THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610240015
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Perry Morgan
LENGTH: 69 lines
A recent band competition at Bayside High School in Virginia Beach suggests the sort of trouble that can ensue when there aren't enough first-place prizes to satisfy demand.
This has not been a problem in the past. People just expected a scarcity of blue ribbons and gold medals and an abundance of bare mentions. No one sneered at second place (``the silver'') or got sick over an honorable mention.
Nowadays there's a widespread urge, as they say on TV, to ``kick butt'' and ``go for the gold.'' A Washington Post account of what happened after the bands played at Bayside portrays a new phenomenon - the sore winner.
Bayside sponsored a contest among 19 bands from around the state. Hundreds of students and parents turned out to watch. Princess Anne High School was awarded first place. The second-place trophy was offered to Thomas Jefferson High School of Fairfax, but Kent Baker, 31, a Thomas Jefferson band director, tossed the trophy into a trash can.
Meantime, the band's other director, Phil Simon, 49, remonstrated with the eight judges about their bum judgment in not awarding first place to his band. When an official from another school retrieved the second-place trophy from the trash can and offered it to Simon, he refused to take it.
Simon later returned to Bayside to offer apologies and picked up the trophy (undinged, one hopes). He also wrote a letter of apology to parents of his band members in which he acknowledged behavior that ``insulted everyone associated with the . . . competition.''
His associate, Kent Baker, spoke of a ``lapse of judgment'' on his part, saying, in effect, that he'd been bewitched by his band's performance which he likened to ``hitting a home run musically.''
The school principal saw parallels between the example set by his band directors and that of Roberto Alomar, baseball's Great Expectorator. Baker and Simon were suspended and told to get a grip on their competitive urges.
Proper penance might require them to critique their own performance. It wanted a great deal in verve and imagination. Their basic idea of simply tossing the trophy into the can was novel but extraordinarily tacky. Still, with a bit of plotting and with music at hand, the thing might have been made to work passably well.
Picture the trophy being extended toward band leader Baker. He salutes with one hand, takes the trophy firmly in the other and then, using it as a baton, forms up his band which marches silently around the field under a banner emblazoned with big letters spelling out the ancient and honorable plaint: ``WE WUZ ROBBED!''
With the theme announced, the band then amplifies the pain of the mighty fallen. It plays ``The World Turned Upside Down,'' the air General Cornwallis chose to mark his surrender to the rabble at Yorktown. There follow five minutes of dirges with band members trailing black streamers to which has been affixed, by some sleight of hand, the accursed second-place trophy. It gleams and tumbles in the dust.
At this revelation of the resentment felt by band directors who came all the way from Fairfax to finish second in Virginia Beach, the onlookers are agog. They hardly notice a step ladder being put up at the other end of the field. But as the band wheels about and begins to march toward that object, all eyes follow.
Band leader Baker ascends the ladder as one of his charges places before it a recycling bin. Band leader Simon, wearing a pout as big as Baker's, hands up the trophy. Baker raises the trophy with upstretched arms and, as a tuba makes a blatting sound, drops the trophy into the recycling bin. The band exits, its members' noses turned upward.
This is only an awkward outline, of course, but the band directors from Fairfax clearly need something to grow on. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB