Asterisk
talk in sports needs to stop
By Michael
Sharp
November 26, 2007 | Not all sports fans are oversized
buffoons that have as little class as their intelligence,
but the sports world's recent misuse of the term "asterisk"
has many people and especially English majors rolling
their eyes.
The latest food for fodder of the stereotypical sports
related stupidity happened when Don Shula suggested
a possible undefeated New England Patriot team should
be branded with the scarlet asterisk if by chance they
matched his overly proud 1972 Dolphins' accomplishment
of an unblemished season.
This in the wake of a recent controversy that had
tactless sports fans voting to place an asterisk on
the career homerun record breaking ball hit by Barry
Bonds, that was subsequently bought by a glory greedy
baseball fan. In both of these recent examples not only
was the word asterisk undeservedly mentioned, but grammatically
misused.
The Oxford English dictionary describes an asterisk
as a pointer to an annotation or footnote. Even in the
sports world this is how the symbol was originally used.
In 1961, when Roger Maris hit 61 homeruns in 162 games
as apposed to the 154 games that Babe Ruth took to hit
60 homeruns, the baseball commissioner of the time added
an asterisk to correspond with a footnote explaining
this fact. Somehow between that time and now this symbol's
definition has changed in the minds of many ignorant
sports fans to mean something dirty, as opposed to something
that needs explaining.
The concept that records need explanation is debatable.
Mike Finger of MySA.com wrote, "Any accomplishment could
be called into question. The Dolphins beat only two
teams with winning records in 1972, which is probably
a bigger edge than Bill Belichick gained with his video
camera. Then we can start going backward through the
list of modern-day champions. The recently crowned World
Series winners, the Boston Red Sox, could take an asterisk
because their payroll was almost three times as large
as the Colorado Rockies. And what the heck -- give one
to Tiger Woods, because Jack Nicklaus never had the
benefit of oversized clubhead and graphite shafts."
Why can't we just recognize that every record has
its own unique set of circumstances and should be celebrated
for what it is?
Contemplating all the asterisks with their explanations
gets a little ridiculous. What would the footnote to
the Barry Bonds and Patriot's records look like? *---Probably
took performing enhancing drugs. *---Used cameras to
spy on other team, which most likely did not affect
the outcome.
Mike Lopresti of USA Today recognized this
problem when he wrote, "Any whiff of impropriety or
undue advantage by a champion or record-setter, and
we know what happens next. There is invariably a star-shaped
character that should be limited to the world of teenaged
text messengers slapped in the history books, thereby
telling the world that something was accomplished that
would not have been otherwise."
Many people believe that asterisks should be added
to records that were obtained by cheating. This is supposed
to be proper punishment for the cheating criminals that
adulterate the games we love. The asterisk by itself,
however, does not symbolize cheating. Wouldn't a more
appropriate punishment of convicted cheaters be to not
give them a name in the record books at all?
Much of this undue injustice to record breakers is
from an older generation of sport authorities who don't
want to give up ancient memories of their heroes setting
records. Eric Wilbur, a Boston sportswriter, put it
this way: "The old asterisk, our nation's crutch to
be forever attached to records and marks we deem not
to have been accomplished the same way as our sporting
forefathers."
So the message to sport fans is to stop asking for
asterisks. Whatever the reason for asterisk demands,
it only gives respectable, thinking, grammatically sound
sport fans a bad name. This is a fad in the sports world
that needs to go.
NW
MS |
