I just finished reading Meat Market, by Bruce Feldmen. Feldmen was given an insider's seat at the table to follow head coach Ed Orgeron and the Ole Miss coaching staff through the ordeal of recruiting for a year, culminating with the 2007 national signing day. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know my feelings on major college athletics, and so I was very much interested in getting a behind the scenes look at recruiting.
While I won't say I came away with any particularly thrilling insights, it was amazing to me just how consuming the recruiting process is at a major football school. They really just didn't seem to quit. I was also quite impressed with the extent to which it all seemed to be something of a house of cards at times, or perhaps a real-life game of Jenga, trying to make this move or that without disturbing the overall tower. I was also rather surprised to read about the level of deception and double-talk that went from recruits and those around them to coaches in some cases. The cynic in me expected that sort of thing to be coming from the schools, but I guess I never really thought about the level to which the recruits might be willing to "play the game" as well.
The story in the book that really cast an aspect of the college athletics scene into a new light for me was that of prized recruit Jerrell Powe. I'm not going to go into all the details of the story, but suffice to say that Powe had originally signed with Ole Miss back in 2005, but was unable to gain academic eligibility, and has since been turned 2 more times. Now, on the surface, this seems to be one of the classic things that I hate about major college athletics - a school doing everything they can to get a kid into school who really has no business being on a college campus. And there's certainly some of that there. However, as presented in the book, Powe was a kid who had been basically ignored and allowed to slip through the school system, despite ultimately failing grades when Ole Miss first discovered him. When Ole Miss began setting him up for academic help, he had a 2nd grade reading level. Within a relatively short time, he was up to a 5th grade level. The various complications and ultimate outcome of Powe's case make it such that I certainly can't hold his actual situation up as an example of a kid really being helped academically as a result of the football machine, but it did make me wonder if maybe there aren't situations similar to this that occur, where a kid who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks of a poor school system gets picked up and put on a better path as a result of interest in his football abilities. None of this, of course, excuses the kind of other academic compromises you hear about all the time, but it does bring me some comfort to think that maybe there are some kids who really benefit from the process, in areas other than just on the football field.
It's worth noting that since the publishing of this book, Ole Miss went 3-9 (0-8 in the SEC) and Coach Orgeron was fired after 3 years at Ole Miss, with a 10-25 overall record, and 3-21 in the SEC.
I'm not sure where I'm going for my next non-fiction read at this point, I'll have to make a decision over the weekend. I've got two baseball books sitting immediately on my stack, but both deal with steroids on some level, and I'm a bit saturated with that topic thanks to Roger Clemens. I'm thinking I may acquire another book on college football or basketball this weekend. No such confusion on the fiction side. Still working through Tom Sawyer, but I just got a box from Barnes and Noble yesterday that contained The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vols. I and II, Treasure Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And thanks to the Barnes and Noble Classic series, my member discount, and a gift card, that all came at an actual cost to me of about 5 bucks :-) Suffices to say, I have plenty of fiction reading for the foreseeable future.
2 months ago
6 comments:
I greatly enjoyed Sherlock Holmes the first and second times that I read it and am appalled that I completely neglected Mark Twain when compiling my book list. Thank you for jogging my memory. I will be adding him and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to "The List."
I know this has nothing to do with the main subject of this post but alas, my total interest in sports could fit inside a child sized thimble. However, I have found your commentary and analysis informative and very often amusing.
Hey, feel free to comment on anything you see, main point or not. Heck, comment on what you don't see.
Also, I highly recommend going over the Barnes and Noble website and looking at the list of books in their Classics series if you're still looking to expand your list. It's certainly not an a all-encompassing list, but it's an excellent compilation of great literature. I was rather appalled to see that I had only read about 5-6 books in that series in full
I took a look at that list, Scott. I've read about half of them, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the list as a whole.
For one thing, there is too much fiction and there are also too many lesser works by important authors. (By all means, Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment, but they also include at least three other books by Dostoevsky. They also include, I believe, every novel by Jane Austen. I certainly don't object to Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and perhaps even Persuasion, but Emma?) They do include a lot of non-fiction classics, but not nearly enough in my opinion. In particular, there is, I think, a complete lack of the great works of mathematics and science, presumably on the theory that the average reader won't understand them. I think the average reader can understand a lot more than he is generally given credit for.
By the way, looking through the books you received at the bottom, it occurs to me that I've never actually read 20,000 Leagues which I probably should do. Treasure Island, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the Twain novels were great favorites of mine as a child.
I'm not really going to argue with that assessment. Like I said, it's far from comprehensive.
But for someone like me, who is looking to fill in a rather expansive gap in my exposure to great fiction, it's a solid start.
Oh sure. My only major disagreement is the inclusion of lesser works due to the prominence of the author (said prominence often resting almost entirely on their greater works).
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