Wednesday, 08 September 2010 10:25

To many women, being the wife of an All-Star major league pitcher may seem like a dream existence. Behind her celebrity husband’s glamorous network TV appearances on the diamond and the sports page headlines, though, a baseball wife must grapple with raising a family alone for a good part of the year when her husband is away on the road, no easy task under normal circumstances, and a daunting one for a family that had to move 40 times because of spring training and trades to five different ball clubs. And if the wife is also battling skin cancer and has one child with Asperger’s Syndrome, and another with anorexia, she is apt to write a book about her trials as Shonda Schilling has done, titled, “The Best Kind of Different: Our Family’s Journey with Asperger’s Syndrome(HarperCollins).” Fortunately, Shonda was a journalism major at Towson State College, Maryland, and knows how to tell a difficult story.

Shonda is the wife of Curt Schilling---a dominating hurler for two decades for the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox, among other contenders, and a man who struck out a phenomenal 3,116 batters while compiling an enviable 216-146 won-lost record over nearly 20 years in the Big Time, collecting three World Series championship rings in the process for his performances in 2001, 2004, and 2007. With Curt away so much it wasn’t always possible to be a typical family, Shonda writes. In an interview on Comcast on “Books of Our Time,” produced by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, Shonda told law professor/TV host Holly Vietzke:

“I think that when you’re married to somebody who’s a professional or a celebrity, you’re often thought of as never having to do anything. So I was always trying to live up to what people thought, to prove that I was doing it. And I was raising my own kids…at a cost of killing myself in the process.” After a while, Shonda said, she stopped trying to change peoples’ minds and determined “to live my life the way that I am, and true to who I am (and after the fourth child)..to get some help in there.” Married in 1992, the Schillings have four children: Gehrig, 1995; Gabriella, 1997; Grant, 1999; and Garrison, 2002.

While she recognized that son Grant was different “in a way I’d never seen before,” Shonda said, “I had no idea that anything such as Asperger’s ever existed…I just kept chalking everything up to that he was the baby of the family.”  At times, Grant would not obey her in public and threw temper tantrums, causing passers-by to stare or offer advice, which Shonda regarded as humiliating. The Schillings did not know Grant had Asperger’s until he was diagnosed with it at the age of seven. What followed in her family, she believes, could happen in any family. “There is no perfect family, and (it’s best) to go with your instinct and just be kinder to people. I mean, knowing now what I know, if I see someone who’s really struggling, the last thing I’m going to do is throw a look at them. I smile at them because it is humiliating, you know, and if someone would have thrown a smile at me, it would have meant everything in the world to me. Instead, I got all the unwanted advice about what I was doing wrong, and what kind of child he was and…that I was failing so miserably. But we just do really (have to) realize that there are all different kinds of kids in the world.”

Shonda learned that the simplest change in routine---such as entering school by a different door---could provoke a crisis. On one occasion Grant began to cry because “I never have gone in the front door of the school and I don’t know how to go in that way.” Grant struggled repeatedly but could not make himself walk through the door but after 20 minutes, though, Shonda calmed him down and had him walk through the entrance when a teacher was present “and he was fine for the rest of the day” but “it was emotionally draining (for me).”

A child with Asperger’s, Shonda says, does not think that other people have opinions that count. “He only thinks that he has an opinion, so if you’re in a parking lot and he sees a dog he really wants to pet, his thinking is, ‘I want to go pet the dog, what’s wrong with that?’ Not safety, not anything…so I found myself always having to be a step ahead of him, often putting my hand on him rather than the younger one(Garrison), because the younger one got it.” There were occasions, she continued, when Grant did not want to be at a baseball game when his father was pitching. “He didn’t...care that I wanted to see the game. It was too much for him and he wanted out of there, so he would rock back and forth and stuff and say ‘I want to go’, and loudly, and he didn’t care who was around.” Other fans would lean over and say, ‘Oh, you need to listen to your mother.’ There’s nothing worse than your child not being in your control and having to listen to other people’s opinions,” Shonda says. Some people suggested that if Shonda spanked Grant the misbehavior would stop. “But I knew in my heart that a spanking wasn’t going to work.” “It had gotten to the point,” she continued, “when he was seven years old, that I knew if I put my hands on him, I might hurt him because he wasn’t responding to me at all, and, in fact, he would give me a giggle that was almost like a slap in the face, like “You can’t affect me.’ It was his nervous way of trying to deal with my yelling.”

