In Earch of Heroes

Do our children realize that it’s more important to be right than Rookie of the Year?

When sports researcher Robert Goldman polled 198 world class athletes, he asked, “Would you take a pill that would guarantee a gold medal even if you knew that it would kill you in five years?” More than half agreed they would.

Where have all the heroes gone? Earlier in this century we had heroes galore—Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, to say nothing of lesser heroes who reigned from season to season among the stars on the local college teams. At the age of eight, I tried to swing my bat like Babe Ruth and peeled tar from the paving blocks in front of our home for a wad to chew on (tobacco would stunt my growth!).

No doubt we idolized our heroes. No doubt their halos shone more brightly because their enhanced description was passed to us secondhand rather than being instantly relayed in the all-revealing light of a television camera. But in my wildest imagination I cannot conceive of Red Grange or Lou Gehrig agreeing to sell out his team for money. Or even Jack Dempsey (no paragon of virtue) agreeing to hold back so his opponent could win. Of course, tragic scandals marred those days, too. The “Black Sox” agreed to lose the 1919 World Series and were barred from playing for the rest of their lives. But that was highly unusual.

Just now I have finished reading through several hundred sports columns in newspapers and magazines, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Sports Illustrated to Harper’s to Psychology Today to the local scandal sheet.

How the mighty are fallen!

• “Hot Rod” Williams and his teammates at Tulane University are charged with shaving points to aid gamblers in predicting the outcome of games.

• Winning U.S. Olympic teams, including seven cyclists, use blood doping (euphemistically labeled “blood boosting”) to improve their endurance.

• Harold Solomon, former president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, reports that illegal under-the-table payments running as high as $100,000 are being paid to top tournament players; he characterized professional tennis as a “dirty little business.”

While he was executive vice-president of the California Angels, Buzzie Bavasi lamented, “I’ve been in the game for forty-three years and can’t remember anything on this scale.” And sportscaster Howard Cosell writes: “Sports have become but a murky blur in a morass of hypocrisy, corruption, and deceit.” Should we be surprised that the president of Southern Methodist University is fired because he reported athletic violations at his own school?

Why The Change?

Why do we face such a dearth of heroes?

Some point to the news media. Formerly sports-writers were sports fans who tended to build up the public image of heroes. They still do. But the gossip column has spread to the sports page. So heroes dissolve into ordinary mortals. Sports Illustrated quotes high school senior Adam Eliot: “I don’t really see them as heroes.” And Matthew McGuire, 13, of Webster Grove, Missouri, adds, “All that stuff has sort of taken the glory away.… I’m not interested in collecting baseball cards anymore.”

(Fortunately, a more thorough and realistic knowledge of sport figures reminds us that physical brawn and fast reflexes do not necessarily make a person good.)

Drugs, too, have changed the picture. Today the topflight athlete has a wholly new repertoire of illegal and potentially devastating drugs that have been proved to give a momentary advantage in the world of sports.

Others think the most significant change is “big bucks.” But professional athletics has always been big business as well as sports and entertainment. Holding out for a salary of $40 thousand is not essentially different from holding out for $1 million 40 thousand.

The real difference lies deeper. As Harry Edwards, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, observes: “Sports is only the most visible manifestation of the voracity that characterizes all social relationships.”

It is not so much that the bucks are larger but that our sense of values has changed. Says Geoff Zahn of the California Angels and a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes: “Society … has done an outstanding job of duping people into making things like cocaine, marijuana, [and] intoxication by alcohol socially acceptable. We no longer think of it as something wrong, but as an [acceptable] alternative.”

These looser standards are not restricted to professional athletes but have backed up into our colleges, high schools, junior highs, and the small-town Little League teams. The guilt begins with parents—upright, church-going, evangelical parents included. And Christian schools are not exempt.

Athletes’ morals and values cannot be isolated from the rest of society. If society tolerates drugs, so will athletes. If corruption prevails elsewhere, it will prevail in athletics. If winning is the only thing in life, it will be the only thing in athletics. Our young people are being systematically trained to put success first. The parent who never made it to the top finds vicarious glory in pushing his child to the limit. The big bucks are merely one more measure of success.

Let’S Change This!

Many of us are greatly concerned about the effect of sports programs on education. I am not so much thinking of the few hundreds who make it into highly paid pro leagues, but of the hundreds of thousands of young people whose education is jeopardized and whose priorities are warped by pressures of a society that encourages them to put winning in sports ahead of an education and even ahead of ethical standards.

Colleges and universities are educational institutions. Let professional clubs provide their own farms at their own expense. Honest colleges and universities must stick to education or change their labels. That still leaves a place for students who are athletes and who can profit from and want a college education. Colleges must admit only students who can profit from a college education. Those who cannot make at least a 2.0 average in solid college preparatory courses should not be admitted. Such students would not be able to profit from the level of education offered. Also, students whose grades fall below the level of what is required for graduation or who fail to make progress toward graduation should be ineligible for intercollegiate sports. (The following editorial in this issue examines the charge that this is racist.)

Presidents at schools with major sports programs have recently enacted rules to set up minimum educational standards for athletes. But they have not gone nearly far enough. Nevertheless, all who are interested in education as well as those who are concerned about integrity in sports should support such action. Athletic directors who defy administration and faculty standards should be fired. Alumni who bask in the athletic prominence of their alma mater at the expense of its educational program should be ignored. Concerned citizens should support universities in proportion to the quality of their education, not on the basis of their win/loss record in football and basketball. And evangelical Christians should take the lead in insisting that valid priorities are to be rigidly set and meticulously followed. Colleges are not sports clubs, nor are they in the entertainment business.

