Readers of Playbooks and Paychecks, Alas, Have Pro Education

We still wonder whether jocks are getting a proper education. We still worry that after getting their college tuitions paid in full, too many voting-age athletes are leaving campus with the reading prowess of a kindergartner, their only working knowledge of the alphabet being the letters that Vanna White, in a strapless gown, flips over on “Wheel of Fortune.”

Arithmetic is a different matter. Jocks do learn to count. They can compute in a second that six zeroes on a paycheck add up to at least a million bucks. And even when a conscience-stricken faculty type like Jan Kemp goes to court to rail against the preferential treatment that jocks receive in college schoolrooms, the only thing some of these young supporter-wearers can make of it is that Kemp sure did make a lot of money on the deal. Missing the whole point entirely.

There is not much the general public is going to do about it if university students, to remain eligible for athletics, can continue to take courses along the lines of Theory of Lunch 101 and Introduction to Dr. Seuss.

If an assistant coach or a well-meaning booster still must woo a physically gifted teen-ager with an envelope stuffed with currency or a shiny new turbo 300-ZX, somebody else is going to make sure that the kid passes classes, by book or by crook.

The National Football League has this neat little by-law. It forbids you to play in the NFL until you have been out of high school for four years. Therefore, nobody spends two winters at Texas or Michigan or Pitt and then leaves school for the high-paying sweatshop run by Pete Rozelle.

Certain early birds--Herschel Walker, Marcus Dupree--did manage to get a nice supply of worms from the USFL, but even that tacky little league has learned its lesson, scholastically speaking. No one from the prep class of ’83 is welcome this season.

And yet, there is another school of thought that such restrictions are in violation of everything for which America stands. A man or a woman should be free, this sentiment goes, to make a living anytime, anywhere, any legal way. Nobody should be entitled to blackball individuals by age any more than to discriminate against them by race or sex.

Corporate bosses have, of course, for years set their own standards on whom to hire. But these same bosses often regale acquaintances at cocktail parties with prideful accounts of how they quit school at 16 to get a job and support their parents, or some such thing.

The National Basketball Assn. evidently believes that anyone of any age should be permitted to earn a living shooting hoops.

It is common knowledge that Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins did not spend so much as 24 hours in college, and the NBA is rife with athletes who did not complete four years. Among them are some of the very best: Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Isiah Thomas and Mark Aguirre. Try explaining to a European why a basketball player can do what a football player cannot. Try explaining that the big league baseball player who has spent a couple of years in college is as rare as a boxer with a doctorate or a fat Olympic swimmer.

Walter Berry, college basketball’s popularly acknowledged player of the year, has had a change of heart and will leave St. John’s University for a shot at the NBA. In so doing, he accompanies William Bedford of Memphis State, Chris Washburn of North Carolina State, Pearl Washington of Syracuse and John Williams of Louisiana State in this vaguely unsettling classroom fire drill.

John Wooden, brigadier general of UCLA basketball for so many years, today has his name emblazoned on an award honoring the college game’s outstanding player, season to season. Twice in three years now, courtesy of Jordan and Berry, the Wooden winner has decided to take the trophy and run.

While he would hardly begrudge young citizens their freedom of choice, Wooden surely would be the first to emphasize the advantages of staying in school, and the first to cite the astuteness and poise of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton and others from his UCLA years. If only he could be convincing.

Alas, some college guys figure they have learned enough. Some freshmen at USC certainly thought they had all the answers when they tried to pull some emotional blackmail on the athletic department, insisting upon say-so in the choice of a new basketball coach, then stalling the man selected, George Raveling, when he attempted to discover if they were coming or going.

In the end, Raveling took their scholarships away, a brave action designed to remind them who was the teacher and who was the student.

We seek wisdom from many sources. More than half a century ago, when a motion-picture university was administered by that esteemed scholar Groucho Marx, it was concluded that the necessary financing did not exist to support both the college and the football team, so: “Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.”

Even then, the jocks ran the show.