Fight Night at Ole Mizzou

It starts out like a bad joke:  "Three Missouri women's basketball players and one male Missouri cheerleader walk into a bar,...."  It ends up with two young women arrested  for suspicion of assault and duly suspended from the team and a young man  suspended from cheerleading.  I am not making this stuff up. It is even much more interesting than the mysterious settlement given to Coach Mark Mangino who was dismissed after a poor season and last minute concerns about verbal abuse and "inappropriate" physical contact. I never knew a coach who was above a little verbal abuse now and then.  And, guess what?  Had Coach Mangino taken his team to a decent bowl game all his sins, which may or may not have occurred, would have been miraculously forgiven. Such is the largess of big time college athletics,  but I digress.

We will never know the whole truth about what happened on fight night, and that is just as well.  We know enough.  We know that alcohol was involved and that it probably played a huge part in the mess that ensued including creating legal and academic problems as well as public embarrassment.

We tend to forget just how problematic alcohol abuse is.  In the very same issue of the paper where the story was carried about the Mizzou students and their fight night dirty laundry another incident was quietly reported that has received less media attention.  Yet, that story is in many ways sadder.  The story I am referring to was the third arrest of a local teenager for drunken driving including printing his picture.

Awareness of alcohol related problems and how to deal with them when confronting friends and loved ones is an important issue.  You can learn more about this very serious disease at: https://health.google.com/health/ref/Alcoholism