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“There’s a certain sleazy integrity to the NFL that’s absent from the NCAA.”

UD has long felt this too. The NFL never presents itself as anything other than a whore. Watching its leader smirk his way through his role as The Voice of Moral Outrage during the Ray Rice thing was oddly reassuring, in a Popeyesque, I yam what I yam, sort of way.

The NFL is like Germaine, Henry’s favorite whore in Tropic of Cancer:

Germaine was a whore all the way through. … However vile and circum­scribed was that world which she had created for herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly. And that in itself is a tonic thing.

The NCAA, on the other hand, is untonically complex – a whore that must pretend it’s a university student. Take Penn State, featured in the recent film, Happy Valley:

[Happy Valley] is not really about a sexual predator and his enabler. It’s about what their downfall illuminates: a nation so drunk on sports, especially on big-time college football, that it has lost the ability to think and feel. America has become a nation, as one reviewer of Happy Valley wrote, “put under a spell, even reduced to grateful infantilism, by the game of football.”

Grateful infantilism – pretty much the perfect opposite of what universities are about.

Margaret Soltan, January 13, 2015 2:37AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to ““There’s a certain sleazy integrity to the NFL that’s absent from the NCAA.””

  1. Mr Punch Says:

    “Pro” is, of course, a well-established term.

  2. Greg Says:

    Like very much: “sleazy integrity.”

  3. dmf Says:

    “Grateful infantilism – pretty much the perfect opposite of what universities are about” really or ideally UD, isn’t the whole modern apparatus around student “retention”, trends in grade-inflation, “libraries” as cafes, etc, proof to the contrary?

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