Covering the Cards

I'm honestly not trying to be an asshole in this post, but I do want to start out with a caveat: If you're the type of sappy sports fan who wishes that every game ended like a made for TV movie, this post might not be for you.  If you love the way the Olympics cuts away from live event coverage to bring you a story about how some cross-country skier from Slovenia spent a year living in his car, you might want to go back to reading a Rick Reilly article. After all, what I'm about to do is, in most people's minds, worse than criticizing Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Sesame Street combined.  I'm going to criticize the media's coverage of injured Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware.

Kevin Ware's injury was undoubtedly one of the more gruesome things I've witnessed in 20+ years as a sports fan, and I cringe every time I think about the freak accident - not to mention the long path to recovery that awaits Ware as he works to return to high-level college basketball.  That being said, I feel that the coverage of Ware's injury - and of the Louisville team's response to it - has been overblown.  Players suffer significant injuries that require them to miss games all the time.  While Ware's injury was clearly more severe, traumatic and unusual that your typical high ankle sprain, broken wrist or concussion, does the severity of the incident make it any more worthy of extensive press coverage than any of these others?

CBS cut to a shot of Kevin Ware approximately once every 10 seconds (hyperbolic estimate).

The media has talked a lot about how Louisville's national championship victory in Ware's absence signifies that the Cardinals are a "team" in the truest sense of the word.  In reality, though, don't teams in both college and professional sports win in the face of injuries all the time?  There's no doubt that Louisville's ability to roll past Duke, Wichita State and Michigan without the services of a key bench player is impressive - I'm the first to acknowledge that role players are much more critical to a team's success than most star-obsessed fans give them credit for.  But Louisville is far from the first team to have players step up for a fallen colleague.  Granted, most of those fallen colleagues didn't have their bones sticking inches out of their skin - but the fact remains that Ware's injury is different from so many others only in terms of its gruesomeness, not in terms of its significance.

Do I believe that the Louisville players truly like and care about each other?  Sure.  Do I think that's the reason they were able to overcome Ware's injury and defeat Michigan in Atlanta last night?  Not really.  At the end of the day, the Cardinals were 2013's best college basketball team, and a potent combination of guard play (Peyton Siva and Russ Smith), clutch shooting (Luke Hancock) and an inside presence (Gorgui Deng) propelled them to victory.  While I feel for Kevin Ware and wish him the best in his attempt to recover from an injury that I can't even really imagine, to say that the team "won it for Kevin" is a bit much.  Unlike the athletes who have been removed from their sports to battle life-threatening illnesses like cancer and AIDS, Ware will surely recover fully and resume his athletic career.  In an attempt to write a compelling personal story, the media failed to provide enough coverage of the players who actually made the 2013 national championship happen for the Cards - the ones that actually played.