Which Way the N.C.A.A.?

Now that the mid-April Sports Illustrated has arrived, filled with N.C.A.A. Championship coverage, it’s a good time to reflect back on March Madness.   This year more than others, the experience had me going hard to my left, suddenly switching right before cutting back left again.  That would be true, I mean, if I could do some actual ball handling on the court rather than just all the thinking/watching/reading about the game that I actually pull off.

I was born fifth into a family of boys.  One of my brothers greeted the news of my arrival with “Oh great, now we can’t have a good basketball team.”  Home movies, bathed in amber light, show plenty of going to the hoop, sometimes with a springboard for help in getting to the rim.  Raised with the feeling that the game mattered in some way, I have always held it close.  Working at a school where I dated a basketball coach and taught post-graduate players;  fast forward — living near a Division I powerhouse; fast forward again — working in the city that is proud to be the birthplace of the game…. all of this made it natural for me to keep the sport shining in my soul even though I myself played different games.

When I married a man who was about to be an ordained priest, I also married a rower pulled more to open rivers than cramped gyms.   We had a son, however, who took to basketball early on, growing up dribbling amidst UConn Huskies.  Those were splendid years.  It was a short walk from the row of campus churches over to the gleaming silver dome of Gampel Pavilion, but oh, what a wide range of cultural values we would traverse along the way.

In those days, the National Collegiate Athletic Association was of course already a force, but it wasn’t particularly in the spotlight.  Within our circle of parents carting kids around to practices, there wasn’t much discussion about the excesses of collegiate sports or concern over the status of players who clearly enjoyed plenty of glory in a small community.  (Well, it’s true that my husband never jumped on the bandwagon and regularly pointed out that things were clearly out of whack when athletics dominated academics on any campus).  Fifteen years later, though, the whole system, based on the sometimes shaky concept of the “student-athlete” — originally established by the N.C.A.A. –along with the mission to maintain amateurism at all costs amid the staggering revenues gushing into athletic departments, is getting a good hard look.

Most of the students in my Creative Writing class this spring do not identify themselves as sports fans and were not caught up in March Madness.  One puts strong doses of hockey into his writing and another is passionate about skateboarding, but nobody burns for basketball.  And yet, a couple of days after the Louisville/Duke game, a bunch of them veered off from their short stories on school laptops to bring up up the wrenching scene of Kevin Ware’s horrible leg break.

For those of you who didn’t see it (I’m sparing you the link) it was hard to escape both the news of Ware’s agony on the floor as well as the follow-up analysis by sports commentators on how a devastating injury like this makes the N.C.A.A. look.  There’s millions of dollars running through the operation, mostly generated by television from the cash cows of football and basketball. Yet the players themselves — the ones who are most responsible for bringing in the revenue, 98.5% of whom will not turn pro and may not get the benefit of a full education either – can’t score any money from anything with their pictures on it and get penalized for puny infractions while coaches are making millions.   It’s true they get scholarships at Division I schools (not the Ivy League) but even these are one-year, renewed annually – maybe.  And, even though they are in many ways like employees who sign contracts, they don’t get any workers’ compensation, so they’re on their own when it comes to recovering from accidents.  In some ways, they may not be having such a ball.

The whole issue of whether the actual heart of a campus, the academic part, can benefit at all from the success of a few teams  remains a perpetual conundrum.  My husband (the guy with the purple jersey — uh, shirt) thinks that using sports money to fund other departments would be too much like relying on casino gambling profits for the state budget.  What a coincidence, too — he was just speaking out in New Hampshire on this very topic.

With the tournament bringing up all of these questions again, I went back to read an article I remembered hearing about a couple of years ago, from the October 2011 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.  Written by Taylor Branch, a civil rights historian and former college football player, it’s called “The Shame of College Sports” and it packs a punch all right.  Essentially, he argues that the N.C.A.A. has been operating with a kind of “plantation mentality” —high voltage language – that is, disregarding the legitimate rights of the players in order to advance their own monetary ends.

Now, however, a few legal cases are working their way through the courts.  Probably the most significant one was filed in 2009 as a class-action antitrust suit in California on behalf of Ed O’Bannon who played at U.C.L.A.  Now a number of co-plaintiffs, including the distinguished Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson, have also signed on, arguing for some kind of stake in their own names and pictures.  Things may really have to change soon.  Branch says:

Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust.  Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

From what I now understand, this greater scrutiny is all to the good.  Some colleges are even taking drastic steps to change the role of sports on campus.  Yesterday, The New York Times ran a front page story about how Spelman College in Atlanta has dismantled its whole inter-collegiate athletic program (which most recently had only 80 participants) in favor of promoting more life-long athletic activity for all students.   Although this is much more feasible for a Division III school than for a Division I place, it still gives an indication of the rumblings that just may be starting around the country.

Meanwhile, about that image of me zig-zagging on the court:  none of this diminishes my affection for basketball in its essential nature.  We have most definitely got some cleaning up to do in our institutions, and we’d better do it; I can’t pretend that the solutions are easy, either.  But this doesn’t prevent me from continuing to embrace the game. Heck, the hardworking Amherst College men’s team just went all the way to win the Division III championship, and I’m sure not raining on that parade.  Plus, there’s that long reach of my memory back to the amber glow and Converse sneakers by our back shed.

Call me sentimental, but going to the hoop will always be on my list of good and yes, even righteous, things to do. I know that Barack and Michelle would agree, which in turn gives me the audacity of hope.