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 Targeting athletes
Posted: Wednesday April 28, 1999 11:31 AM
When the news of the horrific school massacre in Colorado began to emerge last week, I found myself wondering what in the world some foreigner would make of the fact that the young murderers apparently were out to shoot minorities and ... jocks. Even allowing for the fact that hatred is irrational, how to explain that boys who admire Hitler would despise athletes as much as they do racial groups? As despicable as ethnic hatred is, at least it appears to be a traditional part of the worst of the human condition -- and one that is also, too often, passed along; in the chillingly lyrical words from South Pacific: "you've got to be taught to hate." But be taught to hate athletes? The schoolboy killers and their friends obviously had learned to despise athletes from their own everyday experience. Of course, those grotesque boys were deranged, but altogether, as Americans, oh, how torn are our feelings about athletes. What ambivalence we feel about ... jocks. How we like them too much and dislike them too much. It's important to remember that American schools are about the only ones in the world that so intertwine competitive athletics with academics. In most countries, youthful sport is the province of clubs, like our Little League baseball. But we have developed a school system in which sports not only matter a great deal, but often even provide the main identity for a school. The high school athletes themselves -- junior high! -- are lionized. From an early age, jocks in America enter some sort of a samurai class. They are treated specially, cosseted, even lied for by adults. Only athletes can win college scholarships based on their extra-curricular activity. As there are student-athletes, there are no student-actors or student-singers being fought over for scholarships. Are there? So, it's easy to understand how so many quite normal children in America who are not blessed by athletic genes come to envy jocks -- even, perhaps, to despise them. The jocks are so prized in our society. They get the girls. They get the laughs. And because they are on teams, they belong, ipso facto. And everybody wants to belong in adolescence, don't we? It's natural that those children who are not so coordinated, not so comfortable, would turn their wrath toward those smug SOBs who get all the attention, who get along so easily. It was that way when I was in high school. I'm sure it's worse now. Because now there's even more of a division, when so many kids are totally non-athletic. Today's younger generation is the most sedentary in our history. And, of course, the grownups celebrate athletes more in our society than ever before. Our samurai, our musketeers, our heroes. I do not know whether movies or TV shows or rap music or video games have an adverse and compelling effect upon children. But I can understand how sports does upset lots of kids. The jocks are real, and they are right there in school with you, and if you are a boy adrift and insecure, I think it would be easy to hate them. It may well be that in honoring young athletes so much and in concentrating so on the games they play in school, we have made even more of a competition between those children who are and those who are not ... jocks. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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