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BOOK EXCERPT
�Declining by Degrees�
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From �AMERICA�S MODERN PECULIAR INSTITUTION�
by Frank Deford
... The first college baseball game was between Amherst and Williams in 1859. Amherst won. Williams immediately protested that Amherst had used a ringer, the hefty town blacksmith.
The first college football game was held in 1869 between Princeton, my alma mater, and Rutgers. Later that very fall, the Princeton faculty demanded that the third game must be cancelled because football was already diverting the student body from scholarship and religion. It was, however, only a brief setback in the ascent of the charm of college sports. Soon the annual Princeton-Yale football game, held in New York over the new Thanksgiving holiday, was such a smash that the whores in town wore orange-and-black or blue-and white garments to best attract their gridiron clientele.
But then, more recently the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has taught us, with its television contracts, that prostitution comes in many guises.
Of course, sport is good for you and not necessarily antithetical to learning. Hey, Plato wrestled. And, like the ancient Greeks, many distinguished Americans have been successful at athletic and academic pursuits alike. It is certainly not an either/or proposition. But whereas sport-as-exercise has every right to exist in education�especially at a time when so many of our children are growing up overweight�sport as- entertainment only creates problems for the institutions whose names are appropriated for use on the fronts of uniforms.
It is fashionable, of course, to defend college sports by suggesting that they are a healthy outlet, both for those who play and those who watch. School spirit! Among other things, this rationale allows many universities to levy, in effect, a sports tax on the whole student body. These fees, which bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the university, essentially subsidize sports. In a very real sense, lowly students are obliged to directly underwrite the scholarships of the so-called student athletes. ...
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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