I
was musing in writing last year, via relating a conversation that Kathy,
Elliott, and I had had, about living forever.
I happened upon an article about Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who has made a
number of predictions that were born out by events. He’s best known for declaring that "the
Singularity" will occur in 2045, at which point human and technological
intelligence will be merged. In the
meantime, however, he maintains that humans will live forever, and that
phenomenon will start by approximately 2029.
Eternal life will be achieved by the incorporation of nanobots in our
bodies to take over where the immune system fails; these little bots will race
around our body fixing things that fail. "Kurzweil
imagines a future in which technology is so advanced that humans are able to
hack the body and significantly increase our lifespans — perhaps forever." (This isn’t wildly outside the bounds of
current science; there is research going on in nanobots attacking cancer.)
A friend of mine who’s a biologist, however, is
skeptical. "What biologists usually find when we simplify the human body
(or any organism's body) is that we are being naive. I am pretty
confident that nanobots will have a place in human therapy, but we don't
understand the complexity of the body well enough to program nanobots to fix
everything. So you survive cancer and die of an aneurysm or survive both
of those and Alzheimer's gets you. So my take is that he is being
incredibly optimistic. Of course, his prediction is only adding a few
years, not living forever yet. And if we lived forever, this planet would be in deep
doo doo. As would our economy, family relations, etc. Imagine, your
7,000-year-old son moving back in with you."
One of my favorite quotable sources in American history,
H. L. Mencken, commented on living forever.
He, among many others, was asked by historian Will Durant to reflect on
life, religion, and the purpose of life.
I share his contentment about simply disappearing.
I
do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. . . . What the meaning of human life may be I don’t
know: I incline to suspect that it has
none. All I know about it is that, to me
at least, it is very amusing while it lasts.
Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities
that I admire most—courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that
one who fights God, and triumphs over Him.
I have had little of this to do.
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be
good forever.
My
biologist friend was familiar with the Mencken quote. "It
is interesting that Mencken hits on a question that comes up many times in our
biology classes: students are always looking for the purpose behind
life. And at its base, the purpose of life is simply to make more
life. If you look at our evolutionary adaptations, they serve to help us
reproduce. So if we lived forever and stayed true to our biology, this
planet's human population would get to extremes!"
*
* *
In pursuit of candor, I must
acknowledge that Mencken has his severe critics, and rightfully so. He was both racist and anti-semitic, in
addition to being an unmerciful critic of democratic society and admirer of Germany. In 2003 the art critic and essayist Hilton
Kramer—himself no liberal—reflected after re-reading some of Mencken.
Even
the political reporting that once gave me a chuckle now strikes me as more
dispiriting than amusing. The facile
rhetoric of remorseless, uproarious ridicule that made Mencken a culture hero
in the 1920s turns out, in retrospect, to have been exactly what Irving Babbitt
said it was in 1928—"intellectual vaudeville," full of bluster and
farce aimed at what now seem easy targets, but thin in intellectual substance
and woefully lacking in a sense of history.
[That Mencken was seen as] vastly entertaining, and indeed liberating,
by a great many intelligent people is not to be doubted. But not to be doubted,
either, is that ours was a very different country and a very different culture
in the early years of the twentieth century.
It was a far more provincial country with a far more philistine culture
than comparable readers would find tolerable today.
Mencken was wildly popular on college
campuses in the 1920s, but also liked by some of the leading figures in
American political and intellectual life, such as Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes. Mencken crashed and burned,
however, in later years, and is now largely unread except for his witty quips
about American politics and society. So
I quote him from time to time, but with an understanding of his limits.
One Mencken piece was making the
rounds after the November 2016 elections (and often incompletely, with words
added that Mencken didn’t pen, or condensed in a way that hid Mencken’s
point). What Mencken wrote in 1920 about
political contests was this:
The larger the
mob, the harder the test. In small
areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way
through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the
fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of
personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the
man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most
easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency
tends, year by year, to go to such men.
As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely,
the inner soul of the people. We move
toward a lofty ideal. On some great and
glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at
last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Does
Mr. Trump represent the candidate who’s "the most devious and
mediocre" and able to "adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a
virtual vacuum"? I have to say he
sure tried to live up to Mencken’s description.
