If you
read the sports pages for more than the scores you might have come across an article
about Curie High School of Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the
school’s basketball team, which had posted a 24-win, 1-loss season and won the
city’s Public League championship, had the trophy taken away, and its wins
turned into losses, because it had played the entire campaign with seven (!) of
its 12 players academically ineligible.
From
there the story only got stranger. According to news accounts the ineligibility
was uncovered not by the Southwest Side school but by an anonymous phone call
to the city’s school administration.
That body completed its investigation the day the team was to play in
the championship game, but instead of blowing the whistle immediately it let
the contest go on, because, well, the tickets had been sold and the TV cameras
were in place and it didn’t want to spoil the party.
Further
news coverage revealed that city teams were supposed to submit eligibility
lists before each game, but the practice had lapsed from disuse. It also turned out that the eligibility issue
might have been avoided if the school had submitted “individual study plans”
for the underachieving seven, attesting that they couldn’t handle high school
work and needed special help, but nobody had thought to do that.
An
additional layer of lunacy was attained when the Illinois High School
Association, the state’s governing body, stepped in to declare that the seven could
play in state-tournament qualifying rounds because their grades, while under the
“C” average the city requires, made them eligible under its more-lenient rules.
But then it looked again and ruled out two starters, and Curie was eliminated
in the first round of state play, its season going into the record books at an
inglorious 0-26.
Public
and journalistic reaction to the unfolding tale mostly was one of outrage—over
the school-officials’ actions that stripped away Curie’s victories and title.
Like many things these days the issue had a racial twist (team photos show that
11 of the 12 players are identifiably black), and Jesse Jackson, who lives in
Chicago, was quick to leap to the lads’ defense. “[They] didn’t break any
rules; adults didn’t do their work,” he declared.
“These
kids aren’t in gangs. They’re not engaged in violence,” he added, making the
curious assertion that in this day and age the absence of vice should be
regarded as a virtue.
As the
days went by and the blogosphere went into action, a few voices were heard to
say that, maybe, the laggard seven would have been better off spending less
time on their shooting and dribbling and more with their schoolbooks. People
with good memories might recall the Rev. Mr. Jackson making a similar point
decades ago when he proposed “learn baby, learn” as a counterpoint to the “burn
baby, burn” mantra that was fueling the urban violence of the late 1960s and
early ‘70s.
But
while the world is older than it was then, apparently it’s not smarter when it
comes to getting high-school jocks to view their talents in the context of a
broader life plan. The upshot is that
for too many the visions of athletic wealth and glory—the “Hoop Dreams” of the
widely viewed 1994 movie documentary of that name—is a snare and a delusion,
steering kids away from more promising paths for the like-getting-hit-by-lightning
chance for a National Basketball Association career.
Indeed,
if anything the disconnect between athletics and education is wider than it
used to be, and our nation’s colleges are complicit in the development. I refer
to their reaction to the NBA’s dictum of 2005 that it would henceforth draft
only players who were at least 19 years old and out of high school for a year.
The league did that because it had grown weary
of taking the gamble involved in drafting kids right out of high school. That
was understandable for an entity that exists to present entertainment and
profit therefrom. The colleges have (or
should have) other, loftier aims, but opted to accommodate the NBA by setting
aside classroom space for young men who intend merely to double-park in academe
before getting on with their “real” lives. Thus, we have the “one-and-done”
phenomenon that has become the main topic of conversation during every NCAA basketball
tournament since the rule went into effect.
Interestingly, the Curie team was
led by Cliff Alexander, a 6-foot-9 center who, as one of the top-half-dozen
recruiting prospects in his class, is a prime “one-and-done” prospect, and
whose signing- day nod to the U of Kansas was televised nationally. The names of the players whom the city and
state declared ineligible weren’t made public, so it’s not known if Alexander’s
was among them. This was an instance where protecting the privacy of some
tarred all.
Hoop dreamers might get a dose of
reality if they use their computers to learn about the later lives of William
Gates and Arthur Agee, the two Chicago high-school prospects featured in the
“Hoop Dreams” film. Gates’ prowess earned him a scholarship to Marquette, where
he played but did not star. He got no closer to the NBA than a tryout camp and
spent almost a decade in sporadic employment before getting a divinity degree
and becoming pastor of a South Side church.
Agee played in junior college and at Arkansas
State and likewise bounced from job to job after his college days, apparently
degreeless. His latest venture is a clothing company called “Hoop Dreams” which
offers t-shirts for sale on-line. He also gives talks to youth groups in which
he tries “to help kids to understand that their role models shouldn’t be
professional athletes but their parents at home.”
That’s good advice if the parents
really are at home, and on the job. Too many aren’t.