Although outsiders tend to notice the acting out of Asperger children and complain of their anti-social behavior, they don’t recognize the syndrome has some positive aspects, Shonda writes. “I think people need to recognize children with Asperger’s are not doing anything by being malicious…that they’re over-talking, over-talking…our first reaction is ‘this is really weird.’” Kids, though, don’t see that the listener has had enough. They have this wealth of information and they want to get it to you. Nothing they do is to be mean but(for them) it’s a deep conversation and they’re saying it from the heart. They’re not saying things you (necessarily) want to hear.”  Grant, for example, was obsessed with Naked Mole Rats, featured in the cartoon “Kim Possible,” and spent hours finding every book in the library that mentioned them.

Shonda goes on to say, “I think one of the best qualities about my son is that he’s not going to be influenced in the world by status or money because he doesn’t really understand that. He’s going to get into a career that he loves and be really good at it because he’s in love with it and he’s going to research it and he’s going to have a wealth of knowledge.” She adds, “He’s going to have to be taught and understood, when it comes to social interactions and stuff like that but if you understand what kind of a person he is on the inside, you realize that it’s really a gift that he gets to live like that.” Asperger children learn better to socialize as they age and their maturity levels when they’re twenty-five or thirty, Shonda says, are the same as their peers and their quirkiness does not stop them from getting married and raising families.

Shonda says her other children “were mad at Grant all the time. They’d say, ‘Why does he always get his own way and can do what he wants?’ And one of the great lessons is that life isn’t always fair…and so that’s where I’ve seen my kids come a long way, to understand there’s a lot of different kids out in the world, and there’s a lot of different approaches and a lot of different ways to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, I can let that go.’ It’s really not that important.’” Shonda said her children fought a lot until they came to that point and, being forced to handle the fighting with her husband away, she believed her own situation might be considered “not fair,” either.

Far from attempting to hide Grant’s condition from his teachers out of fear that it would label him, Shonda was open about it. “I think in a society that we are recognizing that there is so much different, that understanding it would be the best tool, and it would help my son to be the best person that he could be to be understood, and that the people in his classroom could help him by saying, ‘Grant, you’re talking too much, you’re in my space.’ They need to go ahead and tell him and help him so that he would be learning lessons in school and in sports and in his everyday life.”

Shonda says that Grant is “very proud of himself” to have overcome his problems and that the best feeling for her about the book “is that he has no reason to be ashamed. It’s not a disease, it’s the way his brain is wired, and he should not be treated any differently because of that. My youngest son has dyslexia, but we don’t mind using that term. That doesn’t mean my son isn’t going to read. It just means that he has to learn a different way to reading. It doesn’t mean that my son with Asperger’s is not going to grow up and be a successful human being. It means that his route is going to be a little different than the typical route.” For the most part, Shonda says, Asperger kids “are gifted in their minds, often very, very bright, and you think back when we were in school that these kids were just pushed to the side because they weren’t understood or labeled ‘behavioral.’ And so it’s just really neat to know that people get them now and will be able to bring out the best in them and make them actually contribute to society. A lot of them grow up to be scientists because they are able to hyperfocus on things that they really enjoy.”

Shonda learned to make use of the strategies that would help Grant adjust to an often tumultuous life. Her parents brought him to the baseball park to participate in what they hoped would be a celebration if the Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies (Curt had won the second game 2-1) only in the eighth inning of the fourth game to avoid sensory overload on the seven-year-old. “He never cared about baseball, couldn’t care less,” the worried Mother said, thinking about the tumult that would erupt after the last out of a Red Sox victory, “so a World Series win is the last place you want to be.” Ordinarly, loud noise and commotion would cause Grant to shut down. Shonda feared Grant “might go fetal” so she explained beforehand to him exactly what would happen, including the barrage of flashbulbs. As it turned out, “nobody was jumping higher than he was...he’ll just remember that it was a fun family experience, being on the field and all the kids and parents, with everybody hugging and taking pictures…and there’s Grant running back and forth in the outfield and he sees himself on the JumboTron…and he’s having fun and that’s what’s important, and I took one of my first deep breaths, it was so overwhelming what my life is going to be like.” Shonda added, “Just being able to sit back and watch Grant’s euphoria made me almost as happy as the fact that we’d just won the World Series. Nothing will ever compare to witnessing Grant’s excitement and joy, and the feeling of relief that came over me. It warmed my heart as nothing else could.”

