Hubris? From a millionaire coach? Who'da thunk it?

Jim Tressel resigned (a.k.a. was fired) today as head football coach at [The] Ohio State University. This was about as unexpected as the news that a number of Americans have fired up their grills over Memorial Day weekend. Tressel was allowed to survive as long as he did at Ohio State for one reason and one reason only: he won a lot of football games. That was, of course, what he was paid to do, and even if he didn’t fare as well as fans would have liked in bowl games, his overall record was outstanding: 106-22 (a better winning percentage than Woody Hayes), a national championship, seven league titles and eight BCS appearances in 10 years. Ohio State had more players (66) drafted by the NFL during Tressel’s regime than any other program. Most importantly to Buckeye fans, he was 9-1 against arch-rival Michigan.

Throughout this time, he managed to maintain a reputation for rectitude that the facts didn’t bear out. He wrote books with nauseating titles like The Winner's Manual: For the Game of Life which contained the predictable mix of Biblical quotations and homey aphorisms: “Discipline is what you do when no one else is looking” and similar treacle. As Bill Livingston of the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes, however, “Nowhere in it does Tressel suggest that withholding information on player wrongdoing from superiors, lying to the NCAA in writing, and knowingly playing ineligible players are behaviors worthy to be emulated.” Jim Tressel is a very good football coach. He is also a liar, a cheat, and a hypocrite.

The scandal that brought him down started in December when a half-dozen Buckeye players, including star quarterback Terrell Pryor, were suspended for accepting improper benefits: selling memorabilia in exchange for cash and discounted tattoos (yes, really). This, unfortunately, is the kind of thing that happens all the time. But Tressel, that presumed paragon, covered it up: he didn’t tell the school’s athletic director, compliance officer, or university president. He did tell Pryor’s hometown “mentor.” And, of course, he lied about it to the NCAA. As Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples notes, “Tressel did… make a poor choice of NCAA rules to break. An accomplished former coach once told me that the NCAA only considers two violations unforgivable: Getting caught buying a player and getting caught lying to the NCAA. Tressel is guilty of the second, and coaches who get caught lying to the NCAA rarely keep their jobs.”

When he was finally busted, Tressel started spinning his misconduct as an attempt to protect his players. Nonsense: it was an attempt to protect his winning percentage: nothing more and nothing less. Notice, also, that the suspensions were for the first few games of this season, against Ohio State’s traditional cupcake non-conference schedule (to be fair, the 2011 schedule is far tougher than usual). Couldn’t keep those players out of a bowl game just for blatantly and completely intentionally breaking NCAA rules, now could we?

But this is just the latest in a string of improprieties in Tressel’s career, as a précis on the website Bleacher Report suggests: there was the Ray Isaac story, in which the star quarterback reportedly received $10,000 in cash and access to multiple cars (this was when Tressel was at Youngstown State); there was the admission by Santonio Holmes that he was receiving money from an agent; there were the cash and loaner cars to Troy Smith and to Maurice Clarett (not to mention the fact that Clarett almost certainly wasn’t academically eligible). Then, of course, there was the single-game suspension of linebacker Robert Reynolds for choking Wisconsin quarterback Jim Sorgi. Tressel tried to make it sound like suspending Reynolds showed how tough he was on players who got out of line; in fact, of course, Reynolds should have been thrown off the team and probably arrested.

And there may be more to come: Sports Illustrated’s George Dohrmann, the last sportswriter to win a Pulitzer Prize, has a new piece due out today. He’s not shy, tweeting, “I'm told it is likely my SI mag story will be posted at SI.com later today/tonight. Timing of Tress dec. will make sense after you read it.” Hoo boy.

Only a couple months ago, Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee responded to a question about whether Tressel would be fired: “I hope he doesn’t fire me.” Gee, of course, is an idiot, but something clearly happened to precipitate the change of direction. Given the administration’s serial gutlessness over the past decade, it’s likely to be damning.

