When sports go wrong

Sports are unique in a way that other things will never be. Sports have a way of taking your mind off of the unbearable news of the day. It's no coincidence that sports and weather are the final segments of every newscast. We want you to leave with a good taste in your mouth before returning the next day for another round of sad news.

That's not the case today. The tough news of the day IS sports. At Oklahoma State, it is déjà vu in the worst way. The OSU family lost ten members in a plane crash a decade ago. Yesterday, it happened again.

I had a choice a few years ago when I decided that I wanted to do TV news as a career. I could do news and cover car accidents, plane crashes and children dying, or I could do sports, where the worst thing that happens is your team loses.

Well, today, even though this is a sports story, everyone loses. This is worse than the outcome of a game that doesn't go your way. In the here and now, games don't matter. Families matter. Friends matter. They should matter every day. Sometimes it takes something like this to remind us of that.

Sports are special and athletes have a certain way of bouncing back from disappointments. There isn't a way to bounce back from this. THIS is terrible. My heart aches for Kurt Budke's family and Miranda Serna's family. My thoughts go out to the Cowgirls basketball team. Prayers are flooding into Stillwater.

Life, just like in TV news, is very ‘in the moment'. We are slaves to the second hand, not the minute hand. What is happening right now is all that we care about. But, in this instance, we can't afford to stick to that frame of reasoning. This tragedy should be remembered and filed away as something that we think back on when you absorb the tough news of each new day.

Next week something else will happen and there will be a new lead story. That doesn't mean we should forget the people that we lost today. Just like the Ten that perished a decade ago, Coach Budke and Coach Serna need to have a special place in the hearts of all OSU fans.

And, all sports fans.