Being a baseball player, Curt missed a lot and now that he has retired from baseball “he realizes how much of his life he did miss,” Shonda says. “It’s hard. It’s hurtful. There’s a lot of making up to do and there’s no way to go back.” She says her husband “never fully understood Grant until he retired” and never recognized the burden Grant’s differences imposed on her. She says Curt was thinking, “I’m providing this wonderful life for you and you’re complaining” while she was thinking, “I’m doing everything and you don’t appreciate what I’m doing.”  Writing the book, she explained, alerted Curt to the scope of her problems and the couple got counseling “He came in and said, ‘I had no idea that you were going through all this stuff.’ And that was all I needed. I didn’t blame him or need to be angry at him. I just needed him to understand that I really was trying my best, and I was frazzled, and I felt like a failure, and I was covering it all up so that he could go out and pitch every five days, that I could handle it all…”

In February, 2001, Shonda, then 33, was diagnosed with stage 2 malignant melanoma. The affliction required five surgeries that left 25 scars crisscrossing her back, arms, legs and chest. “We lived a lifetime in 2001,” Curt said. “In a 365 day span we experienced probably the highest of highs, from a professional standpoint and from a personal standpoint, and the lowest of lows on both fronts, too. The thing that worried me the most that year was losing my wife and my children not having a mother.” That October Curt won the World Series co-MVP honor pitching for the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the media wrote up his wife’s battle with cancer. The overwhelming response inspired Shonda to create the Shade Foundation of America. She travels the country warning people to avoid overexposure to sunlight and to have their skin checked regularly. Her foundation has worked to teach thousands of school children about sun-safety and her work has been recognized by the American Academy of Dermatology. She also runs the Boston Marathon each year to raise money for the work. “Every year we provide grant money for schools and community groups to create shade on playgrounds and public spaces,” Shonda says. “In the classroom, we introduced the SunWise program with the help of Environmental Protection Agency. We also run a school poster contest to drive home the message of prevention.”

Since her husband retired at the end of the 2007 World Series, Shonda’s life has become “absolutely easier, because for the first couple of months he said, ‘Whose kids are these?’ and he could see that Grant was exhausting. He would come home and sit down and think we’re all going to eat a balanced meal and you’ve got one (child) who’s not putting food in his mouth (Gehrig was anorexic) and one that won’t touch certain textures…and so he realized that parenting was a lot more than let me raise your voice. But Curt loves parenting. I don’t think anything could drag him back to baseball right now.”

Asked about the positive effect Grant’s Asperger Syndrome had on her, Shonda replied, “I cannot even begin to tell you how much happier I am, just because I realize that there’s just so many things in life that don’t matter, and how neat it is to live truthfully through someone else’s eyes, like his. One great example is I read the thank yous’ at the end of the book, the dedications, and I said, ‘I want you to listen to this and tell me what you think.’ And I read it to Grant and his eyes filled up and he jumped on me and he hugged me and he kissed me and he’s crying and he says, ‘I just want you to know how much that means to me.’ And he was just nine years old and I am so proud of him and it’s so awesome that he gets to live his life so true…He’s always a blessing. He’s always with you when he’s with you and that’s just a neat thing.”

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, producers of “Books of Our Time” on which Ms. Schilling appeared, is a non-profit educational institution purposefully dedicated to providing a rigorous, affordable legal education to students from low-income, immigrant, and minority backgrounds who would otherwise be unable to obtain a legal education.  For further information, contact Sherwood Ross, a media consultant to the law school, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 10:25

Besides holding Afghanistan and Iraq hostage, the Pentagon today is holding American civilization itself hostage to its imperial designs. That’s because war beggars civilized life and ceaseless war beggars civilization unceasingly. As the great political commentator Walter Lippman put it during the Viet Nam War, “All the plans of the Great Society here at home, all the plans for the rebuilding of backward countries in other continents will all be put on the shelf, because war interrupts everything.” In the American Warfare State that prevails today most of every tax dollar collected goes to wage war and the Pentagon spends more for war than all 50 states combined spend for peace. No better example exists than the protest of 750 scientists at the National Institutes of Health who said their basic infectious disease research had been subverted by spending on bioterror research. War interrupts everything: rebuilding our cities, public schools and community colleges, water-works and sewerage systems, housing, mass transit, hospitals, new business start-ups, and the funding of the fine arts.

