Baltimore's Little Italy is still getting over the bad taste left in many people's mouths over the treatment of two bocce players who were initially excluded from the annual St. Gabriel Festival tournamentbecause one uses a wheelchair and the other was born with a form of dwarfism.

This is no Casey Martin case. Bocce is, well, more sedentary a sport than most–even moreso than cart-powered golf or beer frame bowling. It's the lawn-bowling equivalent of darts. But the organizers of the event, tournament Chairman Dino Basso and Joseph Scalia, (president of the Little Italy Bocce Rollers Association) decided to send back the registration check of the would-be contestants (who had just won a handicapped players' tournament).

From the Sun article, linked above:

But the good will evaporated after tournament organizers told Lerche and Stringer they could not play, and sent back their $125 entry fee. While television cameras rolled Tuesday night, one organizer pointed a finger at Stringer and told him he was “never going to play with the normal people.”

…Now, tournament Chairman Dino Basso and his friend Joseph Scalia, president of the Little Italy Bocce Rollers Association, have told Stringer and Lerche that they can play tomorrow. But the welcome is hardly warm.

“They can't compete with us. They shouldn't play with us,” said Basso, 65, a retired contractor from Arbutus. “I just think they're trying to make a statement. But this is America. They can do whatever they want, and they get a little more leeway than other people.”

Whoah.

So, by the way, Lerche and Stringer won in their first round of the tournament. They lost in the next two rounds of double-elimination.

The contreversy has people screaming down in Little Italy. The bocce tournament politburo has rolled over other toes in the past. The amount of bad blood over a sport I played at neighborhood picnics on Long Island as a kid totally baffles me–and that the city, which owns the bocce court used for the tournament, would tolerate this sort of nonsense in an election year is equally baffling. But then again, I'm an Irish/Scot/German transplant, not a native born Baltimoron, so what do I know?