Thus Spake Harrison Bergeron

When I was 12 or so, the East Brunswick Recreational Soccer League messed up the draft. The Yellow and Red teams were decent, the Green, Purple, and Blue teams were doomed to a bad season, but the Gray team was stacked. I was lucky enough to be on the Gray team, and let me tell you, that was a fun season.

The margin of victory was rarely less than 5 or 6 goals, and we were only scored on once or twice. Needless to say, we went undefeated.

During one game, winning 12-0, the coach pulled me and two other players aside. Each had scored a hat-trick already. "No more shooting from inside the 18," instructed the coach, a Brit who liked to tell us to "give it th' boot! and agayn!"

This seemed reasonable. At 12, I had a pretty solid grasp of sportsmanship, and I had spent previous seasons floundering in the misery of an underperforming team. There was no need to rub salt into the wounds.

At 12, though, as at 25, as is likely will be at 85, I recognized the difference between sporting and tiddlywinks. So when their goalie rolled a lazy outlet to a nearby defender, I happily darted in and intercepted. Standing 6 yards from an empty net, it took a great deal of restraint to follow the coach's directive... but follow it I did.

I dribbled from the 6 back past the 18, pivoted, and put the ball in the back of the net. Following the letter of the law, if not the spirit. Because competition is a primal feature of the human condition, because it was there for the taking, because this wasn't Soviet Russia.

Then the coach benched me for the rest of the game.

Today, I am not a particularly good soccer player. Instead I am a student, en route to being a professional Biomedical Engineer.

Coincidentally, I've never been benched for acing an exam, not even when my classmates were frustrated by their low scores. Hmmm, he says as he pensively strokes his beard.

A 9 year old Connecticut boy has been benched for being too good at baseball, because "'Facing that kind of speed' is frightening for beginning players". Elsewhere, a troupe of dancers wore heavy weights and masks, "so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in".

So, okay. One of those things only happened in a short story from 1961. But the other one happened in real life in 2008.