The Errant Æsthete

In his latest column, former New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte traces the rise of “a gladiatorial athletic culture” in the U.S. … This is the inside story of sports corruption at the college level, as offered in riveting form by a great sports observer. It’s a tale of America and of a “higher” education that has sold its soul “to professionalized sports and its caravan of million-dollar coaches, illiterate jocks, cheating recruiters, sell-out professors, boorish boosters, suck-up sportswriters, and administrators in thrall to Nike-Coke-Taco Bell and the grail of a major Bowl bid.”

Stuffed with stuffing this Thanksgiving, drop onto that couch with so many other Americans to catch the next football game — and the next and the next and the next — as the pros of the National Football League and the putative amateurs of the colleges compete for bandwidth. This is the season, of course, when college football teams (and office betting pools) begin the great plunge toward the bowl games, those ultimate gladiatorial events which were once named for flowers and fruits (how could that have happened?), but now represent tortilla chips, insurance companies, and banks.

In his latest column, former New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte traces the rise of “a gladiatorial athletic culture” in the U.S. that, in the form of big-time college football, “teeters on the edge of being a scam and a tax fraud. Universities mortgage their endowments and their souls to build stadiums and buy top coaches and players; and yet, as Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist keeps pointing out, less than a dozen of the hundred-odd top football programs even make a profit, much less successfully fund other sports on campus, no less — har har — libraries and laboratories.”

This is the inside story of sports corruption at the college level, as offered in riveting form by a great sports observer. It’s a tale of America and of a “higher” education that has sold its soul “to professionalized sports and its caravan of million-dollar coaches, illiterate jocks, cheating recruiters, sell-out professors, boorish boosters, suck-up sportswriters, and administrators in thrall to Nike-Coke-Taco Bell and the grail of a major Bowl bid.” [Media Matters]

By the time Lipsyte’s done with the money politics of that “sport,” you’re bound to wonder whether “college football” is not, like “late capitalism,” a classic oxymoron.

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