JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post wants to pay college football players because it is their right.

They work for the schools that give them scholarships and, in turn, those schools make millions on their backs.

The NCAA should face reality, she says, and recognize how it takes advantage of players in order to enrich itself. Players deserve a piece of the action, if only a small piece akin to pocket money.

It would be okay if wealthy alumni fund the paychecks, with sums based on the value of the players’ positions; quarterbacks would receive the bigger stipends.

That pretty fairly wraps up Ms. Jenkins argument. Let’s stipulate that college football has pretty well got out of hand. Football, however, pays for other intercollegiate sports at many schools. And, yes, football coaches and athletic directors usually make much more than do presidents and chancellors and, at state schools, more than the governor.

Something should be done, but what?

Long before most of us were born or, at least, were aware of sports, talented writers on newspapers began to romanticize the skills of college boys displayed on Saturday afternoons. Think Grantland Rice and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (Actually, the 1924 game was held at the Polo Grounds used by the New York Giants baseball team, and Rice’s lede was turned into a promotional photo back in South Bend by a student publicist, George Strickler.) College football attracted fans without college connections before pro football became the obsession it is. In the 1930s and 1940s, even into the fifties, local radio stations programmed college football scores, punctuated with recorded fight songs. Alumni loyalty was augmented by local fans paying reasonable ticket prices to fill stadiums built to hold the followers of the growing attraction that was college football. It was a time when most young people did not consider attending college.

[As a grade school pupil in the late 1930s, I could afford to buy a ticket – something under $1 – to an Ohio State game in the Buckeyes’ horseshoe, an unlocked place we would explore from top to bottom when there were no games, including an area under the stands that contained rooms for athletes. Another grade school recollection is our parochial football team’s star running back in 1940. Two things stood out about Manny Phelps: he was the only kid that drove to school in his own car, and the only one needing to shave daily. I learned the word “ringer.”]

Fandom grew something like that. Now the old stadiums have been expanded or new built; ticket prices have soared beyond the reach of most people. College football is big business.

So, Ms. Jenkins has a point. Time has passed when some kid from West Siwash High, who came to campus by Greyhound carrying his pasteboard suitcase, can walk-on at State U and become an all-American QB. He is recruited from a Texas, Georgia, or Ohio secondary school where he wears fitted uniforms not unlike the pros and has clippings and YouTube posts that bring him to the attention of university scouts. He and his parents and coaches are all but bribed until he signs a letter of intent, almost as sacred as a contract.

Turning back the clock to “winning one for the Gipper” is out of the question.

Some accommodation that most people would agree to be fair needs to be found or Ms. Jenkins would have us believe. But, some little compensation for players would soon grow. Pay schedules would become recruiting tools. Bonus payments would be permitted for sterling play. Athletes in other sports would demand equity. Women athletes would cite Title IX and obtain pay equivalent to men. And those poor high school players could not wait for their compensation and, somehow, would start getting it.

Soon victory would be sought, not for the glory of old Puce and Umber, but for the Sean “Crusher” Jefferson III and his warriors.

Maybe the solution is recognition of what’s happening. Big­-time college football cannot be returned to play between matriculating students preparing for professions who just happen to enjoy athletic competition.Big athletic plants must be paid for by TV networks and fans in sky suites. So, how to supply the games using dissatisfied, underpaid players who supposedly attend classes to earn worthwhile degrees? Make classes optional, pay living wages, lease the stadiums to promoters, and convert football programs to bona fide minor leagues.

For boards of trustees burdened by conscience, let them divorce football teams from the college’s name and devote lease income to laboratories and faculty upgrading.

A few universities might wish to abandon football altogether as the University of Chicago did while remaining part of the Big 10 for academic endeavors.

Those opting to sponsor unabashed pro football programs would not have to pay obeisance to scholarship and agree to a play-off system that would determine the actual top team in the country. Fans would like that.

As for us purists: how about real students going out for the team to represent their school against the downstate rival – just for the fun of it?

TREAD NOT ON CONSCIENCE

Regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services that require religious organizations having employees to buy them health insurance that provides birth control and abortion drugs are labeled unconstitutional by Christians, Jews and others fighting them in court. But there is a more basic reason to fight, and perhaps, a more basic reason for the fight to be won.

