New York Times, November 29, 2003
From Discordant Notes, Reformers Hear One Song
By ROBERT LIPSYTE
This time, the revolution may be telecast on premium cable.
Among the increasingly vocal, yet frustrated and
fragmented, reformers of sport, the only point of agreement
seems to be that sometime soon, perhaps between the Bowl
Championship Series and the Final Four, something will
happen to alert America to its runaway athletic culture.
There is no consensus on what form that wake-up call should
take. Conservative reformers hope that the National
Collegiate Athletic Association will pinch and weed its
wild garden of rules and enforce violations more
aggressively. Centrists see college presidents reining in
their warlord coaches by the purse strings. The more
progressive envision mild civil disobedience that will
include consciousness-raising teach-ins. Radicals predict
college athletes will threaten a sit-down strike moments
before the big game unless television producers come up
with cash, or at least a benefits package.
"There is not a sports reform movement," said Linda
Bensel-Meyers, who became a whistle-blower after the
University of Tennessee brushed off her concerns about the
education of athletes for years. "But there are reform
movements, mostly trying to work through the system in
different ways.
"All of them come up against the endemic problem: the
values of a commercialized and professionalized playing
field, not the values of the university, have become
dominant. They become our national values. Might makes
right. Scapegoat women. Win at any cost."
Bensel-Meyers, who is now an English professor at the
University of Denver, is a prime mover in the Drake Group,
a diverse band of academics who believe an engaged faculty
can curb what they describe as higher education's sellout
to big-time sports entertainment. The Drakes stand out in
the vast and varied geography of reform. At the moment,
they are the only group promising direct action that might
include civil disobedience.
But they are hardly alone. Looming on the right, of course,
is the N.C.A.A., which derives its enormous power from the
colleges it represents, regulates and cuts deals for.
Without the N.C.A.A., its supporters say, college sports
would be Afghanistan. Its critics say the N.C.A.A.
maintains a hypocritical system and that expecting reform
from the N.C.A.A. is like waiting for the evildoers to
voluntarily disarm.
Perhaps the most important centrist group is the Knight
Commission, which has just announced its re-formation for a
third major study of college sports. Critics may call the
Knight Commission toothless, but it has effectively defined
the problems most clearly. Other such middle-of-the-road
groups include the Center for the Study of Sport and
Society at Northeastern University, best known for
groundbreaking studies on race and gender, and the Positive
Coaching Alliance at Stanford with its guidelines for
humane - yet victorious - leadership of youth sports.
Rising on the left is a new umbrella organization, the
National Institute for Sports Reform, that will try to
bring coaches, athletes, academics, parents and community
leaders into a clearinghouse for such interrelated issues
as early specialization, athletic scholarships, drug use,
violence, sports injuries and the crisis in fitness. These
issues have traditionally been considered in isolation. The
group was recently launched by Bruce Svare, a professor of
psychology and neuroscience at the State University at
Albany. Svare believes that "athletic scholarships are the
root of all evil," because their pursuit has poisoned the
sports well down to the peewee leagues.
Energizing the debate has been a number of single issue
champions. Jon Ericson, the former provost and an emeritus
professor at Drake University in Iowa who founded the
eponymous group, believes that disclosure is the key to
reform. He contends that revealing athletes' test scores,
grades and courses, hitherto kept hidden through federal
privacy statutes, can change the "closed society of college
sports."
Others include Kathy Redmond, who founded the National
Coalition Against Violent Athletes after being raped by a
football player at Nebraska; Hank Nuwer, an English
professor who writes about hazing and bullying; and Ramogi
Huma, a former U.C.L.A. linebacker who has lobbied for
increased health and welfare benefits for scholarship
athletes.
Even within the community of people who favor change, Huma,
although personally well liked, is viewed with concern.
Several reformers wonder if his main goals are not
short-term and lack the sweep of real systemic change.
What does all this add up to?
"I think we are seeing the
early stages of a movement, what we call the `micro
mobilization context,' " said Rob Benford, a sociology
professor at the University of Southern Illinois at
Carbondale, who studies social movements. "Right now it's
loose, amorphous, federated, which is typical. It has to
form a collective identity, which hasn't happened yet.