Perhaps the most telling quotation came from Athletic Director Gene Smith: “We look forward to refocusing the football program on doing what we do best—representing this extraordinary university and its values on the field, in the classroom, and in life.” Unfortunately, this may be the one time someone at Ohio State has told the truth in years: yes, I’m afraid the football program and its manifold transgressions do indeed represent the university’s values. More’s the pity.

Legs of steel; feet of clay.

“Faith,” wrote Mark Twain, “is believing what you know ain’t so.” And, when you think about it, that’s pretty much what guided the public’s attitude towards Lance Armstrong: faith. Or perhaps the desire to believe, which is certainly faith’s first cousin.

True, we all knew that Armstrong’s improbable story was just a step or two too far. To beat cancer (testicular cancer to be precise—can you think of a worse condition for a professional bicyclist to have?), and then even compete in the world’s most grueling sporting event is incredible. To win a stage, unbelievable. To win the race, implausible. To do so seven times in a row, well that surpasses credibility. Perhaps we should have looked more closely at the derivations of those descriptions: all of them mean precisely the same thing—that the feats described are not to be believed.

We all heard the voices in the back of our heads, the ones repeating things like “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” but we ignored them. We ignored them because we wanted to, perhaps even needed to. We ignored them because Armstrong was so, well, inspirational. He triumphed over a disease feared by all of us—especially those of us who have lost a loved one, or quite possibly more than one, to it. He didn’t come back just a little, not to even as good as he was. He came back better. There’s a message of hope for everyone feeling down for whatever reason. And it was an especially resonant message for those who needed a hero, a pathfinder, a beacon to light the way through the dark, malignant days ahead.

Not to mention all the money he raised through the LiveStrong foundation. What was it, over $400,000,000? That’s a lot of cash. True, he made damned sure that everybody knew he was the guiding force behind the organization. True, too, that he is by all accounts a ruthless self-promoter, something of a bully professionally and a jackass privately. His treatment of his first wife was rendered doubly despicable by his subsequently trotting out his children to burnish his all-American hero image. He later split with fiancée Sheryl Crow oh-so-coincidentally at the exact time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Way to be there when your loved ones need you, dude.

And it’s true the rumors had been around for a long time. But they could always be ascribed to ulterior motives: the testimony of jealous rivals or the French press, who refused to believe that a mere American could so dominate their signature sporting event. Besides, although he was never warm or even particularly friendly, he didn’t have fits of rage like a Roger Clemens or a Lyle Alzado; he didn’t suddenly develop muscles more or less irrelevant to his sport like Ben Johnson’s biceps; his head didn’t grow to the size of a basketball like Barry Bonds’s. And he always denied using performance-enhancing drugs (protesting too much, mayhap?); he’d never tested dirty after all those years. He could be clean, we told ourselves, and we believed it although we knew it wasn’t so.

Now, with a Sports Illustrated exposé in January, a “60 Minutes” indictment this week featuring testimony from former Armstrong teammate (and Olympic gold medalist) Tyler Hamilton, and, perhaps most damaging of all, new revelations by longtime Armstrong domestique George Hincapi, who has more than a little credibility (in part, ironically enough, because of his confession about his own experiences with banned substances), Armstrong’s aura of innocent invincibility is a thing of the past. In the words of Mike Wise, Hamilton and Hincapie “aren’t bitter soldiers from Lance’s army now craving publicity; these are subpoenaed, former world-class cyclists who begrudgingly gave up the greatest champion in their sport because they did not want to go to jail themselves.”

It turns out, if Hamilton is to be believed, that Armstrong had tested positive in Switzerland in 2001, but that the Armstrongistas made that result “go away.” There’s an allegation that Armstrong made a 6-figure “contribution” to a testing center. Note that for this little conspiracy theory to work, it doesn’t even require a falsified test: just an “accidental” exclamation on the part of a technician that although they’ve found a test for X, they still can’t seem to detect Y. Here’s Wise:

Think about that. Imagine generously giving to the company responsible for your employment drug test. Now imagine trying to explain the charitable contribution to your tax guy. You know, Dave, I really thought about Habitat for Humanity, earthquake relief and of course the Homeless Animal Shelter this year. But when it came down to it, those swell folks doing the urinalysis over at Qwest—now that’s a cause I want to get behind.

