Sports needs a dose of perspective

It is Super Bowl week, and the participation of the Arizona Cardinals in the big game should help us commemorate the single greatest moment of sports perspective in memory.

That would be NFL safety Pat Tillman’s departure from the Cardinals, leaving behind the several million dollars he would have earned as a player so he could play for his country. In the wake of 9/11, Tillman saw joining the Army to fight terrorism as more important than staying with the Cardinals to fight the Cowboys.

It cost him his life.

Now, as we constantly lose our way in our daily dealings in sports, we need to stop and make sure that Tillman’s message did not die with him.

Item: The Dallas Covenant High girls’ basketball team beats Dallas Academy, 100-0.

(The score was 59-0 at halftime and Covenant Coach Micah Grimes didn’t call off the horses until the team reached the 100-point mark with four minutes left. Covenant is a private Christian school. Covenant officials later apologized for the game. After Grimes posted a comment disagreeing with the school’s apology -- saying in part that “my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy” -- he was fired.)

Item: Jason Stinson, football coach at Louisville Pleasure Ridge Park High, is charged with reckless homicide in the death of sophomore lineman Max Gilpin.

(According to USA Today, Gilpin, 15, died Aug. 23, three days after collapsing with heatstroke during practice, where his body temperature had reached 107 degrees. The Louisville Courier Journal reports that bystanders said water was withheld from the players on a day when the heat index reached 94. Two other players were hospitalized.)

Item: Boxer Shane Mosley’s trainer, Nazim Richardson, finds a substance the Mosley camp identifies as plaster of Paris under the wraps on the taped hands of opponent Antonio Margarito before the WBA welterweight title fight at Staples Center.

(“We saw something on one hand and we asked to have that cleaned off,” Richardson said. “The other hand was already taped. We asked to see that one. They resisted. The commissioner stepped in, made them take the tape off. The same stuff was under that tape.”)

Item: Angry fans of Croatia and Serbia punctuate a verbal dispute over a tennis match at the Australian Open by throwing chairs at one another. One woman is injured.

(Serbian Novak Djokovic won the match against Bosnian-born American Amer Delic, who said later, “There is no place for that. This is tennis. Novak and I are good friends.”)

Items: Players in Tillman’s NFL regularly do celebration dances after making tackles in the first quarter of scoreless games after five-yard gains. . . . An NBA owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, confronts a player from an opposing team over an elbow thrown during the game and is fined $25,000 by the league. Cuban’s total fines paid to date as Mavericks owner reach $1.5 million. . . . One of Mark McGwire’s brothers shops around a book project in which he says he would write about his brother’s use of performance-enhancing steroids.

Where have you gone, Patrick Tillman? A nation of sports fans turns its lonely eyes to you.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com