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There’s always been a very Soviet feel to university revenue sports.

The spectacle has the same combination of massive denial of the obvious, forced enthusiastic comradeship, and a love of show trials where, under extremely pressurized conditions, comrades are made to affirm their love of the – as it were – party.

University revenue athletics even has a Palace of Culture, complete with a cafeteria whose wall is emblazoned with the slogan EAT YOUR ENEMIES, and whose every surface has the hammer and swooshle.

At today’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a recent show for the trustees featured revenue athletes there getting up and pledging their troth to the People’s Committee for the Real Actual and True Education of Football and Basketball Players.

But the athletes’ testimony had an effect opposite to its intent. When [one of them] feels compelled to say of himself and his teammates, “Trust me, we all can read and write,” the heart sinks.

And the discouragement deepens with the realization that UNC can’t get beyond denial. The show for the trustees – called “A Day in the Life of a Student-Athlete” – came the same week that national audiences watching shows on ESPN and HBO heard from former UNC athletes with a different message. They said that not only were they steered to no-show classes, but their entire schedules and majors were set up for them to maximize the time they could devote to sports and still stay academically eligible.

Margaret Soltan, March 31, 2014 4:44PM
Posted in: sport

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