CLASS INACTION
ISUPPOSE, at this point, it is just none of our business.
Still, as long as we’ve been watching the NCAA Tournament contested by student-athletes, isn’t there someone — anyone — on these telecasts who can explain for us how the players attend college, when they attend and whether their courses are taught in English?
Chris Webber, a Michigan man working Tournament telecasts, could’ve helped us figure out the presence of 6-foot-11 Moritz Wagner, who arrived at Michigan from Germany last season.
Given that Michigan is a tough academic school for Englishspeaking kids, given that Wagner presumably speaks English as a second language, and given that he misses so many classes to play basketball, how does he legitimately matriculate at such a school.
But Webber, who must know how it works at Michigan, apparently wasn’t asked.
If we’re talking about fraud here — colleges operating as wholesome fronts for basketball teams — TV’s silent financial partnering on such matters makes CBS and Turner a prominent party to the fraud, no?
CBS’ Kevin Harlan didn’t help us out, either. Thursday he seemed delighted to declare Michigan recently “won four games in four days!”
Perhaps that was the week Michigan gave Wagner’s German-speaking professors off.
Gonzaga-West Virginia on TBS was filled with such wonder. Forget about attending classes, are Gonzaga’s practices conducted in English? In addition to a player freshly arrived from Japan, the Zags have recruits from Poland, Denmark and France.
They must be exchange students, enrolled in exchange for helping the college win games — a lofty goal among so many of our institutions of higher learning and social engineering.
Would it be cynical or rude to ask how these full-scholarship players receive a legitimate, useful college education?
A few years back, CBS tried listing players’ academic majors. But, perhaps because so many were identified as majoring in “general studies” and “undecided” — “I’m majoring in General Indecision” — it was, you should excuse the expression, a one-and-done.
That year a French-speaking player recruited from a former French protectorate in Africa was shown to be majoring in French.
Deep into the second half of Oregon-Michigan, Harlan let us in on a secret: Oregon’s Dylan Ennis, 25, is the oldest player in the Tournament.
He might’ve added that he also is among the most immature. After scoring on a layup, he struck an allabout me, double-arm muscle flex.
But at 25, Ennis by now must know that such demonstrations, as seen live, then on tape, throughout the Tournament, guarantee replay attention. CBS immediately rewarded his immodesty with a recorded encore.
As a student-athlete, Ennis has circled the continent playing college basketball. From his home in Ontario, Canada, he first went to Texas to play for Rice, then to Villanova and now Oregon. Before that, he went to high school in The Bronx, then in Chicago.
But no one on CBS/Turner has found that suspicious, let alone curious.
Early in Gonzaga-West Virginia, sideline reporter Louis Johnson seemed pleased to report that WVU coach Bob Huggins’ motto is “No days off, and make every day count.” No days off? What about studying for midterms? Finals? Or am I being facetious? What does college have to do with college basketball?
Moments later, play-by-play man Brian Anderson, in what sounded like a salute to Huggins, reported this about WVU:
“This is a team that won on Satur- day in the round of 32, bussed from Buffalo back to Morgantown, and were in the gym later that night.”
Of course, there was no chance we would be told that Huggins, while the coach at Cincinnati then Kansas State, annually produced graduation rates of zero percent.
But that didn’t matter to the shotcallers at WVU, who hired him to return to his alma mater to coach their student-athletes. WVU, after all, is where Adam “Pacman” Jones refined his social graces before being unleashed on the NFL.
So maybe it doesn’t matter if you speak English to become a full scholarship college student-athlete in the United States — as long as you can, as they say in German, erzielte das
basketball! (score the basketball!)