The Toughest Thing Manley Has Ever Done

A few days ago, in front of a Senate committee hearing, Dexter Manley, the mastodonic end for the Washington Redskins, did something a lot of us didn’t think he could--cry.

Now, you don’t ordinarily think of Dexter Manley as a sensitive, feeling person. He ordinarily comes into focus waving a quarterback--or a quarterback’s arm or leg--over his head and gloating. He snarls a lot. He’s a major league intimidator.

What brought tears to Dexter Manley’s eyes was that he was a 6-foot-3, 260-pound magnificent physical specimen, idol of millions, making a half-million a year, but he was 30 years old and couldn’t do something 5-year-olds can do--read.

Shocking? Why? Happens all the time.

Dexter Manley is a rough-tough, take-no-prisoners type of ballplayer. But I have a feeling the thing that took the most guts in his lifetime was to get up in front of Congress and admit he couldn’t read or write. He deserves more applause for that than for any quarterback sack he ever made.

None of us likes to cop out to our private weaknesses. And Dexter’s had to be more embarrassing than most. Picking John Elway out of a crowd has to be a piece of cake compared to telling people he was illiterate.

On the other hand, you have to wonder why it is that a product of the American educational system for 16 years cannot read or write. You have to imagine the embarrassment of Oklahoma State University, an institute of higher learning that Dexter Manley attended for four years. What is it, a college or a farm club?

You want to know what Dexter Manley learned in school? The Redskin press guide goes over the highlights of his college career: “Dexter totaled 39 sacks over his last three seasons at Oklahoma State. Over his four-year career, he had 198 tackles, caused 10 fumbles and knocked down five passes. His best game was a 17-tackle performance against Kansas”

How’s that for academic achievement?

How does a guy stay in college four years without being able to read or write? How does he get in?

The answer to that last is easy: The athletic departments of major colleges, it sometimes seems, would let in the Piltdown Man if he could take the team to the Orange Bowl.

What they do is rationalize their defections from academic morality. The rationalizations are ingenious. They are not lowering standards, they are simply trying to upgrade individuals.

How you upgrade somebody by turning him out illiterate is something for the department of athletics to answer, but they make a brave if ignoble attempt. Below is what they tell you. In parentheses is reality.

“He says he has a learning disability.” (Yeah, in his case, it’s called stupidity.)

“He came from a disadvantaged background.” (So did Abraham Lincoln.)

“He never knew his father.” (Some guys get all the breaks.)

“They didn’t make school interesting for him.” (Aw-w-w-w!)

“The system failed him.” (Yeah. It’s our fault he’s not a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon.)

“He just couldn’t deal with studies.” (I’ll bet if you locked him in a room with girls for 16 years, he’d soon figure out what to do.)

“He failed math and he had nowhere to turn but to the streets.” (Einstein failed math, too. But he didn’t turn to crime.)

“We should have gotten him tutorial help. (And somebody to peel his bananas.)

“Teachers aren’t what they used to be.” (Neither are pupils.)

Dexter Manley has enrolled in a remedial program to correct his reading deficiencies. This is laudable.

The great American pastime is finding someone or something to blame when things go wrong. When someone can spend 16 years in the educational process and come out functionally illiterate, there’s plenty of blame to go round. Some of it is the system’s.

A lot of it is Manley’s, though, too. Spending 16 years in or around classrooms and coming out unable to read or write is like spending your life in a cornfield--and starving to death.