Charlotte, North Carolina is home to many things: good barbecue, some interesting beers, the NBA's Bobcats and apparently the dumbest soccer team ever.
This past Saturday night the Charlotte Catholic Cougars boys' soccer team arrived at Forestview High School for a playoff game. While they were warming up, they heard something coming out of the speakers at the field.
AC/DC right? A little "Hell's Bells" to pump up the Forestview players, perhaps?
Actually according to the Charlotte Observer, the Forestview players were listening to a snippet of a speech by Adolf Hitler, noted athletic motivator.
According to Charlotte Catholic's coach and a few parents in the parking lot, it was immediately evident to all parties what was being played.
The explanations of Forestview Principal Robert Carpenter were amusing, as he cited everything from a new team battle cry to a German foreign exchange student as reasons for the mishap.
Carpenter assured everyone this was the first time the tape had been played, and the coach was unaware of it, and so on and so forth.
The crazy thing is all these excuses, farfetched as they seem, might be true. A German exchange student could have taught all the players the saying "onward to victory" in German without much difficulty.
There are two things about this story, however, that really bother me. One is the racial slurs allegedly uttered at the two black players on Charlotte Catholic by Forestview players.
I'm not going to sit here and tell people not to be bigots - that's their business. But to actually utter those terms, even during a heated athletic contest, is grounds for getting punched in the teeth.
Second, and more upsetting to me, is this line from Carpenter in the Observer story: "We have a German exchange student on our team. He taught our students to say it in German. Some of our more zealous students sought to capture this slogan in German and to play it on the PA. They copied it from a speech by Hitler but could not just copy the 'On to victory' and got too much of the speech."
Sorry, I guess I didn't get the memo stating that it's OK to play any part of a Hitler speech at any time or any place other than the History Channel. I guess playing a little Hitler would have been just peachy in this instance.
The amazing thing about the story is that apparently none of the members of the team had a conscience that whispered, "Hey, maybe this isn't such a good idea." Then again, considering their alleged use of slurs, maybe that's not such a surprise.
As of today, no action has been reported against members of the team. No suspensions, no detentions, not even an apology letter from the team members to the players of Charlotte Catholic.
That's classy.
As a former high school basketball player, I can attest that games get heated, and oftentimes teams genuinely dislike each other. I was the originator of some very nasty pre-game speeches about the other team. But it stayed in a huddle at center court, and it usually involved talking about beating the living snot out of the other team and other standard fare.
The Forestview players might as well have taken the field wearing white hoods and S.S. uniforms. It would have been an appropriate and logical next step in their march of ignorance and idiocy.
Between racial slurs and Adolf Hitler, it seems like the members of the boys' soccer team at Forestview High are on their way to becoming productive and tolerant members of society.
I'd like to think that the publicity caused by this incident will teach the Forestview players a lesson, but I doubt it. After all, as noted southern comedian Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid."
Forestview High won the game 1-0, but it's obvious who the real losers are.
