With all due respect to the Wikipedia Warriors who updated Brandon Bostick’s page so swiftly the young tight-end barely had time to emerge from the Packer locker room following the Packer’s stunning loss in the NFC championship game last week, we’d like to offer an important addendum.
Thanks to the gracious reporting of impartial sports journalists like Anonymous03808, Bender235, Inhoc12, MjBurf, Diddykong1130 and Bongwarrior, we knew almost immediately that “Bostick, the Packers’ third-string tight end, missed a Seahawks oneside kick,” and that “In his postgame interview, Bostick acknowledged that he was supposed to block so that Jordy Nelson could recover the onside kick.”
The notation tripled the length of the young player’s now semi-protected Wikipedia page.
While we acknowledge that Bostick made a colossal mistake when he lunged for that ball, we think he did something just as noteworthy when he stood in front of the media after the game, haunted and subdued.
Bostick, just 25, sincerely apologized.
In his seminal work, the Last Lecture, Randy Pausch devotes an entire chapter to the importance of a good apology. “A good apology is like antibiotic, he said. “A bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.”
We saw the former just after the NFC championship game, when Bostick faced all those cameras and acknowledged he’d made a mistake.
“I let my team down,” Bostick said. “There was a lot on this game. I just feel like if I was able to do my job – my assignment was to block – Jordy would have caught the ball and the game would have been over.”
He apologized again the next day.
We’d like to think coaches at every level might make an example of Bostick, but not just by rolling the game tape and pointing to an obvious gaffe.
Instead, we’d like to see them roll this one, and speak to the character development that happens when someone recognizes that they’ve let someone down, sincerely apologizes and we all move on.
