COLLEGE BASKETBALL
IS A FANTASY WORLD

By Robert Lipsyte

If you're a fanatic for fantasy, have I got a series for you. This one has it all: Like the Chronicles of Narnia, the good guys sometimes lose, but the message of Goodness shines through.

Like Harry Potter, the heroes are plucky kids with special powers, and just like His Dark Materials, it takes place in an alternate universe a lot like ours but different. Maybe you are already a fan of college basketball.

These are exciting tales, these hoops dramas, often televised live on school nights with thrilling action set to a throbbing background of hard rock, intrigue and danger. The grown-ups, called coaches and college presidents — like the teachers at Hogwarts — may or may not be acting in the hero's best interests. There is a powerful organization, like the Magisterium in His Dark Materials, that acts in mysterious ways, called the NCAA. And as on the other side of the wardrobe, you have to watch out for shadowy characters — here called agents, boosters and shoe sellers.

If you think I'm having a fantasy fit, you need reality therapy.

The American talent for self-deception and wishful credulousness is apparent in our acceptance of big-time college sports as fun and games for "student-athletes." No wonder we are easily distracted when we try to turn our attention to politics and war. We've been conditioned to believe in fairy tales.

This particular fairy tale, part of a multibillion dollar business, is based on the false assumption that Division I college basketball performers are engaged in an extra curricular activity, much like band or student government, for which they happen to get free educations. Furthermore, these young men (and more and more young women) play for the love of the game, although some may also be considered pre-professionals (like their classmates who are pre-law and pre-med majors) because they hope to make it to the NBA. Their presence on campus, we are told, creates a sense of community, brings in revenue and stimulates alumni contributions.

So what could be wrong?

For starters, more and more studies indicate that a team has to practically be a TV regular before it pays its way. The pursuit of star high school players, whether or not they can handle college courses, or even in some cases read and write, has been a corrupting influence on higher education. School spirit isn't helped when non-athletes discover that the perks, the gifts and the grades are available to jocks but not to them.

What I don't understand is how some people can get so exercised about the Christian sensibilities of C.S. Lewis' Narnia tales, the anti-religious propaganda of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass), and the celebration of wizardry and witchcraft in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books — yet they never get upset by the commercialism, the gambling and the exploitation in big-time college basketball.

Now that the Potter and Narnia books are movies, and the His Dark Materials books are moving into production, more people will be able to compare them with stories used to promote college basketball.

Potter, for example, is an orphan who escapes from a Dickensian childhood to become a star schoolboy athlete (in a hoop game called Quidditch). A disproportionate number of college basketball stars are poor African-Americans who, we are told, wouldn't get a chance to attend a prestigious university without their athletic scholarships.

The Narnia stories offer the most obvious symbols of good and evil because of their innate religiosity. And there's no question of the religious fervor in rooting for a college basketball team, including prayers, chants, bonfires and the satisfying understanding that our Saints, Spartans, Knights are good and your Blue Devils, Sun Devils and Red Dragons are evil.

His Dark Materials is my own favorite, perhaps because it is subversive. The books were inspired by the battle, in Milton's Paradise Lost, between the angelic bands loyal to God and to Satan. Pullman, an outspoken British atheist, has created groups of witches, armored bears and daring adventurers to fight the religious establishment, much as a few scattered organizations have stood up to the NCAA. The Drake Group agitates for quality education for college athletes and supports faculty threatened for defending academic standards. Katherine Redmond's National Coalition Against Violent Athletes has urged Congress to investigate the NCAA's non-profit status.

Meanwhile, the NCAA, basically a trade association of athletic departments, seems willing to catch flak as a kind of Tolkien evil empire so long as it can deflect news media attention from the systemic corruption of its members.

Since it helps to have a child's mind to enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books, they would be perfect for the high school hoopsters who have been jumping directly to the pros lately. Maybe the NBA could institute required reading along with its new dress code. Make their teen rookies read about elves, dwarfs, Muggles and Hobbits so they will understand the rest of us while they happily avoid the brutal fantasies of college basketball.