Sayreville hazing scandal brings back memories of abuse all too familiar for many young athletes ... myself included

This happened a long time ago, in a suburban land not far away from Sayreville. I was on the East Brunswick High School junior varsity soccer team, and basically I was being tortured.

 

It wasn’t just me. Whenever the varsity won a game on the road — and that team won almost all the time, unfortunately — the older players would start chanting to bring the younger players to the back of the bus. They would drag us back there, rough us up, strip us, tear off our jockstraps and tie the straps together out a window. When the bus returned to the high school, we’d have to scamper half-naked across the parking lot back into the gym locker room.

I was a particular target, I remember, because I argued against these actions and because I had once rebelled by twisting the final line of the school song when ordered to sing it on the bus. “East Brunswick High, all hail to thee,” became, “East Brunswick High, the hell with you.” Couldn’t help myself. The result was a beating unrelated to ritual, but in the same spirit of tyranny.

This sort of thing went on throughout the season, even though the coach was fully aware of it. Many of us stopped wearing jockstraps or anything else underneath our shorts, because it was becoming too painful and too expensive to lose these protective undergarments. I would purposely sit right behind the coach on the bus and grab the back of his jacket when the older players began chanting, “Bondy . . . Bondy . . . Send him back . . . Send him back.” The coach, who is long gone now, would simply shake my hands off as others dragged me to my fate.

This all came to mind again with these Sayreville football hazings, and with superintendent Richard Labbe’s decision to cancel the whole season — the right decision. I remember how completely abandoned we had been by the coaches and administration, by the adults. How they had allowed this to go on right under their noses, tacitly approving.

Those memories alone are plenty enough for me to applaud Labbe, a former high school football player whose own son had been a victim of bullying at a different time. Labbe told not-so-happy parents, “First and foremost, this board of education has hired me to make sure that the children in this district are safe and taken care of.”

From the reports coming out of the town, the incidents in Sayreville may well have been worse than the ones in East Brunswick. If Sayreville parents are smart, they’ll go with the program now and not end up in a book like, “Our Guys,” a how-not-to primer about looking the other way at athletes’ abuses in Glen Ridge.

No doubt some Sayreville kids who had nothing to do with the hazing will be hurt by this ruling. They lose the fun, the competition. A precious few may even find it harder to get an athletic scholarship. They are victims here, too. The message, however, must be simple and direct: Bullying cannot be tolerated, and those who are aware of it, those who are not victimized, must report it.

That part is never easy. I should have gone to the principal in 1967, I now know. But back then, the thought never crossed my mind. Not because I might have been isolated by the team or benched by the coach, but because the hazing was somehow considered such an integral part of the experience. I just assumed that such awful things happened all the time and were deemed acceptable by the authorities, who would not act in any case. And I probably assumed correctly.

The kids have to believe that somebody is in charge of the asylum, laying down rules. Interscholastic sports cannot become “Lord of the Flies”. The students themselves require a correcting, moral compass when the needle starts veering in the wrong direction.

When I made the varsity team in 1968 the next season, that East Brunswick soccer team advanced to the state semifinals. We were a very good side again. Just looked it up in the yearbook, and we were 10-2-2. But what I remember most of all, what I am proudest about, is that we ended the hazing traditions. No more beatings, strippings, intimidations. One player, a holdover, tried to start the chant on the first road trip and we told him to forget it.

We did that all by ourselves, without guidance from the coaching staff or administration. It would have happened sooner, and come about more easily, with some help.