Ivy League in the Net!

By Tom Plate

Sometimes virtue doesn’t have to be its own reward. The Cornell men’s basketball team just won a pair of big-time basketball games here in the United States. If you’re not utterly shocked, then you don’t know the inside story of college athletics in America.

Cornell University is an Ivy League school whose sole major misfortune is to be frozen every winter like an Arctic ruin in the God-awful upper New York state city of Ithaca. So when its men’s team scored upset triumphs in basketball, it was national news. That’s because it wasn’t just any other time. They were victories in early rounds of the gala national-college-athletic-association (NCCA) marathon tournament known to all hysterical hoopster-lovers as “March Madness” —  and/or “The Big Dance.”  It was the venerable school’s first NCAA tourney wins ever.


You would never know it when you travel abroad, but it gets very crazy in America around this time of year. For March Madness also sounds the opening gong for a different kind of youthful athletic frenzy. It’s known as Spring Break. But let’s not go into that. The significance of Cornell team’s triumph over much-higher ranked Temple University, from Philadelphia, is hard for outsiders to fathom. What’s a good comparison? Maybe the armed forces of Taiwan invade and seek to occupy China? Or maybe I pitch the ninth inning of a Los Angeles Angels game and strike out Japan superstar Hideki Matsui in three or four pitches.  Something like that.

The reason for the astonishment that swept over America is that Ivy League universities pledge not to award scholarships to students for athletics, only for academic achievement or palpable financial need. By contrast, at Temple (like the vast majority of US schools) maybe everyone on the team has an athletic scholarship, including water boys. Not surprisingly, therefore, many Ivy League basketball players are short, lightweight and slow. But they also tend to have stratospheric IQs and brilliant grade-point averages.

When a major basketball power wins a NCAA game or even title —  whether universities from Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky, Florida or whatever —  you are observing a semi-professional athletic team represented by a university athletic department that probably has more power on campus than the otherwise powerful academic Senate. These days, the best college players don’t even bother to hang around campus for four years to get their degree. Some sign multimillion dollar pro-contracts after just one year at school. That makes me sick. For it makes institutions of higher education little more than transition day-care centers for the National Basketball Assn. The entire scene shows the power of the almighty US dollar at its worst. To be sure, the quality of the basketball is often superb. It’s even possible to make the argument that somehow these successful athletic programs benefit the academic programs, too. But I, for one, don’t buy it. Instead, they tend to corrupt the academic environment. And every honest student knows it.

There’s a proposal in the air of America to expand March Madness and make the tournament bigger. But anything that bloats, even more, college athletics is a bad idea. What we need to expand and improve is our academic excellence. This is what has helped turn the US into a superpower. This is what has helped make us the envy of the world. Basketball is just a game, though a great one. What’s of enduring value from our universities is the triumph of our educated brains.

Cornell has its own troubles, to be sure. A spate of recent student suicides drew attention to its extreme isolation and internal competitiveness. No one is perfect. But otherwise, off-court, there’s no one in the NCAA field that sets the same standard. Cornell might never win a national hoops championship, but already it’s the biggest winner in the NCAA’s 64-team field.

Columnist and veteran journalist Tom Plate is writing a trilogy of books called “Giants of Asia.”

Originally published March 25, 2010 in the Khaleej Times.