That it was another ill-earned, adult-supervised record-smasher — high school and college record books are lousy with them — isn’t supposed to be of any concern among those who’d prefer to watch slam-dunk contests, home run derbies and tape of backboards being shattered rather than a good game.
“I felt like anything I tossed up was going in,” Taylor told the Associated Press.
He was 52-for-108 — he missed 56 shots — yet felt as if he couldn’t miss!
On TV, edited reels showed Taylor hitting shot after shot after shot. There was no edited reel of him missing 56 shots or a fast-forward reel of him taking 108 shots in a game won by 75 points.
The once-decent, once-standard act of clearing the bench during blowouts to allow others — the kids who practice hard, all week, perhaps? — to take a shot or two? Forget it. Why win by 50 or 60 when you can win by 75, set a record, be all over SportsCenter?
But it wasn’t just SportsCenter.
Taylor, who seems like a sweet kid — not the kind to enjoy kicking opponents when they’re way down and way out, not the kind of attitude-enriched, Nike-programmed kid you’d expect to eagerly pursue a record for a machine-gunning fish in a barrel — also appeared, the next morning, with Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today.”
Of course, the fact the record was set in a game that only minimally qualified as a “sporting competition” or that this was (another) record-by-slaughter wasn’t mentioned. Lauer and Guthrie told him they think what he did was terrific! What an achievement!
They didn’t ask why he was allowed to take 108 shots — no one on his team took more than six — or why his coach would allow Taylor to take 108 shots in a game that was won before halftime.
But Taylor seemed so innocent and so unaware of the unsportsmanlike excesses that scoring 138 points demanded — perhaps he grew up watching SportsCenter — that he volunteered that he was able to get the ball to shoot so often because his team “pressed all game,” forcing 49 turnovers.
Innocent. Almost as if Arseneault is running some sort of cult out there in Iowa's cornfields.
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