Miracle in Maryland
The similarities in the two cases of heat
stroke deaths of football players at the University of North Carolina when I
was a graduate assistant in economics there in 1971 and what happened this year
at the University of Maryland are extraordinary. At UNC it was at the beginning of fall
practice, in August, when temperatures are high. At Maryland, it was late May near the
end of spring practice, when temperatures can also be high. In each case the victim was a young
offensive lineman. The weight they
carry can make them particularly vulnerable to stress on their bodies. In each instance stories soon emerged of
abusive practices by the coaching staff, although the manner in which the
stories emerged were quite different.
In the UNC case it came relatively quickly—within a few weeks—in
the form of a press conference by a group of former players who had used up
their eligibility but were still students on campus. They were reacting to a hasty official
whitewash by a university committee.
At Maryland, it took more than three months for
the word to get out, and when it did, it came out in a big way in the form of a
hard-hitting ESPN article describing a Ňtoxic cultureÓ in the Maryland football
program. The player, 19-year-old
Jordan McNair, had collapsed at practice on May 29. The article appeared on August 10. Here are some of the highlights:
á There is a coaching environment based on fear and
intimidation. In one example, a player holding a meal while in a meeting had
the meal slapped out of his hands in front of the team. At other times, small
weights and other objects were thrown in the direction of players when Court
was angry.
á The belittling, humiliation and embarrassment of
players is common. In one example, a player whom coaches wanted to lose weight
was forced to eat candy bars as he was made to watch teammates working out.
á Extreme verbal abuse of players occurs often. Players
are routinely the targets of obscenity-laced epithets meant to mock their
masculinity when they are unable to complete a workout or weight lift, for
example. One player was belittled verbally after passing out during a drill.
á Coaches have endorsed unhealthy eating habits and used
food punitively; for example, a player said he was forced to overeat or eat to
the point of vomiting.
McNair,
who was 19, died two weeks after being hospitalized following a May 29 team
workout. He collapsed after running 110-yard sprints, showing signs of extreme
exhaustion and difficulty standing upright. No official cause of death has been
released, but ESPN reported Friday that he died of heatstroke suffered during the workout and had a body temperature of
106 degrees after being taken to a hospital.
-------
"Our reading of the medical records and the
911 call Maryland made to the EMT to come to the field reveal that 45 minutes
into the practice, he had convulsions and a seizure on the field," [McNair
family attorney Billy] Murphy said, "and the 911 call reflects emergency
personnel noted McNair had experienced a seizure."
A 911 call recording
obtained by ESPN shows that at 5:58 p.m., an unidentified man described McNair
as "hyperventilating after exercising and unable to control his
breath."
Murphy called the one-hour time gap between
McNair showing distress at about 5 p.m. and the 911 call being made "an
utter disregard of the health of this player, and we are extraordinarily
concerned that the coaches did not react appropriately to his injury.
---
Multiple
sources said that after McNair finished his 10th sprint while two other players
held him up, Robinson yelled, "Drag his ass across the field!"
Now the diagnosis and first aid treatment of
heat stroke are rather straightforward.
I still remember it from ninth grade health and physical education. What made a big impression on me at the
time was that failure to take the proper steps to reduce the victims body
temperature as quickly as possible could result in death. Heat stroke is a very serious
matter. HereŐs what we learn from
WebMD:
Heat stroke symptoms and treatment.
Heat
stroke results from
prolonged exposure to high temperatures -- usually in combination with dehydration
-- which leads to failure of the body's temperature control system. The medical
definition of heat stroke is a core body temperature
greater than 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with complications involving the central nervous
system that occur after exposure to high
temperatures. Other common symptoms include nausea, seizures, confusion,
disorientation, and sometimes loss of consciousness or coma.
If you suspect that
someone has a heat stroke, immediately call 911 or transport the person to a
hospital. Any delay seeking medical help can be fatal.
While waiting for the
paramedics to arrive, initiate first aid.
Move the person to an air-conditioned environment -- or at least a cool, shady
area -- and remove any unnecessary clothing.
If possible, take the
person's core body temperature and initiate first aid to cool it to 101 to 102
degrees Fahrenheit. (If no thermometers are available, don't hesitate to
initiate first aid.)
Try these cooling strategies:
á
Fan
air over the patient while wetting his or her skin with water from a sponge or
garden hose.
