Recently a news story hit about a young 22 year old student named Yeardley Love who attended the University of Virginia. She was brutally murdered by her boyfriend also a University of Virginia student named George Huguely. What the story said was that they broke up and he in a fit of rage broke down the door to her apartment and proceeded to repeatedly hit her head against the wall; the force of which eventually killed her. What this story has to do with sports is that both of the students were members of the University’s lacrosse teams. Now the question is did something about the game cause the boyfriend to become overly aggressive and kill his girlfriend or was it simply a crime that happened in the heat of the moment.
Lacrosse is a very interesting game and it is mostly played in America. Wikipedia defines the sport as follows. “Lacrosse is a team sport of Native American origin that is played using a small solid rubber ball and a long-handled racquet called a crosse or lacrosse stick. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose netting that is designed to hold the lacrosse ball. Offensively, the objective of the game is to use the lacrosse stick to catch, carry, and pass the ball in an effort to score by shooting the ball into an opponent's goal. Defensively, the objective is to keep the opposing team from scoring and to dispossess them of the ball through the use of stick checking and body contact or positioning,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrosse).
The aspect of lacrosse that I find interesting is the fact that it is a pretty violent game with the men’s version having a high degree of physical contact to it. One of the things that is done in the game, checking, is done by hitting your opponents stick with yours. Even with protective gear on sometimes a stick can go out of control and land on someone’s head or their neck or across their face. Injuries are commonplace in such a physical sport and that leads onto the fact that a reason why that poor girl mentioned above was killed could have something to do with the sport itself.
Whenever a person plays a sport some aspect of the sport’s nature gets implanted into the person. An example of this that has been written many times before is boxing. Boxers are very violent people because of the nature of their sport, and many of them have been known to be very violent against members of the press and their spouses or partners. A large proportion of boxers have wound up dead because of a crime related issue and many of them are involved in dodgy things on the side besides boxing. Some are obviously good natured individuals but many are simply very violent and twisted people. Can this argument be taken over to the world of lacrosse or was this crime simply a reason of not being able to accept being broken up with.
A violent person might be very valuable on the field when playing lacrosse but does that person take some of that anger and frustration from the game back home with them and use it to unload onto their girlfriend. It may have happened that way or it may not have happened like that. But one has to look at the violent nature that the young woman Yeardley was killed in to make up their own minds about it. Another interesting aspect of this story is that Yeardley’s boyfriend George had a history of violent behaviour. “In 2008, Huguely was arrested for public intoxication and resisting arrest. He was verbally abusive and made death threats to the female arresting officer, reports the Washington Post. The officer calmed him down with a taser,” (http: //www.associatedcontent.com/article/2974638/rip_yeardley_love_allegedly_murdered.html). So is a person like this made more violent by the sport they play or is playing a violent sport like lacrosse a good way for a violent person to release their aggression and take control of his life? Each point of view has its supporters and critics but it is up to all of us to decide if we want violent sports to become a part of our children’s future and we need to ask ourselves can we afford them to.
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