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MEET THE EXPERTS
KAY M.
MCCLENNEY
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FRANK
DEFORD
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GEORGE
KUH
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LARA K.
COUTURIER
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LEE
SHULMAN
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PATRICK M.
CALLAN
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RICHARD H.
HERSH
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FRANK DEFORD
Senior Writer, Sports Illustrated
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A few more interesting comments from Frank Deford, excerpted from his interview.
Q: Does it shock you when a basketball player says he spends 80 percent of his time on basketball?
DEFORD: Sure. I mean, obviously coaches are always referring to student athletes as opposed to players. Coaches always talk about their high graduation rate, how they cite the few student athletes that they have who really are students and so forth and so on. So part of that is, I think, a sense of denial on the part of the coaches. And part of it is simply good public relations.
Q: One athlete said people have been asking for autographs since he was in junior high, professors asking for autographs.
DEFORD: Well, we've heard so often that some of the worst let's call them "enablers" of athletes are professors who love sports. I mean, the system wouldn't work unless there were a certain number of professors who are prepared to be the bobos, the ones that are going to get the kids by. Go to Professor Jones's course. Take that. Professors who don't mind throwing away their own dignity and passing athletes along. So professors are very much a part of the problem.
Q: Basketball team's going to be on the road, three days a week during the season. So the professor says, "Okay, you can do it by e-mail. Is that compromising. I mean, why?
DEFORD: I can understand professors or teachers at the high school level where kids have road games and away games and have to leave. I think that those kinds of concessions are perfectly fair. It's unfortunate, though, that so many games are scheduled in the middle of the week. Nobody sits down and says, "You know, we really shouldn't have that many games being played on Wednesday." Now they're playing football games on Tuesday night so that they can get on ESPN. So we go back to the beginning, nobody says it's bad to have games scheduled in the middle of the week, or so many games scheduled. But once that's been in place, I can understand why some professors � all professors, as a matter of fact � should be somewhat understanding of the players, of the demands on them.
Q: What's the root cause?
DEFORD: Well, the root cause is that you allow games to be played in the middle of the week. That you have long road trips for athletes. That you don't just play, if you're a football team, you don't play somebody in the next state, you cross the country. Which means that you have to allow for a time zone lag, jet lag. So you have to take two or three days out of classes instead of one. I mean, to go back to the halcyon days, I remember student athletes would go to class on Saturday morning and play the football game on Saturday afternoon. The idea that anybody would even go to class now the day before a game would strike most people as absolutely ludicrous.
Q: Sports revenue ....
DEFORD: I'm thinkin' about the sports that make revenue, and therefore become very important to the budget. Those other sports should be treated in an entirely different fashion. That's what's so ridiculous about the NCAA , to suggest that lacrosse players and football players are the same animal is absolutely insane. It makes no sense whatsoever. Now, I believe this, too. I believe that none of the sports outside of football and basketball should receive athletic scholarships. Athletic scholarships are the bane of the system, because they give extraordinary power, the power of the purse, to all these coaches and athletic directors.
Q: How so?
DEFORD: Play for the team or you're going to lose your scholarship. We own you. You're here because you have a scholarship to play lacrosse, to wrestle, to play volleyball, whatever it is. And so that, ipso facto, makes athletics more important than academics the minute that that kid walks into the school. You don't give extra- curricular scholarships to anything but athletes. Why should a tennis player get a scholarship, but a piano player shouldn't? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, except that the athletic department has somehow created this entire, wonderful system where they get all the money, they own the students and they have extraordinary power over them.
Q:From the point of view of the marketplace, which athletes should be getting scholarships?
DEFORD: Wrestlers, volleyball players, even baseball players don't bring any revenue into the system, so there's no justification, then, for them getting scholarships. You give basketball players and football players scholarships. You, in fact, give them time, if not indeed money, so that they will play well and produce revenue for the university. And then all the other teams can be funded. So there's a justification, I think, for that � an economic justification for giving basketball players and football players scholarships. But there's no justification economically for giving any other athletic scholarships, unless you're going to give other extra-curricular students the same kind of bonus.