á
Apply
ice packs to the patient's armpits, groin, neck, and back. Because these areas
are rich with blood vessels close to the skin,
cooling them may reduce body temperature.
á
Immerse
the patient in a shower or tub of cool water.
á
If
the person is young and healthy and suffered heat stroke while exercising vigorously -- whatŐs known
as exertional heat stroke -- you can use an ice bath
to help cool the body.
Given the nature of football practices and the time of the
year that many of them take place, awareness of the foregoing should be
fundamental, sort of in the nature of what road signs and signals mean for the
driver of an automobile. Yet it is
apparent that in the case of Jordan McNair at Maryland, the coaching staff did
none of these recommended things, acting as if they were unaware that there was
such a thing as heat stroke. They
adhered, rather, to their rigid toxic-culture model.
Such was the case at UNC with young Bill Arnold, and with
the same results. At least at Maryland,
Coach D.J. Durkin was suspended from his job, though only months after the fact
when that ESPN article came out.
Coach Bill Dooley at UNC was not.
Both institutions conducted official inquiries, and they both amounted
to whitewashes. Coach Dooley and
the football team, at least in the short term, continued as if nothing had
happened. The university is proud
of the fact that the incident was responsible for their creation of a sports medicine program that oversees the safety of
the athletes, but it doesnŐt take a department of sports medicine to recognize
and treat the biggest danger to the life of football players, which is heat
stroke.
On Tuesday, October 30, it looked like we had a replay of
the UNC travesty when the University of Maryland Board of Regents announced
that it had completed its inquiry and that Coach Durkin would be
reinstated. But as it turned out, Maryland
in 2018 was a lot different from North Carolina in 1971. There was uproar at the university the
next day. Maryland Governor Larry
Hogan issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon expressing his displeasure at
the lack of transparency in the process that the Board of Regents had followed
and suggested that they reconsider, and a few hours later the university
president, Wallace Loh, announced that he was
overruling the Board of RegentsŐ decision, and he sacked Durkin.
Topping things off, the very next day, the man who oversaw
the whitewash, the chairman of the Board of Regents, James T. Brady, announced
that he was resigning, apparently bending to popular demand. It was as if a great cleansing wind had
blown through.
To gain some appreciation of what was similar and what,
ultimately, was different in the two cases, the article we originally posted on
March 11, 2001, follows:
Confessions
of a Football Fanatic
The Speech
The year was 1976. I was a young, idealistic
assistant professor of economics at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky
Mount. The college was struggling financially, and as a way to save money the
administration hit upon the bright idea of tapping the faculty as
"visiting speakers" for the mandatory convocations program, hour-long
presentations to the entire student body. Preceding me, among others, had been
English professor Leverett T. Smith, whose Ph. D. was
actually in American studies and history professor Kenneth Finney, a specialist
on Latin America. Smith had talked on the sociological
aspects of the Beatles and Rolling Stones phenomena and Finney, the ascetic son
of missionaries to Peru and Honduras who had been reared in rather deprived
conditions in those countries, had offered up a Philippic against the
automobile.
That background is necessary to appreciate the
references in the oration that follows. I am presenting it here just as I
delivered it then. The facts as I presented them were correct at the time as
best as I could ascertain through my research. The reader will naturally notice
great differences in magnitude in the dollar amounts I mention compared to the
present day. Times have changed quite a bit, too. My strong advocacy of participation
as opposed to spectator sports sounds quaint today, but just nine years before
the post newspaper at Fort Monroe, which I had supervised in my stint in the
Army, had found the master sergeant who regularly went
running after work novel enough to do a story about him. He was the only person
there who did it. A quarter of a century ago Dr. Kenneth Cooper's book on aerobics had just come out and
the fitness craze was in its infancy. The reader will
also notice that I was still extremely naive about the journalistic profession
and that I actually believed that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the
crusading muckrakers that were portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman
in All the President's Men.
I've come a long way since then, but many of the
disturbing trends I speak of here have only gotten worse. So here goes....