Armstrong’s piety now rings more than a little false.

Oh, there will be those who still believe because they have to for their own purposes. And there will be plenty who think he shouldn’t be actually prosecuted for one of two reasons: a). he’s done all those good things, so we should forgive him the bad ones or b). his wealth and popularity coupled with a necessarily complex case would make a conviction difficult and it therefore would be a waste of resources to pursue one. It’s certainly true that convincing 12 out of 12 jurors beyond reasonable doubt that a specific crime was committed is a higher threshold than convincing 90% of us that he almost certainly cheated, and it may be that we as a society will have to settle for that.

But even if we do, we need to reject arguments that he shouldn’t be held responsible for cheating because it was all for a good cause, that he shouldn’t be responsible because “everyone else was doing it,” and that he never asked to be a role model. This latter claptrap is even endorsed by the normally perspicacious Eugene Robinson. But Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford didn’t stop being robber barons by endowing universities (named after themselves, of course), and Lance Armstrong didn’t cease being a cheat and a fraud by using his notoriety to a good end.

As for his not wanting to be a role model: bovine feces. The whole argument that he could accomplish more good things by capitalizing on the fame that comes from winning (and that makes breaking the rules aaaaaaaaall better) is predicated on being a role model. “Don’t give up and you can be like me,” quoth he to adoring kids stricken with a horrible disease. He was lying, of course; lying to the most vulnerable audience you can imagine. But he wanted very much to be the role model. He just wanted us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

This is an especially sad case. There’s no question that Armstrong was—hell, still is—an amazing athlete. He was the undisputed champion of a sport so demanding that most of us couldn’t last twenty minutes, let alone twenty days. I don’t think I ever biked more than about 20 miles in a day. These guys do that in less than an hour. Up the Pyrenees. And then go another couple hundred miles. It shouldn’t shock us in one respect that so many of these guys cheat: Wise reports that only one man on the podium with Armstrong in the seven years he won the Tour de France was never linked to performance-enhancers. There’s considerable argument over what this means: that cycling is the dirtiest sport this side of weightlifting in terms of drugs and doping, or proof that cycling, unlike major American sports, will actually go after current stars with real penalties. Either way, there’s a problem. But, just as the fact cheating in academe is widespread doesn’t mean we should condone it, the “everyone is doing it” defense doesn’t wash here, either.

Lance Armstrong became the face of cycling in this country. He was larger than the sport, and some of the luster of the Tour de France waned, especially in the US, after his retirement. But I, personally, had become a fan of the Tour. That lasted a year. I didn’t get bored; I got disgusted. I quit on the sport when it quit on me: when, in a year decimated by the absence of a number of top stars, all of them disqualified for doping, the eventual Tour winner, Floyd Landis, was ultimately stripped of his title for using performance-enhancers. There was no real sport left, no honest competition. That’s probably still true today. I don’t know, and I don’t care. And that is part of Lance Armstrong’s legacy. His dishonesty and above all his ego have effectively killed a sport he purports to love.

Armstrong’s lesson to those struggling against cancer, too, could have been “persevere, and you will survive. I went on to lead a normal life. You can, too.” But “normal” wasn’t good enough. Not even “extraordinary” was sufficient. Not for his quest for fame and glory. And money; don’t forget money. Now the mantra, or at least the subtext of the mantra, is “conquering a killer disease is child’s play… and you, over there, who are dying: it’s your fault because you’re not cool enough, not focused enough, not tough enough. And, of course, although none of you will ever be as magnificent as I, you can try. Cheat. Lie. Become an attention whore by pretending not to be. And if you raise someone’s hopes only to dash them, so be it. They didn’t ‛live strong.’”

