Dear Diary's for Truth, Justice, & the American Way

Dear Diary,

Faster than a speeding bullet,

More powerful than a locomotive,

Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…

Look, up in the sky!

It's a bird!

It's a plane!

It's the reason we'd rather watch college football than do almost anything else in the world.

It's been a week of ebullient celebration in Ann Arbor while Columbus burns but even those outside of The Sacred Brotherhood have started to muse on the actual justice of it all. WatersDemos took the premise of a New Yorker article – "Is college worth it?" and ran with it for college sports. Most prescient, I thought, was goodness of creating a class of "fake" (not his words) students to serve the interests of what's essentially brand marketing.

I'd like to take that further: what's so good about college sports?

(after the jump, it's a job [lowers voice] for Superman.)

It's said that good ideas are borrowed, but great ones are just ripped off outright. When couple of Cleveland boys* came up with Superman, they admittedly stole the idea from Nietzsche's Übermensch; translation: super-(good)man. The Nietzschian superman is an impossible ideal of man kind – all-knowing, all-good, all-competent – to whom we should all aspire. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster struck gold by tapping the ideal not as a secular stand-in for deities, but as entertainment. And boy were we entertained!

The core of this Great American Mythology has remained unchanged since Action Comics #1. He's stronger, faster, and more agile, can leap or fly higher. He wears a costume of blue with red cape, red boots, red…uh speedos, and the copyrighted pentagonal shield logo. He fights for good – or at least a Midwest conceptualization of it – and asks nothing in return. And Monday through Friday he makes a non-powers-related middle class living in an office which pays for everything he needs. Our hero. You can't change any part of this (except for a few issues, because in comics you can do anything you want) or else find yourself facing an army of hero worshippers who call it the greatest travesty ever visited upon humankind, ever ever.

This is not so far off from how we view our college athletes. Denard Xavier Robinson is a mild-mannered Kinesiology student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with a ready smile who thought real-live snow would be so interesting to his family he tried to bring it home on the airplane. But on fall Saturdays, when he puts on his maize and blue padded uniform (with signature helmet wings), he becomes… "Shoelace: the Fastest Quarterback in the Country, able to deflate overhyped Domers with a single run!" Dah-da-dit-dah!

All athletes – the ones we want to watch – are some form of superhero, merely the grownup version of the same fantasy. They have superhuman abilities and iconic outfits, and contrasting arch-nemeses who hide out in secret evil lairs, hatching nefarious plots to dastardly doom the good guys, then laughing maniacally.

 Meanwhile, in a lair deep in the soulless concrete of Ohio... 

Gee: We shall give all of our star players free cars and equipment that they can trade to shady dealers for tattoos! Then, once we have all of the greatest athletes from Ohio in our grasp, we can use them to DESTROY THE SUPERFRIENDS!

All: MWAHAHAHAHAHAH!

What sets major college sports apart from pro is the illusion of selflessness at the core of the superhero mythos. You wouldn't empathize with Clark for having a tiny apartment, a neglected marriage, and certainly never any time to watch a movie, download the new South Park, or play a videogame. If Lex Luthor has a new ray gun that gives everyone in Metropolis a disease only LexCorp can cure, and it just happens to be 1:10 p.m. on a Saturday in October, well guess who doesn't get to watch the 1st half of the big game? Our response: "dude, shut up, you get to fly!"

Or dude you get run out of the tunnel, tap the banner and play Ohio State. I'm sure there's a comic superhero out there who charges for his services but he's only there to be the exception. This is our real justification for keeping the players out of college ball's money pit. They are provided a lifestyle meant to be the same as every other college student, with the same academic expectations, to preserve that heroic ideal.

But then if you had special abilities, wouldn't you want to find a way to turn that towards a career? If you're Superman, and rent at your Metropolis apartment is virtually your entire salary at the Daily Planet** isn't there something inside you that says "I'm fucking Superman – why am I not above this?" To donate your abilities and the bulk of your time to the common good while living on the same means as the common man is hardly 'The American Way.' More like the Marxist way.