I don’t think he’s a moron, however, although I don't think he's
actually very smart.
Another
from Mencken’s oeuvre, less well known, can be read as commentary as current as
anything one can read on the web or news media.
It’s the opening sentence in one of his collected works, from an essay
"On Being an American." (This
is all one sentence!)
And here, more than anywhere else that
I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private
and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and
chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological
buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of
miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and
extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought
up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost
fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a
petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to
awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a
Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.
Mencken’s cynicism shows, but the daily
panorama isn’t much different from when he wrote that in the 1920s.
*
* *
Not to dwell on Mencken, but I will
anyway. I happened across a book review
Mencken wrote that appeared in the May 3, 1925 Chicago Tribune. The review
was of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby.
I have always been fond of Gatsby, even though it's ultimately
quite depressing. Mencken's review is
almost a paraprosdokian: he starts out
seeming to pan the book and then ends up lauding it. He wrote that it "is in form no more
than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that. . . . This story is obviously unimportant and,
though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is
certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. What
ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story — that
Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in
getting under the skins of its people."
Mencken praises the improvement he
saw.
What gives
the story distinction is something quite different from the management of the
action or the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the
writing. In Fitzgerald's first days it
seemed almost unimaginable that he would ever show such qualities. His writing then was extraordinarily slipshod
— at times almost illiterate. He seemed
to be devoid of any feeling for the color and savor of words. He could see people clearly and he could
devise capital situations, but as writer qua
writer he was apparently little more than a bright college boy. The critics of the Republic were not slow to
discern the fact. They praised
"This Side of Paradise" as a story, as a social document, but they
were almost unanimous in denouncing it as a piece of writing.
It is vastly
to Fitzgerald's credit that he appears to have taken their caveats seriously,
and pondered them to good effect. In
"The Great Gatsby," highly agreeable fruits of that pondering are
visible. The story, for all its basic
triviality, has a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll along smoothly,
sparklingly, variously. There is
evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. It is a quite new Fitzgerald who emerges from
this little book, and the qualities that he shows are dignified and solid. "This Side of Paradise," after all,
might have been merely a lucky accident.
But "The Great Gatsby," a far inferior story at bottom, is
plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard
work.
Thus
Fitzgerald, the stylist, arises to challenge Fitzgerald, the social historian,
but I doubt that the latter ever quite succumbs to the former. The thing that chiefly interests the basic
Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life — and especially
the devil's dance that goes on at the top.
He is unconcerned about the sweatings and sufferings of the nether herd;
what engrosses him is the high carnival of those who have too much money to
spend, and too much time for the spending of it. Their idiotic pursuit of
sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering
swinishness — these are the things that go into his notebook.
What I find striking in Mencken's review is its immediacy. He's writing about the top 1%, or at least
some of them.
One recurring
question in the field of literature is the place of The Great Gatsby in the American canon. One of my friends in English told me it's
"certainly an important book -- one of the contenders for the Great
American Novel, and certainly more often quoted (if only from a few lines) than
most others." He went on to point
out that one of the English faculty at the University of Minnesota has edited a
collection of Fitzgerald's St. Paul short stories and that Garrison Keillor
named a theater in St. Paul after Fitzgerald.
* * *
Were I inclined
to alliteration, I would title the next few paragraphs "Fritz, Fitz, and
Football."
In the course of
a little reading about the initial reception of The Great Gatsby, I stumbled across a Wall Street Journal article from 2014 about F. Scott Fitzgerald and
football, of all things.
It seems that
Fitzgerald was a rabid Princeton football fan.
According to the Journal
article, he decided to go to Princeton after watching the Harvard-Princeton
game in 1911. In case you don't know,
the Harvard-Princeton games are a "storied rivalry." "Once there [at Princeton], he tried out
for the team—but got cut on the first day, a well-chronicled disappointment
that some scholars believe explains the sense of rejection that permeates his
novels, especially 'The Great Gatsby.'"