If, as may well happen, Lance Armstrong is not prosecuted, or if he is acquitted on the most serious charges, he and his minions will no doubt bellow in the style of Bill Clinton that he “did nothing wrong.” He might even believe it. That would be the greater tragedy. But his greatest sin, for me, was that for several years he made me believe it, too. Even though I knew it wasn’t true.

Cheerleading, Confucius, and the Courage of a Survivor.

I’ve taught in colleges and universities for over 30 years, 20 of them in tenured or tenure-track positions. I’ve had my share of athletes in my classes—ranging from an All-American middle-distance runner to guys who sat on the bench for an NAIA school’s basketball team. The majority of these young men and women were essentially indistinguishable from their classmates: some were likeable, some were good students, some both, some neither. A small but noteworthy percentage of them, of course, were living incarnations of the stereotypical stupid, pampered, arrogant, jock.

There was the (married) one who thought that whispering revoltingly explicit suggestions to the women (one in particular) in an acting class was acceptable; the one who came in to complain about his grade on a scene, alleging I had been unfair to him because he had nothing in common with the character, who happened to be a student complaining about his grade (I couldn’t make this stuff up); the one who dragged his position coach along with him to argue that I should have excused his absence the day he was in court, being convicted of an E felony—he also wrote neither of the required papers, got a D on one exam and didn’t show up for the other, and got a 38 (counting the curve) on the final… curiously enough, he failed my course, conference all-freshman team recognition notwithstanding).

There’s at least one of these creatures in the small town of Silsbee, Texas, about two hours south of where I live. His name is Rakheem Bolton (I can use his name because he was actually convicted), and he’s apparently a pretty good football and basketball player. He is also a rapist, or, to be legally precise, he was accused of rape and allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge. This is Texas, after all. Did I mention he’s a good athlete?

The case made headlines a few months ago, not because there’s another jock predator out there (that’s hardly worthy of mentioning), but because the victim in the case, a young woman identified publicly only as “H.S.,” got thrown off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer specifically for her attacker, by name. The cheer in question? “Two, four, six, eight, ten, come on, Rakheem, put it in." Seriously. Needless to say, the school did back flips to coddle their prize athlete, justice be damned. Tanner Hunt, Jr., the school’s attorney, sniveled that they had followed the law: “For all anyone knew, it was a girl mad at a boy.” He also proclaimed that “If there was something to apologize for, we would.”

I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t argue whether what the school did was legal. But I’m pretty sure of two things. One is actually incontrovertible: in a just universe, Tanner Hunt, Jr. would have his smarmy little face meet up with the business end of a baseball bat. And what I wrote in February about a different collection of jackass pseudo-educators in a different East Texas school applies pretty well to Silsbee superintendent Richard Bain, principal Gaye Lokey and cheerleading coach Sissy McInnis, all of whom bring dishonor to their town and their profession by valuing a rulebook over both people and justice. I described then my increasing admiration for the wisdom of the great Chinese sage Confucius:

One of the central tenets of Confucian thought is the avoidance of lengthy and complicated rules structures. Every situation is different, and one can never anticipate all the possible permutations. Confucius’s solution is not to try. He advocates placing authority in the hands of a junzi (gentleman) who is sufficiently endowed with both wisdom and ethical sensibility to be able to adjudicate disputes….

The idiot principal who pointed to the student handbook as if it had been divinely inspired, and who was unsurprisingly too cowardly to even face the press would have been lucky to have been laughed out of Confucius’s presence. More likely, we’d have found out the ancient Chinese word for “bitch-slap.”

Nice to know there’s consistency in the educational hierarchy, isn’t it?

The other point is less ontologically certain, but I strongly suspect that there were other legal means of handling the situation: suspending Bolton being an obvious solution. You know, punishing the criminal instead of the victim? There is no constitutional right to play basketball. I know laws are different in different states, but that high school in California I wrote about in February (February seems to have been a good month for stories about high schools) managed to suspend and ultimately expel an athlete accused of a sexual offense who ultimately wasn’t convicted of anything. If you can get thrown off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for your rapist, shouldn’t… erm… being that rapist get you tossed from the basketball team?