And thus I come to my point. The incidents at Ohio State have again pit America's heroic ideal against our economic ideology. From a fan perspective, college heroes are better than pro ones because they're everymen. But you can hardly expect the heroes themselves to wonder what's the point of giving away what makes them special. A (by available evidence) more selfish man like Terrelle Pryor will hardly view a few handouts – a hot car, a free tat, access to a PS3 playroom with sycophants standing by to deliver drinks and chicken – as less than just recompense for what he has brought to Columbus. So he gave away his gold pants lucky charm? He quarterbacked the Buckeyes to three consecutive wins over Michigan: who really got the better deal?

That justification is easy to find among 19th century German philosophers. Not so much with ours. The best I can do is demonstrate how many more people are rewarded with the collegiate system. The NFL drafts about 250 players per year, of whom less than 100 will still be in the league six years later. The money brought in by those very few athletes pays not just for fancy stadiums, entire athletic departments, entire collegiate marketing budgets, and very nice offices for super-rich dudes, but also the educations of 11,135 Division I FBS scholarship football players.

No, it's not fair, especially when some of the adults around you are making between $750K and $7.5 million. It's not even capitalist. And rules be damned; a truly unjust rule isn't worth following. But for those few athletes relegated to a dorm life far below market value, they're still getting much more than free room, board and education. This is why I won't mourn for a player who put his hand out. Because for a short time, they get something not even the NFL can offer. For a few short years, they get to be Superman.

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* Some of mankind's greatest works have been accomplished in the course of trying to find a way to get the hell out of Ohio.

** Which is running on 1/4 staff ever since Jimmy Olsen left to start his own blog…

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Hang Fire, Put it on the Wire

Sooooo Diarist of the Week. Just read the title.

The Tressel years, in Stones album titles

The diary's as long and entertaining as the Stones' career. One guess which song inspired it:

Tattoo You: And you, and you, and you, and you. In May 2011, Sports Illustrated sends to Columbus a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, an expert in college sports corruption. He discovers, among other things, that many more OSU football players, going back many more years, have been trading trinkets and even loads of their football equipment at two local tattoo parlors, in exchange for tattoos and even pot.

Seiraid Retho

You're traveling to another dimension. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and how far Ohio State would go to protect a guy who beats Michigan. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call Hector B. Tressel's luck with QBs runs out, by Nonnair:

But this incredible string of luck for Tressel didn't end there. Right up until the past couple of months, when it came to his quarterbacks, Tressel was Hector B. Poole. He threw a coin into the quarterback cashbox in November 2001, and it stood on its side for the next 10 years.

Also entering the twilight zone: All of college football:

Michigan will Take the Field and it will be OMG MAIZE JERZEYS! I CAN BUY JERZEYS?

After Michigan takes the field “I Got a Feelin’“ I know what Special K will play (I feel like every time they went to commercial in this game the damn Black Eyed Peas song played, I know that the movie has AC/DC)

That's JeepinBen who hears about new jerseys for the Notre Dame game and worries about Adidas dressing us up like The Eradicator then saying they're meant to honor the heroic veterans of World War II. That's nothing, JeepinBen! MSU is making the Michigan game a Star Wars theme this year!

If this was how my counselors had introduced 1991 Color War, this would have been awesome. Other things I thought were cool in 1991: Vanilla Ice. At least Dez Howard still stands up.

Etc.

Not sure if Srs: A small snippet from OSU's Emergency Preparedness Plan, by Blazefire, which defines emergencies in two classes: those that can harm you, and those that can harm the university. In either case immediate and direct action must be taken to protect the university.

Remember kids, as Six Zero says: Tattoos are forever.

Up, up, and Away!

Natassia Malthe Victoria Silvstedt Hilary Swank Whitney Port Minka Kelly