Fritz Crisler was
head football coach at Princeton 1932-1937, and then went to the University of
Michigan (where he essentially built Michigan into the athletic powerhouse it
remains to this day). He gave an
interview in 1956 to a romance language graduate student, Donald Yates, which
Yates later wrote about for the Michigan
Daily; Crisler related that "F. Scott Fitzgerald called him ‘between
12 midnight and six a.m. of the night before our games—not just sometimes, but
practically every eve of every home game.’" Crisler pioneered the practice of creating
different offensive and defensive teams—that is, two "platoons";
before that, the players were on both defense and offense. Crisler is described by the College Football
Hall of Fame as "the father of two-platoon football." What two-platoon football allowed, in
essence, was unlimited substitution of players during a game.
The reporter who
wrote the Journal article posed a
query: "The tantalizing question
raised by the 1956 interview is: Did
Crisler get the idea [for two platoons] from Fitzgerald? It is not a subject discussed in the
ever-expanding library of popular and academic writing on Fitzgerald. . .
. Scholars who focus on Fitzgerald’s
fascination with money, women, booze, jazz and 1920s Paris have never made much
of his devotion to a Princeton football team that won 10 national championships
in his lifetime. His life as a devoted
fan never fit well in the narrative of Fitzgerald as a tortured artist,
heartbroken by his wife’s mental illness and confronted at every turn by
commercial failure."
The author of the
1956 article with the Crisler interview said that Fitzgerald may indeed have
been the one who devised the idea of two platoons.
During his
Princeton years, Crisler told Mr. Yates, his phone would ring late at night
before games. Answering, he would hear
the voice of Fitzgerald, calling from Miami, Chicago or Hollywood. The calls came "between 12 midnight and
six a.m. of the night before our games—not just sometimes, but practically
every eve of every home game," Crisler told Mr. Yates. Often, behind
Fitzgerald’s voice, Crisler heard the laughter and cries of a dying party.
What
Fitzgerald called to talk about was Princeton football. "It wasn’t just a matter of the habitual
old-grad spirit and enthusiasm," said Crisler. "There was something beyond
comprehension in the intensity of his feelings. Listening to him unload his
soul as many times as I did, I finally came to the conclusion that what Scott
felt was really an unusual, a consuming devotion for the Princeton football
team."
. . .
He was a
smart football fan, though, to judge from that 1956 interview. "Sometimes
he had a play or a new strategy he wanted me to use," said Crisler. "Some of the ideas Scott used to suggest
to me over the phone were reasonable—and some were fantastic."
In the
fantastic department, Crisler cited an example:
Fitzgerald, he said, "came up with a scheme for a whole new
offense. Something that involved a
two-platoon system."
At the time
of the interview, the coach was already known as the father of two-platoon
football. But Mr. Yates didn’t know
that. "I didn’t pay a lot of
attention to sports," says Mr. Yates, now 84 and a professor emeritus of
Latin American literature at Michigan State University.
So Mr. Yates
didn’t ask Crisler the million-dollar question:
Did he get the idea for a two-platoon system from Fitzgerald? Looking back at the statements Crisler made
to him, Mr. Yates says, "That seems to be what he is saying."
Up until 1941, college football
rules didn't allow substitutes except in the case of injury. When the rules were loosened because of WWII,
Crisler moved to two platoons (at Michigan).
It is entirely possible, the Journal
reporter observed, that the idea originated elsewhere and that Crisler just
adopted it, along with many other coaches.
(The NCAA then banned two-platoon football again in 1952 and only
repealed the ban in 1964.) Nonetheless,
Fitzgerald was "way ahead of his time," said the current Princeton
football coach, Bob Surace (who'd had no idea Fitzgerald was such a fan until
the Journal reporter alerted him to
the history). But there was one other
piece of evidence to support the claim that Fitzgerald might have been
instrumental in adopting two platoons when it became permissible to do so.
In 1962,
Fitzgerald acquaintance Andrew Turnbull wrote a biography of the author. He recounts that Asa Bushnell, a Princeton
athletic manager during the Crisler years, reported receiving a call from
Fitzgerald promoting the idea of distinct units of players. "Princeton must have two teams,"
Fitzgerald told Bushnell, according to the book. "One will be big—all men over two
hundred [pounds]. This team will be used
to batter them down and wear them out.
Then the little team, the pony team, will go in and make the
touchdowns."
