THE LOST DISCIPLINE OF CAMARADERIE

The Hurt Locker is a good film and it has nothing to do with bandwagon appeal. I’m a war movie glutton because if I had college to do over again, I’d probably go military academy instead. Platoon was probably the first war movie I remember and it inspired me to write two letters directly to the President of the United States about efforts to rescue prisoners of war. Wait…I saw Rambo in the early 80s but he was a bit of a rogue.

The Hurt Locker has that element of internal conflict mixed with the prominent, non-agendized theme of interdependence. Nothing shows how much we need each other in this world like soldiers whose lives depend on selflessness, courage, poise, discipline and a host of other virtues. Survival has a way of bringing out a very selfish quality that already resides in us unless we’ve been trained to work counter intuitively. And you see that tension in the movie as an army specialist struggles to find meaning in life outside of war. Now away from the cinema and “back to me…”

In basketball in particular, interdependence is in retreat having been exchanged for individualism. If you don’t believe me, go to a community college basketball game in southern California. The good teams have figured out that if they don’t work together all is lost. The Riverside and Citrus Community Colleges of our great region are proof of that. But the vast majority of basketball is diseased because the soldier camaraderie is missing. And I’m at a loss. Though it might border on insulting for me to parallel war and a game I will say that training and absolute hierarchy separates one from the other. The military is not a place for a democratic paradigm to be promulgated. If you make it through training as an insubordinate, you certainly won’t make it through war as one. Follow orders or die from your blind side.

More and more, basketball players of all levels saunter into the gym with an air of superiority and instead of going to war as a team, they engage coaches in a power struggle. Purpose and preservation of life were woven well into the Hurt Locker and although muddled, a distinct deference to them was evident. The movie ended and I sat thinking, “Maybe coaches are afraid of players, afraid of risking the loss of a star player or fearful of backlash from brass and boosters.” Coaches want to win and want to keep their jobs. But shouldn’t we view the consequences of structureless athletics as death?  Lots of mulling comes out of a war movie, especially for guys like me who never served. But I think I get one thing – that when roles are obscured during a crisis, bad things happen. Basketball, like other sports, is just a game but the time our young athletes are living in isn’t.