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Clarett's academic adventures renew age-old debate

I almost choked on my Rice Krispies Sunday morning when I read the lead story in The New York Times sports section about how Ohio State star Maurice Clarett, having skipped the midterm and final in his African-American and African studies course, was allowed to pass after getting through some hastily concocted oral exams. I mean, Linda had to come in from the next room to find out what all the laughing was about.

"It's Boley Bolenciecwcz!" I hollered, barely able to control myself. "It's our one-man blitz!"

When I was a little fellow, my buddies and I used to go see any movie remotely connected with sports. One of our favorites was a loose adaptation of James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, a 1941 film named Rise and Shine with Linda Darnell and George Murphy and that perennial football hero, Jack Oakie. In this one Jack plays the star runner, Boley Bolenciecwcz. They even had a song about him in the movie, and we used to sing it, and I can remember it to this day.

Cheer, cheer for Bolanciecwcz,

He is our one-man blitz.

Well, Boley fouls up on the grades, see, and it looks as if he's going to flunk out, so what do they do? They set up an oral exam for him. I can't remember much of the movie -- I was just a wee child when I saw it -- but this scene is very vivid. The exam is in a big room, and practically the whole student body is there, rooting for Boley. The test consists of one question: Name a method of transportation.

Boley is stumped. The professor tries to help him. "How did you get here?" he asks.

"On a scholarship."

"Choo, choo, choo," the students are chanting. Finally one of them yells out, "What do you do to get in shape, Boley?"

"Train," he says.

"That is correct," says the professor. Everyone cheers. Yaaay! Boley passed!

And now we have Ohio State's current hotshot, Clarett, pulling a Boley, and what's funniest of all is the deadly seriousness with which all this is treated, by America's bastion of serious thoughts, the Times, and everyone else. Hey, this is old stuff, not only going back to the Jack Oakie movie but long before that.

In 1936 Paul Gallico, a leading sports columnist in New York, wrote a book called Farewell to Sport in which he mentioned he was leaving the business. It was published two years later. One of the chapters, "Last Stronghold of Hypocrisy," dealt with the farce of bigtime college athletics, much of the same stuff that's being rehashed now.

I have a series of articles that ran in Collier's magazine titled The Evils of Big Time Football in the Big Ten, and I guess it was pretty startling in its day. Universities doctoring grades to keep players eligible, a slush fund set up by alumni, many things that would be easily identifiable now. The year of the series -- 1901.

Little has changed in 102 years. It's just that schools have become slicker at it, because of the NCAA's occasional punishments, but this Clarett thing -- and I'm sure it happens in many other colleges around the country -- is a real beauty.

Here's my solution, and I bounced it off the Flaming Redhead, who said, "No, no, no, it'll never work," but I'll present it to you anyway.

Do away with the farce involving athletes who play what the schools like to refer to as "revenue-producing sports" having to submit to an academic workload. Instead, let them sign up for a program designed to help them in their major course of study, concentrating on, if they feel they're good enough, a career in their sport.

All theoretical aspects of the game would be covered, plus coaching and management, public relations, interpreting statistics, even officiating, designed for players who might someday become refs, the course to be administered by working officials. Who knows? This might even improve the overall standard of officiating some day.

Is this so far-fetched? Well, when I was at Stanford, I took every course like that I could find -- Football Methods, Basketball Methods, Baseball Methods, Track & Field Methods, and I even heard that they offered Pro Shop Management and Flycasting, which would have been my next ports of entry. Some time later, when I switched to Columbia and it was time to evaluate my transfer credits, my advisor called his buddy over to look at my transcript, and they both chuckled over it.

"These were full-credit courses?" he asked me.

"Three points apiece," I said.

He shook his head. "The Harvard of the West," he muttered. I lost a full year of transfer credits, which was OK because I wasn't going anywhere anyway.

The athletes who would be in this program would be paid, naturally, since they would be the revenue producers in their revenue-producing sports, their pay scale decided by their status on the team. Why even make them go to any kind of classes at all? Because it would keep them out of trouble. Idle youngsters with too much money have a way of getting involved in the wrong kinds of things. What would be the entrance requirements for admission into this program? Well, athletic prowess, of course, and no prior felony convictions. Standards are important.

But not all serious athletes have their eye on a pro career. For those who don't, either from a belief that they aren't quite good enough, or they don't want to take the longshot risk, or they simply have set their goals on other walks of life, such as medicine or business, as students used to do once upon a time, there would be the traditional program. They'd get an athletic scholarship, plus a full load of academic courses. The pay would be in the form of a free education, a full ride in college, plus graduate school.

If, at some point, a member of the athletic program would wish to switch and go the academic route, he or she would be permitted to do so, and his or her financial arrangement would likewise switch over. Ditto the reverse.

There would always be cheating, of course, payments under the table and so forth, but at least this Maurice Clarett type of academic nonsense would be cleared up, as would the accompanying hypocrisy. OK, there it is, I've laid out my program, and the NCAA routinely laughs at dreamers such as me, and I'm sure there are a million holes in my arrangement. So take your shots, please.

First up is my wife.

"Not a bad idea, but very unfair to the ordinary student," she said. "Where do you think the funds for all these extra teachers would come from? Certainly not from the athletic budget. They'd come from some other department. I was an art major. How would I have felt if I read that the art department, unfortunately, was being discontinued because they have to hire some officials to teach refereeing?

"And besides ..."

OK, that's enough. Keep the besides to yourself. No system is perfect. Unless your name is Boley Bolenciecwcz.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and SI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on SI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here.

 

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