College Athletics

* In response to “Education Involves More Than Intellect,” Commentary, Nov. 24:

Contrary to popular conception, sports do not build character. It wasn’t true in Arthur Ashe’s day, and it surely isn’t true in Russ Gough’s commentary. Gough’s belief that “athletic competition teaches student-athletes about their innermost selves, emotion and character,” is indicative of a New Age sports fan, and not a professor of philosophy and ethics.

College football is a sport where character is often identified as the ability to stomp another man to the ground, and the value of a man rides on the chances of him catching a leather ball. These are not the shallow lessons that impressionable youth need. Character cannot be forged in the vain pursuit of simply winning a game.

Character is cultivated in the things that require moral courage. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t play by society’s rules of racial conformity just to “make the team” and be one of the guys. He demonstrated that book learning, empowered by conviction, and not by how many hours are spent in the weight room, can be the greatest touchdown for humanity.

FELIPE MAK

Los Angeles

* At this late date a professor (Russ Gough of Pepperdine) arises to defend, of all things, athletics in the university.

Never mind the rationale, keep your eye on what he’s talking about. The typical Big Athlete in (little) university must be shepherded like a slow-learning child, frequently under the influence of a wealthy grad who wants “his team” to win at all costs.

I understand. When I was an undergraduate I, too, was a compulsive enthusiast. But years later, as teacher, I found the entire athletic mystique a total political and psychological disruption of the effort to teach students to think. Furthermore, in the intervening years college-based athletics was upstaged by city-based (professional) athletics. The popular identification university-team has disappeared . . . wonderfully!

Precautionary: When I was teaching in Chicago, and lived near the university I visited the old crumbling U of C football stadium--long-since abandoned because football had been discontinued--and there found a small brass plaque reading “on this spot the first controlled nuclear reaction occurred.” That said it.

DAVID ALAN MUNRO

Laguna Beach