Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Both Teams Win? Not So Much

There's a video going around of a teen with an intellectual disability scoring a basket in his high school basketball game. His name is Mitchell Marcus, and he had served as the team's manager for most of the season. The coach decided to put Mitchell in to play near the end of the team's last game. There are so many problems with this, but it really comes down to one thing, Marcus is just trying to live life to the best of his own ability. He's not here to inspire anyone. The coach, however, does not understand this. In his interview, the coach said he was prepared to lose the game "for his moment." Their team won, but not before a player on the opposing team blatantly passed the ball to Marcus so he could make a basket. That's not basketball. That's not how you play sports. You play to help your own team win.

When Marcus was interviewed, he (apparently) said he was just happy to wear the uniform, even though that came from the mouth of the reporter, not Marcus himself. That should be true of any athlete at any level. If you're not proud to wear the uniform you are wearing, you either stop playing, or in the professional ranks, request a trade. In any case, they called these events "sportsmanship". This is not sportsmanship, this is patronizing. Was Mitchell Marcus happy to play in the game? He was. Was he happy to score the basket? Again, it's fairly obvious he was. Did anybody bother to ask him about HOW he scored that basket? Not at all. Any other player on any other team would be disappointed in themselves missing so many opportunities before that shot, and it's fair to assume that he is no different. That's right, I said it, he is no different. He joined the team, albeit as the manager, to be a member of the team, and probably to make some friends. If he is aware that he would have trouble keeping up with the competition, he wouldn't want to play just to be left in everyone's dust. Would people applaud him for knowing his own limits? I don't think so, but they shouldn't. Nobody asked him about his opponent who blatantly ignored basic basketball strategy. You don't want to pass the ball to an opponent. No exceptions. If he has the basketball knowledge the coach referred to, he would know how patronizing it would be to have these events unfold as they did and to be the unwitting center of it all. I have no doubt that Mitchell Marcus was happy, but I also have no doubt that he was not intending to inspire anyone. He was just trying to be a normal teen, be involved in his favorite sport (even if he couldn't play), and make a few friends, and there is nothing wrong with that. What's "wrong" with the situation is all the TV cameras and the opposing player doing what he did. I wonder whether or not this video would have gone viral if any one factor changed. If Marcus was not disabled, the opposing player is immediately ostracized. If he had made one of the shots he took under normal basketball circumstances, is this "news"?

It's almost as if the news story isn't about Mitchell Marcus at all....until people want to say how inspiring he is. The story is about all the well-intentioned, yet misguided people around him who literally set the stage for him. They all want to show how "nice" they're being to the disabled kid. They want the glory of being kind people, but when disabled people see this, it has the opposite effect. If you want to be kind to anybody who has any sort of disability, don't patronize them like this. Don't act as if "in his mind, the championship is on the line" when in reality it's not, and don't act like that staged basket won this "championship."

There was a similar situation back in 2006 which involved an autistic high school senior named Jason McElwain. His story gained nationwide notoriety when it aired on ESPN, and some things were still taken too far. Some media outlets even labeled him as a "high functioning" autistic which is problematic on another level that I won't discuss here. However, in McElwain's case, he scored all his baskets during the regular course of the game and under normal circumstances. He scored twenty points in four minutes on the court, including 6 three-pointers.  A streak like that will reach the media even if the player has no disabilities. He made himself newsworthy by playing well, not by other people setting him up, and not for simply living life to the best of his ability while having a disability.

People without disabilities aren't in the news for daily activities at any age, so why is Mitchell Marcus' story different? It's different because people want to make a big deal about being "nice" to someone who has a disability. It's different because people are wrongfully inspired by things like this. It's different because the majority of people don't see how patronizing it is. Nobody wants to acknowledge that this should not be different at all. That is, nobody without disabilities wants to acknowledge this. The disability community would like to see "news" like this disappear, and I agree with this sentiment. We are not here to inspire anyone except ourselves. We don't want fame and glory for living our lives, and especially not for staged acts of kindness and "sportsmanship". Nobody should be exalted for respecting us. Even the opposing player who threw Marcus the ball said "I was raised to treat others how you want to be treated". This is not how to do that, unless he wants to be inspiring in the way that the disability community abhors. We're not inspirational people, we're just people, and we deserve respect just like everyone else does.