Confessions
of a Football Fanatic
Many of you, I have heard, have expressed
skepticism that I was actually going to speak on the subject of football in
spite of the announcement of the title of the address, "Confessions of a
Football Fanatic." After all, everyone knows my main sports are basketball
and bicycle racing and very few people here have heard me utter more than two
words on the subject of football. And I freely admit to a lack of credentials
as any kind of an expert. I have never played organized football. I have not
read any books by sports radicals like Dave Meggesy,
Pete Gent, Jack Scott, Harry Edwards, or others. Unlike Professor Smith, I am
not a professional student of sports in America. (But Professor Smith did not
let his amateur knowledge of rock and roll prevent him from discussing that
subject). I am sure that I have not seen football played in as many exotic
places as Professor Finney has witnessed automobiles in action. But compared to
me, my distinguished colleague has one great disadvantage; he has never known
his subject as would a lover. (Rumors that he is a
closet member of the Richard Petty fan club, I believe, are false.) According
to the best evidence, he has never left rubber of any sort on any kind of road,
concrete, asphalt, or secluded dirt. His has been a very un-American
upbringing.
I have loved football. I remember how as a child
I thrilled to the exploits on the radio of Charley "Choo
Choo" Justice, and have followed his career from
college great to professional mediocre to announcer awful (a standard progression).
I have watched the Super Bowl every year except one when I was out of the
country.
At long last I have concluded, though, that
football is much like the steaks that football players consume in such huge
quantities. One can enjoy it only if he can put out of his mind where it comes
from; only if he can forget how it was produced.
During the recent Olympic Games our sports
announcers were justly critical of the so-called sports factories of East
Germany, Russia, and other Eastern European countries. They objected to their
practice of virtually plucking promising youngsters out of the playpen to train
them into champion athletes. They were appalled at the regimentation. They
wondered about the effect on young emotions of being forced into high-pressure
competition at an early age. They complained about the excessive emphasis on
winning. Most of all, they objected to the hypocrisy of these countries
fielding teams as amateur that could not be more professional.
Not surprisingly, against such competition our
men and women did not fare so well, that is, except for the products of our own
minor sports factories like college basketball and swimming. But if we could
have played football against them we would have met them squarely on their own
terms.
The only appreciable differences between their
sports system and our football system is that they are, for the most part,
dealing with healthful sports in which a broad spectrum of the population is
able to participate, and theirs is run by the government. The football system
is run mainly by private enterprise even when attached to public institutions
and like most profit-oriented endeavors, it is designed primarily to cater to
the wishes of the ultimate consumer, in this case, the fan. If participation in
the football system ultimately proves very unrewarding for most of the young
men who, at one time or another, play the game, we should not be surprised. The system is not set up for
them.
The
Football Rookery
Apprenticeship in football begins early in many
communities in America. Passion for the sport is especially intense in the Deep
South and the Midwest. In Pee Wee leagues footballs are put into hands that can
hardly grip them and all the armor of battle is strapped on. From the start a
passion for victory is instilled. The saying of coaching great, Vince Lombardi,
is heard over and over, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only
thing."
As the players grow so does the pressure to win.
Almost anything is permissible to bring out the aggressive best (or worst) in
the young contestants. Appeals are made to school and team pride. Most of all,
though, the appeal is made to manhood: "What's the matter, kid, can't you
take it? Don't you know that quitters never win and winners never quit? When
the going gets tough, the tough get going."
For the kids, the games are fantastic. As an
emotional high, there are not many things that can compare to them. But the
practices are notoriously grueling and vicious. It is not long before the young
participant begins to develop a distaste for physical
activity in general, associated as it is with pain and discomfort. "The
day coach stops making me do these things is the day I will quit."
At this point you may be saying to yourself,
"So what?" Why doesn't he talk about something important? If I don't
like football I can ignore it, can't I? It's not exactly like the automobile,
which one can't escape even if he wants to.
That's where you're wrong. While these young men
are taking their apprenticeship, the repercussions are felt all around. Because
of the time and money poured into football and the general attitude toward
sports that football engenders, true physical education is slighted. The young
are already being sorted out into the few select professionals who will
entertain us, and everyone else. Girls, especially, at this stage begin to go
to seed. (No extra connotations intended.) Unable to relate to the physically
combative, super-masculine ideal of sport represented by football and not being
exposed to any other ideal, they are reduced to the role of fawning, artificial
sycophants for football players, or they ignore sports altogether.
The lack of any genuine physical education at
the high school level is also explained to a degree by the fact that so many
university athletic directors are football coaches. The training of physical
education teachers falls victim to the major commercial sport mentality. Most
P.E., either at the high school or college level is taught as an avocation by a
varsity coach whose mind is elsewhere. He's interested mainly in personal
advancement, either in the coaching ranks or as an administrator. Somewhere
along the way, the education establishment got the idea that football coaches
make good principals. School administration joins health and P.E. as a victim
of football. Social studies also suffer because their instruction is so often
the responsibility of a football coach. Football's casualties mount, even away
from the field.
