Stories

When members of the Duke Lacrosse team were brought up on spurious rape charges in 2006, plenty of journalists jumped on the case with both cleats, spewing vitriol about the depravity of "children of privilege" and so on. One story, in Slate, stood out for both its venom and lack of knowledge about the sport. In "What's Wrong With Lacrosse Players?" Dave Jamieson, a baseball-loving graduate of New Jersey lacrosse powerhouse Delbarton School, revealed that an assistant lacrosse coach had mocked him once in high school by asking whether Jamison was carrying a shotgun in his glove-and-bat bag. Jamison went on to damn the sport and all its practitioners for being spoiled ne'er-do-wells who have always been handed the good things in life on a platter.

One passage in particlular stood out for its seemingly willful ignorance:

Some aficionados take pride in the fact that their sport was invented by Native Americans, but I don't imagine many members of the Onondaga Nation end up playing lax at Colgate.

The fact is, many of the sport's great players have had Native American blood in their veins. To name one recent example: in the 2009 NCAA lacrosse championship game, Syracuse beat Cornell in sudden-death overtime. Who scored the game-winning goal? Syracuse attackman Cody Jamieson. Before transferring to Syracuse, Cody Jamieson led Onondaga CC to two undefeated national titles in 2006-07 while scoring 237 points, winning the 2007 JUCO Male Athlete of the Year Award and the 2007 Tom Longboat Award as the male Aboriginal Athlete of the Year.

It's unclear whether Dave is related to Cody or to Sid Jamieson, the revered longtime coach who started Bucknell's lacrosse team and led it for 37 years, who happens to be a full-blooded Mohawk Indian and who, like Cody, hails from the Six Nations Indian reservation in Brantford, Ontario, (per Wikipedia). We are guessing...not.

There's wrong, and then there's wrong-on-so-many-levels-it-makes-your-head-spin. Did lacrosse ever get an apology from Dave Jamieson? Or from Slate?