Lippman went on to give advice that nearly every occupant of the White House has since disregarded: “We are not the policeman of mankind. We are not able to run the world, and we shouldn’t pretend that we can. Let us tend to our own business, which is great enough as it is. It is very great. We have neglected our own affairs. Our education is inadequate, our cities are badly built, our social arrangements are unsatisfactory. We can’t wait another generation.”

Today, with 30 million Americans unemployed, underemployed, or dropped out of the labor market, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, “America’s biggest---and only major---jobs program is the U.S. military.” If you want to enlist to kill people, Uncle Sam has got a warplane for you to fly; if you’d prefer to make living room furniture, forget it. Adding up 1.4 million troops on active duty, 833,000 in the reserves, and 1.6 million more employed by defense contractors, Reich calls this a “giant undercover military jobs program,” asserting that it is “an insane way to keep Americans employed” because “it creates jobs we don’t need.” “We don’t have an overt jobs program based on what’s really needed,” the labor authority writes.

Instead, workers we do need are losing their jobs by the millions. Calling the job picture “A Horror Show,” Bob Herbert wrote August 10th in The New York Times, “Government workers are walking the plank from coast to coast.” The paper reported the nation lost 133,000 more jobs just in July. And Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics, told the paper that while corporate earnings have been “spectacular” that “the job market just stinks.” What a fine arrangement! Karl Marx could have cited it as proof of reckless capitalists gone mad and that capitalists need wars to survive. Marx would have also pointed to the amazing high profits of the top “defense” contractors.

In an editorial last May 17, The New York Times observed, “There has been a feeding frenzy at the Pentagon budget trough since the 9/11 attacks. Pretty much anything the military chiefs and industry lobbyists pitched, Congress approved---no matter the cost and no matter if the weapons programs were over budget, underperforming or no longer needed in the post-cold-war world.”  

Rather than renounce America’s imperial direction, President Obama has escalated the senseless war in Afghanistan, requesting the Congress hike defense spending next year by two percent to $708 billion and, says Reich, including Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons, and intelligence, the total national security bill will push $950 billion.

And proving that vaudeville is not dead, Defense Secy. Robert Gates said last week he’d like to shut one military command and reduce the number of admirals and generals to cut spending. This bit of public showmanship will entertain those who do not realize Gates is only switching dollars around. “The funds saved will help us sustain the current force structure and make needed investments in modernization in a fiscally responsible way,” President Obama said, letting the tiger out of the bag.

The Nation magazine got it right when it editorialized last Nov. 9th “The ballooning debt is forcing the administration to match every new expenditure with a spending cut. As a practical matter, that means every dollar we spend on the war in Afghanistan will be one less dollar to create jobs or provide health insurance at home…”

Studies have repeatedly shown that investing money in education, or for that matter, in public works, will create more jobs and prosperity than military outlays, which feed the military-industrial complex. So will investing money in new inventions, in small business startups and in a number of other peaceful, capitalist pursuits. If the economy is limp, if bankruptcies and home foreclosures are setting records, it’s because taxpayers’ bucks that might be fueling full employment and the rebuilding of America are being squandered in the Middle East, whose people are suffering death rates, homeless rates, infrastructure breakdowns and unemployment and poverty as a result of U.S. aggression that the American public can barely comprehend.

Those who have touted war-making over diplomacy have been shown by history to be the scum of the earth. “War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it,” said one such warmonger. His name was Benito Mussolini. Pentagon recruiters put it another way, advertising, “Be all you can be.” Unfortunately, the only thing you can be in a grave is a corpse. The promise of America should be loftier than a death wish in some war of aggression.                                                       #

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer and former wire service columnist who was also active in the civil rights movement. Reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 10:25

Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre---that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters---ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military in Iraq when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April.

