Scorecard

NHL: Peace and Dream Teams

It's difficult to overstate the importance to the NHL of last week's twin announcements that its players will compete in the 1998 Olympics and that the league and the union have solidified their labor agreement through the year 2000. For fans, the Olympic announcement was the more compelling. Some 110 players are expected to go to Nagano, Japan, in 1998 to compete for their native countries. That means a U.S. line of Brett Hull, Pat LaFontaine and Kevin Stevens could skate against Canada's Cam Neely, Eric Lindros and Brendan Shanahan or Russia's Pavel Bure, Sergei Fedorov and Alexander Mogilny. Dream Teams vs. Dream Teams.

But the off-the-ice labor news might be the more important. A year ago the NHL was postponing its season opener and setting the stage for a 103-day lockout. Commissioner Gary Bettman, formerly the number-three man at the NBA, was being lampooned as hockey-challenged, and he and acerbic player rep Bob Goodenow were being chastised for blowing an opportunity to broaden hockey's appeal while baseball was on strike.

Now, with its labor woes settled for a while and its superstars ready to enter a world arena, the NHL has proved that like the NBA, it can perform a nifty spin move.

A Sad Tale from Youth Sports

Though today's headlines are full of malfeasance in college sports, we sometimes need reminding that arguably the greatest abuses take place in the relatively unregulated—and unpublicized—world of pre-high school sports. Would-be Lombardis and overzealous parents can conspire to defeat the purpose of youth sports, which should be about having fun and teaching fundamentals. In the Southwest Midget Football League in suburban Chicago, those are clearly not the priorities.

Among the organizations that compete in the league is the Palos Stars, whose top administrator and coach, Louis Trench, has been active in youth sports for two decades. Trench recently acknowledged in several interviews that over the years he has given Lasix, a diuretic, to players as young as 10 years old so they could lose weight and meet league poundage limits. Lasix is most frequently used to treat congestive heart failure and has drawn controversy for its widespread use to inhibit pulmonary bleeding in racehorses.

Trench's methods became public last month after a local pediatrician, Anthony C. Delach, was told by the mother of a 10-year-old Palos Stars player that her son had lost 12 pounds in three days. The boy went on a crash diet of lettuce and carrots and also took one white, football-shaped Lasix pill hours before the weigh-in. The mother also said—and, according to Delach, Trench later acknowledged this in a phone call—that Trench knew of both the diet and the taking of the pill. The mother told the doctor that her son was so weak at the weigh-in that he had to be held up.

After an enraged Delach took the story public, Trench told the Chicago Tribune, "Lasix is not a bad thing," even though Lasix, wrongfully used, can cause heart failure, kidney problems, coma and even death. Trench also told the Tribune: "We get a lot of kids who get chased down [i.e., recruited] by Catholic schools. They're playing football [in high school] and, it's funny, they're still healthy." It's difficult to say what's more galling about Trench—his ignorance or his arrogance.

Trench claimed that he knows of "worse" weight-loss practices in other youth leagues—enemas, induced vomiting, laxatives and starvation—that are endorsed, and sometimes suggested, by parents. Before he started communicating only through his lawyer, Trench's rationale seemed to be: We're not as bad as everybody else, and, anyway, it's the parents' fault.