It’s that graduation time of year; should we call the cops more often?

High schools and colleges all over the place have had their commencement ceremonies; which leads to an annual problem.

School's commencement gained more attention than athletics

How to deal with those self-absorbed people who can’t control their behavior during a ceremony.

PARTICULARLY THE ONES who think the ceremony is all about their kid; without regard for anyone else around them or any of the students – for whom the ceremony is just as important for them as it is for you.

This issue popped into my head Thursday morning while watching the HLN cable channel, and Robin Meade (I need my daily dose of news from her to start my day) gave her accounting of the Senatoba High School ceremonies where four people wound up being kicked out because their screaming and cheering became disruptive.

So disruptive, in fact, that  somebody, perhaps with the school, filed a complaint with the local police.

Arrest warrants were issued!

THE FOUR PEOPLE, according to WREG-TV in Memphis, now face disturbing the peace charges. They will have to show up in court on Monday, and could wind up paying $500 fines each.

Robin, whom many of us will remember from her Chicago days with WMAQ-TV, seemed to imply she thought certain people were a little too uptight, what with feeling the need to call the police.

The people now facing charges seem to think say, telling their local television station that all they did was called out their kid’s name when she was called on stage to receive that diploma she he worked for so hard in recent years.

Now I realize for some people, particularly those who come from families where college attendance is a new experience, and even high school graduation is noteworthy, there is a need to make a big deal out of those few seconds of a graduation ceremony where the focus is on you.

I RECALL MY own college graduation having both my parents and my step-mother on hand, along with a brother and step-sister, my grandmother and a pair of step-grandparents. Along with several uncles and aunts.

There also was a step-great-grandmother who a week later rather vividly expressed to me her regrets that she couldn’t be part of the festivities on that day I became a college graduate and over-educated unemployed bum. For the record, I began working at a Chicago Heights-based newspaper eight days later.

So I get the idea that it’s a big deal, one of those rare moments that comes along in a family’s overall story! I have no problem with the idea of celebration, or ceremony or ritual. It’s not like commencement is a funeral.

Perhaps we'd be a better world if we all began the day with Robin Meade

But every single ceremony I ever participated in included a vocal announcement to the spectators to try to control their behavior. Why should someone else’s few seconds of the spotlight be drowned out because somebody else called just before them couldn’t pipe down.

USUALLY, PEOPLE MANAGE to comply.

In fact, I remember being mocked by my step-mother’s father for a few days following the ceremony because of how well my college graduating class and their families were behaved.

So I’m inclined to think that if this particular group of people got the cops called on them, maybe they did something out-of-the-box. Or else put up such resistance to being removed from the premises that a school official felt compelled to “drop the dime” on them.

Then again, I’m also willing to concede that perhaps there is a high school administrator who gets a little too uptight about trying to control every little detail of life; resulting in the call to police and creating an incident that has given Northwest Mississippi Community College (where the ceremony was actually held) more national attention than it ever expected – or desired – to receive.

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Restroom break ban for high schoolers?

It has been some three decades since I navigated the halls of a high school on a regular basis, yet I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read the reports in the Tinley Park-based Southtown Star newspaper that are making southwest suburban Evergreen Park High School a place worthy of national news attention.

For officials there are implementing a new policy that they say will increase the amount of time that students spend in the classroom. They’re putting restrictions on restroom breaks.

UNDER THE NEW policy, teachers are to keep track of how many times their students ask for permission to go to the restroom during class. Any student who takes more than three breaks per semester from any one class will be required to stay after school to make up the time they used to release potentially-deadly toxins from their bodies.

It’s not quite detention for using the potty. But it has the same feel.

Now I will be the first to admit that I fully believe some students are abusing the idea of restroom breaks – using them as an excuse to leave classes they find particularly dull (or teachers whom they find to be particularly obnoxious in personality).

I’m sure there are some students who would spend as much of their time as possible in the restroom – when they couldn’t be in the cafeteria (particularly since schools these days seem to be watching those lunchrooms much more closely than they did when I was a high school student).

YET THE IDEA makes me laugh a lot because I can remember back to when I was a high school student and I used to go out of my way to avoid using the restrooms at school.

I also remember that I was not alone among the student body. There were many of us who weren’t enthused about the school restrooms.

Now I’m not about to share horror stories of aging facilities that stank from decades of urine and other foul odors. I actually attended a high school that was less than a decade old when I was there. Everything about the building reeked of cleanliness and sterility.

It was a cleanliness freak’s dream.

BUT NOW WE can cue in our minds that old song by Brownsville Station. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” There were those students (probably the parents of the current restroom malcontents) who tried to spend their time in the “facilities” rather than try to learn something in class.

Which means that one of the unofficial things that a student tried to keep in mind was which of the restrooms was going to stink not of human waste, but of cigarette smoke. Which ones were likely to be filled with students who might not be too concerned about breaking rules, and might try harassment just for kicks.

Then again, they may want to harass, but might have been so stoned that they wouldn’t have been physically capable of doing too much.

With that in mind, it just became more practical to think of restroom functions as something to be avoided unless necessary.

HOW STRONG WAS this sentiment in my mind?

I recently had to go back to my old high school as a reporter-type person to cover a news event. During the event, I felt that urge that couldn’t be withheld.

So I went and found a “boy’s room” and did my business – when it suddenly occurred to me that I was in one of the restrooms that I would have tried to avoid as a student.

