FOOTBALL
Tom likes to watch American football, Kathy doesn’t. I am ambivalent, but I get sucked right in. One thing that seems very odd to me, even as an American, and must seen nuts to people from other countries, is how all major American universities have a professional football team attached to them.
At some point in the past American football was a game that men played with the boys of one university playing against the boys of another university. Boys will be boys. The girls cheered them on. College athletes were amateurs, in fact any hint that they were being paid in any way was considered corruption. True, they often had scholarhips that paid for their tuition and room and board but no cash exchanged hands.
But when college football became a lucrative business the excellent player felt cheated if not paid and would leave to play professional football as soon at they could.
But now that has changed completely. Now the best college players can be paid millions of dollars to play. And as college teams try to improve their record they outbid other colleges for the best players with the result that over their four years and even into graduate school the best players shift from college to college, wherever they can be paid the most.
These are not college teams. What happens in classrooms is almost irrelevant. Universities hire coaches and players and each university is provided a professional team to entertain their students and to bring money to the university.
Highschool football teams don’t pay their students and the players on a school’s team go to class and learn in the same way as everyone else in the high school. Highschool football games are community events that the whole community participates in.
It just seems nuts that universities which are dedicated to intellectual learning hire professional football teams. There is, I guess, a community and tribal togetherness created, but almost no connection between learning and sports.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 