Phelps Discusses Reform of College Athletics

Deploring the "monster" of sports in America today, Richard "Digger" Phelps, former head basketball coach at the University of Notre Dame, discussed reforming intercollegiate athletics and using sports to keep children of America's cities away from drugs and violence in a speech last night at the Harvard Education Forum.

The speech, co-sponsored by the Higher Education Student Association and delivered before a crowd of about 100 at the Graduate School of Education, was followed by a commentary by Bill Littlefield, host of WBUR radio's "Only a Game."

"If we don't reach...kids by the time they're 11 or 12, they're lost," Phelps said. "The students at Harvard can make a difference. If I can get 20 mentors out of here tonight, to invest five hours for five weeks, to see yourself change, then you'll get it."

Phelps said the problems created by increased pressure on young athletes need to be solved even before potential athletes enter high school.

Phelps, who was a special assistant to the Executive Office of the President for National Drug Control Policy under former president George Bush, expounded on the twin problems of drugs and violence in American cities.

"On the streets...you do anything to survive," he said. "[But] it can be resolved...neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, county by county, state by state."

Phelps stressed individual responsibility in alleviating the problems of the inner city. "We have to stop pointing the finger at the White House or at Congress. Point the fingers at ourselves. That's real democracy, participatory democracy."

Phelps, currently an ESPN basketball analyst, cited sports as a way to bring together the "haves" and the "have-nots" of American society.

He stressed mentoring and after-school programs, such as those created under Bush's Operation Weed and Seed, as constructive ways of improving social relations in America.

Some audience members were not entirely satisfied with Phelps' analysis.

"There's a whole part of the equation that [Phelps] left out and that's money and the spectacle of big-time sports," said Dan D. Schwartz, 31, a student at the Graduate School of Education. "We're up against a huge, one might say corrupt, system."

Littlefield, himself a graduate of the Education school, said students need to learn to motivate themselves. They cannot learn academic or athletic discipline "from someone else's stop-watch," he said.

"A lot of college is about learning to make decisions," Littlefield said.

Dean of the Graduate School of Education Jerome T. Murphy said Phelps brought "a slightly different perspective as a coach and a government official."

"The purpose tonight was to get his perspective on ways in which the current system for the promotion of athletes really works," Murphy said. "It accomplished that in that he used his perspective to comment broadly about the state of American society."