It’S A Circus Circus Life
From time to time, we note that none of the revenue in the “revenue sports” of college athletics goes to the athlete.
Yes, he trades his talent in on a premium education, but in the process he also fills the stadium on Saturday and pays for crew shells and the golf team’s greens fees in Hawaii with his sweat and shoulder separations. He works off his own scholarship; should he have to work off the shot putter’s, too?
Some might call that indenture, a word that makes an athletic director’s temples throb.
The prescription: Take two Kevin Browns and call your ethicist in the morning.
If some kids get used, other kids use back.
After three months of pregnant inevitability, the other shoe dropped this week when Washington State’s wayward running back enrolled at UNLV - leaving his former teammates holding the bag. Or fumbling it, to be more precise.
This really came as no great surprise, despite Brown’s jail cell vow that, “I want to go back (to WSU). I love it there.”
What’s not to love? They don’t lock their doors and you can just help yourself to laptops and stuff.
Brown’s May arrest and June conviction for burglary helped set in motion the current slide that finds the Cougars staggering into Saturday’s game against Idaho like a Pomeranian on port wine. A punchless running game has been prominent in the blowout losses to Utah and Stanford - though a 1,000-yard running back isn’t the only thing that’s missing.
Brown had two years of eligibility remaining, but WSU coach Mike Price halved that by quite properly and promptly suspending him from the team - leaving open the possibility of his return in 2000.
It was a fair shake, but fair is rarely good enough for the high-profile athlete these days.
Brown was miffed that the felony charges weren’t boiled down to a misdemeanor, as he felt would be the case for any other student first-time offender. Indeed, he had teammates and coaches vouch that this must have been a one-time brain cramp.
May be. But the notion that a kid wakes up one day - or gets drunk one night - and suddenly decides to be a thief is slippery logic, too.
At any rate, Brown didn’t like being made into an example, though it’s doubtful he ever refused the positive perks of his celebrity.
Possibly the length of the suspension ate at him as well, but that hardly accounts for his transfer. He will have to sit out this year at UNLV, and will have but one season remaining.
“We’re in essence forming a partnership to help him get a chance to make a comeback,” UNLV coach John Robinson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “and he has a chance to help us. I think sports are about that, giving people an opportunity to improve themselves and come back from mistakes. I think we’re in that situation right now.”
Brown had the same situation at WSU, with one difference.
He obviously couldn’t face his Wazzu teammates, whose trust he violated, whose shared ambitions he has apparently undermined. To endure a fall on campus as his team lurched and stumbled - and to confront the silent blame - would have been a test of courage far greater than any fourth-and-1 in the fourth quarter of an Apple Cup tie.
This was Price’s test and Brown flunked, though the coach as usual extended his best wishes on his future endeavors. But Price will pay for Brown’s indiscretions for a while yet, while the kid has used WSU for a springboard to another program and, possibly, a professional career.
Is there still any question whether Kevin Brown is really what Cougar fans want in their program?
Pragmatists will point out that applause for the hard moral line lasts all of a few seconds, and when it dies out even Price’s supporters will be wondering where the running game went. No record book will carry the notation, “Got blown out, but did the right thing.”
That may be why eight-year contracts were invented.
In time - perhaps as soon as Saturday - the Cougars will play harder and smarter than they have so far in 1999, and maybe the results will get better. Until they do, it will be hard to appreciate the big picture as it relates to Kevin Brown, but here goes.
If he’d carried the ball even once this season, it would have rendered meaningless the achievements of some of the guys Price cut no slack.
In 1997, Cougar Nation embraced the second-chance stories of the late Leon Bender and Michael Black, the out-of-position players, the one-time walk-ons and the academic reclamation projects who banded together and took Wazzu to its idea of Eden.
This coach took risks, and smelled roses.
Now those same kinds of risks have turned into stinkweeds. Beyond Brown and his second-story pals, the Cougars lost standout cornerback Chris Martin to grades - a loss every bit as debilitating, if not more so. That two backups at their positions, DeJuan Gilmore and Jermaine Hunsaker, transferred out before these slip-ups exacerbated the situation.
The incoming class of 1999 - actually heralded by several of those damnable recruiting services as among the nation’s best - had four members fail to meet academic requirements. Another went off to play baseball. Another returning starter flunked. Injuries - unheard of during the Rose Bowl year - keep piling up.
The attrition the Cougs didn’t have with the recruits and walk-ons of 1993 has been rampant in the classes of ‘94 and ‘95. Ten former starters have been unavailable this year for a variety of reasons.
That’s why they call them risks. It goes without saying that Price and his staff will intensify their efforts to make every risk less risky.
But if they didn’t take some, a year like this might be a plateau and not a valley.