Darren S. Gonzales
On Tuesday the sports page carried a column that was pretty poor. The author talks about the crime it was for our leaders to congratulating the Utes on the success of their basketball team. Sarcastically, he uses the word “leaders” in quotes explaining that they don’t practice what they preach.
On KSL’s SportsNight with Greg Wrubell, Rondo Fehlberg said that the decision to print the ad was a joint decision between the athletic department, the president of the university and the Board of Trustees. I wonder if the author realizes just who he is sarcastically talking to.
I submit that Tuesday’s author doesn’t know what sportsmanship means. To be a sportsman is to not just accept victory, but also defeat, and to accept either of these graciously. Now, you say “Hey, when BYU won the national football championship, I didn’t see any red flags flying in our favor.” I say that is fine. Not everybody would do what our leaders did. I don’t want to be like everybody else. When my brother performs well, I want to encourage him, not pull him down. (Besides, BYU will get thousands of dollars toward athletics because the Utes made it so far. Just ask Rondo Fhelberg.)
The rest of his article was spent talking about how our athletic program is a joke and the Utes’ athletic program is superior to ours. I wonder if Brandon knows that there are sports in the athletic program other than men’s basketball and football. If you look at our entire athletic program as a whole, you will see that this past season, BYU beat Utah in soccer, women’s basketball (in the WAC Tournament no less), women’s tennis, women’s gymnastics (Utah doesn’t even have a men’s gymnastics team while BYU’s men’s team ended up 12th in the nation), golf, baseball (just last week) and the list goes on and on.
Does Utah have a superior men’s basketball team? Yes. Do they have a superior football team? We’ll see in a few months. Do they have a superior athletic program? I would say no. This is the authors statement: “But if you want to become a real athletic powerhouse …, ” I don’t think that is the mission of BYU. It is nice to compete in sports and it is very nice to compete well. But that is not the only important thing for BYU.
Lastly, I say to the author, shouldn’t use his position as a member of The Daily Universe staff to get this type of article published. The next time you want to say something like what you have said in this article, send a letter to the editor and let them publish it on the opinion page.
