Battle's End: A Seminole Football Team Revisited

Sporting News, The, Feb 19, 1996 by Steve Gietschier

(By Caroline Alexander. 220 pp. Knopl $23).

Caroline Alexander grew up in the shadows of Florida State's Doak Campbell Stadium in the pre-Bobby Bowden days, but as the daughter of English immigrants always wary of America and Americans, she never bought into Tallahassee's unsated lust for football celebrity. After a peripatetic childhood and a college education abroad, she returned to Tallahassee in 1981 and took a part-time job tutoring football players in English grammar and composition. A dozen years later she searched out nine of her former students to find out what had become of them and how, if at all, they reflected on their college football experience.

What she found, as revealed in this book, should chill the hearts of those who hold fast to the belief that the, good spawned by college athletics outweighs the bad. Th nine players she tracked down have not been treated kindly by fife. Two have played pro football, one works in a bank and one in mosquito,control. One is a court officer, one a correctional officer and two are in prison. One has simply disappeared.

These young men were simply small cogs in a powerful machine that cared not one whit for them as people or students. To get a college education, which only some accomplished, they had to struggle mightily without guidance or support they were betrayed not only by the lures of the college recruiter, but also by high schools that abdicated their responsibility to produce students capable of doing college work. With their decided lack of preparation, it is no wonder that once the football system spit them out so many of their lives have gone awry.