Conscience.

“[N]o man has the right to require another to be less than a man, to demote him to the status of non-moral agent, like a beast, or a cog in a machine,” writes Anthony Esolen in a Crisis magazine piece commenting on a book by Robert P. George. “No man may steal my humanity, by demanding treason against that stern monitor, my conscience. But this is exactly what is happening before our eyes, in what used to be a free country. We are demanding obeisance to and participation in things that until eleven o’clock last night almost everyone (and all Christians and observant Jews) believed to be evil, and believed it with strong reasons prescinding from the nature of man and from revelation.”

Esolen, a professor of renaissance literature and western civilization at Providence College, did not mention the HHS or any other controversy in his review of Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism by George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. Nonetheless, current legal and moral questions concerning the HHS mandates clearly fit his observation.

His article is illustrated with a frame from the 1966 motion picture, “A Man for All Seasons” and begins with a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Hidden Strength that tells of an atheist sociology professor being instructed to step on a crucifix. A voice tells him not to do it despite his non-belief, and he refuses. Conscience also guides Thomas More in the history-based play and movie.

Thomas More is a saint of the Catholic Church because he chose beheading over sanctioning Henry VIII’s usurpation of ecclesiastic powers and his illicit marriage. More defied government out of conscience.

Conscience is at the heart of the several legal challenges to HHS mandates. The First Amendment provides constitutional grounds with its right to free exercise of religion. Exercising equates with the dictates of conscience. The courts will have to deal with conscience; take judicial notice of a power inherent in the human psyche.

Esolen writes, “. . . as George notes, conscience is not a ‘permissions department.’ It commands and proscribes; and that’s why we spend so much effort trying to circumvent it, muddle it, or stifle it altogether.” Another literary citation from Esolen: Mark Twain’s Huck Finn protects runaway slave Jim because of something deep inside rather than follow the law and turn Jim in.

Some people might believe that something is permissible although it is evil. They see themselves as being good because of the benefits their evil confers on mankind, he says. “So it is that snuffing out the lives of unborn children, in the minds of some, is more than permissible; it is a great and glorious good . . . Conscience can be unformed or deformed; conscience does not determine what is good or evil, but must hearken to the truth of the matter, even if the person cannot articulate just why he must do what he would prefer to leave undone, or why he must not do what he would dearly like to do.”

And, further Esolen writes: “To forbid someone to do what his conscience commands him to do, or, worse still, to compel him to do what his conscience instructs him he must not do, is thus to work violence upon him at the core of his being.”

He concludes: “The ‘enemies of conscience,’ as Professor George calls them, simultaneously and incoherently deny the existence of moral truths that bind the conscience --- other people’s consciences, while they reserve for themselves a moral right to bind and loose those other people, mechanically, pragmatically, to bring about some vague ideal society. In such a world, everyone is a god or an ant, but not a man.”

So there it is: an argument, difficult to contest, why the government that exists with the consent of the governed, shall not determine the consciences of its individual citizens.

Our unelected regulators, interpreting law and converting it to binding rules, may believe they truly are working for the good of the country. But they may not overturn what their interior voices command or proscribe --- to act or not to act, to do or not to do. Thus, they may be following their consciences, but for a cause that religious groups believe is evil. That would be a deformed conscience on the part of some regulators, while other regulators might find their work in crafting rules to enforce laws inimical to their consciences.

Esolen’s essay, while not dealing with those contingencies directly, does give examples that might be applied (without equating the actors). When dealing with “wicked” actions, the writer says, “Many an SS officer’s conscience was comfortably silent on the issue of slaughtering Jews.” And when dealing with a “heavier burden of justification” to override a person’s conscience, “not by compelling him, but by taking the reins ourselves by doing what he will not do; that’s the case when we give blood transfusions to infants in imminent danger of death, over the wishes of parents, who object.” [Italics appear in original.]

This is basic stuff. The courts must be careful where they tread; our regulators have not been. Conscience and what that entails is at the core of this HHS controversy. Conscience must not be ignored.