Back on the field, last game, senior year. By
this time the probability is great that our young gladiator has suffered one or
more serious injuries to limbs or joints. He will have been encouraged to beef
himself up to a size that will make him more susceptible to a heart attack in
early middle age. Still worse, he will have spent the best part of his youth
learning a sport that he will, in all likelihood, never play again. Let him try
getting some of the guys together later for a game of football: Twenty-two
people, helmets, shoes, pads, field, referees, etc. Forget it.
Anyway, the real fun was not the game but the
glory, the pageantry, the adulation, and he can never recapture that with a
pick-up game. Better to be like Housman's athlete who died young so he
...will not swell the rout
of lads who wore their honors out.
Runners whom renown outran,
and the name died before the man.
The Next Level
Or he may be among the "lucky" few who
are courted by the colleges. A heady experience that is, indeed! College
coaches are paid to win. If they don't win they get fired. They won't win if
they don't get the players, and that's where our high school superstar comes
in. Win-hungry coaches deluge him with letters and visits and offers. It's the
ego massage to end all ego massages: Scores of people, all after the services
of one pimply-faced seventeen-year-old. He makes visits to college campuses
where he will be squired around by a comely Lady Cornhusker or some such and
where he will be introduced to all the important people. His self-esteem rises a few more notches. Even if everything the recruiters
do is legal and well intentioned the effect on the young man cannot be good.
Only in the event that he becomes president or a movie star will he ever be
adored and praised and wanted so much. No wife will ever be able to compete
with this. No professional award will ever compare. No grandchild, no nothing
will ever compare to this in the life of our young football recruit. His peak
will have been reached at 18 and the rest will be anti-climax.
Not all the recruiting is in accordance with the
rules, however, either of the NCAA or of propriety. The school that can offer
just a little bit more is the one that will get the blue-chipper (as they are
called), and the coaches know it. Given the pressure to win and the chance of
getting by with it, the temptation to cheat is often irresistible. Avid and
wealthy alumni are in a particularly good position to break the rules and nudge
the high school hero in the direction of their college. The aforementioned
National Collegiate Athletic Association is supposed to police and punish such
activities, but it employs only nine people to research allegations of
violations among the 703 member schools. In regulatory effectiveness the NCAA
resembles nothing so much as a referee of professional wrestling.
Even
the strongest defenders of college football recognize the ills of recruiting.
Darrell Royal, the head coach of the University of Texas hardly a sports radical has called for conference lie detector tests
to determine who has been breaking the rules. The coaches of the Big Eight have
complained that their recruiting will be crippled by the new NCAA rule limiting
college coaching staffs to nine full-time coaches. (Ironically, the same as the
total number of NCAA investigators in the whole country.)
The chance that our young recruit will ever live
up to the big build-up he has been given is very remote. Since the coaches can
never be sure who will really make it in college ball, they over- recruit.
Johnny Majors, the coach of the nation's number one college team, the
University of Pittsburgh, brought in almost 100 new scholarship players his
very first year on the job. The NCAA has tried to control this practice of
stocking-up by limiting the total number of scholarships at any one school to
95. This rule has not been greeted cheerfully by the big-time
coaches. One responded this way:
"I hate to use the expression, 'running
off,' but I'm afraid we're going to be seeing a lot more of that now."
And what does this term "running-off"
mean? If the coaches miss their guess on a player, under the new system they
are left with only 94 players they can use instead of the 115 or so they might
have had before. They can't take a man's scholarship away and give it to a new,
promising player unless the dud (who was yesterday's hero in the recruiting
letters) quits the team of his own accord. Football must be made so unpleasant
for him that he will "voluntarily" give up the game and his
scholarship. The act of influencing his decision is called "running
off." I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
But what about all those young men that Chris Schenkel and Bud Wilkinson tell us about on NCAA college
football on ABC who are given the opportunity to go to college through the
football scholarship programs?
There are several things to be said about that.
