Tag Archives: Cheating

The Ultimate Sports Corruption Scandal

29 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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Rolls of $100 bills (makes me think of Cyndi Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything”), April 9, 2018. (https://www.gtgoodtimes.com/)

I have long believed professional sports and elite college sports as severely compromised enterprises. It’s not just the obvious examples of league officials turning a blind eye away from the lack of fair play, like with baseball players doping and hitting home runs between 1998 and 2004. Or with the New England Patriots and them filming their opponents’ practices to gain an advantage during games. Or with the Houston Astros stealing baserunning signs from the Los Angeles Dodgers during the 2017 World Series. Or even with NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball, where there are enough recruiting and (until last year) pay-for-play violations to render the student part of student-athlete a really bad joke.

No, I believe owners, universities, and league offices collude to put their thumbs on the scale, and have done so for years. They do it for two reasons: 1., to generate revenue and renewed interest in their sport (whether basketball, hockey, baseball, or football, or — more obviously — WWE) and/or 2., to steer a sport-wide championship in the direction of a particular team (also a way to keep those multi-billion-dollar TV contracts aflowing). 

This doesn’t just explain the New England Patriots and the mysterious “tuck rule” ruling during the 2001 NFL Playoffs, a ruling that cost the Oakland Raiders the game and catapulted the Patriots toward the first post-9/11 Super Bowl (patriotism and sports — it’s kismet!). It explains when referees, umpires, and other officials make consistently favorable rulings helping certain teams win playoffs series and championships. Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals between the LA Lakers and the Sacramento Kings in the 2002 NBA Playoffs comes to mind. An official even admitted they may have rigged this particular series in favor of the Lakers. And Duke and Coach K. All anyone has to do is look at the difference between the team UNLV stomped in by 30 points in 1990 and the team UNLV “lost” to in 1991. Really? What difference — no difference! 

Even this isn’t the worst of it. With the newly opened frontier of legal betting on professional and college sports across the board, the temptations for individuals, for officials, for athletes themselves to alter outcomes to win bets will be enormous. The sports would is only a few years away from healthy athletes dying in their athletic prime of suicide or “suspicious circumstances,” stemming from their own gambling addiction, or because of a fan’s gambling addiction and narcissism.

I kid you not. We are a decade or two away at most from discovering how some of these great moments we have seen in a sport should have never been. All because money changed hands, or because of deliberately calibrated officiating, or because of tampering with equipment or with schedules, or because of general collusion among college conferences and universities or between sports leagues and team owners (or, with the student-athlete system, between all of the above). 

And when these turds hit an industrial-sized fan meant for a large indoor arena, what do any of us say then? That we knew all along? That we just went along because we wanted the distraction of sports free from corruption and politics? All of this is bullshit.

The truth is, sports has always been a source of entertainment, a place where we have pretended for years the outcome was never fully assured. But, we all have known the outcome has been helped along, sometimes by a lot. To build a fantasy around sports as set of institutions that brings people together and creates a sense of community is incredibly superficial. Those moments are fleeting and do nothing to change communities, cities, or our societies. Those moments, even as they temporarily unite folks around as flimsy a thing as a win or winning a title, are not untainted ones. 

Listen, I love sports, and have appreciated athleticism going all the way back to the Ali v. Frazier and Ali v. Foreman days. Heck, when my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father as payback for psychologically torturing my mother after she filed for divorce in 1977, I had appreciation for it then. That moment of college athletic-level tackling and the physics around it have been in super-slo-mo in my mind for 45 years. I have loved watching sports since I was 12, and playing sports since puberty grew me to five-foot-eight before I turned 13, and six-feet-even before my 14th birthday. The business of professional sports (including college sports programs and Olympic sports), though, is ugly. That is why I no longer care if athletes dope, stopped caring ages ago how much money they and the sports team owners make, or care much about wins and losses for my Knicks or other teams I kinda root for. 

Because I believe as much as I believe in anything a day of reckoning is coming for these institutions. And when it does, don’t say I didn’t write about it. When it does occur, we can then finally agree there is no difference in pop culture between commercialized music, PG-13 movies, fashion, and the world of sports.

My Thoughts on Cut-Throat Finals Week

17 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Death Race (2008) Dreadnought scene screen shot, December 17, 2019. (https://youtube.com).

I have seen some shady shit as a student and educator over the years. Between my middle school and high school magnet programs in Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon, my four years as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, my three years of grad school course work at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon, and my years of contingent teaching, I have seen students do everything short of killing me or killing their classmates for a higher grade.

This semester provided some new wrinkles (really, old wrinkles I haven’t seen since my Humanities days in the 1980s) that actually shocked me. All as I taught my 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th classes in my roller-coaster of a teaching career. I have felt a certain way toward some of my most demanding, hold-my-hand-for-an-A, spoiled-brat students over the years. This semester, I found myself actually despising three in particular across two universities and four classes. By no means does my grading reflect what I think of them, as I assigned each of them the grades they earned. But really, there is no letter in the alphabet low enough for them that I could assign. At least, one in which I would ever feel fully satisfied. And that is all because they all made the decision to be cut-throat, toward me and toward their peers.

I fully understand the compulsion. Six years in a magnet program that was one part Benetton commercial and three parts Death Race — the Jason Statham version from 2008 — showed me George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a live-action drama set from 1981 to 1987. Students giving each other incorrect notes from which to study. Classmates telling each other they were going to fail a final, or that they didn’t belong in Humanities. One Class of ’87 star making sure to say to another that they were only getting into an elite school because they were Black.

Hazing, bullying, torture, ostracism, denigration were all part of my experience, and that was before we started taking AP courses! I even snickered when our valedictorian received a 67 on an English essay in 11th grade because she failed to underline the title of a James Baldwin book (either Go Tell It on the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, who can remember such mundanity nearly 34 years later). We became good friends for a while after high school — go figure!

So, it’s not like I couldn’t conceive of setting up a classmate to fail, using someone else’s better words to substitute for my gross and imperfect writing, or spending money to hire a tutor to study for an AP exam. I could’ve really done it, if I had the will and/or the wealth. I just wouldn’t do it. You know, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s in Matthews, the first book of the Gospels in the New Testament. It’s one of the few tenets that I have tried hard to follow in all my years as a human being and as a Christian. (The tenets I follow consistently are universal ones, so please do not get your atheistic drawers all twisted.)

But not always. During finals week my second semester at Pitt, at the end of April 1988, I put that Golden Rule aside, and for good reason. During our two-hour, multiple-choice final exam in Roman History, I noticed him. A skinny, geeky White yinzer with dirty blond hair sitting behind me in the Cathedral of Learning lecture hall on the ground floor. I noticed him because I heard him, somewhere around the question 70 mark. The only time his pencil made a noise was after I had filled in a bubble with an answer. By question 75, I knew the dumb mf was cheating off my answer sheet.

Denzel Washington’s character putting corkscrew to throw/soft palate/brain cavity, The Equalizer (2014), December 17, 2019. (https://imdb.com).

So I did what my years in Mount Vernon and in Humanities had trained me for. I proceeded to answer the next 25 questions on this 100-question exam incorrectly on purpose. It was rich and dripping with caramel-chocolate-on-ripe-strawberries revenge! I knew every correct answer and just kept bubbling in one wrong one after another. And as sure as dog-shit peppering dirty snow piles on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in February, Mr. Yinzer bubbled in his answers right after mine.

Then, I stopped. I paused for a half-minute after bubbling in question 100. I picked up my big eraser, and frantically rubbed out my incorrect answers to each of those last 25 questions. Then I turned around, and gave the yinzer a “Gotcha!” look. He was pissed and scared, his face the pale color of white pastel paint mixed with water. I turned back around, and carefully bubbled in my correct answers for the last quarter of the exam.

After I got up to submit my exam to the professor, I walked up the steps toward the back of the lecture hall, passing Mr. Yinzer along the way. He shot me a look, one where he knew he was caught, like a rat in an old-style trap, about to die from the pain of asphyxiation and a broken neck. I rolled my eyes with the thought, That’s what you get, dumb muthafucka!

I am not proud of that moment. Sure, the yinzer deserved it. But, I could’ve reported it to the professor. I could have just covered my answer sheet up better. I could have confronted the student directly. I could have even let the student ride my coattails toward an A on his final exam. Instead, I went all cut-throat and ensured that this student failed his final. In what way am I really better than him when I helped an academically drowning classmate swallow more water while holding his head down?

I know. What I did may seem milquetoast on the scale between blatant cheating and the viral slut-shaming of a peer with whom you are in academic competition. But that’s the point. None of this should be acceptable. My A in the course would not have changed, and Mr. Yinzer would still have struggled academically even if had succeeded at cheating on this one exam.

