Excellent analysis!  I’m sure you realized this, but you also described obama to a “T”, except he sees himself more like a “King” than a “Prince”.

Thanks for adding to it – I think (meaning, too bad that you can)…

Not to take over the thread, but I keep coming back to this post since I’ve been a teacher and the whole sports fanaticsm stuff just makes me angry on many levels.

lorac’s comment: “Over the years we’ve all read stories of male athletes that just got passed along in school, because their coaches made deals with the teachers.”

This brought to mind and incident when I was doing a teaching assistantship in the grad program–teaching Freshman English.  I had to be away from my class one day and didn’t want to just cancel it, so I asked another grad friend to cover since I had covered for him one day.  When I got back, my grad friend came to me and said that my football player’s last essay sounded exactly like the essay his football player was working on.

We told our Dept. Chairman, who was this quite small man, and I warned the chairman, “You know, when my player has come to the office I share with another grad student, we both felt that we had to get under the desk to give him room.”

We arranged for both of our football players to turn in their papers and then we took them both to the Chairman–they were word-for-word the same paper.  The chairman had to call the coach and inform him that both would be given an F for their respective classes–as that was the department’s policy for plagiarism.

From then on my friend and I would walk around campus looking over our shoulders.  But the thing is this:  My player finally did see me on campus and came up to me and thanked me.  He said that basically he had been passed through high school for doing no work and for learning nothing just because they wanted him to be able to play.  He said he always felt like just a “piece of meat.”  This experience, he said, made him realize that he needed to take advantage of the fact that it wouldn’t happen in college and that he should make something of himself in college other than as a “piece of meat.”

I came to NQ as usuall after reading the morning paper.  Our paper today has a story about a high school wrestling coach in the metro area who was awarded coach of the year and who took his team to several championships.  This coach graduated from the high school of the small town in CO that I mention above, and his home town paper also did a big story about hometown boy making it big.

Well, hometown boy was just sent home from teaching and coaching for havin sex with a minor, one of the students.

Most Phillie fans were appalled at the behavior, but his wife stayed with him, and it sounded like she was accustomed to rough treatment – from some of the comments she made. It wasn’t until Myers began abusing the local sports media that they turned on him with a vengeance.

Myers plays for the Astros now, and it’s just as well, maybe he can take out his aggression on Ed Wade instead – a la Shawn Chacon.
(There’s a good Yankees story in the article as well).

http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2326&Itemid=42

Again, like Mike Tyson getting out of prison for RAPE because men wanted him to box again (and make them money).  Never mind the woman’s life he destroyed with his actions.  Unbelievable.

Thank you for this telling, and disturbing, story…

I might add, Jenkins is a sports writer, hence her focus on these athletes. 

Great comment, CJ.