“What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire---a “wall of steel,” in Army parlance---even if it put civilians at risk,” report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine.

Former Army Specialist Josh Stieber said that newly arrived soldiers in Baghdad were asked if they would fire back at an attacker if they knew unarmed civilians might get hurt in the process. Those who did not respond affirmatively, or who hesitated, were “knocked around” until they realized what was expected of them, added former Army Specialist Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.

A third former Army specialist, Ethan McCord, said his battalion commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after attacks by improvised explosive devices. “Anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED…you kill every motherfucker in the street,” McCord quotes him as saying.

Corcoles told the reporters he purposely turned his gun away from people. “You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you. It’s just insanity to just start shooting people.”

“From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region,” say McCord and Stieber in an open letter to the Iraqis who were injured in the July attack. Together with Corcoles, they have decided to go public about the true nature of the war.  

McCord was shown in the video rushing the wounded children from a van. For this humanitarian act, he was “threatened and mocked by his commanding officer,” say The Nation reporters, and his platoon leader also yelled at him “to quit worrying about those ‘motherfucking kids’.”

McCord told the reporters of “multiple instances in which soldiers abused detainees or beat people up in their houses. In one case, he says, someone was taken from his house, beaten up and then left on the side of the road, bloodied and still handcuffed,” Lazare and Harvey write.

The veterans say they support the release of the video and otber documents by WikiLeaks because it confronts people globally “with the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the video to WikiLeaks, is facing Espionage Act charges and has been transferred to Kuwait for a military trial, Lazare and Harvey note. The government is also probing where WikiLeaks got the 90,000 secret U.S. military documents from Afghanistan it released late last month. These reports, according to The Nation, detailed the role of U.S. assassination teams, widespread civilian casualties resulting from U.S. attacks and staggering Afghan government incompetence and corruption.”

The totalitarian mantle of secrecy by which the Pentagon shrouds its war crimes makes the disclosures by intelligence analyst Manning appear all the more courageous. As long as the Pentagon keeps him behind bars every American who believes in the Biblical injunction that “the truth shall make ye free” is also a prisoner of the same tyranny. And the three former Army specialists who told their story to The Nation have given us a good idea of what it is the Pentagon doesn’t want the American people to know.

Sherwood Ross

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 10:25

The transformation of varsity college football programs into unabashed commercial ventures has come at the academic expense of their players, only about half of whom are graduating. Indeed, pressures on the varsity team performers in today’s Big Time college football atmosphere have made a mockery of the “student-athlete” concept. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, a shockingly low 53 percent of the varsity football squad players graduate. UC’s dismal success rate, like that of so many other football powerhouses, is significantly lower than that reported by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.(NCAA) for varsity players generally in all sports, which ranges from 60 to 70 percent. That’s according to Michael Oriard, associate dean at Oregon State University and author of “Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era”(University of North Carolina Press). Oriard was a second-team All-American at Notre Dame in the Sixties, and afterwards went on to play for the Kansas City Chiefs. The BCS era referred to in the title of his book stands for the Bowl Championship Series that was created in 1998 ostensibly to determine the national champion in Division 1-A college football but which, in fact, has worked to create big paydays for the conferences that provide bowl game competitors.

“I don’t think the kind of full college educational experience that I received and that was available to my teammates around the country is available today, because it has become so much more time-consuming, so much more intense,” Oriard says. “When I was a student at Notre Dame I not only graduated and got an education but I got the best education that my institution offered me while still playing big-time college football, because it was possible to do both at the same time,” he told TV book show host Lawrence Velvel of “Books of Our Time”, which appears on Comcast.  Velvel is the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

In his college playing days, Oriard attended classes until 3 p.m., when he would suit up and practice on the playing field until 5 p.m., take a dinner break and attend a team film meeting. By 7 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. he would be free to devote himself to academic pursuits. That meant going to the library until about midnight and then to bed. Today, by contrast, he says, it’s typical for football team players to have to lift weights early in the morning, squeeze in their class work by 1 p.m., then view films and practice, and then probably commit to more film viewing after practice. “The number of hours that are required has increased by at least a couple every day, if not more than that, for some players,” Oriard says.

