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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Having Heard from the Blancheites...

...of college athletics (see below), let's listen to the real stuff, the authentic voice, the one true thing. SOS likes this writing very much.



When Football Players Go Bad

By Lyndon Collins

'A while back I sold a restored car and got a check for $5,241. It was the most money I’d ever had. For a poor kid like me, who considers a bowl of rainbow sorbet and rented porn a delicacy, $5,241 may as well have been seven ka-billion dollars. [We've got a charmer on our hands. Rented porn a delicacy alone is worth the price of admission.]


There were limitless possibilities for this seemingly endless supply of money. [I'd drop seemingly.] The spending spree I went on was monumental. I lost my fucking mind. I wasted money on everything from a $150 ping-pong paddle (seriously), [Drop seriously.] to $30 hair gel from one of those fancy-pants hair salons. My hair has never had so much body, so much life. It glowed. One time, I even bought shots for a girl and seven of her friends if she showed me her boobs, when I could have gotten the same action at a strip club for a buck (which I did later that night anyway)...I digress. [Drop I digress.]

Of all the ridiculously stupid things I did with my money, [Drop ridiculously.] one thing I didn’t do was sponsor a dog-fighting ring out of my house. This makes me exponentially smarter than Mike Vick  —  who apparently has the intelligence of your average pube hair. [Fine, this is juvenile. He's allowed one or two of these.]

Being the all-knowing, ever-seeing, devilishly good-looking, cocky fucker [The writer puts bashful little stars over the u's in all of his uses of the word fuck. UD's removed them.] that I am, it’s hard for me to criticize someone for being arrogant, but Mike Vick makes me look like the Dali Lama.


Athletes are a different breed of people. By their very nature they are a confident, sometimes cocky, bunch  —  they have to be. Performing in front of thousands, sometimes millions, of spectators takes a certain kind of confidence that most people just don’t have. And while that confidence is great for throwing touchdowns, it can also be a recipe for disaster and embarrassment. [He's young. He's already a very good writer. He'll learn to excise all the to be verbs that are gumming this up.]

Mike Vick had three things that never mix well: amazing talent, a shit-ton of money, and glowing arrogance. [Shit-ton's fun.] This combination is getting Vick a free 18-month vacation to prison. But Vick isn’t alone in his dangerously obvious arrogance.


I love college football. Moreover, I love Ohio State football. If it weren’t for college football I would kill myself every autumn. [There's a pleasant absurdity to the seasonal suicide idea.] The first fallen leaf is a reminder of the frozen drudgery that looms in the coming months. [Drop in the coming months.] But the prospect of drunken Saturdays and screaming ‘til I can’t speak keeps the razor blade from ever piercing a vein. [Lovely.] And while I love Ohio State football, some of their players REALLY worry me.

I would never be so silly as to pretend to know all 100 (or whatever) players on the football team, but I’ve had my share of run-ins. I’m sure that most of them are fine student-athletes who do very little to tarnish the reputation of themselves or the University, but every once in a while a player shows Clarett-like qualities that scare the shit out of me. [Clarett-like qualities. It's poetic.]


I once had a class with an unnamed-but-easily-recognizable football player. He was hard to miss. Before each class he stood out in front of the building laughing obnoxiously, cursing loudly, and grabbing his crotch with a bothersome frequency. [Drop the adverbs -- obnoxiously, loudly. I love the jarring formality of bothersome frequency. It's clever to play with your tone a bit.]

As if annoying the entire campus outside of the building wasn’t enough, he usually spent most of the class talking with his buddies and disrupting the whole class. [Don't repeat class.]

One time the professor actually had to stop class to ask him and his friends to be quiet. The class was in Hitchcock. The player was sitting in the balcony...he was being that loud. [Drop being.]

This guy never brought as much as a pencil to class. I never missed a class, took every note, studied my ass off and still only got a C. It could be that I’m just really, really dumb (and I am)...but then again, I didn’t spend my whole life getting pounded in the head by 300-pound linemen. [Drop (and I am).] Apparently the little brown-haired jock-sniffer that followed him around campus took really good notes for him. I’m sure he [pronoun reference?] didn’t have a problem passing the course. Am I just jealous? Yes, yes I am.

People like our unnamed football player and Mike Vick annoy the shit out of me. They think that their athletic ability and money puts them above the standard.


I know what you’re thinking...”Money?!?! How does a college football player have so much money?” Hell if I know. But you don’t have to be an NCAA investigator to drive by the Woody Hayes Athletic center during football practice. The parking lot looks like a Cadillac dealership. And I won’t even go into the platinum chains and diamond earrings that decorate some of our more eccentric players.

I can’t stress enough that I’m sure that a vast majority of the players for our fine football program are upstanding models of academia. [Redundancy here okay because he means to lay it on thick.] But it only takes one arrogant and talented asshole to bring a story like Mike Vick’s to our own campus.

An important part of life is knowing what you have to lose. A loser like me can drink, smoke, curse in public, and spend my hard-earned money on hookers, [See how nicely he returns to his first paragraph? Good instincts.] and no one would ever care. But when you truly have something to lose and everyone is watching, maybe you ought to act like you have some fucking sense.'



---uweekly.com---

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