I played a year of small-college basketball as a 17 year-old freshman too many years ago to count. At 6-2 I played forward (!), and was the third "tallest" player and one of only two of us on the team who could dunk the ball. We were the only engineering school in the conference; we were also the only school in the conference that gave no athletic scholarships, though I do remember the satisfying steak dinners we players received (our only emolument) in the dorm on game day (mea culpa). Although we won only three or so games (of twenty) that year, when we won, we celebrated with edenic joy, though always soon after with an admixture of self-deprecating humor. Yet even when we lost, we did so with good-humor and even charitable solicitude, as when trailing by over thirty points in an away game, we stalled the last five minutes of the game so our opponents couldn't score a hundred points. We just didn't want to wake their fans.

Today, things are a bit different, even at many middling colleges, where the school's gladiators oiled for the arena provide the "guns" for the mostly middle-aged capos who "run" them. Athletic departments often hold their minions to an omerta that prevents abuses and even crimes from being whispered about outside the family. In the big schools the capos' yearly pelf far exceeds that of our nation's president. Yet the prodigal sums fronted on this campus entertainment industry could perhaps in turn be more lucratively reinvested (if college administrators fancy that such an industry is essential to "under-taking" the college's higher education mission) in other family-run enterprises, such as casinos and brothels.

But the great books schools are ever an inspiration to one who conned his fair Latin, small Greek, and extensive readings in western and world classics at university in his mid-twenties after doing a bit of soldiering during the Southeast Asian war. In my later career as a college professor I've not met but a very few vets among colleagues of comparable age. Perhaps they just weren't recruiting in their neighborhoods. Though I wish I'd started on the classics earlier, I'm delighted that there are schools and colleges like the great books schools that encourage (nay, require) them early. So Greek, Latin, mathematics . . . and croquet
--early. Indeed, my belief is that getting these venerable languages early realizes our human evolutionary destiny, for what's a backside for but(t) to facilitate the study of Greek and Latin?