Added to this burden is “the enormously greater pressure” of performing on television. “Everything they do is on Sports Center, on the highlights, and all this sort of thing,” Oriard says. Moreover, the money that is being generated by the programs is much greater today---as is the pressure on the coaches and their assistants---so that the college football environment is both more intense and more time-consuming, he contends. In fact, “I think college football is really fundamentally at odds with the desire to create a real educational experience for the young men participating and, at the same time, to compete at the highest level.” He notes that some colleges are reaping close to $90 million annually from football and a coach can earn $4 or $5 million per year, far more than the university president.

Oriard says the evolution of intercollegiate football into a costly and potentially lucrative activity began in the 1890s, when only about two percent of Americans even attended college. When the Thanksgiving Day games between Ivy League schools Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, began drawing as many as 40,000 to 50,000 fans to New York, it opened the eyes of university officials to the fact these contests could be good promotion and inspire donations from the local community and attract students. By the 1920s, the commercial football spectacle was filling ever larger stadiums and the resultant revenues were funding the Ivy League schools and enhancing their appeal. The three above-cited institutions would have achieved greatness even if they had not played football back then, Oriard says, but other schools such Notre Dame, a small Catholic college in Indiana that became a national brand name before that term existed, soared to sports fame on the pass-catching prowess of end Knute Rockne (later the most successful Notre Dame football coach in history) and a backfield sports writer Grantland Rice in 1924 dubbed the “Four Horsemen.” As Rice put it:

“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”

“Because of the times, its lowly academic beginnings, and because it was Catholic and immigrant and therefore despised by lots of mainstream WASP Americans,” Notre Dame sought to overcome the prejudices against it through football mastery, Oriard said. It started playing a national schedule, traveling to USC in Los Angeles, SMU in Dallas, and Georgia Tech in Atlanta because such name schools would not travel to South Bend, Indiana. “And they tried to play on the East Coast whenever possible because that’s where the sports writers were,” Oriard says. And so Notre Dame became a leading national university through the football team. Other denominational colleges that also built football powerhouses on the Notre Dame model included Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, Rice, and SMU. At SMU, officials courted the business community through the football program---building a stadium in 1925 but not erecting a library until 1939.

Oriard says that football “was fundamental” to the growth of American higher education in the 1920s, which raises the question of whether it continues to be essential to American higher education today. Oriard answers his own question by saying that, if you could imagine Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Virginia and the University of North Carolina  without football, “the immediate impact would be minimal. They would still get top students applying.” The research seems to suggest, he continued, that “in general, there’s not a correlation between athletic success and fundraising and admissions, particularly for programs that are already established. And for (schools) such as Gonzaga University, that can have a big bump immediately following the success (in basketball), it’s a one-time bump. Things don’t keep bumping ever after.”

Some universities have discovered that big-time football is too expensive for them and have dropped out of the competition. Others, such as the University of Buffalo and the University of South Florida, elected to rise from their lower status to big time at a time when to compete against the Michigans, Ohio States, Alabamas, and Nebraskas---which enjoy so much revenue from gate receipts and TV---“seems enormously difficult,” Oriard says. Among the top 117 football teams in Football Bowl Subdivision 1A and excluding the military academies, the top quarter of these teams average $46 million a year in football revenues.  “Programs that have the 100,000-seat stadiums---Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and Tennessee---have a tremendous advantage here,” Oriard states. “And it’s not just the number of people you can put into a stadium, it’s the dollars per seat you can charge. Because they have waiting lists there you can sell premium seating, and you can have luxury suites and that sort of thing.” In 2008, the University of Texas led all other schools in income with $87 million from football, what Oriard termed an “astonishing number.” The NCAA has calculated that only between 19 and 24 in its 120-team subdivision will consistently make any money. Teams require big bucks as the average coach in the Football Bowl subdivision earns over $1 million and in the BCS bowls $2 million has become the entry level salary for a coach, Oriard says. The professionalism of college coaching is attested to by the fact some college coaches move back and forth between collegiate posts and NFL gigs and things have escalated to where all college coaches today have agents, just like NFL stars. “And so they get these contracts that this coach will make the highest salary in the conference, or no less than the second highest salary, so there’s this ratcheting upwards where we’re now over $5 million in a couple of cases,” Oriard says.