"In the history of the peace, civil rights, environmental
and women's movements, there was a similar period of many
different groups with different names and agendas starting
out with a network of meetings and the sharing of
interpretations of problematic situations."
Benford was one of several dozen academics, coaches and
journalists at just such a meeting last month in Lake
George, N.Y., that was convened by Svare's National
Institute for Sports Reform. While it was hard to imagine
that the event was comparable to the germinal feminist
meeting in 1848 at another upstate New York town, Seneca
Falls, the attendees seemed energized, perhaps none more
than David Ridpath.
A former high school wrestler, Army officer, college coach
and compliance coordinator, Ridpath is just the kind of
apostate athlete that reformers seek to recruit. Onetime
true believers make the fiercest rebels. Last year, when
Ridpath was assistant athletic director for compliance and
student services at Marshall University, Ridpath took the
brunt of the blame for the university's latest violations.
Most of them had to do with a pattern of easy, high-paying
jobs offered to athletes by a prominent local booster, a
practice that began long before Ridpath arrived at
Marshall. Ridpath has since been moved to director of
judicial programs at Marshall, and he is suing for an
apology, $350,000 and the removal of the term "corrective
action" from his file.
"I bought into the whole package that athletics was all
pure and good," Ridpath said. "I was the kind of guy who
thought Proposition 48 was a great thing to help black
kids, until I figured out it was not about education, it
was about getting athletes into college. I was naïve about
a lot of things."
Despite his convert's passion - Ridpath is being touted as
Bensel-Meyers's successor as director of the Drake Group -
the meeting's mood never evoked the militancy of the
so-called athletic revolution of the Sixties. Those heady
days were dominated by the personalities of two former
scholarship athletes, Jack Scott and Harry Edwards, who
went on to earn doctorates and attract disciples. Their
pronouncements and actions were denounced by government
officials and often countered with death threats.
Scott enraged the athletic establishment by challenging the
authority of coaches to dictate an athlete's hair length,
social life, clothing style and course load. Edwards, a
sociology professor at Berkeley, masterminded the Olympic
boycott movement in 1968. Its most memorable moment was
when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a
Black Power salute on the medal stand.
While no one with the charisma and connections of Scott or
Edwards has yet to emerge - and the times may not be as
ripe for reform as theirs were - the athletic establishment
also has no one as strong-willed as Walter Byers, the
executive director of the N.C.A.A. from 1951 to 1987. Byers
is generally credited with building the foundation for the
N.C.A.A.'s current cartel-like power. He also takes much of
the blame.
Critics of the N.C.A.A. love to quote a passage from
Byers's memoir, "Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting
College Athletes," in which he wrote of having "crafted"
the term student-athlete and mandated its use in a 1950's
campaign to make sure words like employee and workers
compensation would never muddy the amateur waters.
The stakes have risen since then, but not the basic
premises. In an e-mail message sent after the Lake George
meeting he had convened, Svare wrote that he "found it
ironic that while we were talking about reforms and their
potential impact upon educating athletes, the Tulane
`Sports Reform' meeting of Division I college presidents
several days later was looking at more equitable ways to
cut up the Bowl Championship Series pie."
"I guess our top educators are still more interested in
money," he said.
Svare is not enthusiastic about the possibility of civil
disobedience "unless there is full involvement by athletes,
former coaches, former players, etc., and a
well-thought-out plan that is articulated to the media well
in advance and executed with the kind of precision that the
N.C.A.A. blitzes us with during March Madness."
Svare said his organization was more inclined toward
working with such establishment types as Terry Holland, the
former coach and athletic director at the University of
Virginia, who wants freshmen to be ineligible to play
again.
So what happens next?
"One measure of a movement's success is that your opponents
recognize your existence,"` Benford, the Southern Illinois
sociologist, said. "It was smart of the N.C.A.A. not to
accept its invitation to the Lake George meeting. The
second major measure is that you frame the debate and the
definitions of the problem. If you decide it's about
athletic scholarships, then you get everyone arguing about
that. You're in control at least of the discussion."
Benford thinks that reform groups need to mobilize athletes
to communicate their stories of individual exploitation. "I
haven't given up on the faculty," Benford said, "but that's
not where the hearts and minds of people will be won. Fans
are interested in athletes, not professors."
Copyright © 2003 by The New York Times