Models

Finally, what about role models? Harper’s (Sept. 1985) declares: Athletes “remain the principal role models of young Americans.” We recognize that we live in a pluralistic society and one that is especially tolerant of departures from basic Judeo-Christian ethics. But surely it is our right and duty to support vigorously those who are striving to create standards of basic honesty in sports and to reward those who serve as acceptable role models for the young of our land. We desperately need to foster a keen sense of right and wrong in those early years when sports stars are so crucial as role models. As someone has said: “We need a sort of civil rights movement to clean up sports.”

Yet Christian parents must remember that they are the most important factor in shaping the ideals of their children. Do we prove by our actions that winning on the job is not the only thing; that in life it is as important to learn how to lose as it is to learn how to win; that the game of life must be played according to the rules; that it really is better to be right than to be President; that we ourselves honor as heroes those who do what is right even more than those who gain success at the cost of doing wrong?

To decry the manners and morals of our decadent society rings hollow if we do not first mind our own manners and morals.

KENNETH S. KANTZER

Varsity Racism?

Recently, university presidents have made some decisions aimed at cracking down on colleges and universities that hire athletes to play ball but do not also give them an education. Many black leaders have hotly protested these decisions. The charge: racism, pure and simple. Jesse N. Stone, Jr., president of the Southern University system of Louisiana, says, “The end result of all this is the black athlete has been too good.… White schools no longer want black athletes.”

The opposition from the black community is nearly unanimous and includes the ablest black leaders—such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, president of People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH), and the Reverend Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What is this ruling that has set off the most heated race relations controversy in sports for more than a quarter century? It is NCAA Rule 48, requiring that, beginning in the fall of 1986, freshmen who wish to participate in sports events of our major colleges and universities must have earned a 2.0 average in 11 standard college preparatory courses while in high school, and attained a minimum score of 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Students who do not make the grade can still be admitted, but will not be able to play until their sophomore year, assuming they have achieved satisfactory academic progress during their freshman year.

The original rule passed in 1983 does, however, contain many provisions to give low scoring students a better chance of making the grade. The rule is now being weakened, due to black protests.

How can stricter academic requirements be interpreted as racist? Because 55 percent of all black students score lower than 700 as compared with only 14 percent of white students. Many blacks, moreover, are convinced that such tests reflect a cultural bias favoring white students.

Not for one moment do we deny that racial discrimination plays an active role in American sports and in the American educational system. It is to the everlasting shame of our elementary and secondary programs that such a disproportionate percentage of blacks cannot make a 2.0 average or attain acceptable SAT scores. But this is not primarily because the tests are discriminatory, but because the education blacks receive is discriminatory. Harry Edwards, who is black, is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He says, “The evidence is overwhelming that such tests discriminate principally on the basis of class rather than race.” The difference is not between blacks and whites but between students from well-off families and students from poor families.

Why not then give poor blacks a chance for a college education on the basis of their superior athletic ability? Because the present arrangement does not give them an education! It encourages them—in fact, it provides overwhelming rewards for them—to ignore their education through high school and college and devote themselves exclusively to excellence in sports. This is precisely what our college and university athletic programs are teaching our young people—especially black young people, and more especially still, financially impoverished black youngsters. So Edwards notes that the charge against Rule 48 “is both factually contestable and strategically regrettable” (emphasis added).

The problem is not rooted in sports, but in American culture and in our system of schooling.

Opportunity

But the presidents of our major institutions and the world of college sports now have a marvelous opportunity to improve the system radically, and especially aid disadvantaged blacks.

Professor Edwards argues: “The standards are too low.” So the presidents must set even higher standards than Rule 48’s 2.0 average or 700 SAT score. This may seem strange at first, but close inspection shows it to be necessary. Few students making those scores are prepared to do successful college work. Freshmen with borderline scores must remain ineligible for sports programs so they can adjust to college-level study and prove they are capable of a college education. Most important, athletes should be required to maintain a satisfactory grade level through their college career and take enough solid courses to enable them to make steady progress toward graduation in the normal four years.

As it stands now, the recipients of athletic scholarships are not getting an education. Studies prove that nearly three-quarters never graduate from college, and three-quarters of those who do, graduate with physical education degrees or majors specially concocted for athletes so they can get by without doing regular college work. If these figures are valid, less than 10 percent of all college and university athletes on athletic scholarships are actually receiving a college education.

The vast majority of these athletes will secure no educational preparation to help them make an effective contribution to society or to secure a job when they drop out of college.

So Penn State’s Joe Paterno, named 1982 “Coach of the Year,” declared: “We have raped a generation and a half of young black athletes. We have taken kids and sold them on bouncing a ball, running around a track and catching a football—that being able to do certain things athletically is an end in itself. We cannot afford to do that to another generation.”

But will it work? Will laying down more stringent academic requirements for college athletes make for better education? Two years ago, an entire Los Angeles school system passed a rule requiring of all high school athletes a C average with no failing grade. Immediately, 6,000 students became ineligible to compete in inter-school activities. But one year later, 3,000 of those youngsters had improved their grades enough to become eligible.

A college requirement that, to remain eligible, all athletes must make normal progress toward graduation in standard programs, would guarantee that most black athletes who now never graduate would secure an education. And that would be a great gain for blacks in American culture. Particularly because of the status of athletics among black youth, tens of thousands of blacks, who at present are not getting an education, would immediately be motivated to secure a basic high school and college education.

Blacks have everything to gain and nothing worthwhile to lose by stricter academic standards for athletes in high schools and colleges. As Edwards says, “The standards are too low.”

KENNETH S. KANTZER

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