Pushed by primal instincts. Such a strange way of being for a university. You’d think even a wretched university would at the very least understand its identity in terms of the civilizing of primal instincts. NASCAR – that’s primal instincts. But a university? A university allows itself to be “overshadowed” by the “unassailable fortress” of football?
What are those instincts? Can we be precise about the nature of the basic instinctual energies that Americans think belong on college campuses? That they think are the center of campuses, so that coaches get statues and millions of dollars and pretty much unsupervised power?
Here’s one paean to big-time university sports. And here’s an excerpt from it.
If you want your alumni to give, you first have to make them fall in love with your school. This is not about having better chemistry programs or more faculty with higher name recognition than the school up the road. It is not about scoring higher on world indices of university quality. It is about competition, drama, intensity, about hope and fear, collective celebrations or collective disasters, seared into young and impressionable hearts where they will never be forgotten — and where they will be annually renewed as each sport in its season produces new highs and lows, new hopes and fears.
Note the Wide World of Sports script: competition, drama, intensity, hope, fear… But these aren’t really primal, are they? Fear – maybe fear’s primal. But hope? Drama?
What is the primal instinct that doesn’t appear on this list?
Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.
Oh right! This guy forgot… violence! He overlooked all the ancillary sports stuff on campus – hazing that kills, players killing each other with guns, coaches beating up players… He overlooked the fact that people like football because it’s incredibly violent.
Rich Cohen, in the New Republic, talks about “the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel.” Now that’s primal, baby! Watching men get all torn up and concussed on the field!
Just the thing for the university.