UH ought to sideline
By Douglas Hilt
football altogether
Editor's note: The Star-Bulletin reported yesterday
that June Jones, interim head coach of the NFL's San Diego Chargers,
will be the new University of Hawaii football coach.POOR Fred is dead. Like King Charles I, he was basically not a bad guy, but still got the ax from Mort the Sport. Not to worry. Fred will rise from the turf and be paid off royally, his successor duly anointed, and the UH football program will take off in grand style. Or will it?
Don't bet on it. Most university football programs on the mainland, despite some dodgy financial footwork worthy of the most elusive running back, still tote up a loss. The inescapable fact is that UH, mired in a fragile local economy and saddled with fair-weather supporters, faces a very uncertain future.
The break-up of the WAC is both an omen and opportunity. Mainland football teams, given the economic situation in Hawaii, are wary of committing themselves to long-range programming involving UH. If this is indeed the case, then there is no real prospect of football ever becoming a moneymaker here -- the main reason for the vonAppen firing.
The alternative needs to be faced squarely. As happened famously at the University of Chicago, much to that institution's benefit, the entire football program at UH should be phased out.
Let's face it, the best of the local high school players, given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a mainland college, are not going to sign up for a foundering program at the local university. Or, desperate to win at all costs, will UH football reduce academic standards to attract the brawniest if not the brainiest?
To the lasting credit of Fred vonAppen, academic achievement was always stressed first and foremost to his charges, which in large measure explains their loyalty to their coach despite poor results on the playing field.
As coach, he should have been reinstated immediately and completed the remaining two years of his contract. The players currently on football scholarships would have had two more seasons before the program is terminated.
But now, two or three years hence, we're in for another dose of deja vu; the more the coach changes, the more things stay the same.
What's really needed, however, is an objective look at football as a university sport and its effects on the campus as a whole.
When I first came to the United States, thanks to a Ronald Reagan movie, I thought that Notre Dame was a professional football team. Only later did I learn that there was a university attached to it. So much for fame.
How can or should UH hope to compete with top mainland teams with their wealthy alumni, population, political support and professional scouts on their front doorstep? Is it really worth the endless scandals, not to mention the on- and off-field violence that seem to be part and parcel of success?
The game should be seen in perspective. Its very name is something of a misnomer, having little to do with what is considered football in the rest of the world.
American football is very regional, being played only in the United States and Canada to any extent. In global terms, the game makes our nation appear all the more provincial and isolated, particularly when seen in the context of the recent world soccer championships in France.
The game -- perhaps one should say spectacle -- stresses hard physical contact, hence the armor borne by the gladiators.
The concomitant violence ("Sack the quarterback!") and injuries require large numbers of reserve players and benchwarmers, who greatly add to the expense of running a program. No wonder the emphasis is on outsized muscular physiques, hardly typical of the general population.
Football is the only team sport in which the tonnage of players is a prominent statistic. Newspapers delight in pointing out the 5-foot-9 player weighing 165 pounds who made the team; the exception merely proves the rule.
The first non-academic priority at UH should be the health and physical well-being of the majority of students, not just those on athletic scholarships.
A casual stroll across the Manoa campus soon reveals the poor shape in which many young men and women, supposedly in the prime of life, find themselves. Often overweight and hooked on cigarettes, many would have trouble getting even once around the running track. The university, if it truly believes in a well-rounded education, should turn students from spectators into active participants.
UH could have an amplified intramural soccer program at a fraction of the cost in which the players, practically the entire squad, would run for 90 minutes of non-stop action. And not only the guys, but also the girls. For the first time, UH would split the athletic budget 50-50 between men and women, and give those of average physique a chance to participate.
A few final questions:
Why are American universities in effect training future football players, yet they do not receive a penny from the beneficiaries, the professional teams?
Along with the UH football program, Aloha Stadium should be scrapped and replaced by something more appropriate, such as a Living Ecology Center. If Hawaii really wants football that badly, then local business should support a professional team and go big time.
But don't expect UH to do the job for them. UH is a university, isn't it?
Douglas Hilt is a professor in the department
of European Languages and Literature at the
University of Hawaii at Manoa.