Saratoga News

Couldn't someone please call a timeout?

By Dale Bryant

I thought there would be big yellow chrysanthemums pinned to all the coeds' shoulders. And a huge student cheering section glaring white under the bright autumn sun. I thought there would be card tricks and that some bouncy boy cheerleader would stand on a railing and direct the cheering section to flash blue cards or red cards or white cards on cue.

I happened to be thinking about chrysanthemums, marching bands, card tricks and such because my husband and I had been invited to a tailgate party preceding a San Jose State University football game. I don't much care for football, and I had never met the tailgate hosts, so I spent some time during the week preceding the game trying to psyche myself up for the pigskin gala.

I have a passing familiarity with professional football since I live with someone who's greatest joy on a Sunday afternoon is calling the plays before John Madden can spit them out. I seldom actually watch the games on TV. How I happen to know every play is that my husband seeks me out, no matter where I am.

What I do know about sports is the incredible salaries professional athletes command these days. How could I not know? Anyone who watches the news on TV, listens to the radio or reads a newspaper would have a hard time missing the high drama of salary negotiations in professional sports. The average salary for a professional baseball player is now more than $1 million per year. Only someone who spent the the last few years under a rock could have missed the fact that Deion Sanders made a nifty $3 million playing baseball for the San Francisco Giants for less than a year. And who could forget the excitement while the whole world waited to see whether Deion would then join the 49ers or go where he could get a more reasonable salary? He ended up with the Dallas Cowboys, who enticed him with $35 million for five years.

As it turned out, the SJSU game was not quite like any I had experienced. There were no chrysanthemums and only a very sparsely populated student cheering section, and that's too bad because the game was great fun--even if it did have a sort of Pop Warner feel to it. In the final 27 seconds, a player on the opposing team apparently misinterpreted a hand signal from a coach and called a timeout. That minor miscalculation put the ball in the hands of a Spartan player who seemed so shocked to have the ball that he didn't know what to do except run. And that's what he did--all the way across the goal line, thus turning the tide and catapulting SJSU to victory.

Although it was disappointing to see so few spectators at the game, it was, nevertheless, refreshing to see athletes playing for fun and to see spectators having a good time watching a bunch of young guys pouring their hearts into the task at hand. It's such a burden trying to figure out whether a player like Michael Jordan is really earning his $32 million annual salary or Dennis Rodman is worth the $10 million annual salary he wants.

While the SJSU football game was a refreshing change from the world of professional athletics, I did become disheartened talking to some of the people at the tailgate party. Many of them were schoolteachers, not in Saratoga, but not far from here, either. They talked about having no books, and about 30-year-old buildings that had never been painted or repaired; they talked about fourth-grade classrooms of 34 students and of students within one school speaking 27 different dialects. They talked about kids whose parents are addicted to drugs and about back-to-school nights that attract half-a-dozen parents.

It made me want to yell: Time out! If a call for a timeout can turn the course of a football game, after all, couldn't a short timeout turn around some of our society's misplaced priorities?

No money for schools, but $20 million for a convicted rapist to box on television for less than a minute? And $43 million for Barry Bonds to play baseball with the San Francisco Giants for seven years. Shaquille O'Neal earns--and I use the term loosely--$72 million for shooting hoops. That, of course, is exclusive of promotional and endorsement fees.

I think we should all stand up and yell as loud as we can:Time out! Then we should hope that some fourth-grader in a crowded, crumbling classroom will catch the ball and run in the opposite direction, thus turning the tide.

Dale Bryant is the editor of the Saratoga News.

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