Not conversant
with anything more than a brief outline of his biography, I didn't know that
the last thing Fitzgerald read in his life was a Princeton Alumni Weekly analysis of the upcoming football
season. He died of a heart attack at age
44 while reading it. Fitzgerald had
written marginal comments in the article that one scholar described as
"good prose," so "that makes college football the last thing he
[Fitzgerald] ever wrote about."
The question I
had, and which I posed to the Journal
reporter via email, was whether Crisler might have met Fitzgerald when he
(Crisler) was at the University of Minnesota (1930-32). The reporter told me that he didn't
know. So who knows, it may have started
right here in Minnesota—but, having asked the question, I doubt it. There's no evidence that Fitzgerald was a
Minnesota football fan, and he (along with his wife Zelda and their baby girl)
left St. Paul permanently in 1922, when Fitzgerald was 26 years old.
My colleague the
late Bob Geary, associate director of men's intercollegiate athletics at the
University of Minnesota (along with his wife, killed in the charter plane crash
in Reno, Nevada in 1985, and with whom I spent many, many hours working—and
laughing because of his marvelous sense of humor), more than once commented
that in his opinion, it was the move to two-platoon football that doomed
Minnesota's continued dominance in the sport.
(Minnesota won five national championships before the war: 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941. After that its performance was mediocre,
although it did get to the Rose Bowl in 1961 and 1962—when one-platoon football
was again the rule. It has been up and
down since, more down than up, and the peaks of the "up" haven't been
all that high.) One theory about the
decline and its relationship to two-platoon football is that the more heavily
populated states were better able to recruit and retain more of the outstanding
high school football players; when only one platoon was permitted, schools
could not grab as many players, so they were better distributed over more
institutions. Minnesota, with fewer high
school football players, benefited from the one-platoon rule. That theory doesn't explain how Oklahoma did
so well, of course, but obviously coaches have a significant role in recruiting
and winning as well (which Bud Wilkinson did at Oklahoma during the 1950s).
What does explain
how Oklahoma and Nebraska and others in the Big 12 became football powers, my
friend Holger Christiansen points out, was the decision by the Big Ten to adopt
need-based financial aid for athletes in 1956.
There's a long history there, starting with the "Sanity Code"
adopted by the NCAA in 1948, which permitted institutions for the first time to
openly provide scholarships (more accurately, grants) and jobs to athletes, but
the student had to demonstrate financial need.
Eight years later the NCAA voted to allow scholarships without regard to
financial need or academic performance.
The Big Ten chose
a different path. It
initially
implemented one-year need-based aid to replace the previous job-based program.
. . . The Big Ten decided to base its
financial aid on the expected ability of a student-athlete's parents to pay for
college
expenses. .
. . The Big Ten's need-based aid policy
failed and in 1962 was eliminated in favor of full-ride scholarships. Need-based aid failed not only because it
increased the conference's administrative workload, but also because it
hindered the ability of conference schools to recruit the best athletes within
the rules. Because other major football
conferences had implemented full-ride scholarships, the Big Ten faced a
significant competitive disadvantage in recruiting. Prospects could receive a larger grant-in-aid
package at schools in other conferences, including some conferences that
offered four-year scholarships instead of one-year renewable scholarships. Recognizing the Big Ten's noble yet naive
attempt to implement a unilateral need-based aid system, former NCAA head
Walter Byers noted that, "competing schools laughed at the Big Ten as they
mined the lode of athletic talent in the Big Ten area."
Thus the Big 12 rose to football prominence.
January 21, 2015
Nevada officials have erected a new plaque in the
memory of the 70 victims and lone survivor of the 1985 Galaxy Airlines Flight
203 crash in Reno, Nev., on Jan. 20, Scott Sonner / AP
* * *
I can't resist
passing along a story that some of you have heard about Fritz Crisler. Before Crisler was at Princeton, he was at
the University of Minnesota. In early
1930, following the departure of Clarence "Doc" Spears (coached
1925-1929, record of 28–9–3), after frantic searching, President Lotus Coffman
hired Fritz Crisler as both football coach and athletic director. The incumbent athletic director, the
University's first, was either forced out or resigned, because Crisler wasn't
prepared to work under him.