I cannot improve on the commentary of Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, “A school is supposed to be an emotional safe haven for all students, and educators should help, not harass, students in vulnerable positions…. Why not err on the side of compassion?” or of Jack Marshall on his Ethics Alarms blog, “This isn’t just bias, or sports mania. This is a black pit of an ethics vacuum, shared by a school, a culture and a community.”

The case is in the news again because the Supreme Court just refused to hear H.S.’s appeal, leaving the girl to pay $45,000 in costs for the school to defend a “frivolous” suit. I suspect that the law really is on the side of the school. What is legal and what is just are not interchangeable, as the ongoing saga of the Westboro Baptist Church continues to demonstrate. But if there’s anyone doing anything “frivolous” here, it sure as hell isn’t H.S. Unsurprisingly, Jack Marshall’s recent piece in the wake of that ruling hits the proverbial nail on the head: “As I find myself writing again and again, the law will sometimes support horribly unethical conduct, and an unlucky, courageous, abused young woman from Silsbee, Texas just learned this lesson the hard way. I’m so sorry.”

But that’s not where the story ends, I’m pleased to say. No, there isn’t going to be a reversal in legal terms. But a self-described “group of geeky women” in Los Angeles, one of whom I am proud to claim as a friend and former student, isn’t going to let H.S. be stuck with a $45,000 bill for doing what is right. Not if the League of Extraordinary Ladies has anything to say about it. They’ve taken up the cause, and they’ve already raised over $1200 towards their goal of paying off that $45K and hopefully having a little more to cover H.S.’s own legal expenses. (EDIT: there's now a separate website dedicated to the fundraising effort. I should also mention that the campaign is operating in cooperation with H.S.'s lawyer.)

As I said, I know one of these women, and if she says all the money is going to help H.S., you can count on it. And if they have their way, and I am certainly not going to bet against them, the lesson H.S. learns won’t be just that jocks can get away with anything, or that you can’t count on the legal system for justice. It will be that there is no shame in losing if you’re fighting for a good cause; that, idiot school administrators notwithstanding, people are more good than bad; and that if you show maturity beyond your years, exemplary courage, and a steadfastness of spirit, someone will have your back.

Talk, as they say, is cheap. This cause explicitly seeks “a large number of people donating a small amount,” even a dollar or two. The number of donors matters: symbolically, politically, and pragmatically. I made a contribution. If you can afford it, you should, too.

Two Stories about High School Wrestling

I came of age in a small city in upstate New York that produced more than its share of excellent high school wrestlers. Even in years when the team wasn’t outstanding, there were always a couple of individuals who were in contention for conference or even state honors. My wife was the statistician for a state championship team in Ohio. We lived for several years in eastern Iowa, where the tiny high school where my wife directed the plays after her day job produced not only multiple state titles, but more than one NCAA champion and Olympian.

So if high school wrestling has ever had a moment in the last generation when it attracted a national spotlight, I suspect we’d have paid more attention than would the average couple. Once in a while, there’s a story of marginal interest. I can’t ever recall a time when there were two significant stories happening at once. Now there are. Both have to do with the essential nature of the sport and the problems associated with, well, grabbing someone else.

The first story is from the great state of California, where the father of an unidentified freshman at Buchanan High is apparently suing the Clovis Unified School District over an incident last summer at wrestling practice in which a senior teammate allegedly rammed two fingers up the boy’s anus in a maneuver called the “butt-drag” (only the classiest of terminology for you, gentle reader). By the way, if you follow the links, you’ll find out the senior’s name, which figures prominently in virtually all of the reporting; on the chance that he’s innocent, I’m not going to actively contribute to the vilification of a minor. The freshman boy’s name has not been released because he is the alleged victim of a sex crime, but his father has made statements to the press and is identified by name in those stories: unless that father has multiple freshman sons on the wrestling team, I’m willing to bet that everyone at school has pretty well figured it out by now.

