June 9, 2010
It's tragedy, not lacrosse
by Chuck Jaffe/
Nancy Grace thinks that murder and sexual assault are “lacrosse stories.”
Grace is the cloying host of her own evening talk show on CNN Headline News, where she typically focuses on the latest sensational case of a missing person or tries to turn some unusual occurrence into the next national panic.
When sexual assault charges were filed against team members at Duke, Grace devoted seemingly all of her time to ripping on lacrosse players, as if illegal, distasteful actions were actually encouraged in the rule book. By the time the Duke players were acquitted, Grace had moved on.
She was back attacking the game after the death of Virginia women’s lacrosse player Yeardley Love, allegedly at the hands of Virginia men’s player George Hugeley. Again, Grace was insinuating that the culture of the game – a game that encourages rough play with sticks – was at the heart of the problem. She was hardly alone; Love’s death received national attention, and never failed to mention the connection with lacrosse.
People magazine had a cover story on what it – and subsequently everyone else – labeled the “Virginia lacrosse killing.” It was not talking about how the Cavaliers dismantled Johns Hopkins in the NCAA tournament.
Each mention diminished the game; the sport was guilty by association.
But Love didn’t die on the field. And Hugeley didn’t attack her because he played the game (or because she played it, for that matter). In Hugeley’s statements to police, there was talk of an argument; it wasn’t over which Virginia team was better and should be ranked higher in the polls.
There is no denying the tragedy of Love’s death, or minimizing its horror, but it’s not a “lacrosse story” any more than Tiger Woods’ infidelities are about golf.
Traditionally, lacrosse has been considered a “preppy sport,” and the pejorative prep-school image involves wealthy upper-class kids living with a sense of entitlement. Thus, whether it was Hugeley, Duke, the players at Connecticut’s Sacred Heart University who were accused last fall of sexual assault or any other incident that could spawn a sensational headline, the public perception when there is “bad lacrosse news” boils down to “rich kids run amok.” (Hugeley, for example, is now the “lacrosse-playing wealthy boyfriend.”)
By comparison, a sport where the media identifies players as “coming from the streets” has a different image. Thus, if the Virginia tragedy had involved basketball players, the story would have replaced the “sense of entitlement” angle in favor of the “can’t escape the culture they grew up in” stereotype.
The timing – just before the NCAA tournament fields were to be announced – and the involvement of highly ranked teams only made the story bigger, and made links to the game inescapable. The people in this domestic-violence story played the game and thus are “lacrosse players” rather than “college students” or “ex-lovers” or any other adjective that would be applied were it not for the tie to the sport.
But the problem here was domestic violence, not lacrosse.
The true lacrosse stories were about redemption, dealing with loss, and moving forward. Virginia’s women’s team – ranked in the top five heading into the national tournament – had to decide whether to play after the loss of one of its leaders, and subsequently had to honor its fallen teammate through its play and actions on the field. Head coach Julie Myers said that every tournament game was a chance for the team to spend more time together, something they needed to do for each other and for Love. Yeardley Love’s family was at every game, because lacrosse reminded them of the best of her, and was in no way the cause of her death. Virginia lost in the quarter-finals.
Virginia’s top-ranked men’s team entered the tournament without a key player, who had been dismissed from the team under the cloud of suspicion. Teammates had to deal with the emotions that one of their own may have caused the death of someone they considered a friend, and a part of their community. The coaching staff had to handle – and will continue dealing with – questions of what they knew of Hugeley’s emotional state, and why he was allowed to remain on the team after previously assaulting a teammate who purportedly had kissed Love.
Those were the lacrosse stories.
They were not the stories being told by Grace and the mainstream media. When Hugeley’s prosecution begins – and the real lacrosse stories have been told – the big media will come back to the game. There will be the repeated film clips of Love or Hugeley playing, while the case is being discussed; it will be a visual track that puts the focus on the game instead of where it belongs, on domestic violence on campus.
And that will make it easier to blame the sport and stain the game the next time a lacrosse player or team does something irresponsible, stupid, offensive or tragic off the field..
Within days of Love’s death, the NCAA released its annual study on “graduation success” for student-athletes. Lacrosse, at 88 percent, had the highest graduation rate among men’s sports (in women’s sports, there are several – including lacrosse – that are jus6t shy of 100 percent success).
Predictably, outside of the lacrosse media, that news did not attract any media coverage. It’s unfortunate that the many things that reflect so well on the sport and the people who play it are not considered “lacrosse stories.”
