Local rivals can learn from history

"Blue shirts to the left of them, Red shirts to the right of them, into the Valley of Death ran the two dozen."

It's a good thing Alfred Tennyson didn't write about high school basketball, though he might have enjoyed the break from the serious stuff he found himself scribbling for millions to read.

The Blue in this case represents Geneva and the Red belongs to Batavia -- two adversaries as bitter as you'll find. And on Friday, the two sides separated themselves on the both sides of a wooden No Man's Lane as schools' boys basketball teams played in Geneva while the girls hoopsters battled in Batavia.

In my case, the game watched involved the girls, and so there was a chance to witness dual versions of chauvinism as the fates of each school's favorites rose and fell. Additionally, scores from the boys contest made their way through the crowd as well, giving a further chance to trumped one team's superiority over the other.

From high in the bleachers, all seemed in order as the girls game progressed. But I have heard from some who won't go to games between these schools because the vitriol is too volatile.

How then to bridge the gap? Is it impossible?

Rather than answer that question, let me go back nearly 100 years to a time when a little more was at stake.

When you're a sports-loving person who also loves history and who adores the sport of soccer, events like the ones that took place in December, 1914 hold a special place in your heart.

That was the first Christmas on the Western Front in World War I, and the moment that, for one brief moment, some soldiers set their guns aside, left the trenches and met in No Man's Land.

Famously, some of the encounters involved a soccer match, which was variously described as a 50-a-side kickabout or something a little more organized -- No Man's Land was hardly a manicured soccer field.

The Christmas Truce was in no way a universal experience but it has been estimated that roughly two-thirds of the troops on the Western Front participated in some form of cease fire.

In some areas, the Truce involved both sides singing carols to each other. In other areas, both sides gave the other a chance to collect and bury the dead from No Man's Land.

But in others areas, there were face to face meetings. Photos were exchanged.

And then they settled back to war. There were isolated incidents the rest of the war, but 1915 brought Gallipoli, Ypres and the slaughter went unchecked until 1918.

And the next time a soccer ball made an appearance on the battlefield was in 1916, when a British officer produced four balls prior to an attack during the battle of the Somme. He offered a reward to whoever could score a "goal" by kicking the ball into the German trenches, the taking of which would constitute a successful mission.

The soldiers made it across No Man's Land, and one of the balls did make it into the opposition "goal" and the trench was taken, though the officer offering the reward didn't live to pay up.

But for that one moment, at Christmas, 1914, the sides met, smiled and shook hands and had pictures taken.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, wrote, "It was an amazing spectacle, and must arouse bitter thought concerning those high-born conspirators against the peace of the world, who in their mad ambition had hounded such men on to take each other by the throat rather than by the hand."

Songwriters have latched onto the Christmas Truce, whether it's Garth Brooks' "Belleau Wood" or Mike Harding's "Christmas 1914" or Eric Bogle's "Christmas in the Trenches", even the Royal Guardsmen song "Snoopy's Christmas" and "All Together Now," a song adopted by English fans after it was penned by The Farm in the 1990s.

In each song, the idea of adversaries meeting and getting to know each other as people is a central theme. As Christmas 2007 approaches, my 6-year-old daughter has fallen for these songs, and keeps asking very non-6-year-old questions like "which war was worse, daddy?"

The answer of course is that they're all awful in their own way, though they keep happening. We never seem to have an end of people to put on the other side of No Man's Land.

My point? That Batavians and Genevans need to meet for a Christmas kickabout on neutral ground?

But maybe I'm getting at something a little bigger. If you had a space shuttle liftoff from the Tri Cities, at liftoff, you'd be very aware of the geography of each community. But a few minutes into flight, you'd look down and just see land. Eventually, all you'd see would be the globe.

And if you tried to put your finger on the spot where these cities exist, you'd most likely hit some abstract portion of northern Illinois. The differences between the areas wouldn't exist because you couldn't see them.

In March of this year, Geneva's softball team met Batavia's on the bowling alley and spent a night building camaraderie in a neutral space. The initiating force behind the meeting was Geneva coach Greg Dierks, who has spent a lot of time coaching Vikings teams of many varieties. He has coached basketball and golf in addition to softball, and didn't like the direction the Batavia-Geneva rivalry was heading.

So the teams got together, juniors and seniors from both teams faced freshmen and sophomores from both teams.

Who won? Everybody who participated.

Somewhere Sir Arthur Conan Doyle smiled, and the spirit of Christmas, 1914 breathed new life.