By late 1931,
Crisler was on his way to Princeton, after less than two full years at
Minnesota. The public story was that
Princeton was making an offer that Crisler couldn't refuse—and that Minnesota
couldn't match. Former Circuit Court of
Appeals Judge George MacKinnon (formerly in the U.S. House of Representatives,
a seatmate of Richard Nixon, politically conservative, football player under
Doc Spears and part-time assistant coach under Crisler and then Bernie Bierman)
says the public story about Crisler's departure was malarkey and said very few
people knew what really happened.
(MacKinnon told me this in an interview I had with him and then a number
of letters back and forth in the mid-1980s.
"Crisler
had been fired privately" by Coffman, before he departed for the Orient in
October of 1931. "All the rest,
continuing as Athletic Director, was just temporary window dressing to give him
time to get another job." MacKinnon, who was no admirer of Crisler's
ability as a coach, nonetheless said it was not Crisler's won-lost record that
led to his demise. (Although, he said,
"his record would have been enough to fire him. He had lost seven games in two years, against
Spears' loss of four games in his last three years by a total of five
points.") Rather, it was Crisler's
unacceptable behavior as a womanizer.
MacKinnon tells the tale.
President
Coffman found out that Crisler, a married man, was carrying on a liaison with a
leading lady actress at the Bainbridge Theatre in Minneapolis, and taking her
on trips to Chicago. President Coffman
called in Crisler and confronted him with the charges. Crisler denied them. Coffman then appointed an investigating
committee with Dean Everett Fraser of the Law School as Chairman. The Committee hired a private detective to
investigate the alleged liaison with the actress. He investigated and reported back to the
Committee. Dean Fraser told me
personally one night after a Law Review banquet, "You would have thought
he [Crisler] would have had enough brains to pull down the shades." When the Committee reported their findings to
Coffman he fired Crisler.
It is MacKinnon's view that
"the die had already been cast for Crisler to leave and Bierman to replace
him" before Coffman left the United States.
So anyone who thought football
scandals are new doesn't know history. They
go back much further than 1932. Here, a
few excerpts from Colliers, December
2, 1905.
The
University of Minnesota has entered into a sort of co-operative football
alliance with the commercial interests of the city of Minneapolis. . . . [I]n the annual game between these colleges
[Nebraska and Minnesota] last fall Minnesota played two men who were entered
for participation in this game only, and a third who was in college for
football alone. Usher H. Burdick of
Mandan, North Dakota, a former Minnesota end, who had left college in June, was
solicited to return by Mr. Frank Force, sporting editor of the Minneapolis
"Tribune, was promised a position in one of the Hennepin County offices,
and came back for the Nebraska game. . . .
Another participant in this game was Henry O'Brien, then a professional
coach, employed by Macalester College.
O'Brien asserts that he entered practice for the Nebraska game, and
played quarter in the second half only upon the solicitation of Coach Williams
and "Ikey" Kaufmann. . . .
"Sunny" Thorp was the favorite with the Minnesota bleacher
crowd during the season of 1904. He was
in college for football alone. Thorp
demanded a position which would pay him $60 monthly. Frank Force, the newspaper man, claims to
have found this position in the office of Hugh Scott, the county auditor, and
when Thorp was not paid the full amount he asked, Force says that he collected
the salary allowed, raised the difference by subscription, and paid the
player. "Sunny" Thorp was
registered in the law school. . . .
Commercial Minneapolis has willingly supplied berths for players.
These facts
seem without point, and explain nothing of a convincing nature in themselves,
but they raise the vital question. Can a
football man attend the arduous daily practice, earn his way through college,
and still be a student? Minnesota has
solved the problem of attendance through her "night law school," but
the dean of that department answers the vital question. Dean Pattee, who has had many football men
under his charge, deprecates the practice, declares that "only about
one-third of the football men can possibly maintain average standing," and
asserts that, "because the game as now played is prejudicial to the
highest interests of the university, the faculty of this law school seem to
stand as a unit in favor of its abolition." In this view Dean Pattee . . . differs with
the president of his own institution.
President Cyrus Northrop, of the University of Minnesota, can see no
real demoralizing evil in the game of football.