After 1973, the NCAA divided football into three divisions in recognition of the fact that some schools were competing at a higher level than others. This led to a more focused group of institutions committed to big-time football with the ability to admit virtually anybody they wanted from high school ranks and, because of the newly adopted one-year scholarship that replaced the four-year variety, gave coaches total power over their athletes. “And so all of these young African-American kids from woefully underfunded, formerly segregated schools were suddenly eligible to play college sports, whether or not their schools had adequately prepared them for the college educational experience,” Oriard said, adding, “And they had one-year scholarships only and their continuing financial aid was dependent on how well they pleased their football coach.”

The real question is, of course, whether this one-year athletic scholarship is in fact an employment contract under the law. Oriard notes the NCAA “was highly conscious of the dangers of that in first calling it a scholarship.” He said that then NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers who ran the organization from 1951-1988 instructed conferences to word their letters of intent and grant and aid contracts “in such a way that it avoided the implications of being an employment contract.” If they were employment contracts, injured players could file for workman’s compensation, as some did. Indeed, the Justice Department has now taken up the issue of whether college “scholarships” are, in fact, work contracts. TV host Velvel, a former Justice Department anti-trust division lawyer, predicted the NCAA will find out “that the fact that it’s not a formal contract is of no consequence in antitrust law. It’s of great consequence in labor law, but the antitrust statutes bar any ‘combination, contract, or conspiracy in restraint of trade.’ It’s a combination and a conspiracy. So the fact it’s not a contract is going to be completely irrelevant to whatever the Department of Justice does.”

As the flood of academically unprepared athletes swamped college football rosters in the Seventies, newspapers everywhere reported ensuing academic scandals of “students getting credit for classes they weren’t taking and students found unable to read and so on,” Oriard states. By the early ‘80s, universities were attempting “to cram the genie back into the bottle but it was too late…There’s been a whole series of attempts at academic reform to try to get the academic side back in balance with the athletic side, and how successful all of those efforts have been is a matter of enormous dispute and controversy.” Berkeley’s high athletic drop-out rate “shocked” Oriard, as it was “routinely the best (academically) rated public university in the country.” Berkeley’s conflict was “you’ve got to bring in athletes who are good enough to play at the highest level but they’ve got to be able to compete academically with the very best students, not just in California, but in the country and the world. So how are you going to make this happen?”

The evident favoritism shown to football players has also raised the Title IX issue, a clause in the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act of 1972 that states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...” Oriard believes the current arrangement is inherently contradictory as it clashes with the principle of equity for female students. “Young women have the same right as young men to participate in college athletics,” he says, “but you have this one sport which is also a commercial entertainment that can generate revenue. And if you have equity in terms of the number of athletes, you have this 100-some people on the football team that you’ve got to match over here, so the complaint from this side is, we’ve got to reduce the number of (football)scholarships over here, and the rejoinder is, ‘You do that, you’re going to undermine the revenue-generating possibilities.’ And so you have these two things that are at odds with each other, which is another manifestation of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of college athletics,” Oriard says.

The football authority goes on to say college athletes today are required to play in “an enormous proliferation in the number of games,” one that “devalues every individual game but creates a much larger pool of money, most of which goes to the major conferences.” A glance at the Ohio State varsity football schedule for 1960 and 1962 shows the team played nine regular season games each year. In 2009, however, Ohio State played 12 games, a one-third increase, and the team is set to play 12 games in 2010. The demand for longer schedules, Oriard says, came in part from the creation of Entertainment and Sports Programming Network(ESPN) in 1979, a round-the-clock cable purveyor of sporting events which in time became a competitor of major broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. The new outlet provided “a lot more available funding for these games,” Oriard said. “When I played,” he added, football was the easiest sport to play as a student, because you miss classes only Fridays before away games, which meant five Fridays a year. That was the most. But now football becomes like basketball or baseball, where you can miss lots of classes during the week in order to get on television…so again there’s lots of implications of this.” Oriard has concluded whether college football players “are getting a very good education has become questionable.”

Interviewer Lawrence Velvel, founder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, is dean of a law school purposefully dedicated to providing a quality, rigorous legal education to students from minority, immigrant, and low-income backgrounds who would not otherwise be able to obtain a legal education. The law school also through its television broadcasts and conferences provides a major forum for discussion of vital issues. Sherwood Ross is a media consultant to the law school. Reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it