In the first place, as we all know, many football players should not be in
college. Admission standards for football players, traditionally low, have
fallen still lower in recent years. The Atlantic Coast Conference fared very
poorly against outside opponents until it got rid of the 800 minimum SAT for
athletes. Now its teams are doing much better, but only with the help of a
hypocritical double standard. The chancellors of UNC and NC State were recently
forced to defend the new policy against charges of professionalism by Duke
coach Mike McGee. This is from a Raleigh News
and Observer article:
"State Chancellor Joab
Thomas said NCSU's policy, which he described as designed to grant
'flexibility' to its admissions committee, is 'just as likely to let in an
engineer as an athlete.'"
One can't help wondering how that prospective
young engineer would demonstrate promise except through academics. Maybe he's
good with erector sets.
The notorious Big Eight has long had flexible
standards for athletes and Sports
Illustrated recently reported that only 30 of the 135 Big Eight players
playing professional football had received college degrees. Colorado and
Oklahoma State were the worst with only 3 of their present 34 players having
graduated.
At the other extreme are those college football
players who would have gone to college anyway and could have afforded to pay
their own way. The major educational difference for them is that the
requirements of football permit them little time to pursue their studies, or
anything else. But for the matter of time, in fact, the ills of playing
football at the college level are pretty much the same as those at the high
school level, except in greater degree: More weight, more injuries, more
organization, more emphasis on winning, more appeals to pride and loyalty, and
more display of aggressive masculinity. But the time factor means that football
is now pretty much like a job. Viewed in this manner, considering the time that
he puts in, the nature of the work that he does, the skill that he possesses,
and the consumer demand for his product, the $2,500 or so that he gets each
year in scholarship makes the American college football player one of the most
underpaid workers anywhere.
To illustrate this point and several others I
have made and will make I would like to relate the following personal
experience. It was from UNC, but it is not intended as an indictment of the UNC
football program in particular. UNC happens to be the only university I have
been associated with. We have professors here who can relate similar experiences
from other universities.
Hell
in the Spring
In the spring of 1971, I was a graduate
instructor of economic principles at UNC, Chapel Hill. I discovered that I had
six varsity football players in my class when I received a note from the
football academic counselor asking for a report on their grades. My first
reaction was one of pleasant surprise that the coaching staff included one
person whose job it was to supervise the players in their studies. We had just
given the second major test of the semester. All six of the players had passed
the first one. The second, if the overall results are any indication, was no
more difficult than the first, but the highest grade among the six football
players was a rather generous 46. What had happened between the first and the
second tests? Spring football practice had begun.
Five of the players were in one section and one,
a very personable and intelligent all-conference linebacker, was in another. I
first asked the group of five to stay after class and discuss their problems
with me. This they eagerly did. I realize that any description of hardship in
spring practice is likely to have been somewhat exaggerated for my benefit so
that I might treat them with leniency at grade time. However, the tales that
they told could hardly have been made up on the spot, and they were given added
credibility by the deterioration in their classroom performance and by their
rather haggard appearance.
They told of practice sessions that dragged on
for hours; sessions that were so demanding that the
players could hardly make it off the field at the conclusion. Their appearance
as much as their words spoke of an almost unbearable fatigue, a fatigue so
great that a player would often flop into bed fully clothed after the evening
meal and sleep until morning, that is, when he was not required to go down to
the field house and view movies. Study under these circumstances was out of the
question. I asked them why they didn't quit a sport that was so clearly
detrimental to their physical well-being. They were
unanimous in saying that it was because they didn't want to disappoint the
folks back home, although one of them, one of the team's best players, did
later disappoint the people in Wilson and quit.
The most dramatic and detailed account of the
evils of big-time college football was to come later in a session with the all star linebacker which lasted for more than an hour.
Practice conditions as he described them were almost unspeakable, but he was
most touching when he talked of his life in general as a college football
player, of how he had always loved the game and how he had dreamed of being the
college standout that he had become. But the great gulf between the romantic
ideal and the grimy reality was almost too much for him to take. What looked
from the outside like a dream had, for him, turned into a nightmare. With all
the practice, pre-season practice, game practice, spring practice, and
off-season weight training and conditioning, he had little time left over for
anything else. All those "special privileges" that football players
get, a separate dorm, separate eating facilities and a special high-protein
diet, tutors when they need it, slide courses, etc. served only to accentuate
the difference between himself and the other students who regarded him and his
teammates not altogether undeservedly he thought like some kind of freak or
animal. In fact, he repeated to me almost verbatim without a trace of humor in
his voice the words of a cartoon I once saw: One football player to another:
"This is a nice college. When my playing days
are over I think I'd like to come to school here."
