IT was a long time ago and I was a lot younger, but I still get a chill when I remember the open casket in McCabe Funeral Home in Billerica, Mass., that cold spring night in 1972. Adult drinking and
youth sports are a bad mixThe line to view 17-year-old Ralph Hallenborg's body wound around the block. I can tell you there's nothing worse than seeing a kid that age in a box.
Only a few months earlier, he had won hearts in his hometown by leading Billerica High School to the state hockey finals at Boston Arena. Ralph was a big, bruising winger with a wicked slap shot and a fierce hip check. Might've been NHL material.
Alcohol had something to do with why his automobile became a tree ornament one evening on Boston Road.
Alcohol was also a factor in why a brilliant prep running back from Kahuku named Jason Keo had his life ended in a mesh of mangled metal in 1996 on the North Shore.
These weren't my kids, but their deaths went through me like a knife because I covered them, spoke to them, wrote about them. They were vital beings with boundless futures.
SO, it nailed me right in the gut Friday night when I saw six adults boozing it up around a car in the Aloha Stadium parking lot during the Kamehameha vs. Pac-Five football game.
The irony of the scene was penetrating.
Kids like Keo and Hallenborg playing their hearts out inside the stadium and these knuckleheads -- adult role models -- tanking up outside.
Bottles and cans in hand, they were having a pretty good time while 12- and 13-year-old newspaper vendors hawked their lineup editions only 25 yards away.
I didn't know who they were, and I still don't.
I don't really care. It doesn't matter.
They're adults and so -- like it or not -- to every kid who saw them, they set an example. An example like Henri Paul.
Hey, look, sports and booze are so intertwined already in the media (can't help loving those Budweiser frogs, can you?), nothing reinforces that message better than an adult hoisting a brown bottle outside a prep football game.
"Do as I say, not as I do"? Get real.
I'M sure one of these adults will call me now to tell me I was hallucinating Friday night.
I mentioned the incident to stadium events manager Eugene Tokuhama when I got up to the press box and I was pleased and surprised that he reacted so quickly. Tokuhama's response was that, under no circumstances, will he tolerate boozing before or during prep games in the stadium lot. He notified HPD.
I told Tokuhama he has my support on this count, and I meant it.
Guys like this deserve support because they care.
I don't know how many other times this has happened during prep games held at the stadium or home sites. I'm not sure how many times I have failed to take note of it because I was in too much of a hurry to make kickoff.
But it hit me the other night and I'm glad it did. It ought to hit more of us when we see this kind of stupidity.
"It makes absolutely no sense," said Carol McNamee, founder of Hawaii's Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). She said the problem of adult drinking extends even to youth league events.
It's one reason why the volunteers who officiate kiddie games sometimes have to flee for their lives.
I guess I just can't understand why it's so important to get blotto before watching your kid play. I don't understand why you have to be seeing 44 guys on the field before you're having fun.