I certainly would like to take my hat off to Johnny Rodgers for turning his life around and becoming a very successful member of society ("Man on a Mission," June 5).

However, I could hardly believe that while he was "grateful" for his NCAA degree-completion scholarship, he felt that it was "a debt repaid and not a gift." I also was quite taken aback that he thought the NCAA has a moral obligation to educate athletes who have not gotten a degree after competing athletically in college, no matter what the cost or effort needed to gain these goals.

You have to be saddened by the plight of education in our country. How can we keep passing all the children in elementary, junior high and high school even though they can't meet the standards of basic education? Then to think that we continue on with this same philosophy in the halls of learning in our colleges and universities. We are shortchanging all of these athletes as they attempt to make a living and be the strong parents of the future.

I was especially appalled to see the statistic that 60 percent of all black male athletes who matriculated at Division I schools in 1992-93 have not received a degree after six years of attendance in college. I hesitate to even come close to using the word "education" as this would be an embarrassment to the word.

Actually, the NCAA and our colleges and universities are covering up the fact that with five years of summer school included in the six years, it actually becomes almost nine years worth of semesters in college. And we now are considering allowing these same athletic types to spend a summer before their matriculation in academic classes.

After I moved to the University of Notre Dame in 1968, I had a goal of graduating my hockey players in four years since they would be losing large amounts of earning power by delaying their time in the workaday world. I can tell you that after 19 years of coaching hockey at Notre Dame, we had a 100 percent rate for 126 athletes who stayed in school for four years. One player jumped to the pros after his freshman year and another flunked our of school after one semester for not attending classes. Of those athletes, 32 played pro hockey and of that group, we had six Stanley Cup rings.

Why did we have such success? First, only the prospective student-athletes who had the academic potential of other Notre Dame students were admitted to the program. No, we didn't win any NCAA championships during this period, but we were always competitive in the WCHA and CCHA leagues, which were considered the powerhouses of college hockey from 1968-87.

As a young man growing up, I was always given a philosophy that playing and participating in athletics should provide us with the lessons of life and allow us a good chance to be successful in future endeavors. We have ruined the Olympic movement with professionalism, and now it looks like the college presidents and the NCAA will further water down college athletics. To me, this is a sorry state of affairs.

Charles "Lefty" Smith
Retired Men's Ice Hockey Coach
University of Notre Dame