Originally published on Facebook on February 23, 2022
Around the same time last night that Mark Hanson watched a St. Olaf College buzzer-beater end the Gustavus Adolphus College men’s basketball season and with it, his 32-year career as head coach, Russia began invading Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, we’d sent a message to Gustavus students, faculty, and staff that masking restrictions were being loosened. Like so many decisions in the last few years, it was made after carefully balancing multiple interests, inputs, and realities. But this one felt different because it represented hope, maybe a hint of light emerging at the end of what’s been a long, dark, winding tunnel.
Hanson became the head basketball coach in 1990, taking the reins of the program between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final collapse of the USSR. Things were booming in the 90s — including budding democracies, the economy, and Gustie men’s basketball, which won four MIAC Championships and finished second twice. (I know I’m drawing parallels here where none exist.)
Towards the end of the game, a St. Olaf parent who had been loud and obnoxious (to put it lightly) throughout the game started chirping the Gustavus athletic trainers for some reason. A Gustavus staff member stepped in and he went back to his seat, but as the game ended he kept being boisterous, confrontational, and unsporting in his celebration of the Ole win, to the point where our athletic director had to talk to him.
Discussing it later with my wife Hayley, she told me about the psychological concept of bracketed morality, “a temporary suspension of the usual moral obligation to consider equally the needs and desires of all persons that is due to contextual factors in a particular situation.” It’s a problem in athletics, particularly among parents in youth sports. Basically, the same behavior that would get the cops called on you in the grocery store is for some reason acceptable, or at least not read by others as being as problematic, when it takes place in a gym. (Sometimes it pays to be married to someone with a PhD in sport psychology.)
I stayed up way later than I should have last night, watching the first rocket attacks hit Ukraine and listening to correspondents talk as air raid sirens went off in Kyiv. Reflecting on it today as I’ve followed the news and thought back on the game, the invasion, and all the other legislative nightmares that are taking place across the world today, it occurs to me that politics also have a major issue with bracketed morality. U.S. politics has become about scoring cheap points, focused more on “winning” than helping people. (Take Abbott’s trans-exclusionary regulations in Texas. How does that help anyone? How does that improve a person’s life, welfare, wellbeing, and ability to thrive?) Russia’s (or rather, Putin’s) aggression here is “bracketed” by history and pride, the perception that somehow the country is less great or less powerful than it was at times in the past, and therefore conditions must be right to suspend morality, unfortunately for Ukraine, unfortunately for all of us.
Before that last-second shot from St. Olaf, Gustavus had an opportunity to win. During a time out with less than five seconds left, Hanson gathered the team on the bench, drawing up a play. They broke the huddle together, set up, and went into motion. When the whistle blew, the inbound pass sailed high, a turnover, and St. Olaf went on to win. Gustavus missed its chance, St. Olaf hit theirs. That’s sports. That’s life.
Last night, Putin likely started the clock on his own downfall, though how many grains of sand are left in the hourglass are anybody’s guess.
The angry dad, I presume, will keep on being a problem.
The masks came off for most people on campus today, though there were less smiles under them than there may have been under other circumstances.
Hanson hugged his assistant coaches, shook hands with the opponents, and went back to the locker room with his team for the last time.
