Blaming the Sports Media

Where was sports radio ten years ago? Nowhere, I imagine. Oh, I'm sure you could find sports programming on then, but it was rare. Once the great realization was made that people often commute to work and this commute is often slow and that people may not care to listen to music and would rather hear about sports, it was hear to stay. I used to listen to NPR a lot. But ever since I discovered sports radio, I find I just listen to that instead.

I know. There are plenty of people who can't stand sports. Sports radio must be even more puzzling. If watching sports is bad enough, then talking about sports must be worse. Most sports shows are on at least two hours, and possibly three. They have to fill the show with content, and since most of these aren't news shows, but commentary, they have to complain about something in sports.

There's been a sports story that has been of note for the past two weeks or so, and not because it has to do with sports, though, in a very real sense, it has to do with sports. It's about the Duke Lacrosse team.

Let's recap a little of what happened. Some members of the Duke lacrosse team were having a party, where they invited strippers. These strippers were, it should be noted, of color. One was a student from a nearby university. Most of the lacrosse players (all but one, we're reminded) are white. Surprisingly, there are some 47 lacrosse players, even if most of them must not play. There's probably about ten players. 47 means you could almost go 5 deep for each person playing.

One of the strippers claimed she had been raped by three white guys. It's not entirely clear to me if the party was only for lacrosse players, or involved others. The aftermath? The coach resigned. All the players but one submitted DNA samples. The claim is that the DNA didn't match. The district attorney, Mike Nifong, said he'd look into this more, that the investigation wasn't over. It's not entirely clear that a rape occurred at the house and rumors that the girl was injured prior to entering the house.

Why is this news? It's news for several reasons. First, even for a sport as insignificant as lacrosse, it's still sports news. When you have to fill up hours of content, you have to talk about this since it's sport news. To be fair, NPR and news stations also cover it, but again, it's because it's a sports team. Suppose a rape occurs on campus, but it's not somebody from sports. It's horrible. Is it news? Would it be news if it were a member of the debate club?

It's news because it's sports, and as much as we call these things "games", careers are made from reporting on games.

Indeed, this is about the only way lacrosse makes it into the news. It won't get a mention after this is over, at least, not as a sport. Anyone going to care about the national championships in lacrosse? Are Greenberg and Golic going to talk about it? Is Kornheiser and Wilbon? Heck, Maryland used to host the semis and finals for years, and it barely made news (mostly since it happened after the semester ended).

Is this going to disappear? I suppose. I consider the Baylor incident where one teammate killed another, and the coach attempted to cover it up, an order of magnitude worse. Yet, people are already forgetting that incident. Of course, Duke's name is a lot bigger than Baylor, so that may keep it around. And the lacrosse team was actually decent. Remeber George O'Leary. He was the guy who "puffed" his resume, and then it burned him when he tried to get the Notre Dame job (which lead to Ty Willingham getting hired, having one great season, and several average ones before he got hired as UW's head coach, and then Charlie Weis came from being offensive coordinator of the Patriots to coaching this team to a great record again).

O'Leary had several of his players tackle another guy for not protecting his QB in practice. Guy got hurt. O'Leary was criticized for this. He claimed he never intended for them to hit the player. Remember that? Probably not. How about Kobe Bryant? Here was a case that was almost as clear cut as you could get, in the sense that Kobe didn't deny being there, didn't deny having sex, only denied that it wasn't consensual. People probably still remember this incident, but when you score 81 points, it's easy to forget.

And that case was one of those where men probably view it differently from women. Women would say "no means no", and guys would say "it depends on the situation as whether it should be considered rape or not". In any case, she dropped the case, and was probably given a large settlement to keep it quiet. There is, I suppose, some difference when the report is several people "ganging up" on another person. No information has been provided as to the exact details. Everyone is talking through lawyers.

I remember five years ago when Mike Wilbon was saying sports was irrelevant, shortly after 9/11. That lasted, hmm, two weeks? It was his living. He wasn't going to do a Pat Tillman and head off to Afghanistan. He wasn't going to quit reporting on sports. And heck, even the soldiers sent overseas wanted to hear sports to take their minds away from the war they were in.

Sports has become highly relevant. Sports pages are highly read. More than the front page. More than money. People care about Barry Bonds and steroids and whether Tiger Woods wins and when football training camp starts and the results of the combine and Wonderlic tests. They want to see the draft. They want to participate in brackets.

And even so, we're not nearly as fanatic about sports as countries where players have been killed for performing poorly, where the entire country shuts down just to watch sports.

Why do universities like sports? Alumni seem to contribute more when the sports team is doing well. All those years spent in college and what they remember is being fans in stadiums. They can still hold onto that experience much longer than they hold onto the actual experience of learning. It says something about the priorities of Americans (and the world) when the average alumni thinks about sports more than education.

Education does, alas, lack the thing sports seems to bring into focus so clearly, and that is the evaluation of a person's skill on a public stage. If you do badly in an exam, you don't have the shame of an entire university bearing down on you. You can even keep this private from your classmates. Asian countries often post scores of all students to shame the poor students (it usually has a bad effect, which is they don't care about their grades anymore). There's also, effectively, a high teacher-student ratio. Check out any football team and how many coaches and assistants there are. Maybe 15 total? For 80 players? About one coach for every four players.

How often do you get that ratio in classes? And yet, college sports is big business, and winning is big business. Education is not, in and of itself, big business.

I write this, of course, but would watch college football or college basketball. And I still listen to sports talk radio. There's something that still appeals, the primal thrill of victory that somehow education is unable to match. I don't know how to explain it.