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For a while, I was keeping a clip file of crime and
court reports involving athletes at every level from high
school to professional. Once enough material had
accumulated about duct-tape rapists and homicidal
ball-carriers, I'd write a column about how it's true that
Sports builds character
-- it's just that the
resulting character
isn't what we usually mean by
the word.
That didn't seem quite fair, though, so I abandoned that project for another: Repeal the Sports Taxes. Most prominent are the levies for stadiums, of course, but I also wondered how much other tax money goes to subsidize athletics.
Plus, there are exactions that aren't exactly taxes, but might as well be. For instance, Qwest gives money to the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics, in exchange for being able to display the five interlocked rings.
If I had a choice in this matter, I'd rather do business with a company that invested in improving its service, rather than in associating itself with bribery and prostitution. But I don't have a choice -- so this is essentially a tax.
Likewise, I never watch any of the dozen or so ESPN signals that arrive on my satellite dish. I'd rather not pay for them -- but when I inquired, I was told that various linkages with other portions of the Cute Rodent Empire (ABC, Disney Channel, etc.) meant that I was stuck paying for ESPN. It's not exactly a tax, but it's close enough.
However, that project is still in process -- it will take a lot more research to determine just how much money we're forced to pay to continue to support millionaire athletes and billionaire team owners in the style to which they have become accustomed.
There's a related project I never started, or even thought about. But I'm glad the Post has looked into Colorado's open-enrollment policy and its effect on high-school sports. It turns out that some schools are building athletic dynasties by attracting stellar athletes who would normally attend other schools -- sometimes more than 100 miles away.
In ways, it appears that we hold student-athletes to a different standard, and perhaps an unfair one. If a bright math student needs calculus classes that aren't available at one high school, but are offered in a nearby school, no one would blame her for transferring.
But if a talented athlete wants to further her skills with better coaching and a tougher level of competition, it's different. Why is that so?
One reason is that high-school athletes are often told
that they're representing the community.
They can't
be very representative of the community if they're not part
of the community, and are instead commuting only to be on a
given school's team.
Another reason is that competitive sports are supposed
to teach certain virtues, like sacrificing your individual
preferences for the good of the team. You know, the cliche
that There is no I in teamwork,
as with the hitter
who'd prefer to swing for the fences but instead lays down
a sacrifice bunt.
But here you have elite athletes pursuing what is best for their personal records, rather than participating as a member of their team of residence.
This process seems to belie the entire rationale for competitive high-school sports, so why does it happen?
The athletes say they want to win scholarships to college, which means developing their skills and playing on winning teams that get noticed by scouts.
Can we blame the colleges, then? In my ideal world, colleges would be academic institutions, not places where instructors have been fired if they give an honest failing grade to an athletic star.
But in the world we live in, many colleges deem it important to field competitive teams, and that means recruiting athletes.
Why do the colleges want competitive teams? It makes them visible in the media, and they can pick up some money along the way. Their games are on television because enough people want to watch them so that sponsors pay for advertising. The reports are in the newspaper because people are interested in the games.
And if one newspaper suffered from an attack of virtue and halted the process of making celebrities out of teen-aged athletes, its circulation would drop while its competitor's grew.
One way out of this mess: Congress could pass a law denying all federal funds to any college that gives athletic scholarships -- but that's not going to happen so long as this nation is remotely democratic.
Thus, many talented high-school athletes have every incentive to abandon their teammates and their home towns -- all as part of a program that was supposed to instill the virtues of teamwork and self-sacrifice and learning how to represent a community.
You can't really blame them. But you can wonder why we've set up such a bizarre system.
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