Christian Darling and the NCAA

I'm looking forward to another big weekend of football.

Listen, I am a fan, but I am also a realist.

It is around this time every year that I celebrate one of the greatest short stories ever written, Irwin Shaw's The Eighty Yard Run.

As a young man reading this story for the first time, I was thrilled by the way it captured the essence of football, yet still revealed the human character of its protagonist.

Christian Darling has discovered, after the glorious feeling that accompanied his greatest day on the gridiron, that fate and the journey of living offer a man more complex challenges than any game ever invented.

Fifteen years after his eighty-yard run, which occurred during a scrimmage, Darling is lost. His awakening to this fact is brutal and oppressively sad, and that, not football, is the theme of the story.

In the end Darling is offered another dead-end job by a man who wants to cash in on his fading renown, and Darling knows it, for his eyes have come open at last.

Today, college football is over-lorded by a group that has refined the chattel/exploiter mentality of Darling's wannabe boss.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a worn-out and corrupt disaster.

The NCAA is as corrupt an institution as exists in the U.S. today. If I didn't have a love for the game aside from its politics, I'd wash my hands of it.

I'm not ready to do that. I'll watch the games this weekend, as I'm sure Darling would, with an open mind, fully aware that college football is rotten under the skin.




TS