Good Sports
ROSE, MATTHEW
Good Sports What college athletics does for us— and what it doesn’t. BY MATTHEW ROS High-minded boosters of college athletics in America like to quote the Duke of Wellington—"The Battle of...
...Its events aren't cost-efficient, and its employees aren't what they could be...
...But for those iron-willed enough to survive a full data-assault, a startling picture appears...
...One of the many suspicions Shulman and Bowen confirm is that a unique ethos—a "jock culture"—has been institutionalized on campuses and has disturbingly changed the image of the student-athlete: "Those who play college sports have different expectations from the time that they entered college, different priorities in the classroom, and different views as alumni of what the priorities of college should be...
...and what type of people they become...
...In 1951, male athletes averaged 36 points lower on the SAT than their classmates...
...Other myths are similarly exposed...
...You will never do anything so important in your life again," a coach told his players, just before World War II began...
...Shulman and Bowen's most striking findings involve the liberal arts colleges and elite universities that are supposed to be redoubts for serious student-athletes...
...Injecting some much-needed data into the charged anecdotes, colorful histories, and overheated loyalties of college athletics, Shulman and Bowen study the lives of athletes from the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s at thirty-two institutions, including large public universities, Ivy League Schools, private universities, and liberal-arts colleges...
...It's not true, for example, that an athlete is more likely to assume public or private leadership roles (except in sports clubs and youth athletic groups such as Little League...
...Intercollegiate athletics is a shoddily run enterprise...
...Shulman and Bowen first coolly disprove the prevailing rationales used by advocates of college sports...
...One place to begin deciding is with The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values by James Shul-man and William Bowen...
...So what role do sports really play on campuses...
...They have little interest in the not-for-profit sector and report low interest in research, the arts, the clergy, writing or doing doctoral work...
...By 1986 the gap had widened to 118...
...Varsity athletes form 40 percent of the men at Williams College, but only 3 percent at Michigan—which one is the hearty jock-school again...
...Being well off financially" is deemed important by more athletes than non-athletes, and ex-athletes flock to the financial services after graduation...
...It's not a connection of geometric necessity...
...During the 1950s, male athletes were fairly indistinguishable from their classmates...
...Shulman and Bowen know this...
...Of course, college sports has never been a model of perfect sanity or thoughtful moderation...
...Their goal is to see what role sports play both in college and beyond...
...If athletics at the University of Michigan remains in the red after its football squad hauled in 111,000 fans per game, then there's not much hope for Bryn Mawr...
...Sure, Bill Bradley was a varsity athlete at Princeton, but so was the parent-murderer Lyle Menendez, and the athletes being groomed by major college programs for professional basketball and football seem to have launched in recent years a concerted effort to embarrass their schools...
...All sports programs lose money...
...Their method is plodding (for each issue, a regression analysis), and their prose is nearly unbearable (for each adjective, a pair of quotation marks...
...But, hidden underneath, there remains in college sports something about virtue that is still worth learning...
...Still, the belief that athletics are the training ground for the game of life remains a much-hallowed one in America, where our definition of "well-rounded" would exclude Leonardo da Vinci for want of a slap-shot...
...Nor is it the case that athletes are more financially committed to the school as alumni (athletes don't give much more money, and what money is given is often earmarked for athletics...
...But today's small-college athlete isn't what he used to be...
...A football player at Williams in 1951 was a typical Williams student, with a little extra giddy-up...
...The director of admissions at Amherst College explains, "Here we are with 400 slots and I'm not just looking for a football player or a linebacker with scores that are acceptable, I'm looking for a left outside linebacker who can blitz...
...they were admitted on the same criteria, performed just as well academically, and had a wide variety of intellectual interests...
...Gentleman, you are about to play for Yale against Harvard in football...
...Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency White House meeting to discuss the situation after the 1905 football season resulted in the deaths of eighteen undergraduates...
...The Game of Life shows that both male and female athletes at all levels are outperformed by other students...
...Are athletic skills transferable into social virtues, or should we think of college athletes as (to quote William Faulkner) a collection of A Division III All-American football player at Wabash College in 1998, Matthew Rose is an editorial assistant at First Things...
...BY MATTHEW ROS High-minded boosters of college athletics in America like to quote the Duke of Wellington—"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"—leaving the rest of us to connect Eton with Florida State and Waterloo with, well, jobs in politics and modern corporations...
...Indeed, that's only half the dismal story of college athletics today...
...If you want to go to college today, it's better to be good in the paint than good with paint, better a second-string goalie than a second-chair trombone...
...The quaint image of the small college athlete as a pencil-necked scholar blessed with an above-average jump-shot proves misleading...
...They begin The Game of Life by admitting that they cannot battle "the power of myths," which is wisely to concede what we all intuitively know...
...It's the ectomorphic kids of Swarthmore, and not their corn-fed cousins at Iowa, who have 32 percent of the places in their class reserved for athletes only...
...Athletes at all levels have fewer and less rewarding relations with professors than non-athletes do...
...what type of students athletes are...
...The biggest myth of all—that athletic revenue amply bankrolls other programs—is revealed to be sheer buncombe...
...Their academic tastes incline heavily towards the social sciences—particularly political science and economics—and away from the humanities...
...Speaker Denny Hastert, for example, is a true believer in sports: "A lot of what I do as speaker of the house is just my old wrestling-coach philosophy...
...quarter-wits, half-wits and three-quarter wits...
...But there is nonetheless something about college athletics that needs to be affirmed—and the techniques of social scientists are not able to discover exactly what that is...
...Aggressive athletic recruitment also fails to strengthen the socioeconomic or racial diversity of student bodies (subtract black male athletes from the student body and black enrollment decreases a paltry 1 percent...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 23
