There's no crying in basketball

Sunday night, the world learned via Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra that many Heat players were in tears after dropping their fourth game in five attempts.

Now, I'm not going to stand here and say that crying is unacceptable in sports. I cried when my pee-wee football team lost in the championship game, there were some damp eyes after my final high school baseball game, and I had a few champagne-soaked tears when the Phillies finally won the World Series.

This is getting out of hand though. It seems like not a week goes by where some player or coach being reduced to a sobbing pile of pity in front of the cameras.

Postgame press conferences following big games are providing less celebration or vows of revenge and are instead looking more like the "I give up" segment of an episode of Made.

Being the helping sort that I am, I figured that I would try to provide athletes and sports fans alike with a better guide for when to show extreme amounts of emotion. By adhering to this straightforward list, I think that we'll all be better off in that we can retain our ability to shed the occasional tear while keeping sports from looking like a soap opera.

Things that are OK to cry over

• You come to the realization that your career is over
• This has to be one of the worst moments of any sports fan's life. Almost all of us grew up playing one sport or another and I'm sure that most of us held out hope that we'd make it to the pros a lot longer than we should have. But inevitably, there comes that day where you just know it's over. Whether it's the day you're cut from the high school team, the realization that there are no colleges knocking down your door, or even the last day of a Hall of Fame career, the final time that uniform comes off is a tough one. No one will say a thing if the room you're in gets a little dusty.
• After a career of at least 10 seasons, you finally win a championship
• There are a lot of great players out there who just never run into the luck of having an equally great team surrounding them. If a player has gone through the grind and his in the twilight of his career when he finally wins a championship, it's OK to let some emotion show. This doesn't hold true for rookies though. Congrats. You walked into a good thing and won. Put in a few more years of work before you start weeping for the camera.  

• After a drought of at least 20 years, your team finally wins a championship
• This is the more likely scenario for most of us who spend each season in front of the television cheering on our favorite teams. If you've been a devoted enough fan that you've stuck out enough losing seasons to span the turning of a generation, then you can't be held accountable for what happens when your team finally pulls through for you. If, however, you turn on the waterworks when your team celebrates its 27th championship - I'm looking at you, Yankees fans - then you're just a giant tool. 

• The day you make the pros
• If you're good enough to get drafted and - in the case of baseball and hockey - work your way up through the minors, you've got to have a ton of commitment to go along with your talent. Chances are that you've been working day and night on your dream for the better part of 20 years. If you finally make it to the show, you've earned a couple of tears while you notify family and friends that you're sending them tickets to your pro debut.

• The day your childhood hero dies
• If you spend your entire life rooting for the same team, chances are that there was one great player that you idolized as a kid. It's going to be a rough day when you wake up one morning to find that the guy you worshiped as a 7-year old is gone. Disclaimer: The athlete in question MUST be at least 20 years older than you. There are some players out there right now that I idolize, but it would be weird if I found myself crying over the death of a guy who is only a few years older than me on the grounds that he was my hero.

And that pretty much covers it. I know there aren't a whole lot of examples here, but that's how it should be. When athletes start bawling over first downs, strikeouts and regular season losses to the Bulls, they're ruining it for everyone.

So to LeBron, Dwyane Wade and all the rest of these crybabies, please stop with this nonsense. The fact that you're getting worked up over something so minor is far more embarrasing than any amount of tears could ever be to even the manliest of men.