Foosball is the Devil!
Last week, the Eugene Weekly ran a piece written by U of O professor Jim Earl criticizing the sports fetishism of colleges and universities in America. Fair enough, you might say. He could have a point, considering the U of O is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new basketball arena, while its dorms rank among the worst in the nation. But does Earl tackle this problem? No, he goes for the gusto and attacks sports in general (and football, specifically) for their inherent moral wrongness. I’m not joking; this man is the ultimate killjoy. Check it out:
“What bothers me, really, is what football is teaching the kids about life. Take a bunch of high school kids, many of them from tough backgrounds, and just shower them with luxuries like private jets and air-conditioned lockers with Xboxes. Fulfilling their crudest teen fantasies is teaching them something? What, that life is a game? Great lesson.”
But that’s just the opening salvo, my friends. The main meat of Earl’s diatribe is based on a meeting between him, The Frohn and the late, great Bill Moos. Earl is yammering away about his tweed jacket or some other shit when he accidently makes an awkward faux pas.
“[I] blurted out something like this: ‘You know, the relation of football to higher ed isn’t exactly natural or obvious. After all, the values of the football field are the exact opposite of the values they learn in class. In class they learn that violence and force are wrong, that life’s not a contest, that beating the other guy isn’t the goal …’ I could have gone on, but […] Dave and Bill were staring at me as if I’d just peed on the table.”
Well, duh. I’d look at Earl the same way if he pinched off that verbal turd in my office. Seriously, who used the wayback machine to transport Professor Goodvibes here from the ’60’s? First of all, I thought the whole reason I’m going to college is so I can get ahead in life. Oh right, but it’s not a contest. Excuse me. Second, imagine if, at this point in the conversation, Bill Moos put Earl in a headlock and gave him noogies until Earl admitted that football is totally awsome. Where’s your peace, love and understanding now, Stodgy McKilljoy?
I yearn to quote more of Earl’s surreal, Appolonian tirade, but you can read the whole thing for yourself. I guess I could make some jokes about Earl being picked last in gym class and wearing tweed jackets, but I’d rather deflate his argument with an actual example. Take the town Barrow, Alaska. Well north of the Arctic Circle and 500 miles from the nearest town, it’s an unlikely place for people to live, much less play football. Nevertheless, the local high school put together its first football team, even though they had to practice on gravel and no one knew how to actually play the game. Thanks to donations from some random woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers got an actual turf field … about 20 feet away from the Arctic Ocean.
Here’s the rub, though: since the formation of the football team, attendance and grades at the high school have rose dramatically. What’s that, you say? Sports having a positive effect on teenagers? That’s right. it’s the inspirational, feel-good story of the year. Of course, playing sports doesn’t mean that you will be a good person. It doesn’t guarantee good morals. At the very least, though, it is an incentive for kids to go to school and keep their grades up, so why not? I mean, god forbid that a kid get a free (or discounted) college education for being good at sports – an opportunity he or she might never have had otherwise. Arguing against the athletic arms race happening on college campuses is one thing, but arguing against sports completely? Lame.
