OPINION: Canceled game is shame of season
Friday night, 7:45 p.m., and darkness filled Dean Miller Stadium. No lights. No fans. No players. No cheerleaders. By the entrance, where patrons should have been lining up, waiting with money in hand to buy a ticket to Lindhurst vs. Marysville, a television truck idled, ready to beam the embarrassing news across the region.
Vandalism! Graffiti! Students suspended! Game canceled! Check your favorite TV station last night? There was Lindhurst High and its football field, empty and cavernous, yet stuffed full of negative perceptions about its own student body.
How sad. A small group of punks prevailed and the "Battle for the Bell" was canceled, replaced by enough scandal to make news directors scramble their vans up to Yuba County.
Whoever decided to spend a school night with spray cans tagging Marysville High took it too far and ruined it for everybody. Make no mistake, this wasn't some cute "chalk-it-up-to-the-rivalry" tale. This isn't time to spout some "boys will be boys" excuses about youthful indiscretion and how none of us were perfect growing up.
This was malice, and I don't want to hear the "rivalry" excuse. "Rivalry" doesn't give criminality a pass.
Tagging an outline of a body — a la a murder scene — and identifying a player by name? Tagging a beautiful mural at the neighboring Marysville Charter Academy for Arts with scenes so inappropriate the mural had to be covered? Smearing You Know What, as the television stations reported?
Those are the acts of criminals.
Kids TP houses. Teenagers dealing with maturity issues may throw a few eggs. Crooks use spray cans, and according to reports, players themselves helped steal a game away
from their own school. Vandalism took away what would have been the biggest gate of the year for the Blazers' program. In these times, programs can always use the money.
But administrators made the call to cut the grandest game of the season for these two schools. The excuse being thrown out was that due to suspensions handed out as a result, the Blazers "could not field a team due to disciplinary actions."
That's sad enough. But then even bigger buzzwords started coming our way. "Safety" had become a concern, and that's just plain scary. Now tales like this aren't a revelation in prep athletics — you all have the Internet — but it doesn't make them any less disheartening when they happen in your backyard.
Last year, this game ended without handshakes. I wrote a column for Monday saying how neat this rivalry can be when everyone just shows up and plays football. I interviewed both coaches on Wednesday and they were both excited about the opportunity to play. It's been a tough season for the squads, but this game had the potential to be evenly matched. If these vandals wanted to stick it to their rivals, just outplay or outcheer them.
Instead, we have this. Innuendo will fly. People will immediately come out and condemn Lindhurst and the communities it serves. There are 35 players on the Lindhurst High football team, and more than a 1,000 who attend school there. A reported eight did this. Remember the math, even if it doesn't soften the initial blow.
It should have simply been Indians vs. Blazers. It should have been just another Friday night under the lights, like the thousands of others that went off without a hitch across the state.
But at 7:45 p.m., darkness filled Dean Miller Stadium, and everyone lost.
