Monday, December 7, 2009

Monday Musings on Sports - Rex Marks the Spot

As regular readers of this blog are aware, the Monday post was usually devoted to sports with highlights and analysis of the Max Kellerman show which formerly aired on 1050 ESPN Radio. As Max has resigned from 1050 and has not yet resurfaced on the NY area radio waves, I have decided to continue the tradition of linking sports to Torah which I believe was an undercurrent of the Max Kellerman show.

Following the Jets Thursday night win against Buffalo, a great deal of ink was spent on Rex Ryan's comments about Mark Sanchez after the Jets win. As NFL fans may recall, during Thursday night's game Sanchez attempted to run for a first down and dove forward for extra yardage. Two players after the dive, Sanchez took himself out of the game. It was later learned that he had sprained his right knee on the play.

This marked the second week in a row that Sanchez had injured his knee while running with the football. In the previous game against Carolina, Sanchez had injured his left knee while running out of bounds. After that game, Rex Ryan brought in Yankee manager to teach Sanchez to slide. Why? For those uninitiated - in football a quarterback can run and then slide feet forward on his side or back. From the moment that he launches into the slide (commonly known as the , the quarterback cannot be touched. He also gains no extra yards from the slide, but the trade off is that there is no danger that he can be hurt by other players.

The alternative is that the quarterback can dive head forward. When he makes this kind of dive, the quarterback is fair game to be hit by other players, but also can get extra yards until he is touched by an opposing player.

In the Buffalo game, Sanchez scrambled and dove forward for the first down. In so doing he sustained the knee injury, although it is unclear whether it was caused by the hard AstroTurf or contact with another player. After the game, Ryan talked about how it was more important that Sanchez make a "give up" slide then risk getting hurt.

The obvious flaw in Ryan's lament was that the point of making a "give up" slide is to avoid injuries to the head or upper body which are the usual points of impact when a player dives forward. Injuries to the legs are much less frequent occurrences when a quarterback is diving for a first down.

Following the press conference, I read numerous articles about how Ryan's criticism was damaging to Sanchez's psyche as it purportedly deterred him from being competitive and could damage his standing with the team. There is some truth to the argument that making a give up slide and not getting the first down (when the game's outcome was still in doubt) makes Sanchez look like he is afraid to get hit.

The comments I have a problem with were those made on a sports radio show which took issue with Ryan implying that if Sanchez slid properly he would not have gotten hurt at all. Yes, the injury was a freak thing as Ryan's concern in having Girardi teach Sanchez to slide was to avoid head/shoulder injuries. But what bothered me about the criticism was that none of the hosts on the show was a parent and as such they could not understand the angle that Ryan was coming from.

Parents try to do whatever they can to prevent their child from getting hurt. No parent likes to see their child hurt, even if the child learns one of those "life lessons" as a result. As such the parent warns the child not to do something else so that there is an extra layer of protection to prevent the child from getting hurt. When the child does not listen and pays the consequence, the parent is upset at the child as well as himself for not preventing the child's injury. Even if the child is injured in a way that the parent could not have anticipated, there is still a feeling of anguish over the injury -- that if the child would have listened, everything would be fine.

We see a similar concept in Torah thought. The Rabbis enacted gedarim (fences) which protect us by adding an extra layer of prevention from violating a biblical prohibition. While we may not like or agree with the geder, we are required to follow it as it will prevent us from the more severe problem of violating a heavenly prohibition. When we ignore the geder we run the risk of violating the Torah prohibition and face much sterner consquences.

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