Don’t let anyone tell you that we get an education, that we’re “student-athletes.” As others have said, you are an athlete-student more than you are a student-athlete. It’s always athlete first, classes last. Let’s talk about what a typical day is like when you’re playing Division I, Power Conference NCAA football. You wake up at 5:30 a.m. to get in your morning workout. Then you eat as much as your stomach will hold because food access is restricted and money is tight, so you eat when you can and hope it keeps you filled up for the day. That means protein and starches, but a lot of players go the junk food route because it’s cheap and vending-machine-ready.
You go to your classes. You make damn sure you’re on time or you’ll be doing extra running, something a regular student wouldn’t worry about. Then you go to lunch and carbo-load again. After lunch you go to practice, then when practice is done, it’s back to study hall. Usually there is also an evening class, because you’ve designed your class schedule not around what you want to study but around practice and games. It’s a ten-hour day, and of course it dramatically affects what classes you can take and what you might want to explore intellectually.
I’d challenge anybody to do the equivalent of what we are asked to do and then be fine with not getting compensated: dedicate their body, put in ten-hour days, travel, and still stay “NCAA compliant” by handing in the necessary classwork while not taking as much as a free lunch. We do it to generate funds for the athletic department and billions of dollars for conferences and cable networks. We are there to get other people paid and to try to take advantage of that slender shot at the NFL. We are there for the dream to earn in the future, not to learn in the present.
My interest was in sociology, yet I ended up studying something a little bit different at Texas A&M: farming. Yes, farming. After growing up in Louisiana, after all those days of picking okra and bell peppers and body-slamming cousins among the cows, I made it to college and ended up back where I started. They called it agricultural science, but make no mistake, it was farming. It was easy for me, like someone from Mexico taking Intro to Spanish.
I tried to stick with sociology. I wanted to study human beings and understand how they affect and are affected by their environment, but picking up a full sociology course load and playing football felt about as realistic as trying to sack a quarterback while wearing my daughter’s ballet slippers. Not even slippers in my size but her slippers. It wasn’t just the classwork. As a Black football player I wasn’t made to necessarily feel welcome in the academic world.
During an introductory class, the professor lectured, “The Holocaust is the biggest massacre in the history of the world.”
No one said anything, so I spoke up and said, “I respectfully disagree with you. The Holocaust was awful, but there was this thing called Manifest Destiny that justified the slavery of African people, the slaughter of the Native Americans, the killings of Chinese workers. If we called Manifest Destiny ‘the American Holocaust,’ I bet we’d look at it a much different way.”
She answered, “No, no, no!”
But some people in class started clapping. That just got me going even more. I said, “If you look at what happened to the Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, you will cry yourself.”
She responded, “That’s not true. That was part of making America. It was for the greater good.”
So I asked, “Greater good for who? What’s the difference?” When she didn’t answer, I left. The class was clapping. I’m still not sure if that clapping was for what I said or because I was leaving. That applause had an edge.
While some of my professors made it clear that I was a football jock they didn’t want in their classes, I also believe my coaches did not want me studying the kinds of issues I wanted to explore. They wanted us in classes like farming, classes that would make sure we could stay eligible and get everyone paid.
I clashed with my coaches because they kept telling us, like a broken record, that we needed to be “professional.” This bothered me because I thought we were supposed to be “amateurs” and “student-athletes,” but here they were, telling us to be “professional.” I’m a Bennett, so I had questions. I asked them how they defined “professional.” They said it meant how we dressed, how we listened, and how we weren’t supposed to talk back. In other words, they answered my question, “What do you mean by ‘professional’?” with “Being a professional means shutting up, not challenging our authority, and not asking any more damn questions.” It meant we were under their control.
We didn’t realize how few of us would make the NFL. We didn’t realize how few of us would get our degrees. We didn’t realize how little help we’d receive if we were injured. Above all, we never thought or talked about how we could organize ourselves. When we debated the problems of our situation, we’d conclude, “Well, when we make it to the NFL, all of this will seem like a small price to pay.” That’s how most players in college think, and that’s why we get so many stories of the “student-athlete who couldn’t