Out of twenty-nine college presidents, who replied to a communication
sent out by Judge Victor H. Lane of Michigan, in an inquiry into the faculty
attitude toward athletics, the reply of President Northrop was alone favorable
to the game as now played. He advances
the opinion that "as long as football is skillfully and honestly
played," he is in favor of it, and because "it has such a tremendous
hold upon everybody" he can see "no use in fighting it even if it is
an evil."
The demand
for victory comes with no more striking force from the commercial interests of
the Minneapolis than from the sporting element:
the habitues of the saloons, the cigar stores, and the gambling dives
now languishing "under the lid."
Minneapolis has had a wave of municipal reform. The city conscience has been exercised, and vice
in its manifest forms has been driven from the town, or suppressed beyond the
reach of the novice. There are no curb
men who now even dare to announce in a whisper chance games going on
"inside," yet when the dignity of a university is loaned to the
practice of betting thousands of dollars are openly wagered in public on the
results of the larger games.
* * *
The Fitzgerald
story inadvertently provided a rather neat segue to football at the University
of Minnesota.
As I was writing in early 2017,
we in the Twin Cities were bombarded with news about the University of
Minnesota football team. For those
outside the area, a number of players were suspended because of group involvement
in sexual activities with a young woman; the team proposed to boycott playing
in a post-season bowl game because, they charged, of a lack of due process for
the players; the head coach, Tracy Claeys, tweeted support for the boycott; the
University's internal report on the events was released, suggesting that the
players indeed engaged in unseemly behavior; the team gave up its boycott; the
team won the post-season bowl game even though they were underdogs; the
athletic director fired the football coach after the bowl game. The major issue was the toxic culture
demonstrated by what was essentially a gang rape (although the woman may have
initially consented) and how the University would respond to an extremely
sensitive matter.
College
athletics, at the major-school level, and particularly in football and men's
basketball, is a swamp. But draining
that swamp is a far greater challenge than that faced by Mr. Trump (in that he
and his administration could act unilaterally and get something done, although
it's evident he and they will do nothing of the sort, whereas in college
athletics no one has sufficient authority to take any effective action because
it's a pattern diffused throughout the culture).
An academic
friend of mine who's a fairly keen observer and fan of college sports supported
the decision to fire the coach.
I think that
[the president and athletic director] did the right thing in firing Claeys.
Even though he established a winning record and accomplished what [former head
coach Jerry] Kill couldn't -- win bowl games -- the football team's toxic
culture needs to be cleaned up, and Claeys is not up to that task. Hopefully the next coach will be like the one
[another school] just hired, who won't tolerate any improper behavior. I was on a committee that interviewed the two
finalists. The first guy had a proven
record but his answer to questions about Title IX was that he wanted to have a
strong connection with the police so that he would be the one to get a call to
get them out of trouble before it hit the media, whereas the other guy talked
about establishing a culture of true respect and zero tolerance. Claeys struck
me as an old school coach like the first candidate. Those guys need to retire,
as this is a new age.
My disagreement
with my friend is that Claeys is "old school" and that he and coaches
with similar attitudes should get out of the way in a new age. Claeys is younger than I am by 17 years. I don't think this attitude, taking a sort of
"boys will be boys and I'll support my team," is confined to
"older" coaches. It's an
attitude that I saw quite a bit when I was more involved in athletics
(admittedly, that was about 30 years ago), but based just on what I read in the
news media for a long time, I doubt much has changed. That macho culture seems to be alive and well
among at least a fair number of those in college (and professional)
sports. It clearly isn't universal;
there is a large number of male coaches who don't have any more tolerance for
the abuse of women than I do.
My friend didn't disagree.
Both young
and old coaches can be old school. So to
me that term is NOT about age, it's about a perspective. Indeed, there were plenty of coaches from the
dawn of football who didn't embrace a toxic masculinity culture. Perhaps what
we should say is that as society becomes less and less tolerant of that then it
will be harder for today's football coaches to embrace a culture that was much
more widely tolerated in the past? So
it's easier for a younger coach who is just getting started to pay more
attention to Title IX than a coach who grew up in an era before it was
embraced, and that's a good thing!
I agree but I'm not sure that
the macho culture is anywhere near extinction.
No comments:
Post a Comment