Clean Play vs. Rough Tactics in Kennewick-Prosser Basketball
While the Prosser team walked away with a 25-13 victory, Kennewick's local squad earned praise for maintaining composure despite aggressive, unsportsmanlike conduct from their rivals.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
As nearly everyone expected, Kennewick lost to Prosser at basketball last Saturday night. The game was far more interesting than the score of 25 to 13 would indicate, being most aggressively contested by both teams during every minute of play. The local boys deserve credit for keeping Prosser's score as low as they did, Squibb, one of the strongest players of this year’s team, being out of the game. The Kennewick boys had it on their opponents in at least one phase of the game and that was the matter of controlling their own tempers. Prosser resorted to unnecessarily aggressive tactics, without actually slugging, in the evident effort to provoke the local players into 'starting something' on their own floor, but Kennewick played a clean game all the way through. Time was called twice to allow injured players to be patched up, and once the game was halted while the Kennewick coach entered a protest against the over-vigorous language which was being used by a Prosser player. Principal Dorsey, of Pasco, refereed.
“Prosser resorted to unnecessarily aggressive tactics, without actually slugging, in the evident effort to provoke the local players into 'starting something'.”
Inter-city sports rivalries in the Tri-Cities remain a staple of local life. Even in 1916, fans were debating 'sportsmanship' versus 'winning at all costs'—a classic civic friction that still resonates in high school athletics today.
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