[In honor of the
upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories
and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories
in comments, y’all!]
On
schadenfreude, bigger problems, and the need to keep an open mind.
As a lifelong
fan of the University of Virginia’s sports teams, I have to admit that the
recent, ongoing allegations
against and investigations
into Roy Williams’ men’s basketball program at the University of North
Carolina have prompted some serious feelings of schadenfreude. Partly that’s
just sour grapes, of course; outside of the brief mid-1980s window of Ralph
Sampson’s heyday, UNC has consistently dominated UVa in men’s basketball,
and the childhood traumas of repeated sports butt-kickings tend to linger. But
while Virginia is of course not an Ivy League school in its approach to
athletics, it nonetheless felt, to this Virginia at least, that UNC represented
a more aggressively cynical athletic powerhouse, a university where the “student
athletes” tended to be even further removed from the official definition of
that category. So I can’t lie, stories about rampant cheating and malpractice
at UNC have resonated satisfyingly with the me who will forever be about 10 years
old.
Yet the me who
is 37 years old and an analytical AmericanStudier to boot believes that the
details of UNC’s academic fraud and programmatic skirting of the rules and other
violations represent, as do pretty much all such revelations about college
athletics, much more of an
example of trends taking place around the country than an anomaly. If that’s
true, if we would find similar or at least parallel efforts at numerous other
big-time college sports programs, than simply punishing UNC, necessary as such
a response no doubt is, might well become at the same time an elision of the
bigger problems, indeed would serve as an implicit argument that UNC’s
particular program rather than the NCAA in every way comprises the problem. Seen
through this lens, efforts to unionize college athletes such as the
one underway at Northwestern thus become far more significant collective
responses, and the ones on which we should focus our communal attention as much
as possible.
And then there’s
Dean
Smith. For permanently 10 year old me, Smith was the symbol of all I
despised about North Carolina basketball. Yet when Smith passed away earlier
this year, I had the opportunity to learn a number of striking
stories and histories about which I, to my shame and perhaps because of
that instinctive antipathy toward Smith, had previously known nothing. Such
stories, including both of the ones hyperlinked previously in this paragraph as
well as this
amazing Twitter story, make clear that Smith represented the best of what
college sports can include and mean, as well as just a genuinely inspiring and
influential-in-the-best-sense American life. As I’ve
written before in this space, being willing to admit all the things I don’t
know is as vital to my evolving AmericanStudying as any other element or
perspective, and I’m very happy to say that my ignorance about Dean Smith has
been replaced by a more knowledgable, and far more beneficial, awareness of
just how much we can learn from this North Carolina basketball icon.
Last Carolina
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?
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