Mark St. Amant thinks that one youth soccer league’s twist on the mercy role (score too many goals, and you automatically lose) is a sure sign that we’re careening toward Crazyville.

An apocalypse of yet-to-be-determined magnitude is on its way.

The specifics, at present, are unclear. But it’ll very likely include fires, tornadoes, floods, pestilence, locusts—your basic Biblical shit, minus the nuclear holocaust which, I believe, was not part of the Old Testament.

And the root of said apocalypse? Kim Jong-il’s nuclear arsenal-slash-batshit craziness? The fun-lovin’ Osama bin Laden? Deadly rioting after Brett Favre announces that (oops!) he’s not returning to the Vikings after all?

Nope—it’ll be caused by the complete and utter wussification of youth sports. Let me explain…

In sports, the “mercy rule”—also known by the more violent, bloodthirsty, Braveheart battlefield-ish nickname of the “slaughter rule”—has traditionally worked like so: if a team jumps out to a seemingly insurmountable lead, the game/match/contest is ended, giving the dominant team a well-earned win and presumably sparing the losing team any further public humiliation or self-esteem erosion.

But a youth soccer league in Ottawa, Canada, has recently established a mercy-rule-in-reverse-twisted-sideways, and it works like so: if a team jumps out to a lead of five goals or more, that team forfeits. No, you’re not drunk; you read that correctly. Play too well and you automatically lose!

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In other words, if a team threatens its sensitive opponents’ nascent, porcelain mouse-fragile self-esteem—even though five goals, while a nice lead, is by no means insurmountable—that team, in the spirit of would-be sportsmanship and “can’t we just all get along” squishy-huggy-joy-joy run amok, is penalized with a loss, thus, like the original mercy rule, also sparing the real losing team any further public humiliation.

Oh, and then there’s this: in 2008, parents in the Youth Baseball League of New Haven, Connecticut, began boycotting games and refusing to allow their kids to play whenever a young pitcher named Jericho Scott took the mound. Why? Because Jericho had the sheer audacity to be—wait for it—too…good…at…pitching!

He threw too hard, they complained. Was too dominant. Too accurate. (Too accurate? Wouldn’t you prefer—and encourage—pitchers in your kid’s baseball league to possess enough control not to drill your son or daughter in the dome?) The league even threatened to disband Jericho’s team and redistribute his teammates to other teams, sort of a prepubescent version of Major League contraction.

And while I can see maybe doing this to, say, the Pittsburgh Pirates, doing so to a Little League team because one kid happens to be succeeding too much is just naked-Gary-Busey-riding-a-unicycle-with-a-meth-smoking-ferret-on-his-shoulders-level crazy.

Especially when you consider this: Poor Jericho was 9.

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Not to play the In-My-Day-We-Walked-To-School-In-the-Snow-Uphill-Wearing-Cardboard-Shoes card, but back in the ‘70’s, there was a kid in my little league named Scott Lodgek. The dude was like 6-foot-9 in sixth grade. He threw absolute gas. And this might just be my mythologizing him over time, but I think he even had a moustache.

Not a bushy Tom Selleck kinda deal, but the other, far worse kind: that unruly, scattershot, Bob Dylan barbed wire-looking mess that says, “I don’t know why God has cursed me with pubic hairs under my nose, but I’m going to take it out on you little shits by drilling your skulls with 96 mile-per-hour cut fastball.

I’d go up to bat, close my eyes, swing through three Rawlings blurs, and go sit back down. Done and done. No tears. No self-worth destruction. Just… the way it was. Lodgek owned me and everyone else. And he deserved to because he worked at his skill, honed it, practiced it, and earned it. No one gave him anything.

But did this occasional emasculation mean that I, or any other kid, who failed miserably started taking their frustration out on neighborhood animals, or grew up to be Ted Bundy? No. (At least not that I know of.)

Did my coaches or parents feel the need to pull Scott aside and whisper “Uh, say there, big fella, maybe you could tone it down a bit, throw underhand, just to make these poor little guys feel better about themselves.” No. We went up there, took three cuts, and sat back down, relieved that he didn’t give us a concussion.

All of which made it that much sweeter the first time I swung and—ping!—took a patented Lodgek heater over the Hunnewell Field fence for a three-run bomb. That’s because after so much failure, success felt… earned.

Does Harvard accept kids with C-minus averages just to make them feel, well, accepted? Do the New England Patriots give massive signing bonuses to guys who catch passes with their faces, not their hands? Does Goldman Sachs accept barely literate, unscrupulous charlatans into its residential mortgage-backed securities department? Okay, bad example on that last one.

But you get the point—real life doesn’t work like Jericho Scott’s baseball league. You shouldn’t be handed something just because you feel you deserve it, or just for showing up.

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I think the reason I’m starting to obsess about this alarming Everybody Gets a Trophy syndrome is that my daughter, Harper, just turned 4. Meaning we’re about to start that phase of her life where nights and weekends are filled with various soccer-swimming-tee ball-esque activities. I just signed her up for Boulder’s “Little Dribblers” soccer program seconds before writing this, in fact, and we’ll soon perform that suburban dad-and-daughter ritual known as shin guard shopping.

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And I honestly worry that, when I start coaching, I won’t be able to hide my disdain for this touchy-feely, “certificate of participation”-filled parenting/coaching philosophy that’s spread like so much Ebola these past few years.

That’s not to say that I advocate being another Marv Marinovich, the longtime poster boy for the sports version of the Obsessed Stage Parent. He was a training freak and football svengali who infamously and relentlessly drove his son, Todd, almost from birth to become an NFL quarterback. Marv’s craziness included stringent workouts (in-crib pushups when Todd was one month old), a nutrition program (Todd was forced to bring his own sugar-free/refined flour cake to birthday parties, and balance and agility workouts before he could even walk. For Marv, Todd wasn’t so much a little boy as a gridiron lab rat who missed his entire childhood. But it worked.

Kinda. After a hot start to Todd’s career at USC—he led the Trojans to the Rose Bowl as a freshman—he soon clashed with then head coach Larry Smith and, the following season, …continued on page two

