Society needs a wakeup call

Sporting News, The, March 15, 2004 by J.C. Watts, Jr.

You are reading this copy of the SPORTING NEWS because you love sports.

You go straight to the sports section in the morning to study the box scores ... or to calculate your fantasy football team's score ... or to read about how Tiger Woods lapped the field yet again.

You watch SportsCenter to see Barry Bonds drown another pitch in McCovey Cove ... or to marvel at the above-the-rim acrobatics of LeBron James ... or to see Donovan McNabb scramble and fire a bullet to one of his receivers.

Unfortunately, real life has kidnapped the sports pages. It's getting more and more painful to read them.

A college basketball player murdered in Texas. A partying coach in Iowa. Another in Alabama. Academic fraud in college athletics. A former NBA star on trial for manslaughter.

Now, the headlines read like a Jerry Springer Show promo.

Night of sex, booze

Rape angle downplayed

CU: No more strippers

D.A.: Sex used to recruit athletes

CU scandal drenched in alcohol abuse

You get the point.

Sadly, this isn't new. I am the proud alumnus of a university that had its own problems 15 or so years ago. Oklahoma's troubles were not in the recruiting process, out in me Dayers it recruited.

Our headlines centered on drugs, gun violence and rape. You might remember seeing an OU quarterback in a prison jumpsuit on the cover of a competing sports weekly in the late 1980s. (I'm proud to report this former quarterback is a model citizen today. I couldn't be more proud of him.)

Coach Barry Switzer maintained that he could not control the young adults on his team 24 hours a day. That is a familiar refrain we hear coming from Boulder and coach Gary Barnett today. Both coaches are correct, but the buck has to stop somewhere. I love Coach Switzer and always will, but we started calling him "former" OU coach largely because of the fallout from that scandal.

My freshman year at Oklahoma, our curfew was 11 p.m. A coach checked every room. But after bed check, two or three players often slipped out. Regardless of the rules you put on players, there always will be those who push the envelope to circumvent them.

Major university athletic departments are easy targets for criticism. But they should not be singled out, because this is a much bigger problem. It only stands to reason that when society loses its compass, it will domino right down to college athletics.

Sadly, rape, illicit drugs, violence and pornography have taken up permanent residence on the sports pages. And that's not why people like us open the sports section first thing every morning.

If you're disturbed, you should be.

If you're surprised, you shouldn't be.

We live in a culture that has lost its way. Should you doubt that, just review the headlines from nearly every other sector of our society, from entertainment to politics to even the clergy.

We have created a culture that has told us the only thing right is to get by and the only thing wrong is to get caught. A culture that says, "If it feels good, do it. If you don't want to do it, don't. If you can't handle it, drink it or drug it."

Sports at all levels, from high school to professional athletics, are being affected by this cultural decay.

It's easy to criticize a coach for recruiting individuals based more on talent than character. But the fact is, every major program in the country recruits from the same poor of athletes, and Colorado beat out a lot of other schools to get the players making dubious headlines today.

Certainly, there must be more supervision within college athletic departments. Though no coach can be on the watch 24/7, he ultimately is responsible to set the tone and standards for his program.

But no level of standards, rules, regulations or laws will prevent what we are witnessing in our culture. The ultimate responsibility for instilling character in young athletes lies at the front door of their homes. Parents must take responsibility for developing the hearts and minds of their children before they send them out into the abyss of today's culture.

J.C. Watts, a former U.S. representative from Oklahoma and quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners, is chairman of J.C. Watts Companies. E-mail him at jcwatts@sportingnews.com.