Dear readers: Your team rules. Love, a reporter

that sounds like something a parent would write. maybe he met some of the players' moms and owed them a favor?

 

At first I was going scold the initial poster for picking on a sad little foreign journalist - but then it occurred to me that Batavia is actually a town in the U.S.

Good grief.

 

That makes me want to stand up and wave a flag...a white one.

 

Honestly, what harm does it cause in his situation? I'm generalizing here, but I imagine he's a guy that is content at working at a small-community newspaper. He's probably a bit older, maybe it's not even his full-time job, and he felt bad for the 13 or 14 kids (that's a football team?) that came over and got thier asses kicked for four quarters. So he thought it would be a nice pick-me-up for the players, coaches and their parents when they read his LTE in the next edition of the leader herald. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, and I certainly wouldn't have done it, but in the end if he's happy with his station in life and really felt compelled to write something gracious for those kids, who cares? I don't think this is the kind of guy who's looking to be at the Washington Post anytime soon.

 

Because it makes the rest of us look bad. It also makes everyone else at his paper look bad.

"Why can't you be a good reporter like that Tom Rivers? He's the only one who seems like he cares about these boys!"

 

It's all about the kids.

 

I disagree. I just think it makes HIM look bad. But this might be a guy that doesn't even consider himself a sportswriter for all we know. So I think, and certainly hope, he won't get lumped in with the rest of us.

 

What you want, a cookie?

 

they gained first downs. ... that shit is great.

 

Batavia and Gloversville are 210-some miles apart, as per MapQuest. Odds are real good nobody in Gloversville is ever going to read the Batavia Daily News. Or vice versa.

I would assume he went ahead and wrote a story for the Daily News which focused on the Lyndonville team, as well it should have, given the outcome of the game and the interest of his readership.

If the New York Amateur Football League is like any of the other "amateur football leagues" I've ever seen, it's mostly players in their 20s and 30s, some 40s, some (a tiny few) playing because they have some goofy dream of making the NFL, but most playing because they love playing football. With extremely rare exceptions, they not only don't make any money, they have to spend quite a bit to play.

And yes, it is somewhat unusual that a team in such a league with a winless record would keep playing hard for the whole game. In many amateur leagues, when teams go bad, everybody starts fucking around, tiptoeing away from pileups, turning the whole thing into a sham for everybody.

It doesn't kill anybody or compromise anybody's integrity to write a letter saying they played hard. He didn't say they were a better team or that they deserved to win (obviously they weren't and they didn't). He just said he enjoyed watching them play. What the hell's wrong with that?

 

"they made first downs."

come on starman, you gotta lose your man card with that statement alone.

 

but what about the amateur jv teams?