At just 10 days before I turn 50, I have figured out what I hate, actually hate, about other humans. I hate habitual liars, especially the ones who regularly lie to themselves while telling me their lies. I hate elitist assholery, even from those whom I admire, even from among my friends. I hate cheating, and those who think they can get away with it. I hate brown-nosing, as I smell this shit from a mile away. Now, I despise those who would eat A’s and A-‘s for their three squares a day before recognizing that education is about much more than a high grade an a job to pay off their student loans. Education is about freedom, having and making good choices, and finding yourself a crew that you can rely on and can rely on you long after graduation. Those who think otherwise are as lost as Dr. Manhattan caught in a quantum vortex.

School of Dreams (and Nightmares)

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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School of Dreams (2003), by Edward Humes, September 9, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yesterday was the thirty-first anniversary of my first day of seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, my first day in a six-year slog in Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. The academic pressures that came with being part of a gifted-talented track magnet program were such that the lessons I learned during those years remain with me to this day. The unique lessons about who I was and whom I wanted and needed to become, though, are the kinds of lessons reserved for a memoir, like, say, Boy @ The Window.

But there are other lessons, other issues that anyone who has gone through such a program, is in one, or has kids in one, should heed. Perhaps the best book I’ve ever read about the experiences of high ability students in a gifted track middle or high school has been Edward Humes’ School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School (2003). Despite some of the flaws in the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author’s account covering a year in the life of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, this is a book I’d use in many of my future graduate seminars in US educational history.

A particularly poignant passage was where Humes wrote, the “combination of a school built upon high expectations and a student population whose dominant culture elevates learning to a high priority—and hard work in school to an absolute necessity—makes for a kind of education echo chamber” (p. 340). Humes meant this as a positive comment on the academic culture of a public high school in Southern California.  But it also reflected a constant tension between learning and zero-sum competition.

Starbucks double chocolate chip frappucino, September 10, 2012. (htttp://wwwcoffeespitfire.blogspot.com).

Humes somehow doesn’t fully take stock of this tension beyond the context of the high school in which he embedded himself in 2000-01. There were stories, disheartening stories about seventh graders hitting up Starbucks for coffee before school, during lunch and after school to stay awake. Of parents who shunned their kids’ artistic talent and aspirations in their quest to ensure they earned a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. Of students taking as many as six AP (Advanced Placement) courses in a single school year, or colluding to cheat on a calculus or physics exam when the pace of study and testing proved to be too much.

Yes, despite this, Whitney has produced thousands of elite college-goers, and 4.0 is the standard, not the exception, that its students shoot for. But now, in an age in which high-stakes testing is the norm, what’s the social and psychological message that we’re communicating to the current crop of K-12 students in the US today?

For me, the best way to answer this question is to look back on my own experience and the experiences of my former Humanities classmates. Based on my own writings and findings, there’s plenty of evidence that intensive academic rigor and competition — like intensive athletic training and competition — will produce excellent students well prepared for college, but not necessarily well prepared for life. Many of my former Humanities classmates (and many of the students Humes tracked and interviewed for School of Dreams) were socially inept, put themselves under constant stress (not to mention experiencing psychological pressures from each other, their parents and teachers) and lacked the deeper critical reasoning skills necessary to make college a worthwhile experience.

The students had a “cram-and-exam” methodology to learning, spending hours learning techniques and concepts and little time in applying them beyond the classroom in the vast majority of their subjects. Often when students discovered a new talent, particularly in writing, the arts or in music, many of their parents pounced into action to admonish teachers for encouraging these developments or to force their kids into their way of thinking about their future. Bottom line: while many of these high-achievers were willing to slit each others’ throats for an A, an AP “5” or an SAT 1600, they hadn’t really made up their minds about who they wanted to be, the talents they wanted to explore, or the world in which they wanted to live.

“Nightmares & Daydreams” episode screen shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender, September 10, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to pic’s low resolution.

When I first read Humes’ School of Dreams nine years ago, it forced me to think about these parallels. I realized that if Starbucks was within a mile of either A.B. Davis Middle or Mount Vernon High School in the ’80s, our class alone would’ve spent about $160,000 a year there on coffee and pastries. That most of us were sane enough to only take three or four AP courses my senior year. That our standard for a minimally acceptable SAT score was a 1200. That, instead of kids crying or running away from home for two days over a B, attempted suicides or a turn to crystal meth would’ve been more common. I guess by Whitney’s standards, we would’ve been slackers.

Still, more than a quarter-century since my last Humanities course, with tighter budgets and far more high-stakes testing (see the correlation?), the crush of intense academic competition has made our public schools a poor place for polishing students into well-adjusted young adults. Yes, I know that this is primarily a parent’s responsibility. But then again, public schools are meant to be far more than an octagon ring with No. 2 pencils.