Sportsmanship

In 1989, Spike Lee earned an Academy Award nomination for his drama, "Do the Right Thing."  As Douglas E. Abrams writes in this month's installment of his series, Youth Sports Heroes, more than 20 years later, the command perfectly describes the noble split-second decisions made by three pairs of high school athletes and their coaches who set a standard of sportsmanship in following their best instincts to do what was right. 

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On March 3, 2010, senior Rebecca Wong finished tenth in the Massachusetts state high school alpine skiing championships, the final medal position. Or so she and everyone else on the slopes thought. When Wong watched a film of her slalom run afterwards, she realized that she had missed a gate near the bottom of the course and should have been disqualified. Race officials had not seen the miss, and neither had any spectator. What happened next made Rebecca January's youth sports hero.

Wanting to win is understandable. But in Doug Abrams' fourth annual countdown of top youth sports stories, five examples of exceptional sportsmanship involving disabled athletes confronting special challenges serve as a reminder to all of us that the final score is much less important than it seems.