Only in this nutso, PC era can sports records be referred to as "ill-gotten achievements." That's how the New York Post's Phil Mushnick refers to a college basketball player's recent 100-point game. It's not an achievement to be celebrated, but something inappropriate and politically incorrect.
Wayland Baptist University's J.J. Culver deserves scorn, not accolades, for making 33 three-point shots in his amazing performance during a 124-60 win against winless Southwest Adventist College last week. He's just the fourth man to score in triple digits in a college basketball game. Video shows flat-footed Southwest Adventist players virtually resting on defense as Culver repeatedly scores unchallenged, but Mushnick portrays Culver as someone who should be ashamed of what he's done and his school as un-Christian. Oh the horror, the inhumanity, of it all!
There's more to this than Culver's feat; it's yet another liberal attack on achievement. High school and college record books "are loaded with ill-gotten achievements as urged by just-don’t-get-it adult coaches,'' Mushnick charges. An ESPN Around The Horn panelist was also incensed by Culver's breakout game. As Mushnick explains it ...
"Frank Isola, bless his heart, ripped Wayland Baptist coach, Ty Harrelson, for engineering a nauseating bludgeoning and depriving his bench of genuine game time by feeding a player until he became the fourth college male to score at least 100 in a game. Yes, on ESPN — where our sports normally go to have their sports removed."
In another lopsided win earlier this season, Wayland Baptist killed the sport and kicked its foes when they were down, in a 100-51 win. "Wonder what they’d do against Mercy," Mushnick asks.
While questioning the coach's sportsmanship, Mushnick also examined Wayland Baptist's mission statement:
“Wayland Baptist University exists to educate students in an academically challenging, learning-focused and distinctively Christian environment for professional success and service to God and humankind.”
"Heaven help us," Mushnick groaned.
Mushnick didn't write just to complain, though. He has a solution to these ugly massacres that turn sportswriters into snowflakes. It's the "Coach Feldman Plan," and Southwest Adventist's coach should have employed it, too. It was created by Mel Feldman — "a slow-to-anger, thoughtful, kids-first gym teacher and girls basketball coach at Fallsburg High School in the Catskills."
One of Feldman's teams long ago ran into a buzz saw, a team that clamped a full-court press on his kids and had them down by 40 points at the half. At halftime, Feldman spoke to his squad about competing, about standing tall in the face of adversity and learning character through the lessons of sports, right? No way. He taught them to wimp out, but you can't convince Mushnick of this:
“In the locker room, I told the girls that no one deserves to be humiliated like that in any ball game. … And if beating us by as many points as possible was that important to their coach, the least we could do was help him out.”
Starting the second half, Coach Feldman's instructions were that if the other team continued stomping them, "he’d see their mockery of the game and raise it two mockeries: 'We were to score layups into their basket.' ”
The girls carried out the plan, eagerly scoring baskets for the other team. Feldman said they had fun doing it. In a rematch later that season, the rival coach did not press or run up the score.
“From no sportsmanship,” Feldman said, “to total sportsmanship.”
"And everyone lived happily ever after," writes Mushnick, who now wonders how the Wayland Baptist coach would have handled the Feldman Plan if his opponents had tried that on his team. "Would he have ordered his team to try to block shots aimed at his basket? Would the official scorer have asked for an official scorer?"
If Adventist had employed the Feldman Plan, says Mushnick, "the fish-in-a-barrel 100 points scored by a player would’ve taken a far back seat to Adventist’s response to this needless humiliation:''
“You want to make news by humiliating us, making fools of us? You want headlines? Well, try this one on for size. What’s that? You never heard of the Coach Feldman Plan?”
We also know the Adventist coach would have been fired for engaging in such a frivolous attempt to wave the white flag of surrender. College coaches are paid to win, not to aid and abet opposing teams. And certainly not to cave in to political correctness.
