Rhoden: No Mention of Race

[henryhenry]

today rhoden writes about the exploitation of so-called "amateur" college athletes - he had the balls to bring it up at the BCS after saban cashed in

not a single mention of race

huh? not a single mention? i'm certain i read numerous hate-mongering posts screaming and ranting that he never has written a race-free column.

this column is dead on - goes right to the heart of the sham of college sports - total freaking hypocricy - thank you bill rhoden

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Once a month ain't bad.

I don't know who said that he's "never" written a race-free column. I don't recall ANYONE here
typing that.

You want to defend the guy, that's your privilege -- but get your internal references straight.

Again . . . READING IS FUN-DAMENTAL.

Peace.

 

[Alma]

Are we gonna read the piece, or just take your word for it?

 

[henryhenry]

Paying the Price While Coaches Cash In

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
GLENDALE, Ariz.

The college football season ended last night with the highly anticipated championship game between No. 1 Ohio State and No. 2 Florida.

The Bowl Championship Series title game was the finale in a postseason that featured a smorgasbord of exciting games: undefeated Boise State defeating Oklahoma in overtime with creativity and nerve, Louisiana State routing Notre Dame behind a dominating performance by the junior quarterback JaMarcus Russell. Last night, Florida, led by the senior quarterback Chris Leak, upset undefeated Ohio State, 41-14, to win its first B.C.S. national championship.

Once again, however, the defining news of the college football season was a transaction that underlined the commercialization, exploitation and hypocrisy that increasingly define big-time college sports. Last week, the University of Alabama hired Nick Saban away from the Miami Dolphins to be its head coach. After weeks of saying he would not be the Crimson Tide’s coach, Saban accepted a package worth a reported $32 million over eight years.


There is already talk that Ohio State will modify Jim Tressel’s compensation package, estimated at $2.4 million a year. I don’t have a problem with Saban’s accepting the money; no one is forcing presidents to pay it. I don’t even have a problem with Saban’s perhaps lying about his interest in the Alabama job — he gets pummeled if he tells the truth, he gets pummeled if he lies.

•

What’s persistently galling is our approach to the big-time, blood-money intercollegiate sports of football and basketball: Adults make millions, and the “kids,” as they’re called, receive tuition and room and board for the glory of mangling their bodies for Ole Sigh U.

Last week during a news conference, the University of Florida’s president, Bernie Machen, took issue with Saban’s contract. Machen, who had hired Urban Meyer at Utah in 2002, said that giving Saban an estimated $32 million contract set a bad precedent. Yet a little more than two years ago, Florida gave Meyer an estimated $14 million over seven years to leave for Florida.

The coaches, who should be leading the charge for player compensation, are too often silent. On Sunday, Meyer wanted no part of the issue.

“Wow,” he said. “ I don’t know. I’d rather talk about Chris Leak. I don’t have any idea. I don’t have any thought.”

I was willing to let it go at that. But then Meyer began talking about the role that players played in his success as a coach.

“You take Alex Smith out of that equation at Utah, and I’m not the head coach at Florida,” he said, referring to his former quarterback at Utah. Smith just completed his second season with the 49ers.

“I am the first one to recognize that. And our staff is the first one to recognize that. You take Chris Leak and Tim Tebow out or Percy Harvin out or Ray McDonald out, and we are at some other bowl and I am already home and jogging and getting back in shape and those type of things.”

Instead, Meyer basks in the glow of his first national championship.

Given that, don’t the players deserve a financial bonus for helping a program reach a bowl game?

If the coach is rewarded for leading his team to a bowl, his players should be rewarded (and not in coffee mugs) for helping get him there. If a program reaches a bowl that pays in excess of $1 million, players should share in the bonanza. Coaches preach the gospel of team and teamwork, family and unity; they talk about pulling for one another — until the talk turns to revenue sharing.

On Sunday, I asked Tressel what he thought about a stipend for athletes for helping their team reach a lucrative bowl game. Tressel responded like a politician.

“I think that would take a lot of discussion, and that’s what I think people like about the game of football, is that there are so many components that go on to the success of a team,” he said.

•

Tressel’s first title-game appearance at Ohio State was embroiled in controversy. In January 2003, the Buckeyes played Miami in Arizona. The Buckeyes’ star freshman running back, Maurice Clarett, complained about not being able to get back to Ohio for the funeral of a close friend. The issue revolved around paperwork that had not been completed in a timely enough fashion for the university to provide Clarett with the $300-plus plane fare.

Clarett made a cogent point at the time about the inequities of a system that pays out millions to universities during the bowl season while players get relatively little.

I asked Meyer the same question about giving players a piece of the bowl money.

“I am a big proponent of that,” he said. “I heard the story about Ohio State had the families that were going to get together to raise money. That’s nonsense. To think about that and all this money being shuffled around, and here is a star player whose mom can’t afford to go out there, that’s not right.”

