Rush

Rush was Ron Howard's movie last fall about the Formula One racing rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. I cannot imagine it was a commercial success, especially because the racing sequences are much more abbreviated than in either Frankenheimer's Grand Prix or Steve McQueen's Le Mans. This means Howard will have to make some stupid blow-'em-up movie to get back in the good graces of the studios. However, it is a great story, contrasting Lauda's Germanic heads-down attention to detail with Hunt's seat-of-the-pants, screw-every-woman-available style. They both accomplished amazing things on the race course, winning races and glory. This culminated in the 1976 season, in which there were a lot of rule book arguments, in which Lauda had a near-fatal accident at the German Grand Prix, and in which Hunt took the world championship by one point at the rain-drenched Japanese Grand Prix. My main frustration with the movie is the short shrift given to the two races which I saw in person that year at Long Beach and Watkins Glen.

The King of Sports

As an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and columnist for ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook has the credentials to write The King of Sports, which, as its subtitle claims, analyzes "Football's Impact on America." He wanted to write about a college football program he could profile that had a reputation for being honest and graduating its players at a rate roughly equal to the general student body. He had a hard time finding one, finally resorting to Virginia Tech. He then compared the program at VT to other big money colleges, and examined the way in which the NFL treats it customers and players. To summarize his conclusions: The NFL exists as a monopoly organization to funnel money from television networks to the team owners. The teams are a way to funnel public money, in the form of stadium bonds, tax abatements, and free rent, into private hands. Lucrative money from cable television is further encouraging already-bad practices. College football exists in a region outside normal college life, where very few universities are actually interested in seeing that students playing big-money sports actually graduate, and the universities are happy to play along, paying their coaches more than their presidents, to keep the money rolling in. Except that the money doesn't benefit the universities as a whole, they only benefit the athletic programs. And the NCAA is a co-conspirator in this. The NFL teams and big money colleges regard their players as essentially disposable commodities. None of the football programs at any level are interested in making clear to starry-eyed players how unlikely it is that they'll get to the next level --- one in two thousand high school players eventually get to the NFL, and of those, very few play the four years required to vest their benefits.

"There are no words strong enough to express how little the NCAA cares about whether the football or men's basketball players who generate economic returns also receive an education. To the NCAA, the barometric pressure on the planet Neptune matters more than whether football and men's basketball athletes receive educations."

     --- Gregg Easterbrook, The King of Sports