In the interest of responsible sports writing, I do my best to try to keep my columns as controversy-free as possible. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this is possible for me to do this week. For those easily offended, it might be best to put the paper down immediately and pick up something a little less volatile. For those coming along for the ride, buckle up, because I’m going to blow your hair to the back of the auditorium.
First topic: People disgusted with the Yankees getting Alex Rodriguez. Okay, so I admit it, I’m a Yankees fan and I was delighted as the next Yankees’ fan to hear that we now have the best baseball player in the world on our team. But of course, people started grumbling about how the Yankees buy their teams and how they are ruining baseball. Surprisingly not all of these people were Red Sox fans, although a large percentage of them were.
To those grumblers, I would reply: Hello, this is America, “Land of Opportunity.” If you’ve got a dollar in your pocket and an idea in your mind and are willing to work hard, you can make it big. You can be famous! This move was capitalism at its finest. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it’s the American way. Then, why are people complaining? I don’t understand it. You want your fancy sports car, your expensive education and your designer clothes, but you don’t want one team monopolizing baseball? I don’t think you’re allowed to have it both ways. Either you accept the fact that we live in a land where the powers that be, whether in the corporate, political or sports world, can go unchecked or you subscribe to a whole other ideology. And I guarantee that there won’t be that many people voting for the communist party in this year’s election. They should teach a class at Wesleyan called “the New York Yankees: Symbol of Capitalism and America.” It could be an Economics class with an American Studies cross-listing. I’d put that on my electronic wait list in a second. It is time for baseball fans to understand that the Yankees will always be the dominant entity in the game and there is nothing that anyone can do about it as long as America still rewards those with the most money. Deal with it.
Second topic: State of Athletics at Wesleyan. First off, I’d like to congratulate the women’s basketball team for advancing to the second round of the NESCAC playoffs and wish the other teams who are entering the postseason the best of luck. I’d also like to apologize to the men’s hockey team for having one of their best season’s of recent memory, and then having the chance to go to the playoffs ripped away from them because of a bogus ruling by the Administration. Your crusade to stop underage drinking does not need to start by suspending a team from the playoffs just to make an example of them. I’m not saying that underage drinking isn’t a problem at Wesleyan, or every single college in America or every single town in America. I just think that it is unfair to punish a team that has worked extremely hard for an entire season for a problem that faces the entire University.
Let’s look at who is hurt by this ruling most: most importantly, angry and alienated students, and their parents who pay the exorbitant amounts of money to send their children here. By not allowing the hockey team to compete in the playoffs, the message is being sent that any University group that endorses underage drinking will be punished as strictly. By that rationale, any group that puts on a play and has a cast party afterwards and provides alcohol to someone under twenty-one, well sorry, but you’re production must be stopped. Yes, that sounds ridiculous to me too, but that’s what happened to the hockey team.
Of course, word is going to spread about this incident to other schools around the league. Wesleyan’s name is going to be tarnished, simply because the Administration wants to take the high road and turn this school into New England’s version of BYU. By attempting to preserve the image of Wesleyan, the Administration has terrified the students here. We now must live in constant fear for our extra-curricular lives when offered a beer by upperclassmen. Instead of staking our fame on something pertinent, like academics, we shall be known as the school that takes teams out of playoffs, or eliminates funding for clubs or shuts down theatrical works, solely because of underage drinking.
Unless of course this punishment will only be doled out to the hockey team, which I have an eerie sense will be the case. Hey, if something goes wrong at Wesleyan, blame the athletes. SAT scores aren’t high enough, must be the football players; underage drinking party, blame hockey. And so on. We’ll be your scapegoats because we should just be happy to be here getting a quality education. I think it is time that we all stop kidding ourselves and admit that athletics is something at Wesleyan that is deemed superfluous. Who honestly cares about athletics on this campus? Five percent, maybe 10 percent of the students. By eliminating the athletics program, think of all the money the school will save to buy nice glass walkways between buildings. Think of the nice raises the administrators can get. And by getting rid of the athletes there should be nothing stopping Wesleyan from getting back into the top 10 of U.S. World & News Report College Rankings. Don’t feel bad for the athletes though, we’ll just start going to Williams or Amherst, they’re better schools anyway.
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