mean-to-do-it killing, is the same whether you slug somebody in a bar, on the street or on a soccer field.
If you intend to do harm, if you do harm, there must be consequences.
Bassel Saad — and anyone else who decides that the innate violence of sport isn’t enough — must pay the cost.
That means going to jail for a time that is commensurate with what happened, not with what he meant to happen.   http://www.freep.com/article/20140713/COL10/307130113/Bassel-Saad-soccer-game-killing
I used to umpire softball/baseball and volleyball and some people take the game so darn seriously.  They think their game is as important as the 7th game of the World Series or the World Cup final.
I would have people stop me in the street trying to talk to me about a call I made 3 days earlier in a city sponsored softball league.
Seriously? You want to argue a call in a meaningless game to 99.999999% of the world's population made 3 days earlier?
And this thug in the article thought his game was so important that he had to physically attack the referee?
Seriously? 

No comments:

Post a Comment