I love getting my daily dose of satire from The Onion, but sometimes I wonder if reality is more humorous. Consider this excerpt from a Sports Illustrated article on NCAA basketball champion UConn:
Last spring [Kemba] Walker approached UConn academic counselor Felicia Crump and asked her to help him figure out how to earn his degree in sociology so that he could enter the draft this year and still graduate. Together they built a schedule that required Walker to take courses last summer in Storrs and then a full load in both the fall and the spring. “We’re talking about a young man who was just an average high school student, at best, and who had always been more concerned with basketball,” says Crump. “I told him, ‘If you can do this, you’ll leave behind a legacy that’s more important than anything you do on the basketball court.’”
Walker took schoolwork with him throughout the Big East and NCAA tournaments, completing short required papers while postponing tests until after the season. He met with his campus tutor on Skype. And in his travel pack is a copy of New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden’s Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, a book that Crump encouraged Walker to read as part of an independent study class on racism in sports. Before the Final Four, Crump suggested that Rhoden’s book would be the first that Walker had ever made it through cover-to-cover. After the win over Kentucky, Walker confirmed this. “That’s true,” he said. “You can write that. It is the first book I’ve ever read.”
Mr. Walker may earn himself a nice living as an NBA pro. But for higher education, I’m not sure what is worse — the fact that he read his first book as a junior or the fact that he was proud to admit that to a national audience.