A majority of college athletes are content to simply “be here,” to play for this college or that, from Florida to Ohio State, Maine to Middlebury, to play in the national championship game. But there comes a time when adults must step in and look out for the best interests of young people. That time is now.

Share the wealth.

 

[cranberry]

Solid column. Didn't break much new ground but it's an issue that needs to keep being raised. I like Bill. Although I usually agree with his viewpoints, I sometimes wonder if he marginalizes himself by writing too often about race. But he obviously writes with a great deal of passion, so who am I to judge?

 

[Alma]

If Rhoden isn't going to talk about Title IX, then I'm not sure why you write this column at all. Sorry. They're nice words. All. Completely. Meaningless.

 

[heyabbott]

You can debate the pros and cons of paying college athletes, either the revenue generating atheltes, men's basketball and football only, or provide a stipend to all atudent atheltes. But tuition, room and board at most schools today is a $100,000.00 over 4 years. Most student athletes receive academic tutoring, if they want it, that can cost $25-50 an hour, free. Many get unlimited use of the most modern workout facilities in the country, conditioning and nutrition coaches and better medical care than anyone this side of Capitol Hill. BTW, the food, rooms, class selection process, counseling and guidance received by atudent atheletes surpasses anything the non athlete will ever get.
For the 99% of all NCAA student athletes that don't get professional sports contracts, their scholarship may be the ticket and opportunity to future success. To the ones that don't take intelligent advantage of their opportunites, tough ****.
To those of us that paid and worked our way through university and work and pay our way for our children's education, I could give a **** about Rhoden's topic. He sounds like a tax lawyer for all the Goldman Sachs employees that got 6& 7 figure bonuses complaining about the taxes and the bosses that got 8 fugure bonuses. Since when did newpaper columnists start siding with the privleged over the working stiff.

Rhoden shifted his racial angle and in this instance, is an elitist snob. See, I can find a reason not to like him anytime.

 

[statrat]

Yawn. Didn't I see almost the same column churned out by about 500 national columnists last week?

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I think it's fine if Rhoden wants to write about race almost every day. The topic interests me, athough there are plenty of writers I'd choose before Rhoden. Someone has to do it, and at the NYT that someone is Bill Rhoden. They have plenty of sports columnists from which to choose, and the only one who raises my pulse is Selena Roberts, and she simply entertains me with her choice of words.

And I think it's fine if he wants to write the column posted here, although I have zero interest in reading it because the topic does not interest me, and I wouldn't be especially interested even if my favorite columnists wrote about it. Neither am I interested in the columns written by people who are on the anti-steroids bandwagon. I don't give a rat's ass, to be honest, and I don't think the fans do, either.

I prefer columnists who entertain me. A sense of humor is an absolute requirement. It's best if they can mix it up and be funny one day, passionate the next day and moving the day after that. You can rip someone like Lupica, legitimately or not, but he has all three pitches and he uses them. It's what makes him a Hall of Famer, in my opinion.

So while I think it's unfair to rip Rhoden for the subject matter he chooses, it really is OK to just turn the page without reading him. I do, plenty of times. But he's no more boring than about 60 percent of the nation's big-paper sports columnists -- his particular obsession just happens to make some people uncomfortable.

 

[Boom_70]

If Rhoden isn't going to talk about Title IX, then I'm not sure why you write this column at all. Sorry. They're nice words. All. Completely. Meaningless.

Did someone say title ix ? Bill finds that racists also :

Sports of The Times; Breaking Down the Institutional Barriers That Women Still Face
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By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
Published: June 22, 2002
DONNA LOPIANO and I have this running joke about royalty payment. The joke goes back to a conversation we had eight years ago when we were discussing Lopiano's frustration that her greatest goal in life would never be realized. She wanted to play center field for the Yankees.

That's an impossible dream for nearly every ballplayer but, as a woman, Lopiano, the executive director of the Women's Foundation, knew she would have to wait the rest of her life and the life of another generation for this to possibly happen.

We talked about my daughter's generation and my commitment to fight the institutionalized barriers that prevent women from fulfilling their aspirations. Lopiano folded our conversations into speeches in which she told audiences that hope was on the way. There was a generation of sportswriters who would strongly advocate the women's movement and smash barriers. The anecdote became popular and the joke was that she owed me residuals.

Nearly a decade has passed since our conversation, and tomorrow the nation will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination in education by institutions receiving federal funds. Networks will broadcast hours of programming on the struggles and triumphs of women in sports.

But the movement for women's rights in sports is complicated by the conundrum of gender and race. The movement has celebrated breakthroughs: more women playing more sports at earlier ages unshackled by old-fashioned attitudes. But the distribution of power that has marked the dominance by white males in sports has characterized the ascent of women as well. The old girls' network replaces the old boys' network: white women sit at the controls, black women sit on the periphery.

