THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603220266
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
The current investigation into gambling on high school basketball games reminds me that I'm glad I never became a sports writer.
That was my ambition in high school and college. Oh boy, getting paid to watch all those talented athletes do or die for the old home team. It would be hog heaven for a guy who invariably got picked last when they chose up sides in the neighborhood games.
But economics derailed my plans. The only job I could get when I graduated from college was police reporter for the Lynchburg, Va., Daily Advance. Come to think of it, being a police reporter these days is unhappily close to being a sports writer. It's rare that the sports pages don't tell us the sad tale of some college player under arrest. Should the usual college colors be black and white stripes? Just asking.
As for gambling on basketball games, I've been there. In 1950, when I was a college student in New York, a major scandal erupted over bribing of college players to throw games. College basketball was big-time in New York back then. The games were played at Madison Square Garden, and it was common knowledge that big-time money was being bet.
Then it all exploded. The papers were full of stories about players charged with taking bribes. I'll never forget the first time I went back to Madison Square Garden after the scandal broke. The gamblers used to sit in the seats along the edges of the playing floor. After, those seats were filled with policemen.
I know that there are college sports programs that are clean and honest. Aren't there? Out there somewhere? But, in my view, major college sports programs tend to be cesspools of hypocrisy and flat-out cheating. Is there an anti-social lout who, nevertheless, can outrun his peer group in a football suit? College scouts besiege him. Is there a dim bulb who struggles to recite the alphabet but can sink baskets from mid-court? All of a sudden, he's a ``student-athlete.''
It's been going on for decades. When I was in college, there was a football player in my history class. He was struggling with the course and told me one day, ``I wish I was back at my old school. Everybody played, nobody worked and everybody got paid.''
There's another aspect of the college sports scene that grinds my gears something fierce. I've seen cases where a young athlete changes his mind about attending a particular college or wants to transfer. The coach screams in outrage and questions the player's morality, courage and ancestry.
Ah, but then the coach is offered more money and his own TV show to coach at another college. Certainly, he jumps ship. Goodness gracious, that's just career enhancement. And coaches whose ethics would make a burglar blush seem to be able to skip from job to job as long as they can produce winners on the field. ``V'' is for victory, not virtue, and don't you forget it.
All of this adds up to the reasons that I only watch professional sports on TV. The pros are businessmen going about their jobs in a no-nonsense manner with a very high degree of skill. They're doing or dying for the incentive clauses in their contracts that pay more money for success.
Hey, I can't really knock it. If a guy can persuade someone to bathe him in millions for playing a game, that's the law of supply and demand at work. Sports economics primarily annoy me at the college level anyway. At a major university, the football and basketball coaches get so much money that the best professor on campus is a payday peon.
Of course, what's going on right now in professional sports is bewildering/disgraceful/hilarious (check one). Free agency, which allows players to negotiate with any team, has shuffled rosters like they were cards in the hands of a riverboat gambler. Yay, Joe Musclebound, star running back for the Giants, Cowboys, Eagles, Steelers, Colts etc. And that's just this week.
Same thing with the teams. Every time an owner sees a chance to hustle down the highway to a more profitable situation, it's goodbye Charlie. Fan loyalty? Absolutely a one-way street. It isn't you and me who buy tickets to the games that count. It's the corporate customer who buys a sky box for the season that makes the team accountants as jolly as Santa on laughing gas.
Sports can be fun to watch. And every now and then, there are truly emotional moments, like the night that Cal Ripken, the Baltimore shortstop, broke the record for most consecutive games played. But sports is mostly a business, too often a dirty business, and it's depressing to think that the contagion may be seeping downward to make teenagers party to crime. by CNB