THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 17, 1995 TAG: 9505170240
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BOB MOLINARO
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
It's too early to know where 6-foot-11 teenage basketball prospect Kevin Garnett is going to end up, but Sacramento or Denver is a better guess than Ann Arbor or Chapel Hill.
Speculation about Garnett's future should take into account one thing: No matter how daunting the NBA may be for him, he is better equipped to take on O'Neal and Ewing than Shelley and Keats.
If his final bouts with the entrance tests don't produce the desired results, Garnett seems ready to admit that he doesn't belong in college. In this way, the 18-year-old from Mauldin, S.C., is more honest and sensible than the college coaches who would embrace him faster than you can say, ``The Road to the Final Four.''
Should Garnett opt for the pros, he could conceivably be leaving open a place in college for a more deserving student.
In that case, he should be congratulated.
But that still doesn't explain the dozens of athletes who enter college each fall under false pretenses.
Garnett is garnering attention for threatening to take the road less traveled. But how many other recruits are as obviously unprepared as he is for college work?
We don't want to know the answer to that. The charade is too charming, the product too entertaining to spoil with tough questions.
It's a fact, though, that the University of Virginia has recruited perhaps its best center prospect since Ralph Sampson, and that this player has yet to make the grade on his entrance test.
Let's face it, the basketball recruiting pool is not exactly overflowing with Grant Hills and Tim Duncans, athletes who can both dunk a basketball and autograph it, too. Schools cannot field teams by recruiting the chess club.
At the same time, the media are overly tolerant of coaches and schools that recruit with unrestrained expediency. In this way, we journalists are like educators and society at large. We wink at a system that tries to pass off entertainers as students.
When you hear that an institution such as U.Va. needs to raise between $75 and $100 million in the next few years for athletic facilities, you understand why it is necessary for educators, including college presidents, to live in a permanent state of denial.
Boosters must be fed a steady supply of talent and winning teams, or the money stream will slow to a trickle. Asked about the conspicuous excess of intercollegiate athletics, Bear Bryant, the football coach, once observed that it was hard to rally around a math class.
Athletics are far too important for fund-raising purposes to allow academics to complicate things. Everybody at the universities, from the president to the student body, is a party to this. They all look the other way.
Why not, then, drop the facade? If a saxophone player can become a music major, why shouldn't a jump shooter be able to study athletics?
Admit the jocks for what they are, or want to be. If they are not true students, don't pretend. A department of athletic studies would at least reduce the level of hypocrisy.
Otherwise, colleges will continue to operate within a conspiracy of silence.
Under the current system, an 18-year-old athlete from South Carolina, a kid who takes a beating on his entrance exams, must call a press conference to tell college educators what he should be hearing from them. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Kevin Garnett is garnering attention for threatening to take the
road less traveled. But how many other recruits are as obviously
unprepared as he is for college work?
by CNB