Posted on: Friday, December 6, 2002
Island Voices
Winning is not the only thing
David T. Johnson is an associate professor of sociology at UH-Manoa.
During the brawl that followed the University of Hawai'i football game on Nov. 23, one UH player grabbed a crutch from a disabled bystander and used the weapon to whack a Cincinnati player. The law has a word for this felony: assault.
Another UH combatant captured a Cincinnati helmet. Holding the spoils over his head, this team captain ran around the field celebrating like the gladiators once did in the Roman Coliseum.
Four days after this debacle, The Advertiser sponsored an Internet "chat session" with the same captain, presumably so that fans could express their admiration for his feats on the field. The behavior of some spectators was equally shameful. In the end zone seats, one young "fan" picked a fight with a senior citizen from Ohio.
Other UH "fans" rained bottles and garbage (not to mention a cascade of obscenities) on the Cincinnati players as they were leaving the field. The New York Times (circulation millions) published a photograph of a Honolulu police officer shooting pepper spray at a group of unruly Hawai'i supporters. Marketing professionals call that kind of attention "adverse publicity."
As a supporter of UH sports, I am embarrassed. As a professor, I am dismayed at the responses given by officials at my university. Athletic Director Herman Frazier offered this non-sequitur: "The emotion was there for both sides." Head coach June Jones said, "We won, and that's all I care about." Despite clear evidence to the contrary, Jones also said it was impossible to identify the player who committed the crutch attack.
Other UH officials have been conspicuously silent. No apology. No accountability. No punishment. No condemnation of the misconduct or of the lame excuses that have been trotted out to defend it. And no promise that this kind of disgraceful behavior will not be tolerated.
With non-responses like this, is it any wonder that after the melee, players celebrated their pugilistic prowess by trumpeting how many "licks" they got in?
This is not the first time. Last year, one intrepid UH linebacker attacked a BYU cheerleader. His misconduct was greeted with a shrug that said, "We won; don't worry about it."
Vince Lombardi, the hall-of-fame coach of the Green Bay Packers, believed that "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This attitude is all too common in Division I college football, and it frequently displaces more important values. Two such values are especially significant: rectitude and academic excellence.
When winning is the only thing, coaches tolerate and condone misconduct, and players respond accordingly — with more bad behavior. And when winning crowds out learning, many student-athletes find themselves stuck with an inferior education once their playing days evaporate.
Unfortunately, one of the main lessons college football teaches is that the more talented you are as an athlete, the less is expected of you socially and academically, and the more the rules will be bent for you. I am especially concerned about the academic repercussions of the "just win" approach.
According to a recent study by the NCAA, 57 percent of the scholarship student-athletes who entered UH-Manoa during the 1995-96 academic year earned their degrees within six years. Among the 296 schools in the survey, UH finished tied for 162nd. This puts our university in the bottom half of Division I schools.
Reflecting on these results, Athletic Director Frazier said he's "happy we're at 57 percent." I'm not. For one thing, the graduation rates at some other WAC schools are substantially higher: Rice, 91 percent; SMU, 83 percent; Tulsa, 80 percent.
For another, the graduation rate for scholarship athletes at UH-Hilo is 100 percent. More to the point, the NCAA survey found that the graduation rate for UH football student-athletes was 27 percent. That's hardly cause for celebration.
Among the UH sports teams, poor academic performance appears to be mainly a football problem. In the Fall 2001 semester, for example, the grade-point average for all female student-athletes was approximately 2.90, while the GPA for their male counterparts in all sports except football was 2.93. In contrast, the GPA for football players was 2.32.
This large gap cannot be justified. Football players can do better, much better, to conduct themselves with rectitude and to perform in the classroom with the same intensity that they do on the field. They will do so if, and only if, the people who lead them foster a culture in which winning is not the only thing that matters.
