 photo by Al Tielemans |
A Jock School is any college or university in which sports are
central to campus life, a place where sports-minded students can
flourish. Stanford is a Jock School. Princeton is a Jock School.
Cal is Jock School. Which is to say, you can get a world-class
education at a Jock School, just as you can get a salad at
McDonald's. But that's not why you go there, is it?
No, in selecting the proper Jock School for you, academics are,
well...academic. Pay no attention to the library, unless it was
built by the guy who founded Nike. Ask not "Are tutors
available for remedial study?" but rather "Are the song girls
available for private parties?" (They are at USC, though the
band comes with them.) Why fill that pointy head of yours with
fancy book-learnin' when you could be watching baseball at
Mississippi State's remarkable Dudy Noble Field?
Education may be noble, but it is hardly your dudy.
"Education," somebody once said, "is what remains after you have
forgotten everything you have learned." To which an educated
person might say "b.s.," which does not, in this instance, stand
for bachelor of science. Instead, what remains after you have
forgotten everything you have learned in college is...a
moth-eaten letter sweater...your football season tickets...a
rooting interest in the NCAA basketball tournament...a trick
knee you wrecked at the rec center...a lifetime of writing
booster checks ... a police record from Sugar Bowl weekend, 1958
...your cheerleader wife...your quarterback husband...
photographs that will prevent you from ever seeking public
office (Nude Olympics).
Sports, not academics, provide the public face for a university.
As Bear Bryant said, "It's kind of hard to rally around a math
class." Writer Christopher Buckley notes in his book Wry
Martinis that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died three days
before the Harvard-Yale game in 1975--and that, on the eve of
the game, three Yale students scrambled up onto a prominent
billboard near campus and painted the following:
NOV. 19--FRANCO
When the youths descended from the sign, they were apprehended
by waiting New Haven policemen, one of whom asked (presumably
while fingering his nightstick): "O.K., which one of you guys is
Franco?"
The point is, there's a limited audience for intellectual
pursuits, but everybody knows football.
NOV. 22--HARVARD
