Is There Life After Football? (6 page)

For better or worse, athletic dorms often become “athletic islands,” isolated from much of student life.
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While he doesn't lay all the blame on athletic dorms, George Koonce thinks that football diminished his college experience.

My social circles were limited. Just about all of my friends were teammates, not classmates or fraternity brothers. . . . One of my biggest regrets about being a student-athlete is that I did not get a chance to take part of all of the things a university has to offer. . . . I didn't have a balance
.
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And the balance is further upset as players find their college life closely tethered to their training facilities. All the top football schools have shining new athletic complexes that provide meeting space, weight rooms, rehab centers, and recreational outlets. Indeed, the “arms race” for training facility superiority is positively nuclear. With multimillionaire donors such as financier T. Boone Pickens (Oklahoma State: $265–400 million) and Nike's Phil Knight (University of Oregon: $300 million) paying the way,
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universities are building increasingly extravagant sports palaces to
attract the best recruits and “nurture” superior players. The University of Oregon's Football Performance Center tops the list. With a cost conservatively estimated at $68 million, the 145,000-square-foot complex is a palace designed to satisfy nearly all of a young sportsman's dreams. Giant screen TVs, video games, lavish furnishings, locker rooms, training facilities, and more. It's enough to make a young man feel special.

Premium Perks

The NCAA boasts of a plethora of additional benefits beyond tuition, room, and board. The official list includes: degree completion and postgraduate scholarships, life skills training, and development grants. Among the primary financial benefits is the NCAA Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program to assist student-athletes who suffer catastrophic injuries while participating in an intercollegiate athletics activity. The NCAA also provides other insurance programs and also helps student-athletes with unmet financial needs through the Student Assistance Fund.
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Nevertheless, additional perks—many of them “off the books”—are widespread and legendary, if not systematically documented. These include direct financial payment to players by coaches, alumni, and boosters, financial enticements offered to recruits, money made by selling football awards and memorabilia, shelter from university and criminal justice sanctions, academic fraud to preserve players' eligibility, provision of prostitutes to players, and special incentives and “bounties” offered for game performance. Such transgressions at high-profile programs are too numerous to catalog, and have been going on for decades. Recently, for example, former players at Auburn University made a series of startling, yet all too familiar allegations: coaches were paying football players; payments were offered to players to forego entering the NFL draft; prospects were offered illegal recruiting enticements; players were commonly engaged in illicit drug use; players were sheltered in dealing with the criminal justice system; grades were inappropriately changed, and on and on.
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Similarly, the University of Miami has been accused
of illicit payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars, implicating 72 former Hurricane athletes.
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At USC, a Land Rover and airline ticket were provided to a key football player.
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Ohio State players were guilty of accepting improper benefits and selling awards (including Big Ten championship rings), gifts, and university apparel valued from $1,000 to $2,500.
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Some of these “bonuses” are negligible and many are written off as the consequence of players merely trying to tap into the tremendous financial profits turned by big-time football, although all players are apprised from the start about NCAA regulations relating to financial benefits. But other rewards are far from trivial, occasionally approaching six-figure payoffs. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Southern Methodist University boosters maintained a $400,000 “slush fund” for paying athletes—with the knowledge and cooperation of coaches and the complicity of university presidents and members of the university Board of Governors, including a governor of the State of Texas. The situation got so out of hand that two players hijacked the entire slush fund without repercussion because coaches were afraid the players might expose the program to the media if they were punished.
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Such payouts have been around from the beginning of intercollegiate sports, and tales—both mythic and true—have long circulated regarding special treatment accorded campus football heroes.
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While the magnitude of contemporary perks is often staggering, old-timers remember legendary LSU running back and former NFL star Billy Cannon making extra money by selling off entire
sections
of Tiger Stadium seats.
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Clearly, rules and regulations didn't fully apply when you could run the ball like Billy Cannon. George Koonce recalls that they might even be bent for inside linebackers who seldom touched the ball.

Boosters were always around. They wanted to be involved. . . . After a pep rally, or the hotel on the road, they would try to get to know you. They had “Feed the Pirate” nights. A booster's family would take a player into their house for dinner. . . . Now and then I got some handshakes with some hundred-dollar bills. . . . I appreciated it, because I didn't have any money. So, I basically used it
for gas or to get a sandwich. It's not like I was getting a lot of money to go to the mall or buy some jewelry
.
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To be sure, Koonce was getting sandwich money, not Mercedes money, but special treatment filtered all the way down to a JC transfer linebacker. The point is not to belabor illicit gains by scholarship athletes. Rather it's to underscore the pervasive ways in which “being special” manifests itself in the lives of college players.

“NFL Draft Day.” They wait in the “Green Room” in New York or at home by the phone. It's a moment of defining truth, the moment when dreams are fulfilled or shattered. The elation and anguish is played out each spring on ESPN as top-rated players wait to see where they will be drafted—or
if
they will be drafted. Outcomes aside, however, the NFL draft culminates the process most players have pointed toward since early childhood.

“This is a dream come true,” exclaimed Eric Fisher, the first pick in the 2013 draft. “I've worked for this all my life.” “It's the best feeling of my entire life,” said Luke Joeckel about being the second overall selection. “That's what America is all about,” gushed Jon Gruden, ESPN analyst and former NFL coach. “A kid comes out of nowhere to become the number one draft pick in the NFL.”
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For the very few who are actually tapped on draft day, dreams have indeed come true. They have worked hard to get to that point as they arrive on the doorstep of their ultimate destination. On the road to the NFL, however, where else, metaphorically, has the lifelong pursuit of the dream taken these special players?

