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JL
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Aroma Around College Basketball
The vast number of college basketball players transferring from one school to another as permitted by the NCAA’s liberalized ‘transfer portal’ rules make a mockery of college sports. (The same thing to a somewhat lesser extent applies to college football, which is not governed by the NCAA.) There is a stench to it.
Consider the five such transfer students who are on the University of Kentucky’s basketball roster. Without their presence, Kentucky probably would not have been in the NCAA tournament. And this is just an example. These student-athletes never applied to college to get a free education in exchange for their skills on the court, the way things used to be. They applied so they could play basketball there. Period. And when another opportunity, one more likely to better display their skills at another college, presented itself, they took it. While they bring a lot of revenue to the many schools involved, they take up space which might be filled by real students.
It only takes a couple of athletes transferring from major basketball ‘powers’ to make a small college’s team successful. Some of the schools in the NCAA tournament which you never heard of before fall into that category. Their “stars” came from Power Five schools, where they were first recruited. (Admittedly, some small college players also end up transferring to bigger schools that recruit them after spotting them play a year or two at another school.) Some even came from the national basketball teams of other countries and, outside of playing basketball, had no other motivation for seeking higher education in the United States.
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| Hassan Drame played for the Mali national team before coming to the U.S.A. |
The fault for this lies
with college presidents and the boards of trustees who hire them. Believe it or
not, there are many colleges in this country where athletics are not
emphasized. The University of Chicago is
a famous one, and there are many, many, more.
Their names, however, do not appear on the sports pages.
When you see many teaching assistants and professors EDUCATED OUTSIDE OF THE UNITED STATES at the blackboard, teaching classes and running laboratories, you can bet the undergraduate schools where they studied didn’t play in any bowl games or basketball tournaments. Look at the names of the scholars getting Ph.D.’s these days and writing papers on scientific and historical matters.
JL
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Short Story Time
Here's an original short story
which I dedicate to the Governor of Florida.
Enola
Jack
Lippman
Jim had
an idea why he had been called into the principal’s office. He knew when he accepted the assignment to
teach the advanced placement course in history at the high school that he would
be dealing with subjects which some considered to be controversial, but he felt
that he could successfully handle them.
Mr.
Carlucci smiled. “Jim, I want you to
know that you are probably the most highly respected social studies teacher not
only in South High School but in the entire district. That’s why you were selected to teach this
advanced placement course.”
“Mr.
Carlucci, please get to the point. I
know you didn’t ask for this meeting just to compliment me.”
“Please,
Jim. We’ve known each other for a long time. Please call me Paul.”
“Okay,
Paul, but what’s the deal? Why are we talking?”
“There’ve
been complaints, Jim. Parents.”
Jim
relaxed a bit and interrupted. “As I
anticipated. Particularly when we got to the end of World War Two in the
Pacific. There are some issues there, I
know, and I believe I touched all the bases, leaving no opinions out. But what’s the complaint?”
“Hiroshima,
Jim, it’s what happened there.”
Jim
stiffened a bit, replying to the principal.
“Sure, President Truman authorized the use of the atomic bomb to end the
war, killing over a hundred thousand innocent civilians in Hiroshima. And a
load more a few days later in Nagasaki to show that we weren’t kidding. We all know that but consider the alternative
he faced. I explained to the kids that our not using the
bomb would have meant invading Japan itself to end the war. That would have meant
a lengthy struggle taking many years perhaps, presenting tremendous logistical
problems, and costing many lives.
Knowing the ferocity of the Japanese soldiers, losing 200,000 American
lives in such an invasion was a conservative estimate. We wrote papers on both sides of the
argument, held debates, and spent two weeks on the unit. I think the kids learned a lot.”
“I know,
I know. You did a great job, Jim.”
“So
what’s the complaint?” Jim answered. “Could
it have been on our discussions of nuclear disarmament, never using such
weapons again? Making them illegal? Or talking about the morality of using the
wholesale killing of an innocent civilian population as a weapon? Or maybe how nuclear weapons served to deter
a future war where everyone would be a loser so long as both sides had the
ability to vaporize the other’s major cities?
Both having the power to initiate mutual annihilation would serve to
prevent that awful thing from happening.
That’s the way it seems to have
worked out, Paul, over the years since Hiroshima. Like I asked you, what’s
wrong with teaching the kids about the way things are? What’s the complaint?”
“Jim,
there’s not a word you’ve said that I don’t agree with,” answered the principal.
“So what,
specifically, is it that these parents are complaining about? Jim asked. “Why
are we talking?”
“The
bombing of Hiroshima, Jim.”
“What
about it? We covered it thoroughly.”
“Two of
your students’ parents objected to your identifying the plane which dropped the
bomb.”
“Sure, it
was a B-29 Super Fortress, right?”
“Yes, yes,
but the crew had painted a nickname on the plane’s nose. You mentioned that.”
“Of
course, of course. It became famous!”
Jim
hesitated, holding his hand to his mouth.
“Oh my God!” he exploded, “Oh my God!”
“Yes,
Jim. That’s it. From now on, when you
teach this course, and I want you to continue teaching it, you cannot mention
that B-29’s nickname. This is Florida,
you know. You risk losing your job, and
the school district stands to lose some State funding, if we permit you to
mention that plane’s name in your classroom.”
Jim got
up and ran out of the principal’s office into the hallway, screaming at the top
of his lungs, “ Oh my God, Enola Gay! Enola Gay! Enola Gay!”
JL
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Vladimir Putin's fear of Ukraine is not a military one. It is an ideological one. He feels threatened by the more liberal democracy which prevails there and which might be sufficiently contagious to spread to Russia. That would herald his downfall. That is the basis for his invasion, after which he had hoped to install a government friendly to him. When President Biden said "this man cannot remain in power," it was a message to the Russians to find a way to get rid of him. Like our own, Ukraine's democracy is not perfect, but this is not the time to criticize it. It first must be saved.
JL
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Pulling Punches
Just as we expend less than our maximum efforts in aiding Ukraine in its struggle against Russian expansionism out of fear of elevating it to World War Three, we also dilute justice in our country by soft-pedalling certain investigations and prosecutions out of fear of their bringing about a continuation of the Civil War which apparently did not fully end in 1865. I ask how long will we continue to ‘pull our punches?’
An example of this is the new Manhattan
District Attorney not continuing to pursue an indictment of the defeated former
president for obvious financial skullduggery.
Rather than attribute this to unadmitted support for the ruler of Mar-a-Lago on his part, I
suspect he just feels it would involve too great an amount of the DA’s office’s
resources and last forever. I am
reminded of the quasi-sport of greased pig wrestling, occasionally encountered at county fairs, messy and taking a long time since the pigs seem to enjoy it.
JL
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