Education: College Sport...Foul!

The ball loved Flick.

I saw him rack up

thirty-eight of forty

In one home game. His

hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade,

he just sells gas,

Checks oil, and changes

flats.

-- JOHN UPDIKE

Among the more than 25 million Americans watching the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament on television this week will be Tom Scates, the 6-ft. 10-in. former Georgetown University center. A 1979 graduate, he was once a mainstay of a winning team, and his hopes were pinned on making the pros. Today he is in uniform all right -- as a doorman at a downtown Washington hotel. A gentle Goliath with a cavernous bass voice and a ready smile, he wears a pith helmet and has a whistle dangling around his neck to summon cabs. "There's more to life than sports," he says. "It's a hard reality." That is a lesson that Scates, and thousands of other student athletes across the land, are given a lifetime to mull over.

This is the season of "March madness." It is a frenzied time when basketball rules the tube, millions pour into college coffers, and lanky young giants seem anointed with superhuman gifts of grace and courage. But beneath the pageantry of March madness lies another, more disturbing kind of madness: an obsession with winning and moneymaking that is perverting the noblest ideals of both sports and education in America.

During a three-month investigation, TIME talked to scores of young men who had hoped to exchange their sweat and talent on the basketball court for an education and a better life. Some, like Tom Scates, got their degrees and found jobs. But for many the promise of an education was a sham. They were betrayed by the good intentions of others, by institutional self-interest and by their own blind love of the game. Equally victimized are the colleges and universities that participate in an educational travesty -- a farce that devalues every degree and denigrates the mission of higher education.

Out of sight of the fans and boosters, college basketball presents a sometimes sordid, often tragic scene of young men -- some even functionally illiterate or learning disabled -- trying desperately to keep up with their work. Some, unable to read an exam, must be read the questions aloud and respond with oral answers. Some were wooed by recruiters who could not make good on promises of tutors and extra study time. And some have found themselves befriended by unscrupulous agents and professional gamblers.

As the ongoing Chicago trial of sports agents Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom shows, it is often the integrity of the university that sustains the most serious injuries in big-time sports -- football as well as basketball. Two former University of Iowa football players testified that they took such puff courses as billiards, watercolor painting and recreational leisure.

Corruption and exploitation are as old as sport itself. College basketball in particular has been punctuated by sensational scandals, including revelations of point shaving that emerged in the '50s, '60s and early '80s. But today the money is bigger, the temptations are greater and the pressures to win more crushing.