So some 28 years after graduation, I finally “did my business” in one of those rooms (which I must admit stunk from decades of tobacco fumes – even though the whole building now is officially a “no smoking” zone).

I AS A student would have fought to avoid the restroom, while it seems officials at Evergreen Park High School are determined to spend their academic careers in “the loo.”

Have teenagers really changed that much in three decades’ time? I doubt it. Somehow, it seems to me that school administrators have come up with an over-reaction to a problem – one that will do nothing to resolve the situation.

For I don’t see how “after school” sessions will do anything to truly make up for class time lost due to a restroom break. Is someone clocking students to see how long they were on “the potty?”

Does this mean teachers will have to stay after school to try to re-teach what was already taught? Or will students merely sit pointlessly in a quiet room after school?

WHAT A WASTE of time!

But it does show that at least one thing hasn’t changed about high school throughout the years – there are always bound to be some school administrators whose reaction to a situation will be a layer of bureaucratic nonsense.

It’s no wonder that, for me, high school was something to be endured before I could go off to college – which is where life truly became enjoyable.

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Does Payton knowledge change Super Bowl Shuffle memory? Not one bit!

Depending on where in the country you live (some people are going to be deluded into thinking that either the Philadelphia Phillies or the Buffalo Bills are more important), Walter Payton is once again on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.

No, he hasn’t done anything new. He hasn’t done anything, period. To riff on Chevy Chase for a moment, Walter Payton is still dead.

IT’S JUST THAT there’s a new book being published – one that purports to be the definitive biography on the one-time star running back of the Chicago Bears. And one that tells us that Payton abused drugs, experienced mood swings later in life that had him contemplating suicide and was less-than-faithful toward wife Connie during their marriage.

Now all of this stuff may be true. Not that I care much. For I didn’t know Walter Payton as a person. Nor did many of the people who are now getting all outraged and claiming that it is somehow disrespectful to report on Payton’s failings as a human being.

They want the illusion maintained that Payton the person was somehow as gifted as Payton the athlete. Which in the case of 99 percent of professional athletes is a serious miscalculation.

I’d argue that it doesn’t really matter. In fact, we’re probably better off realizing that the people on the playing field of the various games we enjoy watching for our entertainment are really just human beings like you and me.

BEING CAPABLE OF throwing a curve ball with a sharp break on a reliable business or being able to stuff a basketball into the hoop isn’t what makes one a preferable excuse for a human being.

It isn’t even the discipline that it takes for one to develop such athletic skills through constant (and single-minded) practice throughout the years. If anything, you could argue that it is a flaw that a person didn’t use such dedication to develop some skill that could better benefit humanity.

My point is that Walter Payton was a ballplayer. For those of us who didn’t know him personally, that’s all he was. Why we should feel compelled to make him into more than that probably says more about our flaws than Walter’s.

So those people who want to “spit” on Jeff Pearlman (or commit more severe bodily attacks) because he would dare to take down “Saint Walter” are being absurd. When Mike Ditka said he would plant a hocker on Pearlman if he ever saw him again, all he did was showed that Ozzie Guillen is far from being the biggest ball of hot air to ever be involved with Chicago sports.

NOW BEFORE ANYBODY starts saying that I’m not appreciating what Walter Payton meant to Chicago, I’d argue that I really do. I was in junior high school when Payton was a rookie out of Jackson State University, was in college back when the Bears won their only Super Bowl title with Payton and was in the early years of my time as a reporter-type person in Chicago when he finally quit playing.

I’d say the only reason Michael Jordan gets a bigger rep than Payton is those six NBA titles, compared to only one NFL title for Walter.

But do our memories of what happened on the turf at Soldier Field really get impacted because of what we know about Walter as a person? I’m not downplaying the significance of abuse of prescription drugs (the death of Michael Jackson easily shows us what can go wrong).

Although with all the battering that a professional football player takes during his career, I’d be amazed if Payton was NOT taking some form of pills to cope with the pain.

AND AS FOR the part about infidelity, he’d hardly be the first professional athlete to cope with life on the road by cheating. I’d argue that is an issue for his wife to deal with in whatever way she is most comfortable doing (and my understanding is that Connie and Walter came to some sort of forgiveness just before he died in 1999).

It doesn’t change the recollections I have every time I hear the “Super Bowl Shuffle” and think of that one Bears team that actually managed to “win the whole thing” during the past half-century.

If anything, I’m more offended by Payton’s one-time teammate, Dan Hampton, saying he plans to blow off the ’85 Bears visit to the White House on Friday, in part because he doesn’t approve of President Barack Obama’s politics.

Which means he just politicized an event that could easily have been about fluff – a sin bigger in my book than acknowledging athletes as mere people.

BESIDES, BASED ON the excerpts of Pearlman’s book, I have to admit to getting my biggest kick out of something other than the so-called salacious stuff.

For it seems the post-football Payton had an appetite that could have put William Perry to shame. “Pilgrimages” to Bob Evans for eggs and bacon (with side orders of sausage) and taking advantage of a card offered to him by a Wendy’s corporate executive for free food.

“Let’s just say they knew him at the Wendy’s drive-thru,” Pearlman quoted someone as saying. “He loved those free burgers.”

Be honest. Isn’t at least a part of you wondering how many patties (single, double or triple) Walter had on his burger, along with what toppings?

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