Every now and then, something happens that puts sports in perspective.
Crestview High School’s baseball team was supposed to travel to Tallahassee on Wednesday to play Chiles in the state playoffs quarterfinal. I was going to catch a ride on the bus with the team.
As an old athlete, I’ve had my share of team bus rides. I’ve even hitched a few rides on a team bus since I started writing sports. Believe me, riding a team bus isn’t all that glamorous, and it has changed since back in the 1970s.
But a not-so-funny thing happened before the Bulldogs could leave for Tallahassee. For a day, we experienced a flood of biblical proportion.
Many of you experienced it in ways you don’t want to think about. I was hit hard by the rain, too, with my house in Fort Walton Beach receiving flood waters that reached between 4 and 6 inches inside and knee level and higher in the yard.
Floods across Northwest Florida, tornadoes that devastated our neighbors to the north in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee, hurricanes and things like last year’s terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon help put sports in perspective.
Anyone who knows me will tell you I love to compete. And more than my love for competition is my desire to win. If I’m playing dominoes with my family, bowling with friends or taking a photo that will appear in the Bulletin, I want to be better than those I measure myself against.
Most athletes and coaches I know are that way as well. If you aren’t going to have a winner and loser, why keep score? And if you don’t keep score, why play?
There’s nothing wrong with that. America was built by men and women with a competitive fire that drove them to succeed in business and industry. Winning and losing are important.
But to say, as I have in the past, that winning is more important than a matter of life or death does injustice to those who have lost loved ones in the recent storms.
To say winning is more important than a home lost is at best careless and at worse callous.
The lessons we learn competing in athletics serve us well in life when facing tough moments. I’ve used some of those life lessons to put my relatively minor flood damage in perspective.
A postponed baseball game will be replayed. Athletes and coaches recover from lost games. Sometimes you never recover from a lost loved one, and it’s a lot easier to recover from a lost game than a lost home.
Sports have always been a part of our society. They lift our spirits in the hard times after tragedies or natural disasters. Sports remind us that valuable lessons are learned in both winning and losing.
Sports are important, but this week we were again reminded that our games must be kept in proper perspective.
Randy Dickson is the Crestview News Bulletin’s sports editor. Email him at randyd@crestviewbulletin.com, tweet him @BigRandle, or call 682-6524.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: SIDELINE OBSERVATIONS: Flood helps us keep sports in perspective