Teeing Off

Author: Peter Baumann

It is the nature of sports that they often distract us from what is important. To this day my mother bemoans the fact that I can name the starting nine on the 1995 Colorado Rockies playoff team while simultaneously needing a calculator to figure out 20 percent of my dinner check. "Think of the wasted brain-cells!" she'll groan whenever I spout statistics as if I was reading off a cue-sheet.

But every once in a while, that rare time comes around when rather than distracting us, sports can actually provide the platform to help athletes remind us exactly what is important. Nov. 22 is more than a week away, but go ahead, mark your calendars, because that afternoon one of those moments is going to occur.

At some point on that Saturday the Maryland Terrapins are going to throw deep into the Florida State secondary, completing a back-breaking pass that destroys any hope the Seminoles have of making it to the ACC title game. And some announcer is going to explain why the pass was completed: that Florida State was playing this game, the most important of its season to date, without its all-American candidate at safety. He's going to explain that this player, one of fifteen semi-finalists for the top defensive player in the country, is not on the field because he is putting the student back in the often misused term: student-athlete.

And maybe then we will all realize that at the very time when we are using them to distract ourselves from what is important in our own lives, sports can also remind us of its own relative place. For on Nov. 22, while Maryland's quarterback is picking apart his secondary, Myron Rolle is going to be in another state, passing up the national spotlight in order to interview for the Rhodes scholarship.

I wish this wasn't a story. I wish that the tale of a college student willing to miss the biggest game of the year for academic advancement wasn't a big deal, but it is. Too often our sports pages are dominated by tales of theft, assault and general misconduct from these athletes who are students in little more than name. Rarely do we see someone whose moral compass is screwed on so straight that he has already announced he would choose the Scholarship over first-round money from the NFL next season.

Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for finding this story - that belongs to Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel - but when I read his story, I couldn't help but pass it along. I sent it to my mom, my dad, my former high-school teammates and every coach that taught me to look at athletics as a metaphor for life, not the other way around. I sent it to everyone I felt needed a reminder of what college sports should be about, and now I'm passing it along to you. Here at Middlebury, we often take for granted that our athletes are students first and players second, but at the big-time College Football factories that is rarely the case.

I sometimes worry if all the time I spend watching sports is a waste of my time, but I can promise you on Nov. 22, it won't be. I'll be sitting on my couch, letting my head fill with wasteful statistics, notes and observations, but each time the Terps complete a pass into the heart of Florida State's cover-2, I will get goosebumps on my arm as I think about the player that should have been there to defend that pass - the player who took the road less traveled. For those of us who look to athletes as role models, that choice will have made all the difference.