Student Blogger Disagrees With Swine Flu Closings

Swine Flu Outbreak

As news of the swine flu began to spread, Texas’s UIL association decided to postpone all baseball and track and field activities until May 11 at the earliest. I’m not going to delve into politics here, but it seems like the new administration is trying to be over-the-top cautious after many felt George Bush acted too slowly during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. The media, after seeing how much the government was freaking out over swine flu, freaked out too, because there’s no better story than one that strikes fear into others to keep them tuned in.

Cutting to the chase, all this “freaking out” has trickled down to the DFW metroplex after a handful of cases have been reported in the area. What would be the logical thing for local officials to do? Sanitize everything; reassure the public that there are plans in place if the media’s self-proclaimed “pandemic” actually turns into a pandemic, and let life go on as usual. What ended up happening? School districts closed down, individual schools closed down, sports and band activities have been cancelled; it’s eerily like the moments after an earthquake hit game three of the 1989 World Series between the A’s and Giants: complete and utter chaos.

Kids that are still in school are exposed to thousands of other students every day, and you’re telling me that a baseball game is too dangerous because, at the varsity level, you might have a crowd that is probably 1/10 (that’s being very generous) of a school’s class size? Where’s the logic in that? You could argue that sporting events increase the risk of contamination with the passing of equipment, baseballs, etc., but that’s what sanitizing the area is for.

Canceling track and field events is even more stupefying. Unless there’s some sort of cross country event in which runners are required to travel through a farm full of infected pigs, I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s not like the crowds are insanely large at the high school level, and if a fan is worried about attending a sports event where there are only a few hundred people they don’t have to go. I’ll end this with a statistic: there are 900 reported cases of the swine flu worldwide and approximately 6,790,062,216 (and that’s of July 2009) people on this earth. Simple division will tell you that 900/6,790,062,216 = a number smaller than Zack Grienke’s ERA this season (which is pretty hard to accomplish). On the other hand, true pandemics like the Black Plague killed around one half of Europe and Asia’s population, and there has never been a professional baseball player to hit .500 for an entire season, so we’re going to be just fine.

Round one is complete, and I was eight for eight on my predictions, although there were few surprises. If I go a step deeper and give myself one point for every series I got the correct number of games for and a half of a point for every series I predicted the right winner but the wrong number of games, I would accumulate six out of a possible eight points. Not bad at all, but the second round is where things start getting interesting.

I listened to Marc Stein rave about Yao Ming and the one-two punch of Shane Battier and Ron Artest on Kobe Bryant, followed by his announcement that it would be a shock if their series went beyond six games. Since the guys on ESPN seem to be taking the “I’ll be extremely conservative in my picks” approach, I’ll stick with my the Rockets taking the Lakers to seven games before going down, and the Magic knocking out the Celtics with relative ease as “surprise picks”. A story that I didn’t think got nearly enough attention was the huge margin of victory Orlando had over Philly in game six of their series without Dwight Howard. After the game, Andre Miller went as far as to say that “one of their players told me that they were better without Dwight Howard. They said the ball moves quicker. They're not standing around a lot.” We could question the truthfulness of such an outlandish quote, but the bottom line is that what was a close series ended in a blowout with the Magic’s best player in a hotel room. Perhaps the Magic do play better as a fast break squad against the 76ers, mostly because Philadelphia also uses a run and gun offense that Orlando had trouble matching with a big man that needed touches inside.

Against Boston, however, Dwight Howard will be the reason the Magic can win this series. He will have a field day on Glen Davis, Kendrick Perkins, Mikki Moore, and others. I have to give credit to Denver so far; especially with the way J.R. Smith and Carmelo Anthony have resisted the urge to take every shot they see. If they continue to get offensive production out of those two guys along with the steady play of Chauncy Billups, Nene, Kenyon Martin, and Chris Anderson, the Mavericks could find themselves in danger of being swept.

Finally, how could I not throw in a comment about the Celtics/Bulls series? It’s disappointing how game seven failed to produce a game winner or another overtime, but every other game in the series was an instant ESPN Classic. Game six was one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was one of those games where neither team deserved to lose, and it would take an impending attack from pigs infected with swine flu to get me to move away from the television screen. The degree of difficulty on some of Ray Allen’s shots was simply absurd; whether he was falling out of bounds or just making clutch shots, it was hard to root against the guy unless you were a Bulls fan. Just when the C’s looked like they could take the lead, Joakim Noah stole the ball and went coast to coast for a thunderous and one dunk. When he initially stole the ball, the game seemed to go into slow motion. At first, it seemed impossible that Joakim Noah took it from Paul Pierce. After realizing my eyes were not deceiving me, I awaited the inevitable: Noah dribbling off his foot. Once he got to the rim, I expected Pierce to send him into row three of Chicago’s arena. Instead, Noah had the coordination to avoid dribbling off his foot and foul out Pierce with a great jam. At that point, there was no way the C’s would win game six. In the end, Boston held on with the steady play of Rajon Rondo (except for game six), Glen Davis, Ray Allen, and Paul Pierce.

*Jasper High School sophomore Alex Shultz writes on high school life and other stuff every Monday on VYPE.com/DFW.