The only difference between his words and that
of the cartoon was his added remark that when he returned he would like to use
his spare time to write an expose of the football program. By that time I was
convinced it would be a bestseller.
Mindful of the academic chain of command and my
lowly place in it, I went to the professor who was the lecturer in charge of
the course and told him of our problem with the football players. I suggested
that our efforts were being undermined by the football
program and that through the dean of the school of business we should
register a complaint. He responded to the effect that I was evidently unaware
of where power lay in the institution, and that was the end of that. (Actually,
it was not the end of my efforts to do something about the matter, but, in the
interests of time and not wanting to appear to be trying to puff myself up, I
did not tell the audience about what I did next. Recalling the student journalist
who had just written what for the time was a daring article about the
homosexual hangouts in Chapel Hill for the Daily Tar Heel, I sought him out and
told him what I had learned about the savagery of football on campus and
offered to put him in touch with my students. He showed little interest and
declined the offer. At that point, I gave up.)
Tragedy
Strikes
On a hot, muggy August afternoon that same year,
while doing end-of-practice wind sprints, wearing full football gear, including
a helmet, a fine, handsome young offensive guard for the Tar Heels by the name
of Bill Arnold collapsed from a heat stroke. He hung on for about a week and
then died.
A faculty committee was soon appointed to
investigate the death. They rendered a report that proposed stricter medical
supervision of football practice, more frequent water breaks, etc., but they
absolved the coaching staff of all responsibility in the unfortunate
occurrence. Once again, that was the end of that...I thought.
About a week later, on a Sunday afternoon, as I
was on my way up to the campus to do some work, I heard on the car radio that a
group who called themselves something like "The Committee of Concerned
Athletes" was getting ready to give a news conference at the student
union. No more details were given. My curiosity aroused, I hustled up to the
union and joined a small audience of about 20 people, mainly reporters. Eleven UNC students, all former football players, sat at the front
of the room. Their leader and chief spokesman was Bill Richardson, the
defensive captain of the previous year's team who had used up his eligibility.
Not one of my six students was among them. One of the committee passed out a
mimeographed statement several pages thick which
attacked the faculty committee report as a whitewash. Then, one by one, the
eleven former players told their own stories of what had happened to them in
the football program and what they had seen done to others. To me it was mainly
a familiar tale by that time, except for some rather graphic descriptions of
"running off" techniques and accusations of several of having been
forced to play while injured.
As you might expect, the news conference caused
a mild sensation, but a good deal more mild than you might expect. The
sportswriters either studiously ignored the whole matter or tended to take the
side of the coaches without dealing with the substance of the charges. It is
interesting in this age of Woodward and Bernstein that investigative reporting
among sportswriters remains virtually nonexistent. Every one of the writers
that I mentioned at the beginning is a former athlete, not a professional
sportswriter. When Professor Finney begins his dictatorship he will need a
compliant press. I suggest that he jail all regular reporters and turn the
papers over to the sportswriters. (See how naive I was. Now I know that that
would not be necessary.)
The faculty stuck by their report. The coaching
staff denied all the charges, and, admittedly, they were almost impossible to
prove. What the eleven "malcontents and quitters," as they were
called by the football people, most hoped for failed to occur. None of the
members of the football team defected to their ranks. In fact, several, in most
manly fashion, shaved their heads clean as a sign of support for the program,
and the tradition continues even today.
A week or so later, in an attempt to salvage a losing
cause, Richardson scheduled a bigger, better-
publicized news conference. As the meeting began some of you may have seen it
on Channel 11 in Durham with TV cameras whirring the head football coach
arrived from the practice field with the whole team in tow, all in full
football armor. An ugly confrontation occurred. I got there a little late this
time and watched with amazement as 60 or so players, looking stern and
formidable, clattered in their spiked shoes down the steps of the union. One of
them, bald-headed and mammoth, I barely recognized as one of my students who
had complained most woefully about practice conditions. I had time only to
splutter out, "What are you doing here?" He mumbled something like,
"Gotta have a winning season," and rushed out
with the others.
Ours not to ask the reason,
Ours to have a winning season.
