It was supposed to be a basketball tournament in paradise for eight lucky collegiate women's basketball teams. And for 24 hours, it was.
Four teams gathered on each of the two destinations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Johns and St. Thomas. Both served as playgrounds complete with basketball courts and postcard-perfect beaches as a part of the two-day roundball festival known as Paradise Jam.
The Penn State women's basketball team faced Rutgers on Friday. After a 13-point win over the Lady Lions, the Scarlet Knights advanced to the final against No. 14 Arizona State. Arizona State defeated Western Kentucky in the earlier game on Friday.
Jordan Johnson, the 15-year-old brother of Arizona State senior forward Aubree Johnson, died in his sleep while at the tournament. According to Associated Press reports, an autopsy showed that Jordan had an enlarged heart.
And the battle, the war, between No. 18 and No. 14, which tournament organizers no doubt figured to be the headliner of the weekend, was never held.
The final between Rutgers and Arizona State was called off. And suddenly, sports didn't seem all too important.
"A personal death is a situation that brings people back to earth," said Dr. Harry Edwards, who is currently a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers and a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley.
"They realize sports is just another institution invested with traditions of institutions," such as political or economic institutions, "but it does not solve ongoing problems in society and on this planet."
Edwards, one of the world's most famous sports sociologists, spoke about Thomas Herrion, a first-year 49er who collapsed and died in the locker room after an Aug. 20, 2005 exhibition game against the Denver Broncos.
"Such a totally and completely devastating situation, we ended up dealing with it for the rest of the year," Edwards said. "And we still deal with it. We returned to the same locker room to play a regular season game this year. And we had to relive it as an entire team and as an organization."
And it takes such tragedies to bring us back to a clearer focus as we too often allow the lines of distinction become blurred.
We see athletes, cartoonish with their mega-contracts and anabolically-infused muscles, as heroes. They perform feats of athletic wonder we can only dream of, and they play for the teams we love.
We see sports as a metaphor for life. And sports is, but only to a certain extent. Then we overextend it: A game is war; a win is happiness; a team is a family.
"We tend to take examples from out real day-to-day lives [and apply them to sports]," Edwards said. "When you get the level of intimacy, the level of confiding in on another, the level you get on a sports team its almost natural to think of it on some ways to think of it is a kinship, a group. You share virtually everything. It's almost as if every members family become a member of the team because you become that close."
And, Edwards said, we tend to take sports and extrapolate it into a secular institution. We get the "departed patriarchs" in Vince Lombardi and Red Aurbach. We get religious idols with Babe Ruth's bat or Muhammad Ali's gloves. We build $600 million stadiums that "rival anything built to the glory of God in the middle ages," Edwards said.
"Sports is invested with the most serious, most salient values of secular society," he said. "God is on the side of the winner. At the end of the day its not so much escapism as it is reaffirmation. Fans really feel we won, we were more competitive, we were more blessed."
It takes events like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or the death of Jordan Johnson, Edwards said. We're forced to take two big steps backwards, call off what we once deemed as life or death, and recognize the frailty of our own morality -- what life or death really is -- and question the importance of sports.
