HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel spent an hour on Wednesday night telling us what we already knew about big time college athletics.
Andrea Kramer interviewed former Auburn football players Chaz Ramsey, Troy Reddick, Stanley McClover and Raven Gray, all of whom said that they were given cash during their time at the university.
The Real Sports expose attempts to paint a picture none of us have ever seen, but in reality the same issues of cash, sex and steroids have existed in major college athletics for more than 30 years.
During the recruiting trips I took, there was always a cute coed that was assigned to be my personal tour guide, although the guided tours didn’t have anything to do with the campus’s facilities.
I can tell you from personal experience that players have received hundreds of dollars in handshakes since the late 70′s. It didn’t take much to figure out which players were receiving the extra benefits, because all of them had nice vehicles and plenty of money to buy pizza every night.
A friend of mine who played at the University of Georgia told me Herschel Walker would leave the locker room with as much as $800 in his pocket after a game.
And if you think the recruiting process is a tsunami, then I can only imagine what you’d think about the steroid problem.
Back in my day we didn’t have to worry about drug testing. Since most of us were your average teenagers who didn’t know any better, we took “the little blue pill” as it was known to put on muscle.
If you worked out every day throughout the course of a season, you might gain 30 pounds of muscle. But if you took the little blue pill you could gain that much in a month.
For all of its intended purpose to shock and awe the viewer, Real Sports failed to address the origins of recruiting violations – and they don’t have anything to do with the NCAA.
During the last 10 minutes of the show, host Bryant Gumbel discussed the piece with a panel that included former Michigan Wolverines football coach Rich Rodriguez, former CBS college basketball analyst Billy Packer, Fox Sports journalist Jason Whitlock and former Ivy League athletics commissioner Jeff Orleans.
Gumbel and Whitlock spent a lot of time talking about the NCAA’s greed, tearing down the system and redistribution of wealth, but none of that has anything to do with the problems associated with recruiting.
Moreover, Whitlock’s long standing position of paying college athletes and sharing the wealth don’t begin to offer real solutions to the issues, and those issues don’t have as much to do with the NCAA as he’d have you believe.
The fact is, the sewer that former University of Houston coach Tom Penders spoke of during the segment begins with the recruiting process, when an athlete’s family sees the young person in question as a means to an end.
The high school and AAU coaches, and the “representatives” for some of the most talented athletes are just as guilty in the exploitation of these young men and women.
Without realizing it, these young athletes are being whored out by those closest to them, the same people who should have this young person’s best interests in mind.
But those interests are generally limited to the highest bidder, the school whose network of boosters can provide the most benefits.
Blaming the NCAA about players receiving cash from boosters isn’t going to resolve those problems, despite what Whitlock or Gumbel attempt to have you believe.
I’m not defending the NCAA though. I have long believed that it is the most useless organization on the planet next the to United Nations.
For all its talk about integrity, the NCAA is not only guilty of hypocrisy, it’s selective use of enforcement is mostly doled out as a result of a reaction rather than being proactive.
The NCAA’s inability to be proactive in addressing the issues involving college athletics have actually fostered the illegal activities prevalent in the recruiting process and beyond.
And at the root of all these evils is money. Those who have money want more, and those that don’t want those that do to share.
I believe that’s what the sociologists call a conundrum.
I don’t want to come off as knocking Real Sports either. For the most part, I consider Real Sports an excellent program. I regularly watch the show and enjoy the fact we get to see stories that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day.
But the fact is, this particular episode of Real Sports was nothing more than a rehash of what many already knew, and it failed miserably to point the finger where it really needed to be directed.