The alleged back-story in this case was that the senior was bullying the freshman over the younger boy’s water bottle. According to the New York Times (yes, they had an article on this case),

On July 15… according to the younger boy’s account, he refused to hand his water over, prompting threats from [the senior], including menacing gestures. The police report states that at a practice that evening, [the senior] purposefully stood near the younger boy during a wrestling exercise and, when the coach whistled for wrestling to begin, threw the younger boy down, pinned him to the mat and performed an invasive “butt drag” maneuver.

The senior claims the move consisted only of, and again I’m just quoting newspaper accounts, grabbing the freshman’s “butt cheek” in a move he’d been taught by a middle school coach. If the reporting of the Fresno Bee is to be believed, the incident took place in “a crowded gym during practice in front of parents and coaches.” Yet there appear to be no witnesses.

I’m not putting implicit faith in Jane Jamison of UNCOVERAGE.net, especially when her editorial piece is cross-linked to something called “Right-Wing News.” That said, I have seen no contradiction of the following:

The “victim,” a freshman, made no complaint about the move in practice, and in fact, was joking and having a good time and never even mentioned the incident, according to witnesses and the coach. It wasn’t until sometime later, that the younger wrestler said something to his step-mother and then to his father. The father is a former counselor for a local child-abuse agency.

The “victim” was taken to a doctor, who found slight redness in the victim’s anal area. The fingers, if they did go in or near the anus, were OVER the victim’s work-out clothes, it was not a “skin-on-skin” allegation.

Moreover, the “butt-drag” does indeed appear to be a standard wrestling move. It does not, by design, involve anal penetration of any description, but mistakes happen in sports. I was watching a basketball game last night, and an Oklahoma State player elbowed a Kansas player in the face. It was clear from the replay that there was no intent to do so; it was equally clear that the incident had indeed occurred.

It is impossible to conclude definitively what happened last July. According to an AP report, the older boy’s attorney asserts that a police investigation “found no evidence on the boy's underwear or gym shorts to support his account.” First off, there’s an investigation I’m glad I didn’t have to conduct. More to the point, the implicit suggestion here is that such a search would of necessity have been carried out very shortly after the incident itself, thereby calling into question the claim that the younger boy waited for a substantial period of time to file a complaint.

So we are faced with a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps the older boy actually threatened and then assaulted a younger, smaller teammate. Or the freshman (or his father) made the whole story up, whether for attention or hoping for a payout in a nuisance lawsuit or whatever. It’s also possible that there was an honest misinterpretation about the alleged threats, and/or that the anal penetration happened, but purely accidentally. Whatever the actual facts of the case, the senior was arrested on a charge of sexual battery (the charges were later dropped) and first suspended, then expelled, from school.

The school, of course, has one of those ridiculous “zero tolerance” policies, and I do wish I could blame it for the brouhaha. Unfortunately, I can’t. The question here isn’t whether a student ought to be suspended for getting highlights put in her hair. This allegation is indeed serious. If a bully committed a sexual assault on school property, of course he should be thrown out of school. The question isn’t whether the punishment meets the crime, it’s whether there was a crime.

The only people I’m confident aren’t at fault in this case are the school officials. Whereas one or the other of those boys is guilty of a crime, whether of assault (at least) or of filing a false report (at least), there is no allegation that I’ve seen suggesting the younger boy complained prior to the alleged incident that he was being bullied. The school apparently acted swiftly to suspend the older boy as soon as they heard of the allegation. That not all their decisions were unanimous suggests only that the facts of the case are open to more than one interpretation. All of which says that the younger boy’s father is an unethical ass for suing the school (but not the other boy?), whether his son’s claims are legitimate or not.

The other wrestling story is from Iowa, where a boy named Joel Northrup defaulted his class 3-A state tournament match rather than having to wrestle a girl, Cassy Herkelman of Cedar Falls. (It’s important that he defaulted rather than forfeited, as that allowed him to continue in the consolation round.) Northrup is home-schooled, but wrestles for Linn-Mar High School, just down the road from where we used to live. His rationale:

Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith, I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa.

