COMMENTARY : Edwards’ Problems Are of His Choosing

Husband: I think I’m getting a stiff neck. You know how I hate to sit in a draft.

Wife: Well, dear, why don’t you get up and shut the window?

Life doesn’t offer a lot of simple solutions, but it does offer some. And in the case of Donnie Edwards, a 235-pound UCLA football player-graduate student who recently complained of malnutrition, several seem to have escaped him.

Edwards, a linebacker ticketed for an NFL career, apparently has been angry for some time about his scholarship deal at UCLA.

Because he plays football well, he has been a guest of the university for four years--this is his fifth--to the tune of room, board, books, tuition and fees. He lives off campus so he gets $560 a month to cover rent and incidentals but is restricted to one school-supplied meal a day. If he lived in campus housing, he would get three meals, but no money.

That’s what Edwards finds so irksome. He had to choose between the money and the food. He can’t get both. And he’s hungry. And the money doesn’t go far enough.

And there are a few other things. Because he’s a scholarship football player, he’s not allowed to get part-time work, except during summer vacation. And he’s wheezing around Westwood in an old beater while everyone else is breezing in Mercedeses and BMWs and other classy iron.

That’s the tough life of today’s big-time college football player and it’s all the fault of the NCAA, which sets the rules for college athletes. Of course, in a few months, Edwards will be the beneficiary of a draft-day windfall the likes of which most of us will not see in a lifetime of toil. But that’s beside the point. Donnie is hungry now. And the beater is low on gas.

Apparently nowhere in his academic pursuits did anyone advise Edwards that life is one choice after another. It’s choices and trade-offs. You can pick one each from Columns A, B and C, but you can’t get two from one column and you certainly don’t get everything in every column. Only Deion Sanders gets that.

Edwards’ first choice, in this scenario, was to accept the athletic scholarship. No one forced it on him. He could have said, “Thanks, Coach Donahue, but I think I’ll see if I can learn to be a welder. Good money in welding.”

And it isn’t as though he learned the terms of the scholarship once he got to school and they had barred the doors on him. It was all spelled out for him.

Naturally, Edwards, being a bright young man, went for the deal. Playing in a first-class program is the best way to the pros. But even if Donnie hadn’t been quite so good a football player, it would have been a good deal. His five years as a Bruin--room, board, books, tuition and fees--are worth at least $75,000 in crass cash, probably considerably more. And the education that supposedly comes with all that is priceless. There’s lots to be said about the school of hard knocks, but there is no substitute for a college education.

At some point in his college career, Edwards chose to live off campus.

“I live off campus to have some privacy and to see the money,” he said. “People who live in the dorms are broke. They are boring. . . . “

At some point, he chose to get a car.

“You drive around the street here in Westwood in your little bucket, shooting fumes out of the muffler, and the guy next to you at the stoplight has a Mercedes or a BMW.”

And last spring, he chose to enroll in grad school and complete his college football eligibility, even though he had earned his degree and could have marched off to the brave new world of the NFL without so much as a look back.

The question lots are asking, now that we have learned what a drag it is to be a starving college football player, is, why didn’t he?

Obviously, Edwards values his education and is sincere in his gripes. But his only valid point is the NCAA’s prohibition of part-time jobs for athletes. There is no reason an athlete shouldn’t have the right to get a job once their season is over, rather than only in the seven weeks or so of summer vacation.

Otherwise, the choices were Donnie’s. He chose apartment privacy and a bit of cash over three squares a day but no loot. He has no money for food but he has a car.

No question, L.A. is a hard town to live in without wheels. But people do it. And if you have no car, you have no gas worries, no parking payments, and you don’t feel inferior to all those Mercedes owners, whom you then pay no attention to. With the money you save, you can buy a slice of pizza. And take a girl on a date--provided she doesn’t mind walking.

You can sit in the draft. Or you can get up and shut the window.