 

[Boom_70]

Cont


Once upon a time I believed that the burgeoning industry of women's athletics would create a fresh athletic model. The movement was in position to create a new model in which black and white women shared equally -- all things being equal -- in power, access and opportunity. Instead, many of the same power relationships are forming along the lines of race, especially in colleges, where power is concentrated in the hands of white women, and black players are funneled into track and basketball.

In retrospect, perhaps it was too much to hope -- and sexist as well -- to think that women's ascent to power would create a new paradigm.

Lopiano thinks so. ''I think it's kind of the nature of the beast that when you're in a position of power you succumb to the majority that put you there,'' she said recently. ''And you've got to conform.''

The immediate problem with exclusion is that when a real battle comes along, you have only half an army at your disposal; and now Title IX is in for a real battle. Even as its proponents celebrate, Title IX is being challenged by a lawsuit by the National Wrestling Association of Coaches. It contends that the law has become a quota system that damages men's sports.

If there ever was a need for an all-for-one, one-for-all battle cry, this is it. But how much passion can you muster in a fractured field, where power and access are so unevenly distributed? Black women have been herded into basketball and track and field. Off the field, they are practically nonentities.

Last year The Chronicle of Higher Education published a report about how African-American women have been left behind, if not left out, of the women's movement in sport. The participation figures are numbing.

Nearly a third of the women playing Division I basketball are African-American and nearly a quarter run track. Fewer than 3 percent who receive scholarships to play all other sports at predominantly white colleges in Division I are black.

While the four-fastest growing women's sports are soccer, rowing, golf and lacrosse, colleges have not added basketball and track teams at nearly the same rate -- only 26 percent.

Lopiano recalled a meeting she attended with the Minority Opportunity and Interest Committee to discuss the lack of coaching and administrative opportunities for minorities. The committee framed the debate as a gender issue. Lopiano startled and even offended some officials at the meeting when she suggested that African-Americans were being ''ghettoized'' into basketball, football and track. ''Where do you see black lacrosse coaches?'' Lopiano said.

''I was trying to persuade them to step back and see the bigger picture. You got to go after the segregated sports system in the United States, because otherwise you're picking at the fringes.''

There will be no new all-inclusive model for this current generation of women, perhaps including my daughter's generation. What there will be is a larger throng kneeling at the same altar: power-hungry men supplanted by power-hungry women. What we will celebrate tomorrow is progress. Reform is another 30 years away.

 

[FantasyAlliance.cm]

Coaches make millions and all the poor "student athletes" get is four free years of a college education. Boo hoo.

 

[shotglass]

So we're giving medals now for columnists who do not play the race card in one given piece of copy? Wow, I know some columnists who would really get weighed down by all the hardware.

 

[Terence Mann]

Damn those Yankees and their institutional barriers keeping Donna Lopiano from playing center field for them.

 

[Alma]

Those sports are added most frequently because they're cheap. Basketball and track were already present at many schools, and thus not added in as great a frequency.

If anyone is ghettoizing black athletes into certain sports, it's not the colleges, but the high schools. I don't think you can require college programs to take on people who have never played lacrosse or golf to satisfy Bill Rhoden.

 

[goalmouth]

Wise up. Rhoden in his column plays the race card by not playing it. Which is the dominant racial component among BCS programs?

 

[heyabbott]

If they want to pay the football and basketball players a piece of the money pie, in addition to their tax free scholarship, (which can amount to $25-45K a year) wonderful.
I think that they should have to meet the same academic standards as any other group of students.

 

[novelist_wannabe]

Rhoden: Coaches make big money.
Read: White coaches make big money. You'll note, for the record, there was no mention of the millions being paid Ty Willingham. Course, only four of 119 I-A coaches are black, but that's another issue.
Rhoden: Athletes deserve a piece of the pie.
Read: Black athletes deserve a piece of the pie. Do you really think Rhoden cares if Laurinitis has money to go out on a date? Given his persistent beating of this particular drum, I seriously doubt it.

Also, it glosses over the fact that the players are allowed -- and often get -- up to $500 worth of bowl swag. Xboxes, iPods, clothes and all manner of other stuff were handed over to them when they checked in at the official bowl hotels. Pales in comparison to the bonuses the coaches got for getting to the bowls, but $500 isn't chump change, either.

 

[Floyd]

Just to add to the Rhoden-bashing regarding rowing, lacrosse and soccer growing faster than basketball, there's a very good reason: It's all about numbers.

Title IX requires equal scholarship dollars for both men and women -- so to counteract the large rosters of scholarship males, schools use rowing programs (which often have up to 30 or 40 women) and lacrosse and soccer (also with relatively expansive rosters) to even things out. Basketball is still 12 women on a roster, and there's not much way around it. Sports that can offer spots to more women makes Big State U look more in line with Title IX standards. Nothing to do with race.

Without much actual evidence, too, I would imagine more schools ALREADY had women's basketball than had other lesser known sports. Therefore basketball would inherently be growing at a slower rate, so the statistics are really meaningless anyway.