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playa2
Posts: 34922
Alba Posts: 15
Joined: 5/15/2003
Member: #407
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I can't believe this thread wasn't closed.
Oh well
I came over this and thought about you fishmike.
In his recently published book Confessions of a Spoilsport, English professor William C Dowling says this is absolute bollocks.
Some US colleges, says Dowling, still participate in amateur leagues with teams comprised of genuine students. But a growing number have joined "professionalised" leagues. Here, unqualified and often illiterate players are recruited solely on the basis of athletic ability. Far from being humble members of the student body, these fake students live a separate, pampered existence. They often either don't attend classes or take fake courses (sample question: "How many halves are in a college basketball game?") Far from being ordinary students, these athletes swan around in sports cars, train in state-of-the-art facilities, play in purpose built stadia, have tutors do their coursework for them and are flown to games in hired jets.
"In the two years I was there, I never did anything," former University of Minnesota basketball player Russ Archambault admitted after a 1999 grade-fixing scandal. "The coaches knew. Everybody knew. We used to make jokes about it ... I would go over there some nights and get, like, four papers done. The coaches would be laughing about it."
At these colleges, sports are totally commercialised and massively hyped, says Dowling. Academic standards have crashed, and in the vicious scramble for players, recruiters engage in "brutally cynical behaviour" that often shades into criminality. This billion dollar culture of "corruption and hypocrisy and self-deception" has, says Dowling, turned hundreds of US colleges into intellectual wastelands dominated by a braying, moronic, drunken and mindlessly violent yahoo "booster culture".
And when the pervasive corruption in college sports is exposed, it's more often than not the whistle-blowers who are ostracised and attacked. "Who gives a flying **** what these football players are doing?" wrote a University of Tennessee football fan to a teacher who exposed a grade-fixing scam. "It ****ing happens on every college campus throughout the world. What makes your ****ing horse so much higher than everybody else's?"
Many colleges have become mere life support machines for massively bloated sports programmes, says Dowling. With the result that "thousands of ... brainwashed ... undergraduates have no idea of what a real college education might be."
"The student who has come to college hoping to learn about Greek philosophy or Renaissance poetry or molecular biology," says Dowling, "walks the campus as a ghost." At these colleges, says Dowling "the only point of being a student is to sit in the plastic chairs and yowl for lower level professional athletes." In short - professionalised college sports have eaten the US further education system's brains.
Spoilsport also touches on professionalised sports' hooligan fan culture - seen by some as evidence of passion, but by Dowling as a sordid debasement of the Corinthian values once widespread in college sports. Far from offering a healthy, grassroots alternative to professional sports, argues Dowling, Division 1A college sports are professional sports in microcosm - complete with all the corruption and scandal. And then some.
Spoilsport is centered on Dowling's decade-long (failed) campaign to stop Rutgers University in New Jersey becoming yet another dumbed-down "sports factory" - a rot he saw embodied in a moonlighting professor leading basketball fans in a chant of "Always Rutgers! Always Coca Cola!"
Not only has pro college sports driven down academic standards and debased university culture, says Dowling, but at the vast majority of colleges it contributes nothing financially. He cites several examples of football and basketball coaches earning $500,000 or $1m salaries while classes are taught in ramshackle classrooms, honour-student courses are abandoned, and tenured professors sacked.
Professionalised college sports, says Dowling, are a festering swamp of unethical behaviour and illegality-from illicit payments and fixed grades, to the use of prostitutes at recruiting parties, and incidents of rape, assault, financial fraud, drug dealing and murder. He mentions the 2003 basketball scandal at Baylor University where one player murdered another and a coach then attempted a cover up. And Michael Vicks' alma mater, Virginia Tech, where at one point in the 1990s, 19 football players faced criminal charges "ranging from rape and sodomy to assault and battery."
There have been scores of others. But the big scandal, Dowling implies, is that the billion-dollar college sports entertainment industry just keeps rolling along. At the time of writing, Professor Dowling has abandoned his campaign to stop professionalised sports at Rutgers.
There are several criticisms you could make of Spoilsport. Haunting the book is the unspoken fact that a disproportionate number of college football and basketball players are African-American and working class. Dowling fails to ask why these kids aren't being educated to a level where universities wouldn't feel the need to cheat, lie and forge in order to recruit them.
That, perhaps, is the bigger scandal.
JAMES DOLAN on Isiah : He's a good friend of mine and of the organization and I will continue to solicit his views. He will always have strong ties to me and the team.
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9/18/2008 8:19 AM