… but no one else is. I guess she just needs to puzzle it out logically, and if she does that she’ll join the rest of America, which yawns at news stories about whole squads of university students – venerated revenue sports players – roaming the bars near campus and, with remarkable violence, beating students up. She admits to being amazed that no one seems to care about American universities going to great lengths to recruit and retain frighteningly violent people to their campuses. You’d think students would be a little nervous, since they’re the ones getting beaten up. But they seem to welcome these scholarship students.
Logically, though… Logically, you’re looking for the most violent people you can find – it’s football, after all – and you’re doing all you can in grueling team practices to make them even more violent… So the reasonable way to look at this is … If you want a winning team, you’re almost inevitably going to end up admitting a few people, every few years, who can be expected to damn near beat random undergrads to death. Price of doing business.
Like this student at Lehigh University who, with some of his teammates, hit the bars one night and got into a fight with another group of students walking out of the place. No reason for the fight – he and his buddies were just drunk and belligerent… Spoiling for a fight, as they say.
So this particular football player just kicked the living shit out of this student.
When police arrived after receiving reports of a fight, they found [the student] unconscious on the ground and the former Mountain Hawk defensive back running away. Police managed to chase down [the player] and arrest him, according to court records.
Witnesses told police Phillips kicked at Graham as he lay unconscious and defenseless. Graham testified today the attack broke his jaw in two places, and he had to have his mouth wired shut, leaving him unable to eat or speak. His injuries delayed his education by a year, and he is still in counseling over the attack, he said. He cannot yawn without paralyzing pain, he said, a condition doctors say will stick with him for the rest of his life.
Hell of a tackle there, and UD is sure the pros will be all over this guy when he gets out of jail. I see him playing shoulder to shoulder with Richie Incognito. Dream team.
April 12th, 2014 at 12:21PM
Start here: There are two major sports, football and basketball, that were developed and nurtured on American college campuses. They are the two team sports in which sheer size is most important, i.e., in which physical attributes count most as compared to skill, intelligence, character, etc. This may be a hothouse effect, in the sense that the campus is an unnatural environment where every athlete is a ringer.
April 12th, 2014 at 1:47PM
You’ve got ya pampered, entitled, roided up, geared up, sheltered athletes, who are coached by much the same, what could possibly go wrong?
April 13th, 2014 at 12:27PM
As a side note, his attorney did a great job for him. That had to be plead down to a misdemeanor and that short period in jail? Color me impressed.