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Monday, October 08, 2007
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I Don't Get Nicholas Von Hoffman. Not that I mind competition in the Pour Scorn on Bigtime University Football business. But Von Hoffman always seems a day late and a field goal short in his snarly outings for The Nation. A sample: The all-time topperoo is takeover artist T. Boone Pickens' $$165 million gift to gussy up the T. Boone Pickens football stadium at Oklahoma State. According to ESPN the gift, "'. . . isn't just about football or basketball or our major sports,' athletic director Mike Holder said. . . 'It's about every sport, giving every coach here and every athlete here the opportunity to strive for excellence.'" And the more excellent they get at OSU the larger are their necks and the smaller are their heads. What those pinheads should do is change the name of the dump to T. Boone Pickens U and kick out all the losers who can't make varsity. The whole thing is like that - pinheads, dump... Nowhere does Von Hoffman say anything about why it's not a good idea for universities to be dominated by football; he just says over and over again that places so dominated are dumps for pinheads. If he wrote like Mencken I guess he could just go that far and we'd be thrilled anyway. But his writing is irritable, tired, flat, unfunny. The energy's gone out of it. Ad hominem, argument-free palaver is no threat to the bad guys. |