Whereas the California story is about two different versions of what happened, with little disagreement about what should happen if we could be sure of the facts, this one is about whether what everyone agrees happened should have. A lot of folks in Iowa and elsewhere gave young Northrup a lot of credit for making this very difficult decision, and indeed for being disappointed but not whining about circumstances. (There’s no lawsuit forthcoming here.) Others, of course, smirked that he was afraid of losing to a girl. Maybe. But I suspect not.

What I know for certain is that ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly is, as usual, full of crap. There was, needless to say, a vulturous swirl of reporters surrounding Herkelman, to the point where she “couldn’t get focused” and her coach took away her cell phone and denied her internet access in a vain attempt to allow her to concentrate on wrestling. All this, in Reilly’s world, is Northrup’s fault, apparently because jackasses like Reilly can’t be expected not to unnecessarily harass 14-year-old girls. It’s all the kid’s fault, because, you see, he didn’t say his unwillingness to grab a girl by the breasts or between the legs had something to do with sexuality or sexual mores. Bullshit. He’s 16, and apparently a devout (and probably somewhat cloistered) Christian. Of course it does, whether or not he may be a little embarrassed to cite it as a reason.

We’ll never know how many of the 20 boys Herkelman defeated on the mat were less aggressive than they would have been with a male opponent, were just that split-second later than they would otherwise have been to wrap up an opponent from behind, or hesitated ever so slightly before attempting to sling her to the mat, giving her just enough time to re-establish her balance. Or, conversely, whether they were so concerned about the possibility of losing to a girl that they were too aggressive, taking chances they otherwise wouldn’t have. Maybe—consummation devoutly to be wished—none of them did, and they’d certainly all deny it. But there will always be the suspicion. That said, the last thing I want to do is to suggest the Herkelman didn’t deserve her spot in the state tournament. Certainly treating Herkelman differently than any other competitor would be the truly insulting course of action.

Reilly, of course, presumes to lecture an adolescent boy on both ethics and religion: “Does any wrong-headed decision suddenly become right when defended with religious conviction? In this age, don't we know better? If my God told me to poke the elderly with sharp sticks, would that make it morally acceptable to others?” Reilly is, of course, too arrogant to notice that his flair for the hypothetical could readily be turned around. His entire argument is founded on the idea that Ms. Herkelman is entering into this competition willingly, knowing the risks. She’s 14, remember, too young to be responsible for other decisions regarding the mutual touching of boys and girls (the age of consent in Iowa is 16). But even if she were of age, would we be criticizing Northrup for not screwing her under the bleachers just because, hypothetically, she didn’t object?

Wrestling, unlike any other interscholastic sport, is specifically about grabbing the opponent, sometimes in what Reilly calls “awkward places.” That’s going to be more than a little weird for a fair number of adolescents if the opposition happens to be of the other sex. (Like puberty isn’t difficult enough already, right?) And it’s also one of few sports in which boys and girls compete against each other. There are separate teams in golf and track and tennis, none of which involve touching the opponent at all, but there aren’t enough girls to field a separate wrestling team, so we get co-ed competition in the sport that is in social (as opposed to athletic) terms the most problematic. And, especially at the lower weight classes, there will be some girls whose quickness and athleticism will overcome a relative deficit in upper-body strength. In other words, I’m not surprised that a girl could reach state at 112 pounds, although I doubt that a). it would happen at one of the higher weight classes, or b). she’d actually win the tournament.

I have no problem with Ms. Herkelman; with the authorities who allowed her to compete; with her father, who encouraged her to do so; or with the boys who decided to wrestle her. But neither of the two girls who qualified for the state tournament condemns Northrup. Nor does Herkelman’s father. Nor do I. No, that is left to the national sports reporter who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Because if he went to Cedar Falls intentionally, it would have to have been because he considers Herkelman unlike any other wrestler who went to state but didn’t win. And that would make him a raging hypocrite. Oh, wait… Rick Reilly… yeah, old news. Sorry.