That's what my high school coaches said about me. In other sports notes:
The University of Minnesota men's basketball team, which will play its tenth game of the season later today, is beset by legal problems--two of its better players are defendants in pending criminal cases. One of these, ahem, student athletes, a freshman, is charged with shoplifting at the Mall of America and then assaulting a security guard who confronted him. A couple days after these charges were written up in the newspaper it came to light that he is also a suspect in a dormitory theft complaint. The other fellow had, if I recall correctly, a set-to outside a club in Miami.
At least none of the Vikings has been arrested recently for drunk driving. Their star running back, however, was clocked doing 109 mph a couple of weeks ago.
It's been worse for the Gopher basketball program. Their previous coach was ousted in the wake of an academic cheating scandal. And the career of the coach before that coach ended when three players were charged with sexual assault after a road game in Madison, Wisconsin. The players were eventually acquitted but the evidence presented at trial was, or should have been, embarrassing to them. Yet one of these student athletes returned to the (basketball) court after his acquittal sporting a champagne glass design carved into his haircut by a clever barber.
The star d-back of one of the recent Gopher football teams was convicted of a sexual assault that occurred at a campus party. The victim was too drunk to giver her consent. This student athlete might have escaped punishment if a teammate had not taken pictures with a cell phone.
Did I hear somewhere that Tiger Woods has been behaving badly?
Okay, maybe some part of this has to do with fame and visibility. As a former Timberwolf basketball player complained after his forty-fifth brush with the law, "I'm a marked man!" Moreover, the demographic group to which star athletes belong--males under 35--accounts for such a high proportion of all crimes that waxings and wanings in the crime rate are sometimes attributed, plausibly, to bulges or tapers in this part of the population.
When a 30-year-old sales rep gets a dwi you don't read about it in the paper.
Still, I laugh to recall the sentiments expressed at all the post-season banquets I attended in my youth. You know the ones. Participation in athletics builds character, instills discipline, teaches teamwork and other important life lessons, like: "You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it." All, strictly speaking, crapola. The only lesson I learned is something like the opposite of that. No matter how much you like to play, and no matter how hard you try or how much you practice, others are going to be better than you. They are bigger, stronger, faster. The discouraging facts of the case recommend a kind of rear-guard action.
Maybe that is a good lesson to learn, but no one ever talks about it, and it's axiomatic that the biggest, strongest, fastest, and best learn something else.
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