First and foremost, on the field, they've become accomplished athletes—the very best in (and on) their fields. They've forged their bodies and honed their skills. They've developed disciplined habits around their games and learned the mental aspects of the game. Off the field, compared to most of their peers, elite athletes have been surrounded by material luxury. They've lived in swank athletic dorms and eaten at
sumptuous training tables. They sport a nearly endless supply of athletic garb and footwear. They study in electronically tricked-out facilities with tutors and advisors at their beck and call. If troubles arise, someone from the program is quick to intervene.
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At the same time, however, many players reach adulthood with limited experience in how to actually manage their own lives. Of course all children are cared for and guided by adults, but elite football players have been under heightened scrutiny and control since they were mere boys. Coaches, onlookers, and adult benefactors have guided their decisions on and off the field for years.
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Teachers have known that many players need special consideration or their hopes for a better future will evaporate. Snoop Dogg lavishes junior players with attention and nicknames. Hall of fame coaches and college recruiters dangle enticements in front of 12-year-olds. Millionaire boosters want to be seen with 19-year-old linebackers. The college provides players with the finest dorms, but coaches tell them where to live and who to live with. Extravagant meals are prepared for them. They order from seemingly endless, but set menus, both literally and figuratively.

By the time elite players are knocking on the NFL's door, they've been treated as special
people
for most of their lives. Their self-images and self-esteem can't help but reflect the ways they have been perceived and treated. Elite players come to see themselves as others do—or at least as others say they do. It's a social psychological truism: when people treat you as special, you view yourself as special.
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But as they come to see themselves as special, players come to
expect
special treatment. To be fair, this isn't in every realm of life, nor on every occasion. But elite players routinely expect singular consideration within the context of their daily lives on campus—and maybe even back home. Mundane details aren't their concern. They have to “take care of business” as it relates to their athletic lives, but that business is carefully mapped out for them. If they fail to register for classes, someone will work things
out, smoothing over any bumps along the way. Their material circumstances are taken care of. When you've lived four years in a luxurious athletic dorm, why should you expect less? Kids want your autograph. Coeds want to date you. And, at the end, the pros come knocking. By this time, expectations can run high—realistically or not.

The darker side of such expectations, however, is that elite athletes sometimes lose sight of conventions, rules, and regulations by which most everyone else abides. If rules don't always apply, they're easy to overlook or forget. Most of the time, it's minor stuff. If a player stays up late watching Letterman and his grades begin to slide, perhaps the athletic department can find ways for work to be made up and grades salvaged. But this, over time, may lead to chronic irresponsibility in the academic realm that can seriously jeopardize the chance of earning a degree.

Sometimes flaunting the rules leads elite players to run amok legally. Instances of property crime, assault, and sexual misconduct are unfortunately common. While public opinion certainly decries athletes' misbehavior, systematic evidence is equivocal regarding whether college athletes are more prone than other male students to legal transgressions.
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But two aspects of this situation are clear. First, when student athletes run afoul of the law, and those situations come to light, the athletes are generally thrust under a bright spotlight.
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At the same time, colleges (and especially athletic departments) are notorious for downplaying, mishandling, or even covering up student-athlete–related campus crime.
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Serious offenses may never reach campus police officers or their off-campus counterparts because complaints are funneled directly to university or athletic department administrators. When violations are acknowledged—even serious ones such as sexual assault—they may be processed as “student conduct violations” rather than legal transgressions, thus allowing colleges to shelter student-athletes from public scrutiny under student privacy laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
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If things get really bad, colleges may pull out all the legal stops. They (or their agents, alumni, or boosters) often
provide athletes with the best legal defense available, as well as institutional resources and power that can help insure palatable resolutions to sticky legal situations.
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There's certainly an obligation on the part of colleges and athletic departments to protect the rights of their student-athletes. Nevertheless, bailing them out of legal jams (both literally and figuratively) condones, if not encourages, the sort of selfish, undisciplined, or antisocial behavior for which college players are becoming increasingly well known. Repeated instances of hooliganism at college powerhouses such as the University of Miami, campus sexual assaults, academic shenanigans, and illicit financial gains cast a spotlight on college players that's extremely unflattering. Helping athletes escape these encounters relatively unscathed contributes to feelings of entitlement and invulnerability.
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William Rhoden is quite critical of how special treatment of young elite athletes shapes their lives and identities. He decries the effect of loading young athletes onto the conveyor belt that transports boys and young men into the mills of the “sports-industrial complex” where their talents are exploited while their selves are distorted.
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The Conveyor Belt introduces young people to the worst ills of the contemporary sports-industrial complex while they are still young and impressionable. It's at the camps where many first learn about the gifted athlete's limitless entitlement. The better athletes learn that no wrong is too great to overlook, if not erase—that no jam is too severe to get out of. The Conveyor process makes a future star feel he is above the fray from an early age. Isolated on the Belt, the young athletes become accustomed to hearing “yes” all the time and having adults fawn over them and give them second and third chances because of the promise of their talents. The end result is often as evident on the crime blotter as in the sports section. No matter how focused and disciplined they are on the court [or field], young athletes are not given any restraints off the court [or field].
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