The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 1991

'BACKBOARDS AND BLACKBOARDS'

Sociologists' Look at Big-Time Basketball Depicts a World in Which Players' Academic Goals Are Subverted

By Peter Monaghan

Before they saw big-time college basketball close up, Patricia A. and Peter Adler recall, they were as dazzled by the game as any sports fan.

But after spending five years in unusually close contact with one big-time program, the sociologists have written a book detailing their views of college basketball. It speaks loudly of their disillusionment.

Backboards and Blackboards: College Athletes and Role Engulfment depicts a closed world in which players come to college with athletic, academic, and social aspirations that gradually are whittled away in favor of the all-consuming cause of a winning program. Inexorably, they say, players become "engulfed" by the single, highly specialized role of college athlete.

Other sports sociologists say the Adlers' book, published by Columbia University Press, is one of the best studies yet of the socialization of college athletes. They say it documents something that others have long suspected: that high-level college athletics subvert academic pursuits not just by taking up so much time, but by winnowing out any traits not crucial to their optimum performance athletically -- including intellectual curiosity and industriousness, and their ability to relate to ordinary students.

"People have seen ours as a damning portrait of college athletics," Mr. Adler says. "That's not the perspective from which it was written. But certainly, in the end, it's a rather sad tale."

The Adlers were able to write that story because they gained greater access to the inner workings of college sports than perhaps any previous researchers.

In 1980, Mr. Adler, now a professor of sociology at the University of Denver, began advising players on the basketball team at a Southwestern university, which they chose not to identify in the book for reasons of confidentiality. Mr. Adler first counseled players informally, and then signed on as an assistant coach through 1985. He talked with the players about many issues, from personal life and friendships to leadership, academics, career planning, and the mysteries of momentum in sport.

In 1982, when the team jumped to near the top of the national rankings, reporters flocked to the campus and began to notice that it was, as one wrote, "the only team in the country with its own sociologist." Mr. Adler became, as he puts it, a "mini-celebrity" in his own right.

The counterpoint to this headlong involvement, the Adlers write in their book, was Ms. Adler, now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Being a woman, she says, precluded her from a role like her husband's. She befriended many of the players, but had greatest access to coaches' wives, boosters, journalists, and the girlfriends and wives of players.

The Adlers begin their book by saying they intended "a sympathetic, albeit realistic portrait of this social scene." But the picture they present is not pretty.

The players, they write, had to sacrifice non-athletic interests, activities, and, "ultimately, dimensions of their selves."

Their academic aspirations, often grand at first, were thwarted. Coaches chose players' classes and majors and often enrolled them in "manageable" courses taught by "friends of the program." Many athletes, the authors write, considered their studies "comical, irrelevant, or demeaning."

Isolated in an athletic dormitory, which the Adlers describe as "a black ghetto encased within the overwhelmingly white environment of the University," the players attended required study halls where they "mostly clowned around." They were further cut off by racial and socioeconomic differences, their schedules, and even their size. Many students considered the players "frightening, or too tall to interact with comfortably."

The athletes, the Adlers report, lost privacy, autonomy, and control of their time, most of which was spent recovering from exhaustion. Few took their books on road trips "because they knew it was futile."

The adulation of fans, the Adlers say, led players to develop a "gloried self." Often, in that state, players literally forgot to go to class. Yet the reality of hero worship, they say, was that players had to act out images created for them by reporters and had to learn to speak "sportuguese" -- vacuous language suited to trading formulaic "empty words" with fans and fawning boosters in "pseudo-conversations."

For the players, the Adlers found, all of those things contributed to a process of "simultaneous self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment." Most athletes, the Adlers say, could not cope with the forced withdrawal from their roles after leaving college.

The Adlers qualify their comments by noting that the athletes were in some ways similar to other highly specialized students -- those studying law or medicine, for example. But the athletes' experience, they say, was far more intense, their "tunnel vision" more narrow, and their preparation for a career more dubious.

"Other people making the same sacrifices would have made the preparation for a future lucrative career," Ms. Adler says. "The athletes don't see that."

Despite all the negative features they found, Ms. Adler says: "I really do think that with the bad comes a lot of good." The Adlers say, for example, that the players learned to deal with socioeconomic and educational worlds they had never seen while growing up. And, adds Mr. Adler, "it was the time of their lives."

While with the program, Mr. Adler says, "I got disillusioned because while I was screaming at them, telling them there were other things in life, they weren't hearing it." He and his wife say they have learned, however, that some players have begun to shuck off their sports dreams by returning to college to complete degrees or by otherwise leading productive lives.

As for the head coach, the Adlers so admire him that their book is dedicated to him. Mr. Adler calls him "really a miraculous person," saying that despite the pressures of operating a big-time program, the coach still did everything in his power to help the players mature.

Still, the authors' outline of the coach's techniques is arresting. They say he subjected players to "a rigorous resocialization process involving the stripping down and rebuilding of the self." That he achieved in part with hazing-like "mind games" including "public shaming rituals" in which players were denounced and threatened with benching or worse.

Although the coach also encouraged players to "snitch" on teammates who broke team rules, the Adlers note, the players remained unified because all they knew was an all-consuming basketball subculture. They note that the players were, however, well aware of their commercial worth, and eventually saw themselves as exploited labor. They considered academic degrees -- if they earned them -- paltry compensation.

Almost to a man, the Adlers report, the players clung, to their last day in the program, to their dream of becoming a professional athlete. Astonishingly, the Adlers say, that was true even of the least-used players. Of the 39 players they studied, two went on the National Basketball Association, while 12 others played in lesser professional leagues either in this country or abroad.

While they generally sympathize with the players and coaches, the Adlers are highly critical of college administrators. The recent, much-debated reforms demanded by college presidents, they charge, are "Band-Aid" measures designed to decrease the public's perception of colleges' hypocrisy.

Nothing will truly change, the Adlers argue, as long as colleges and their administrators maintain their monopoly over pre-professional basketball and football.

Says Ms. Adler: "There's a fundamental hypocrisy they're not addressing: that a lot of these athletes do not belong in college. If there were minor leagues, as there are in baseball, then a lot of people who don't want to go to college and who are not college material, wouldn't have to."

Reform is barely possible, Mr. Adler suggests, as long as so many coaches have to fight to recruit such limited numbers of athletes who are well prepared as students.

The Adlers provide a sense of the individual players' and coaches' personalities, aspirations, and disappointments, by including many excerpts from interviews with them, reproducing the players' own, often-sardonic language.

The Adlers do not, however, identify their research subjects by their real names. They also keep the name of the program they studied confidential. But many followers of basketball will recall Mr. Adler's "mini-celebrity" -- he appeared often on radio and television, and in print media -- and they will know he was then at the University of Tulsa.

Coaches, athletes, and some others associated with that Tulsa program will be able to identify the Adlers' subjects. By now, however, all the players have moved on to post-college-basketball life, and virtually all into public obscurity. Something similar can be said of the Tulsa program, which rose to prominence in the years the Adlers studied it, and then fell.

The head coach then, Nolan Richardson, is a different story. He went on to the University of Arkansas, now ranked second in the country and a contender for a national title. He remains a highly regarded coach, who still recruits some of the country's most talented players. Mr. Richardson said last week that he had not yet had a chance to read the Adlers' book.

As for the Adlers, they have broadened their focus of research, and are studying childhood socialization. They still follow college basketball, though not the way they used to do.

Mr. Adler says he had his years of "living vicariously" through college sports, but got "burned out." Now, he says, "I know what is behind it, and it makes me uncomfortable."

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