"Odd Man Out" ethics

He soon will be able to buy and sell every last one of them with his Harvard medical career.

 

Love the comments in the excerpt about baseball people still seemingly uncomfortable with the possibility that a drafted player might have brains. If true -- unless McCarthy was just feeding an old stereotype -- it shows you a culture that hasn't progressed much since college boys were being referred to as "Professor" back in the '60s and before.

And damn if his description of Jenks arriving to camp didn't have me thinking of Ricky Vaughn.

 

I've talked to smart people - guys who eventually went back to school for MBAs, law degrees, etc., etc - that played in the NFL, and they've told me that it could be very, very difficult some days trying to fit in. I imagine baseball is very much the same way.

But then again, is it that wild of a notion in this country that someone is looked upon with disdain for having an Ivy League education? I refer you to the most recent presidential election ...

 

I really enjoyed the excerpt. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to buy the book.

I just found an interesting review of the book from the O.C. Register, including a comment about it from one of the players in the book: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/mccarthy-angels-book-2294101-luther-don

The book definitely raises some good questions about the ethics involved of writing something like that.

 

Though "If I Don't Six" and "Ruffians" are novels, they seem to hold a grain of truth about people with smarts trying to make it as athletes. They're written by, respectively, Elwood Reid and Tim Green, and Reid's book is far and away the better of the two. Oh, in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," one of Tom Wolfe's characters has a bit of an epiphany about his studies and is raked over the coals for it by his coach.

Strange, athletes need to have some intelligence to grasp the intricacies of their games but coaches don't seem to want them to develop intelligence about anything other than their games.

 

Kind of how too many newspaper publishers/editors feel about the journalists on their staffs. They want 'em smart enough to cover stuff but don't want 'em turning those instincts and questions around in-house.

 

Bingo.

And re: your previous post, you're right ... if you mean the 1860s. That attitude has been around as long as colleges and athletics have been connected. Read some of Zane Grey's baseball books sometime.

 

The problem is - and this is the same with a certain segment of the conservative political movement - that they don't see Yale book learnin' as real "smarts." They see it as some kind of pretentious affectation. Whether they truly feel that way or if it's just a defense mechanism, I'll leave up to the trained sociologists.

 

Not all Ivy Leaguers are jerks, but I know too many who are, and for the most part, it's due to their carrying around
an absurd level of social entitlement/arrogance which simply isn't justified, in too many individual cases.

 

That's certainly the stereotype - look at the Andy Bernard character on "The Office," for example. Because of him and the boyfriend character in "The Wedding Crashers," I have permanently sworn off khaki.

 

Is it money? Or is it the Ivy League?

I know one, and she was a hose-hound way before college.