The Heels did have a winning record that year,
and hardly anyone noticed when a senior on that team, a journalism major who
had held his tongue and played with the others through the successful season,
published a series of articles in his hometown Winston-Salem Journal. The articles vouched for almost everything
the dissident 11 had said, but by then it was old news, and everyone was more
interested in reading about basketball. That, finally, was the end of that.
I would like to reiterate at this point that I
do not intend to single out the football program at UNC for condemnation.
Everyone knows that football is emphasized much more at some other schools in
the country. From what I have heard, too, practice sessions at Carolina have
become much more reasonable. In fact, I read in the paper not too long ago that
the embittered, articulate former all-conference linebacker had, indeed,
returned to UNC, but not to write an expose. He had taken a job as assistant
football coach.
Sometimes I read other things that give me a
real feeling of deja vu. Such a time was late this
summer during the drought when the citizens of Chapel Hill were forbidden,
under penalty of law, to do such things as wash their cars, and restaurants had
stopped serving water with meals. The athletic department was caught not once
but twice watering the football practice field at 4:00 in the morning. They had
some rationalizations for their anti-social and illegal behavior, but they did
not compare to the ones the University had produced a few days earlier. This is
from the Raleigh News and Observer,
August 20, 1976.
|
CHAPEL
HILL University of North Carolina (UNC) officials Thursday said students
returning to dormitories here next week face cold showers, even after
physical education classes unless they play for UNC's football team. The no-hot-water policy was adopted, officials
said, because several gallons of cold water normally flow through spigots and
showerheads before tap water gets hot. Asked specifically if hot water would be
available to football players preparing for the fall season, [Vice Chancellor
Claiborne S.] Jones said, "We will not cut off hot water in Kenan Field House, and this is on the advice of our
sports medicine director. "A great many medical authorities have
said that without hot water there is a great chance of a streptococcal skin
infection which we cannot risk for our athletes, or any of our
students," he said. However, another conservation measure
announced earlier in the week was a complete cutoff of showers in Woollen Gym and Carmichael Auditorium, where university
physical education classes are held. Jones was asked how, with hot water turned off
in dormitories and no gymnasium showers available, students who did not play
football were expected to avoid streptococcal skin infections. "The scientific studies that our sports
medicine director has available," Jones replied, "indicate that
these streptococcal skin infections are related to the kind of activity that
is related to intercollegiate athletic programs and not to any other type of
activity." |
What makes grown men in responsible positions
talk this way? You might as well ask why the N.C. State coach had one of his
own professors arrested as a suspected football spy, or why those disgruntled
fans in Tennessee sent a moving van to Coach Battle's house (unrequested by
Coach Battle), or why those people send threatening letters to Howard Cosell
when he slights their team on Monday night highlights. Why do apparent adults
drive around with the scores of football games on their cars?
America's
Game
It's all part of the larger lunacy of football
in America. If Rollerball is the game for the future, football is the game for
now. Even without its violence and its militaristic overtones (long bomb,
blitz, ground attack, air attack, trenches) it is the perfect contemporary
game. Like Exxon and General Motors it is a big business. The two-year ABC TV
contract alone is worth $16 million for participating schools. Playing in a
bowl game is worth, on the average, $300,000 to a school and its conference.
But more particularly, football is the perfect
game for the over-specialized, alienated society. As life becomes more and more
compartmentalized: live here, work there, find recreation somewhere else; as we
become more and more sealed off from each other, age group from age group,
social class from social class, car from car, department from department,
football provides the perfect example of the over-specialized sport. The sport
has offensive specialists, defensive specialists, passing specialists, running specialists,
pass-catching specialists, blocking specialists, tackling specialists, even
something called special-teams specialists. No one player is any more a master
of the entire sport than any one worker is master of the production of an
automobile.
Football rules change and specialists
change, but the one immutable specialist is the spectator, the inveterate
watcher of football. Football rounds out a life made dull and purposeless by
the same kind of system that produces football. With work robbed of its meaning
as expertise and power become ever more concentrated at the top, the only means
of fulfillment left is in consumption. Football is the ultimate in sport as a
consumer good. No one can produce it for himself.
Like most consumer goods it comes in a wide
variety of packages to fit a variety of budgets. At one end of the spectrum is
TV consumption for the working class beer drinker. At the other end is the
conspicuous consumption that one can partake of by belonging to one of the
college booster clubs. For $1,000 or more a year, one can buy, among other
things, the privilege of parking for games close enough to the field house to
smell the sweat. Just as the Exxon men claim to be only meeting the demands of
consumers, so, too, do the producers of football.
