They Had 101 Reasons for Not Finishing

I don’t know about you, but I’m with Gil Ramirez.

Ramirez is the high school basketball coach at South Torrance who refused to send his girls back onto the court after halftime because Inglewood Morningside already was leading, 102-24. What the coach did was against the rules, and disciplinary action was taken against him. Well, I guess that was to be expected. High school people just love taking disciplinary action.

However, Ramirez also is being accused of poor sportsmanship, and that’s where I differ.

I thought the coach acted bravely on behalf of good sportsmanship. He took the heat for an action that the Inglewood people should have taken themselves--calling off the slaughter.

Ramirez spared his girls humiliation that could have lasted weeks, months, maybe years.

He had only four players left. South Torrance had only six to begin with--another was injured--and two of them fouled out. One of the remaining four was coming back from an injury. Ramirez wasn’t being a poor sport. He was trying to keep a basketball team of 3 1/2 players from more pain in the beating of a lifetime.

Did the Morningside people sympathize?

Hardly. Instead of volunteering to spare their South Torrance sisters any further embarrassment, they got all hot and bothered because Lisa Leslie, a 6-foot-5 senior, did not get a chance to continue pouring points onto the Torrance girls’ heads.

Leslie scored 101 of Morningside’s 102 points.

A reportedly sweet kid who recently was named the top student-athlete among America’s schoolgirls, Leslie got a little carried away with her attempt to break Cheryl Miller’s scholastic record of 105 points in one game. You can’t blame her much. She’s a senior. This was her big chance.

But I think somewhere deep in her heart, Lisa knows that records don’t mean diddly when they are gained at the expense of an under-womanned, virtually defenseless opponent.

Describing herself as “kind of heartbroken,” Leslie even went up to Ramirez before the team left the court and asked him if South Torrance would let her score three more baskets, so she could get the record.

Ramirez, supposedly the heartless soul who did not give Morningside the satisfaction of scoring 200 points against his team, actually went up to his players and passed on Leslie’s request. His players said they had had quite enough of Morningside for one day, thank you.

Even though Ramirez was suspended for violating the Southern Section’s “sportsmanship code of ethics,” I just hope people remember that what he did was a positive action on behalf of his kids, not a negative action that besmirched the good name of girls’ basketball.

In fact, it’s amazing these days that any basketball coach knows how to behave, what with the example being set by America’s college coaches.

Once upon a time, John Wooden and Ray Meyer and Ralph Miller conducted themselves with dignity, providing shining examples for their young, easily influenced athletes.

Look at what we have now. Bob Knight throwing chairs and tantrums. Dale Brown and Rick Pitino challenging one another to a fight. Nolan Richardson walking off the floor because he doesn’t like a referee’s call. Billy Tubbs castigating the officials over a public-address mike. Mike Krzyzewski browbeating a boy from the student newspaper.

The coach from Florida, Don DeVoe, tells his star center, an upperclassman, he can’t play unless he gets a haircut. What year is DeVoe living in--1950? Somebody tell him this is 1990.

Then again, maybe we need to get back to some 1950 discipline.

Somebody probably has told Gil Ramirez more than once that it’s not whether you win or lose that counts, it’s how you play the game.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, that makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t, however, mean that you have to keep playing the game until you’re down to your last player while the rest of your kids are sitting on the bench, physically and emotionally torn to shreds.

Ramirez did the right thing.

And it’s not an easy thing to do the right thing, particularly when you know, as the coach did, that there are going to be repercussions.

Some official from Inglewood Morningside, rather than demanding Ramirez be punished, should have made a call to the league office suggesting that no disciplinary action of any kind be taken against him.

Morningside should have showed some mercy, which is more than it did during the game.

AFTERMATH: School suspends coach for the rest of season. Page 6.