Little League Meeting Turns Into a Brawl

GARDEN GROVE — Two baseball coaches trade insults. Someone throws a punch. Before it’s over, five guys pile on in a no-holds-barred brawl.

A major league scuffle? No, this fight happened in Garden Grove on Tuesday night when a meeting of parents who coach 11- and 12-year-old Little League players turned violent in a dispute over whether a hotshot pitcher is too old to play in the league.

By the time police arrived, one team manager was on his way to the hospital--gouged with a set of keys, according to police. And mothers at the league meeting were clutching their children and screaming for their husbands to stop slugging it out.

“Little League brings out the worst in parents,” said Suzy Clarke, whose husband, Dave Clarke, was one of the team managers involved in the fight. “I mean, people getting into physical brawls about Little League? . . . It’s a little bit above and beyond the call of duty of being a Little League coach.”

The brawl underscores what experts say is the biggest problem with the world’s largest youth sports organization--overzealous parents who treat the game like the big leagues.

In the highly competitive leagues, parents trade players and have drafts big league-style, observers say. Some parents lie to get their children on teams. Others scheme to get their children on winning teams. In 1993, a cheating scandal forced Little League Baseball Inc., which oversees all league play, to strip a team of its world title. And explosive arguments between parents during games are common throughout the United States, where Little League is nevertheless viewed as the apple of team sports.

“Unfortunately we’re seeing more and more of this kind of thing,” said Leonard Zaichkowsky, a sports psychologist at Boston University who studies the culture of Little League baseball. “These parents are living in a competitive world, in their business or whatever, and they see professional sports on television where it’s kind of win at all costs.

“They talk a good line telling their kids that sports is for fun and camaraderie,” he said. “But when it gets down to it, they are teaching kids to behave like, well, kids, even when they grow up.”

Witnesses and participants in the Garden Grove scuffle said no one involved acted particularly grown up.

As they recounted Wednesday, the fight broke out as the Northeast Garden Grove Little League’s volunteer board was preparing to meet on a thorny issue: whether a team should be forced to forfeit the first six games of the season because its star pitcher is too old to play. The forfeit would cause the team, the Athletics, to lose its first-place standing.

By Tuesday night, parents whose children play in the league said tensions were high, with managers of other teams insisting that the Athletics forfeit the games. Larry Gomez Sr., manager of the Athletics, and parents of children on the team suggested that the games be replayed.

But before the board of the 25-team league could vote on the matter, punches started flying, witnesses said, with the two managers, Gomez and Clarke, who coaches a team called the Angels, in the middle of a five-man scuffle.

When three Garden Grove police officers arrived, Gomez was bleeding from a deep cut on his forehead, police said. None of the men sought charges.

“We had two parents get in each other’s faces and a punch came over the top from nowhere and that’s what started it,” said league President Blair McCullogh, who had called the meeting. “This whole thing is ridiculous. . . . The kids were actually the best behaved people there.”

Bandaged and with stitches in his forehead Wednesday, Gomez said he was ashamed of getting into the fight at the meeting at Earl Warren Elementary School.

“I think it’s actually pretty ignorant,” he said. “I’ve been playing or coaching baseball for 25 years and I’ve never been involved in anything like this.”

McCullogh said the league has yet to decide how to handle the incident but that it will consider suspending the parents involved from managing or coaching again.

A spokesman for Little League Baseball in Williamsport, Pa., said that over-excited parents are a sad fact of life in the sport played by 3 million youngsters in 85 countries.

“The vast majority of parents are not going to get into fights, but are going to make this a fun experience for their kids,” said spokesman Lance Van Auken. “But in individual cases we do have people who become overzealous. . . . You often hear people say that Little League would be fine if it weren’t for the adults.”