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opinion:
chef ben's stew
Reporters real
victims of Little League saga
As the old saying
goes, if you cannot beat them, cheat them.
At least that is
the interpretation used by the masterminds behind the Little
League World Series scandal, which sent an ineligible 14-year-old
ace pitcher, Danny Almonte, to compete against children two
years his junior.
Playing the blame
game, fingers are pointed in every direction, at the parents
of Almonte, at the team's coaches, at the Bronx league officials,
but the real victim is the press.
Sports reporters
nationwide were forced to put quality coverage of significant
sporting events completely on hold in order to entertain readers
about the first incident of American age tampering in the
history of the Little League World Series.
Of course, the
Danny Almonte saga is not extremely mundane, but it certainly
pales in comparison to the final stretch of the Major League
homerun race with Barry Bonds, Luis Gonzalez and Sammy Sosa
or the dramatic crowning of new WNBA champions, the Los Angeles
Sparks.
Nearly three weeks
of news coverage has been devoted to the topic since a Sports
Illustrated reporter discovered a Dominican Republic birth
certificate stating that Almonte is 14 years old and not 12.
I honestly cannot
blame sports fans for growing as weary of hearing about this
fiasco any more than reporters are weary of writing about
it.
Even President
George W. Bush was asked to address his opinion on the subject
? the biggest sign that things are blown out of proportion.
Without hesitation,
President Bush voiced his disappointment about the deceptiveness
of the adults in charge, according to reports from the Monterey
County Herald.
The press, rather
than having a sufficient amount of space to tell true sports
fans about U.S. Open or the upcoming NFL season, have been
subjected to finding fresh angles to explain that 14-year-old
pitcher pretended to be a 12-year-old pitcher.
A CBS news report
on the Internet went so far as to ask Almonte's opposing batters
if they thought his pitching was to good to be true.
Enough is enough.
When the words
"Danny Almonte" are typed into the google.com search
engine and 2,440 related links pop up, it is readily apparent
that true victims are the sports reporters who suffer to generate
new ideas in an attempt to prolong this story.
A recent espn.com
poll asked sports fans who they thought were the biggest victims
of the Little League World Series sabotaging.
The options were
limited to Danny Almonte, his team, the teams that Almonte
pitched against or Little League baseball.
I almost laughed
when I read the poll. The real victims -- the poor sports
reporters -- were completely overlooked by all.
Ben Dimapindan
is a journalism major at Cal State Long Beach.
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