Proposal 42 Unfair to Those Wanting a Pro Sports Career

You want to be a doctor. You’ve always had a talent for helping sick people. You have become a legend in your neighborhood.

“Man, that boy can heal ,” you’ve heard people say in awe as they watch you down at the playground, helping a kid with a cut or a bird with a broken wing.

Your life’s dream is to be like the wonderful doctors you’ve seen on TV. That’s all you want, you are obsessed.

You’re not ready to be a doctor yet, of course. You will have to learn the specific skills, practice on animals and cadavers. But once you have demonstrated that you know what goes where, you’ll be right there in the big room, baby, under the lights and up to your elbows in goo and gall bladders.

One catch: Society has decreed that if you are to become a surgeon, you must first go to rodeo school for a few years. That’s fine. You’ll give it a try, because you will do almost anything to become a doctor.

Now there’s a new catch. You must first qualify for the rodeo school by demonstrating a minimal skill at riding bulls, roping steers and speaking cowboy.

This is a problem, because you grew up in Beverly Hills and if you climbed onto a horse or bull, you wouldn’t know which end to face.

Nevertheless, those are the rules.

OK, enough silliness, but now do you understand why Proposal 42 sucks lemons?

Under current rules, before an athlete is allowed to compete in college, he or she must meet certain academic requirements. If he meets only some of the requirements, he can still attend the university, but must spend his first year studying and not playing ball.

Fine. But with Proposal 42, you must meet all the requirements or you don’t enter the pearly gates of Hoop U or Pigskin State.

The reason this is a bad proposal is that in America, if you want to play professional football or basketball, you must first play college ball. This system works beautifully for the colleges, which get cheap athletic labor, and for the pro teams, which get a free farm system.

It does not work to the advantage of the athlete, but he doesn’t get a vote.

You can’t deny an obviously talented athlete the right to pursue his professional goals simply because he lacks skills in a totally unrelated area--academics.

Those who defend Proposal 42 lay this one on us: “College is not for everybody.”

True, but as long as playing college ball is the only entry to pro football and basketball, college should be for just about everybody who shows potential to become a pro athlete.

And the way our society is structured, the best athletes tend to come from the worst academic environments.

If we’re worried about protecting the academic integrity of our universities, we can do this: Once we admit these scholastically-marginal athletes, we can actually educate them.

Many college coaches and administrators secretly subscribe to the Wet Paint Theory: If a ballplayer is enrolled in college 4 or 5 years, even if he never attends a class or even learns to read , at least some learning and sophistication rubs off on him, like wet paint.

The kid is allowed to major in Square Dance, because the coach doesn’t care if the player learns to read William Shakespeare, let alone William Cosby. This is not education, it is a free lunch.

It is also exploitation.

If we let a youngster into Hoop U and sell a lot of tickets and make the school rich and famous, we have a moral obligation to attempt to educate him. Not necessarily in the field of nuclear physics, but not in Square Dance, either. We can at least make the kid literate and employable by a company other than the Green Bay Packers.

School, player and society all benefit.

Some kids can’t or won’t learn, but remember what the character portraying Garfield High School calculus teacher Jaime Esalante said in the movie “Stand And Deliver.” He said, “Students will rise to the level of our expectations,” or something like that. And he proved it.

Because Proposal 42 could be killed in a re-vote, let’s try this:

Let the coach of Hoop U recruit and sign whomever he wants. Once the budding young star is in school, he or she must maintain a minimal achievement level in academics, even if it’s in remedial classes, or be suspended from the team.

If suspended, he cannot be replaced on the team roster by anyone but himself until after his class graduates.

If he is suspended, athlete and coach would suffer, thus creating a strong double motivation for improving the lad’s grades.

If a basketball coach gets down to four eligible players, he would tend to develop an interest in his players’ school work.

With this plan, would inner-city kids and those from low economic backgrounds get filtered out of college sports? Not unless we stop keeping track of Hoop U’s wins and losses.

OK, the plan has a flaw or two, but it beats 42.