image: victorfosterono
By David Roth
Big-time college football is home to enough small grossnesses that fans barely notice them anymore. Actually, small may not be the right word for these thousands of legalistic elisions and micro-oversights and case-specific ethical lapses. The millions in tax dollars paid to coaches and assistant coaches and athletic directors for knowing the most effective of those oversights and lapses make them more abstract and farther reaching than the particulars of any isolated incident. Public employee salaries do kick up some froth from the ever-seething Don’t Tread On Me caucus, but whether it’s that set’s genuflective reflex towards people making that kind of money or something else, complaints about those particular salaries are most often seen in poignantly cheesedicked unsigned newspaper editorials, and not seen often even there. It’s all strange, but if you care about college football you have already gotten used to it.
The massiveness of those uglinesses makes them abstract, and thus has the odd effect of turning what are actually smaller – or at least more specific – offenses into the greater grossnesses, at least in terms of how long they persist in public memory. All these queasy hiccupps are symptomatic, but they fit more easily in memories and news cycles than the abstractions of what is actually the larger rot. Those broader scummeries periodically lead to specific outrages like the University of Washington ignoring any number of awful things to keep a rapey menace like Jerramy Stevens out of jail for three terrifying years, or the University of Miami’s signature inability to notice while a creepy booster named Nevin Shapiro funded eight years worth of hookers-on-boats for football players. Those are what we remember long after we go back to forgetting all the endemic uglinesses that make these sexier mini-outrages not just possible, but constant.
Though I think the general argument here is “right,” I think there’s a glaring hole, or at least a glaring lack of explanation, regarding how exactly the ”college football discourse” is any more or less able or willing to handle the discussion that will pop up surrounding the Sandusky case than that of any other sport. When college football gets back to talking about “that College Gameday shit” — which it obviously will, probably as early as this Saturday — how, exactly, will that be any different (or worse) than what is happening in the discourse right now surrounding, say, the NBA. The NBA is a league made up mostly of men who grew up in environments that exposed them to violence and ways of dealing with problems that no kid should have to experience, and many of those same men have trouble leaving that past behind them, whether in mindset or in who they surround themselves with. And while the NBA discourse — both its huffy blowhards like Whitlock and Plaschke and its very brilliant lesser knowns — obsesses over the NBA lockout, the sport just had a player arrested for allegedly murdering an innocent woman, the same player who less than a year earlier had absurdly challenged a teammate to an actual dual with guns that both had brought into an NBA arena. The incident illustrates a problem that is largely endemic of the NBA, and yet the discourse has moved on, if it ever stopped to discuss the issue (again) in the first place. This dynamic — reconciling what we, as sports fans or journalists, spend our time discussing — is something that plays out regardless of the sport, and if our focus is being diverted to the wrong places, then it’s the larger community as a whole that is arguably failing. The Classical, I assume, is an attempt to reconcile that, but it doesn’t start by being unnecessarily preachy while still also failing to acknowledge the wider picture.
(Source: classicaldotorg)
