Sherrill Can Teach Brutality With the Best

One of the lessons of football as the great educator in our society is to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. And so Jackie Sherrill goes from campus to campus leaving behind his trail of dirty laundry and is welcomed at the next institution as a great educator.

He can teach the brutality with the best of them, all bloody-handed and proud. As a visual aid to his players, he had a young bull castrated at practice before Mississippi State’s game with the Texas Longhorns. There was some blood, an understandably loud bellow from the animal and some equally understandable bawling.

And the players were shown their visual aid by the professor of brutality. Football is not worth that price. The coach who would say it has no place at an educational institution. What this course teaches is that you can disregard life, a system of values, stretch morality -- anything -- as long as you win.

Take this incident a little further and we have the number of incidents of groups of teammates committing rape in the hotel room in Seattle or elsewhere. “It’s not a reach,” said Dr. Claire Walsh, director of Campus and Community Consultation Service in St. Augustine, Fla. “This is a preparation for that kind of atrocity.”

Anybody who takes the trouble to read Sherrill’s resume knows that he, like the scorpion, does what he does. He did leave Texas A&M; under suspension, so you would have to conclude that Mississippi State University is not terribly unhappy with what Sherrill did this time, regardless of the public condemnation by the university president.

The incident emerged because a Mississippi State student who was nearby at the time called a friend who called the Mississippi Animal Rescue League in Jackson, Miss. A student does not ring the bell on King Football without some trepidation, and this is not primarily an animal rights issue. Castration is a fact of life in cattle raising; that’s where steers come from. This is a people rights issue.

What Sherrill wanted to do was show his players what he wanted them to do to the Texas players. No less. It was only convenient that Texas’ symbol is the Longhorn. The message is much more primitive.

“It’s ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” said Christopher Cowan of the National Values Center in Denton, Texas, where football is very important. “After you defeat your rival, you eat his body parts and acquire his strength.”

This is part of the self-image the system builds. “Sherrill has altered sport to primitive war: Defeat the opponent, humiliate him, castrate him and rape his women,” Cowan said.

Sherrill is very good at manipulating the minds and self-image of players. He understands how they think and feel. His story is that he asked his Bulldogs what a steer was, “and nobody knew what a steer was,” Sherrill said. Well, surely some of the big old farmboys must have seen an animal cut, but nevermind. Not more than a mile from the practice field, Mississippi State has a world class school of veterinary medicine, where somebody could have shown them the procedure. They might have passed the Ethics Department on the way.

Sherrill manfully said he would take responsibility even though he was not involved in the procedure. The day after the players failed the steer quiz, Thomas Hughes, Class of ‘75, provided the animal. The procedure is generally done when a calf is 3 or 4 months old and his nerve endings haven’t developed. It is said that the animal feels no more pain than an infant male does at circumcision. But this young bull was 18 months old and weighed 525 pounds.

“Animals are akin to humans,” Deborah Boswell, director of the animal league, said.

“These people would like to make it up as a ‘crazy animal-rights’ issue,” Boswell said. “That guy didn’t just show up on campus with a bull; Sherrill requested it. This was some symbolic ritual, and if you find the Ethics Department, be sure to let me know.”

In form this isn’t a lot different from the high school coach preparing his team to play the Golden Eagles. He got e chicken, spray-painted it with the appropriate colors and had his players stomp the animal to death. That was all in the name of education, mind you.

So was this, only more so. That was brutality; this was sexual brutality -- and what then is rape but sexual brutality?

“Rape is inflicting pain, which is what they did to the bull,” said Dr. Thomas Tutko, who teaches sports psychology at San Jose State. “They did this to a big animal, ostensibly more powerful than them, which makes them more powerful, more macho. This makes them more worthy than the opponent, more worthy of sex than the opponent. It gives them more license.”

Don Beck of the National Values Center spent years on the sidelines of the Houston Oilers and New Orleans Saints as a team counselor. He likens the group mentality cultivated to that of dogs or skinheads in a pack, or the behavior of numbers of the “Miami Hurricanes” proving they were unholier than thou.

Football, as brutal as it is at times, is only the vehicle. A coach like Sherrill is the teacher and the university is the enabler. It is a commercial decision. Mississippi State has a stadium of 62,500 to fill. It’s only business.

So Mississippi State defeated the now-emasculated Longhorns, 28-10, has won its first two games and is aiming for a higher national ranking. University president Dr. Donald Zacharias said he spoke with Sherrill and is “confident that nothing like this will occur in the future.”