When I
joined the staff of The Daily Illini as a University of Illinois freshman in
1955, my first assignment was to the office of the Champaign police magistrate,
Virgil Burgess. A police magistrate was a kind of justice of the peace, hearing
traffic violations and misdemeanor crimes, and the posting was traditional for
a journalistic newbie.
I
didn’t get much news from the beat but did get to know Burgess. He was a nice
old man (maybe 15 years younger than I am today) who kept a pot of coffee going
and liked to talk. Sometimes on Mondays he’d entertain me with accounts of
humorous police busts of the weekend before, including those of U of I football
players involved in bar fights. One player in particular, who’d later attain
professional fame, was a frequent delinquent.
It
never occurred to Burgess that I’d write up such matters. It never occurred to
me or to the reporters for the town papers to do so. The view then was that
boys would be boys and that jocks were especially boyish. Underage drinking was no college-town sin and
as long as no one was maimed the cops cleaned up and sent home the Saturday
night brawlers. It was better for all concerned that way, everyone agreed.
I think
about that almost every morning when I peruse the sports pages. You can’t pick
up the paper these days without reading about an athlete (or two or three)
getting into trouble with the law. Assaults (mostly bar fights) are frequent
raps, as are mixing booze and driving and (most distressingly) incidents of
domestic violence.
One football player, former New England
Patriots’ tight end Aaron Hernandez, is charged with murdering three people.
Another, ex-Pro Bowl safety Darren Sharper, stands accused of being a serial
rapist. It seems that there’s a crime wave in progress, with many of the perps
being guys we cheered when their teams took the field.
I think
the question “What’s going on here?” can be answered in part by the little
story that began this piece. Time was when a sort of gentlemen’s agreement
shielded well-known athletes from public gaze for bloodless improprieties, just
as politicians were given a pass for sexual, uh, peccadillos. The turning point for the latter issue
came in 1987, when Sen. Gary Hart, a candidate for the Democratic presidential
nomination, was nailed in the press for flaunting his extramarital affair with
model Donna Rice. Ten years later Bill Clinton was impeached for doing something
John Kennedy reportedly did just about every day during his presidency. So the
planet turns.
Today we live in a tabloid world where every
transgression by anyone with the slightest celebrity is broadcast immediately to
an eager public. Almost everyone has become a cell-phone-camera paparazzo and
few remarks, no matter how off-hand, go unrecorded. It’s a wonder we have time to process it all.
That said, though, something
clearly is up and needs to be accounted for. One piece of the answer that was
absent back in the day but present now is steroids, which make the user antsy,
irritable and far more likely than otherwise to fly off the handle. Sports
organizations would have you believe that their testing programs have tamed the
stuff, but don’t buy it. Scientifically speaking the users always are ahead of
the testers, and as long as the stakes remain high they’ll continue trying
their luck whatever the possible consequences.
Another factor is the air of
permissiveness that surrounds good athletes in an increasingly sports-crazy
society. Our most-promising young jocks float through childhood on a cloud of
“yes,” their talents shielding them from rebuke by parents, teachers or their
contemporaries. A pioneer in that regard was Pete Rose, who as a youngster was
rewarded with cash from his parents for his diamond feats and given a pass on
schoolwork if he performed well afield. Rose was ineligible for sports his
senior year in high school because of classroom failings, but that was okay
with his folks because he could play on a semi-pro baseball team instead.
Little wonder, then, that in later life he felt free to disregard his sport’s
bedrock strictures against gambling, or the tax laws.
Much the same sort of thing surfaced again
earlier this year when it was revealed that seven of the 12 players on the
basketball team of Curie High School in Chicago played an entire season,
through the city-championship game, while academically ineligible. Apparently,
teachers and administrators didn’t want to spoil the kids’ fun with unpleasant
news.
The most discouraging aspect of the
rising criminal-jock tide is the number of collegians involved; few major schools
haven’t been affected, most more than once.
And while the increased willingness of the college-town press to report
such matters plays a role (things like Jameis Winston’s crab-legs caper would
have been buried a decade ago) I think it also stems from the growing gap
between real students and so-called student-athletes at schools in the sports
business.
Athletes long have enjoyed
privileged status on campus, but as athletics budgets have soared, and with
them the stakes for winning, colleges are taking greater chances on the kids
they recruit while not providing these often-marginal students with the time and
help they need to succeed in the classroom. In embracing the one-and-done model
in basketball, and countenancing not-much-longer campus tenures for top
pro-football prospects, colleges are conceding that they are mere stopping-off
places for young men whose goals have nothing to do with academic proficiency.
While many of these guys are in college they’re not of college, meaning they
may be less than receptive to education’s civilizing influences.
NCAA “reform” is in the air now,
but I hold little hope for it. It’ll probably end with the schools tossing a
few more dollars the kids’ way. That’ll satisfy most critics but won’t deal
with the system’s real problem, which is the sacrifice of the schools’
educational mission on the altar of playing-field revenues. Until that’s
addressed we can expect more academic scandals of the sort that’s playing out
at the University of North Carolina, and more jocks’ names on police blotters.
