The Days of (Athletic) Innocence

My son, who is 8, asked me the other day what year Elvis died, and when I told him 1977, he said, “Oh, yeah, that was the same year ESPN was founded.” He was off by two years, but this gives you some indication of the influence the 24-hour scoreboard-and-highlight reel network already exerts over his third-grade imagination. My wife and I both like sports and find it charming up to a point to hear him sing out, in perfect “SportsCenter” pitch, “We’re going to OT!” But lately I’ve begun to worry that he is losing his athletic innocence to the big-time sports addiction that has mocked and humbled too many of our institutions of “higher learning.”

Eventually Devin will have to sort this out for himself, but I can see he is headed for his first reckoning with the ESPN way of life, the result of our buying a house close enough to Occidental College that we have been able to walk to the Division III Tigers’ basketball games this season. (Admission is free.)

It was some season, with Occidental going undefeated in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference while compiling a record of 25-3 and advancing to the NCAA D-III tournament, winning its first two games but losing in the quarterfinals. We have no official ties to Occidental, but Devin became a devoted fan, cheering from the bleachers in Rush Gym, searching for the scores of away games in the sports section and adding the members of Oxy’s starting lineup to the fantasy contests he plays and narrates on our driveway court (“Song CUN from downTOWN--THREE-POINTER!”). He could not imagine a better or more exciting college basketball team and so could not understand why Occidental was not on television (indeed on ESPN) playing Oklahoma or Duke. And I didn’t want to tell him, at the risk of denting the joy he experienced watching a talented bunch of young athletes play at the top of their game all winter.

I minced words the way a parent does when explaining some faulty part of our society that you’d rather your child not know about. I had to resist just blurting out the bald truth: Occidental wasn’t on television because its athletes are drawn from a student body of 1,800, all of whom had to satisfy demanding admissions requirements and none of whom are on athletic scholarships or expect to have a career in the NBA. They are student-athletes with an emphasis on student. Their best player, high-scoring forward Finn Rebassoo, is majoring in physics. And, no, they are not as good as the teams playing Monday night in the NCAA Division I finals.

Why is it so unpopular in 2003 to suggest that this is the way it should be at all colleges? In an era when shoe companies have bought ad space on undergraduate jerseys coast to coast and the NCAA negotiates television contracts worth millions, it’s hard to recall that intercollegiate athletics were once an extracurricular activity for students who played merely for the love of the game.

Today’s Division I prime-time athletes are, more often than not, academically challenged semi-pros recruited to serve as part of a revenue-generating unit of popular entertainment. Coddled as celebrities, they spend several hours a day at practice or in the weight room, and if they can make it to class occasionally, you know, fine. Many never graduate, while their coaches earn more than the university president, not to mention the best professors. Is this not an embarrassment to the brainy nation that sent men to the moon?

I don’t want to get into all this with Devin, not yet. I would have to tell him that behind the scenes at many of the schools whose teams he sees extolled on TV, an unprecedented national coalition of university professors and trustees was formed last year for the purpose of trying to rein in the abuses, scandals and commercial excesses that have come to define the big-time athletic programs dominating their schools. Few expressed optimism this would happen any time soon.

Ah, well. For Devin’s sake (if not for ESPN’s) we still have Division III, whose teams admittedly are jeered by big conference frat guys who never played a down or a quarter of high school ball and get their bragging rights secondhand. No matter. It’s clearly Occidental and Whittier and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps that have the right idea, contained in the NCAA’s Division III philosophy statement, which says, “athletic participants are not treated differently from other members of the student body,” that emphasis be placed on students and alumni rather “than on the general public and its entertainment needs” and that athletic-related financial aid is prohibited.

The NCAA also recently posted on its Web site the incongruous reminder: “There are 360,000 NCAA student-athletes, and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.” Nice of them to say, but a little late for the hoopsters of Division I’s Atlantic Coast Conference, where the graduation rate last year was 36%.

The thing is, Division III athletics can be pretty terrific by any measure, full of skill and competition that even qualifies as entertainment, as my son has discovered and, I hope, will continue to believe until ESPN and Sports Illustrated and the rest of the American sports establishment convinces him otherwise.

Call me sentimental, but when I’m watching a college game, I want to believe that the athletes are actually students and not ringers who work out five hours a day and couldn’t find their way to the library unless you told them Jim Rome was doing his show there. I’ve always found it odd that the major sports media routinely belittle teams from the Ivy League and other conferences that adhere, at least in principle, to the ideal of the scholar-athlete. It’s an ideal that looks pretty good compared to what has replaced it: academic fraud, under-the-table payouts, preening 19-year-old egomaniacs, sneaker contracts and agents lurking outside the locker rooms.

The graduation rate, by the way, for Occidental basketball players for the past 15 years, under Coach Brian Newhall, is 100%.

Like many a dad, I enjoy watching my son and daughter play sports. I want them to try their best while having fun and getting exercise. Do I want them to be pros? Not really, but even if they were blessed with that kind of talent I’d still want them to go to a college where the classroom comes first--because that’s where they will get the preparation they’ll need for the rest of their lives, no matter what they do. This is not a value they’re going to pick up from watching ESPN.

So I’m hoping Devin can remain an Occidental fan even after he starts to understand why the Pac-10 is so much more important to the sports channel universe than the D-III teams he’s been watching. And while I love listening to him announce those fictional games on the driveway court, I really want him to start piano lessons soon.