The real problem is with these people who have
little capacity for enjoyment except through the exploits of others, soap opera
characters, Hollywood stars, football teams. Increasingly, that is all of us.
Quoting Eric Hoffer: "The less
justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he
is to claim excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy
cause."
He might have added, "His football
team."
The corporate technological society has, step by
step, taken away the creative ability of the individual and robbed him of his
right to claim excellence for himself. Football and its friends are now rapidly
taking away recreation and family fellowship. Thanksgiving,
New Years, and, most recently, Christmas have been consumed. Pretty soon
it won't matter because no one will remember what we did together during those
occasions, anyway, and no one will have any resources of his own left to be
taken over.
In conclusion, maybe in our inquiry into the
phenomenon of football we have stumbled onto the real reason for the
difficulties of small, liberal arts colleges. Liberal arts stand for the
cultivation of the whole man. Such an endeavor runs counter to the current in
modern society
.
But as long as there are still institutions that
truly attempt to cultivate wisdom and courage through Christian education there
is still some hope. Maybe there is also some hope for the Greek ideal in
athletics in which, according to Jacques Ellul,
"physical exercise was an ethic for developing the human body" as
opposed to the Roman concept of sports as a "technique for increasing the
legionnaire's efficiency." Maybe as long as there are students who will
attend institutions like Wesleyan, if you will, there are still people who are
not content to take their recreation ready-made, or to have their identity defined
by the automobile they drive or the football team they support. Maybe there is
hope for us yet before the final whistle sounds.
(End earlier article)
Why
the Difference?
The similarities
should be clear enough, but how can we account for the different outcomes, the
Ňmiracle in Maryland,Ó if you will?
For one, the overall
societal attitude toward football has changed to a degree. The dangers of the sport and the
abusiveness of some football coaches tend not to be as widely tolerated. The sports writers are not so completely
in the hip pockets of the folks making the big bucks from the sport, as
evidenced by that ESPN article.
They still have a long way to go, though, as evidenced by the fact that
it took more than two months for anything like that to be written, and it
didnŐt come out of the locally powerful Washington Post. As far as the latter was concerned, what
looks very much like a case of negligent homicide was no big deal. It was no big deal with all the major
news organs in North Carolina in 1971, though.
The reaction of the two student bodies also
appears to have been different. As
we saw, the disgruntled former players were able to gain no traction with their
fellow students.
The university leadership took different stances
in the two cases. One canŐt help
but believe that it was the public pressure, heavily influenced by that ESPN
expos, that made the difference.
President Loh signaled his displeasure that
the BoardŐs decision to reinstate Coach Durkin as soon as they did it, and then
the governor followed his lead.
Nothing like that happened in North Carolina.
The family of the victim took a much stronger
adversarial position to the university in the Maryland case. I donŐt recall ArnoldŐs family enlisting
a law firm, calling for Coach Dooley to be fired, or saying that they felt that
they had been punched in the stomach when the whitewash results were announced,
all of which the McNair parents did.
Also, the athletic department is simply more
dominant at UNC than it is at Maryland, although its dominance and its
corruption has long been more a basketball thing, as we have seen with its
largely covered up and excused massive academic scandal. After all, the way Coach Charles ŇLeftyÓ
Driesell reacted to Len BiasŐs drug overdose death at
Maryland cost him his job. ItŐs
hard to imagine that something like that would have gotten Dean Smith or Roy
Williams sacked.
That raises the real cynicŐs question. Did the fact that Durkin had a losing
record ultimately seal his fate?
Perish the thought, but I must say that that was my main reason for
believing that his goose was cooked as soon as I heard about the death. Coach Dooley had a winning record,
although he was no Dean Smith in that regard.
Finally, there is the racial angle. Bill Arnold was white and Jordan McNair
was black. A black suffering at the
hands of corrupt (white) authority has a natural constituency who will come to
his defense, which a white person usually lacks. Bill Arnold had no large group of people
who would come to speak up for him.
College Sports and Sex
Slavery
ItŐs a modern day form of
slavery,
With wealth made on unpaid
backs.
Enriching a privileged few,
While fairness falls through
the cracks.
But the players arenŐt forced
to do it,
One of my critics frowns.
No, Ňseduced is a better word
for it,
With the pimps wearing caps
and gowns.
David Martin
November 6, 2018
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