Over the weekend, it was once again shown that college athletes are expected to be more like other professional athletes than college students. In an incident involving an Oklahoma State basketball player, Marcus Smart, and a fan; it was once again made clear that some college athletes are simply unpaid professional athletes. This is particularly evident in the most competitive sports (football and basketball).
As sports fans on all sides of this issue converge to dissect this issue and divulge the wide variety of opinions, I try to look at it from an impartial point of view. That is to say, I am neither an OSU fan or a Texas Tech fan. Rather, I am a fan both of college sports and most importantly, the kids who play them. As a fan, I try to imagine a sport, other than basketball or football, where a reasonable person would find themselves yelling at a student athlete, "you piece of crap". Truth be told, much worse things are often said at really competitive college games. But the perspective I focus on is the disparity in college sports. I try to imagine a college gymnast, male or female, having a similar statement lobbed in their direction. I try to imagine a college golfer, again male or female, being expected to "work" under those conditions. Maybe, I just never attended the right volleyball game or soccer match in my years at Oklahoma University. Maybe, if I had attended a wrestling match or a track meet, I would be more comfortable with what seems to have become a well established and acceptable norm. Surely, if I found a student working in the library, on a work-study program, it would not be uncommon for those coming in for a research project to address their underlings as "pieces of crap".
As I reflect on my time in college, admittedly not on a "full ride" athletic scholarship, but on the much less prestigious academic variety, I can hardly imagine a situation where I would have been expected to accept being addressed as a "piece of crap". Maybe, that is a fair price for a very select group of "student-athletes" to pay for their opportunity to bring fame and fortune to their chosen schools. Maybe, as we (college sport fans) continue to carve out the acceptable work environment for this very select group, we will continue to make sense of the increasingly harsh workplace we are providing for them. As the stakes rise in college sports and the fans pay ever-increasing sums of money to be up close and feel a part of the action, it is important not to lose sight of the distortion that is occurring. We, the fans, are not given a list of things not to say or do, as we enter sporting events. In fact, we do not even have the obligatory signs saying "do not tap the glass", "refrain from loud noises", or "please do not rattle the cage", that you might find posted at the zoo. Instead, many arenas around the country, take it as a point of community pride to proclaim their stadium/arena an especially difficult place to play/hostile environment.Even as I write this, anyone can find ESPN specials that speak to the research done in certain college arenas (Duke, North Carolina, etc.) to find the perfect words to insult the opposing players. There are no limits, except local norms and mores, to the extent that they exist, to stop fans from sitting close and yelling loudly whatever comes across their minds. Somehow we have come to expect and accept that the price to play certain college sports is much higher than the price to play other sports. Meanwhile, the scholarship is the same.
Don't get me wrong, I love to scream as loud as the next guy, hoping to cause a missed free throw or a botched snap that might change the outcome of a game in favor of my team. I just have a much more difficult time missing the blurred lines between "college student-athletes" and their "professional" counterparts. That is to say, some players are forced to apply their skills, valued at hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for a very small fraction of that amount. And, as an added bonus, they live in an even smaller fishbowl than their professional counterparts, without much of the support system that professional teams employ to protect their highly valued investments. So the next time that I hear of a 19 or 20 year old kid, who has seemingly cracked under the pressure of his unpaid, non-professional work environment that we call college sports, I will wonder to myself if things would have been different if he were a professional athlete.
