COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND HONOR

Joe Paterno? He's just one of the crowd.

I grew up with publicity that called a mean, cruel, vulgar, ignorant man "a builder of men." He was the basketball coach at Western Kentucky, a sort of Penn State of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a disgusting man, and in no way a "coach"--or "a builder of men."

When I was thirteen I was taken to La Guardia airport in New York to meet the plane a country boy, a high school senior from Tennessee, was on. It was awkward when he shook hands with my father and me: He had a suitcase in one hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in the other hand. My father--Western's athletic director and assistant basketball coach--was in New York with the team for the NIT tournament; a "backer" had sent Tom to the tournament, as part of the wooing process. I was given money every day to feed and entertain Tom; my father didn't want him spending Boo's money.

I knew which players at Western went to which local businessmen for their monthly salary, and where they got their free clothes and shoes. And where in Bowling Green they could eat for free. All perks.

When, in the early 1970s Western Kentucky's basketball program was being investigated by the NCAA, my father--at the end of his tenure, then, as athletic director--was called to a meeting with the college president. (The president was an old Western basketball player, my high school basketball coach, a high school principal, the dean of students at Western, and then president.) My father came home and announced proudly that when Dero had told him how worried everybody was about the NCAA investigation, he had responded simply, "My lips are sealed, Mr. President."

I had gone to Notre Dame as an undergraduate. A basketball scholarship freshman--also from Kentucky--was a friend of mine our first year. He told me he had come to Notre Dame because other schools were offering him so much money that his father was scared. (And no, it wasn't Paul Hornung; he played football, and sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets every home-game Saturday in South Bend.)

I went from Notre Dame to Michigan. In the 1970s I met an inmate in a minimum security federal prison in Michigan. He wrote to me because a former Michigan fullback had recommended me to him. This man was being denied parole mostly because he was a black man from inner-city Cleveland. (I helped him get parole. Two years later he invited me to his wedding; he had a good job in Florida.) The former Michigan fullback had been a great star in Ann Arbor. When he graduated he held the record for the most touchdowns scored by a Wolverine. But he was too small to make it in the NFL. And in the fall after he graduated, he got frustrated with having no weekly wad of money, no free big car, no apartment. And he bought a pistol and walked into a bank, demanding money.

After 28 years at Michigan--which was for most of that time a great university at which I was proud to teach, despite its fraudulent athletics program--I left, to take care of my elderly parents and teach at a small college in Kentucky. One spring night a very expensive fifteen-passenger van belonging to the office of Student Affairs was vandalised. The tires were slashed, the windows broken, the interior destroyed. The next morning my freshman English class wanted to know if I had heard about the incident. I hadn't, but they had, and wanted to tell me about it. As they were relating the story, a not-very-bright boy who was at the college on a baseball scholarship interrupted: "Hey, nobody is supposed to know about that! Coach called a meeting this morning, and told us to keep quiet about it." Everybody knew about the vandalism--but nothing was done about it.

The moral of my story: it's not that the athletes are immoral, or criminal. It's that the coaches and the athletic directors and the university administrators are corrupt. And the Paterno scandal is just another example.

Why not do away with what is called "college athletics." With the money saved, universities could go back to being universities. True, some of the big athletic programs make money--but the money they make goes to athletics, not academics.

Bert Hornback