Q: So basketball and football are just big time business?
DEFORD: It's just business. So you can understand why they get scholarships. I think, as a matter of fact, they're underpaid. They not only should get scholarships, but they should get stipends, or let's call it salaries. They are workers. They work for the university, no less than the guy who cleans up the stadium, no less than the professor, no less than anybody who's on the payroll. Why shouldn't they get money as well as everybody else?
Q: What does this have to do with the purposes of a university?
DEFORD: Nothing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with education. What it has to do ..is something that's grown up ... a goiter on the educational system, which is very, very visible but absolutely serves no purpose, educationally. I think that you can make an argument that intramural athletes, people playing and doing healthy things, whether it's just playing flag football or lifting weights or cross-country running, or anything of that nature, I think you could argue that that is very, very important for the whole person. This goes back to Plato and a sound mind in a sound body. But to pay 100 players to go out on Saturday afternoon and play a game makes no sense whatsoever. It would be the same way as if you only gave attention and scholarships to the brightest students whatsoever. That nobody else was allowed to take philosophy courses except for them.
Q: We all read about the scandals in big time sports, what do you make of them?
DEFORD: I think that you shouldn't look at it from the point of view of the one, the two scandals that become so visible that we can't ignore. I think it's the system that is corrupt insofar as it's part of education. And therefore, you have to look at the whole system. Is the system bad? Many of the things that go on in college athletics are perfectly legal. It's perfectly all right for a coach to make $2 million a year, and the president of the university to make only a few hundred thousand, and professors to make only a hundred thousand. So there's nothing illegal about that. The question is, is it right, is it moral, is it ethical, and does it help education? That's the question to be asked. Sure, these scandals that pop up every now and then have to be dealt with individually. But it's the whole rotten ship that's afloat that we have to consider.
Q: Rotten ship being big time sports?
DEFORD: Rotten ship being big time sports that floats down this river of education and its wake swamps everything in its path.
Q: Can the problem of college sports be solved?
DEFORD: Well, I don't think a lot of it can be solved. Because I think that there is simply too much in place. And maybe I'm a cynic. But first of all, you have all this real estate. You have these extraordinary millions, billions of dollars that have been placed into the stadiums and arenas. So those, by themselves, argue that we've got to have teams to go into them. The system has been built up so in the United States that it's really sort of part of our DNA now. We kind of accept it. And to all of a sudden turn around and tell the people in the good state of Oklahoma or Alabama that we're cutting back on your football team, you could no more do that than take sex out of movies. People wouldn't tolerate it. It would be like saying, "You can only watch television one hour a week, you people in Alabama."
Q: You wrote that the lure of athletic scholarships is more damaging than the reality. How so?
DEFORD: I think we have a situation in this country now where so much has been heard about athletic scholarships that parents start trying to direct their children into a course of sports which is designed to win them an athletic scholarship. That becomes a prime goal of many parents in this country. And first of all, what it does is, it makes young children concentrate on athletics at far too early an age. And not only concentrate on athletics, but often concentrate on one particular sport. A white suburban parent will say, "Don't play football. You're never going to get a football scholarship, it's too hard to get. Those black kids are going to dominant football. I want you to play lacrosse. You've got a chance there, to get a lacrosse scholarship." So you not only have kids who are taught to concentrate on athletics, but even to concentrate on a particular sport at a very, very early age. And so this lure, this dream, of the athletic scholarship is absolutely poisoning the whole athletic, the whole educational system from a very early age.
Q: When we were kids, there were a lot of three sport athletes �
DEFORD: The ideal used to be the guy who wore the varsity sweater all year long. He played football, then he would star on the basketball team. Then he would be the baseball star. And not only that, he would go out and run track between innings of the baseball game. That was the early American sports hero. And now, you're forced to play a sport from an early age. And among other things we're finding out is that it injures kids. Because to, say, throw a baseball from the time you're eight years old, to the exclusion of any other muscular activity, is liable to damage an unformed arm. So it not only hurts you from a social point of view, it not only hurts you from an educational point of view, it might, ironically, damage you as an athlete along the way, too. |
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