The NCAA News - Comment
December 23, 1996
Guest editorial -- The social questions of global marketing
BY CURTIS W. TONG
Pomona-Pitzer Colleges
While Americans bemoan the importation of Japanese automobiles and electronic technology and their impact on the American workplace, a more sinister, reciprocal pressure is being felt on the west side of the Pacific Ocean by Western imports of a different nature. This is an advance by Western nations (mostly America) upon the most solid of Japanese foundations: the deep-rooted mores of Japan's culture.
Although many of the early postwar American influences lent flavor to Japanese society -- especially in dress, medicine and technological advancement, all of which bettered living conditions and health practices for Japan's millions -- recent years have introduced a new wave of less desirable Western influences.
Perhaps in the interest of preserving Japan's rich culture and spiritual traditions during the occupation years following World War II, U.S. military policy served as a buffer to the intrusion of "willy-nilly" commercialism into the country. Unfortunately, today "willy-nilly" has arrived, not so much in commercial products but in commercial influence.
The cumbersome, but beautiful, kimono, long the trademark of Japanese apparel, is rarely seen other than at festivals, weddings or countryside funerals. Its absence, although missed by curious tourists and Japanese traditionalists, probably has done more to ease body discomfiture and to pave the way for the liberation of Japanese women than any other change in the post-war period.
The introduction of sports like baseball, basketball, tennis and golf has brought a fresh vitality to hundreds of thousands of recreationists now feeling freer to express themselves in fun activities than in the more male-oriented combative sports (sumo, kendo, tae kwando) so common to Japanese life during much of the Showa period.
The more comfortable Western dress and enjoyable Western sports are products that, most would agree, have enhanced Japanese life considerably. Yet, in recent years, Western influence of a far more corruptive nature,
taking full advantage of the Japanese obsession with Western tastes and lax advertising laws, has insidiously bored its way into the country. It is a sad legacy to American influence, particularly when such exportation is carried out with a missionary zeal and not with a missionary spirit. It comes in the form of products and ideas that have a negative impact on Japanese society.
Cigarette smoking, especially of American-made cigarettes, has abetted the incidence of heart and lung disorders in the Orient the likes of which Americans have vigorously tried to curb in their own land in the past decades.
Also, young Japanese particularly, but many adults as well, obsessed with the fashion trends viewed in American films and advertising, have directed their energy and money into cosmetics, hair dyes and suggestive attire. These trends have replaced the costumed garb of yesteryear's school children, who once sported their beautiful black heads of hair closely cropped in the tradition of the past. Worse, the application of cosmetics, with the help of pocket mirrors, just as on Rodeo Drive, is performed on trains and in other public places -- much to the displeasure of the older generations.
All this said, as a physical educator, I find the recent opportunistic intrusions of the professional sports leagues and big-time college athletics into the Japanese market the most objectionable. Sport in Japan, even the imported sports mentioned above, have long served the country in a most useful way. But today, with little care of Japanese sports fans, professional sports in America have introduced a new marketing mentality into what had been a rather pure sports scene.
Baseball and basketball, especially, but with football and hockey hot on their heels, are flooding Asian countries with marketing experts seeking only to harvest millions of dollars through the sale of logo-emblazoned sportswear made popular through taped telecasts of big-league contests. The influence of American pro sports has introduced free agency and arbitration into Japanese baseball and can be credited, at least in part, for planting the notions that created the first scandal in sumo wrestling in the country's memory.
American big-league baseball has decided, having lured Hideo Nomo from Japanese baseball, to attract more of the island nation's better players to the American leagues with huge contracts. This, of course, has affected the popularity of the Japanese leagues and is rapidly relegating those leagues into minor-league equivalency. Even in the most remote hamlets of Japan, where once the ball cap of the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants was popular headgear, young people today sport the preferable caps of the Dodgers, Yankees and other American Major League Baseball teams. Even in northern Hokkaido, the most isolated
area of the Japanese archipelago, I recently noted with interest many men and boys sporting Boston Bruins, Philadelphia Flyers and Colorado Avalanche jackets, the names of U.S. star players frequently emblazoned on the backs.
It all seems harmless in a way, but it reflects an absence of understanding or caring by the greedy promoters of American sports stars and the marketeers of professional sportswear. They appear to seek wealth with little concern for the distasteful attitudinal changes it imposes on a society. Japan has long been a nation, even despite the ugly notions of some past warlords, that has been enriched by the intangible qualities of life it espouses and not by the materialistic. The marketeers of American pro sports are heavy contributors in bringing change to all of that, and it is unfortunate.
Curtis W. Tong is director of athletics at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges.
Comment -- Another Division III take on Bylaw 15.4.9
After reading Chris Murphy's guest editorial, alleging widespread cheating in NCAA Division III, and Arleigh Dodson's response that contended that the true problem was not cheating but rather lax standards for the permissible award of academic-based aid, I feel compelled to respond with a differing viewpoint.
I accept Mr. Dodson's invitation for a critical analysis of the bylaw in question, and I flatly reject his conclusions. Perhaps the 10 schools in Mr. Dodson's conference have standards for academic awards that far exceed the NCAA standards, and perhaps some of those institutions award academic aid to athletes who meet NCAA standards but fall below the institutional average. That seems to me a conference problem that, if it truly existed, could be handled rather easily by conference legislation.
I believe, however, that most Division III institutions find themselves in a different situation -- a situation where the bylaw in question results in an actual restriction on the amount of aid available to athletes, as opposed to an opportunity to bestow copious amounts of undeserved awards.
In the case of the University of the Ozarks (Arkansas), a student with a 3.400 grade-point average, a 24 ACT and in the top 25 percent of his or her class would be a very desired student for our institution. Such a student likely would qualify for an academic scholarship covering between 50 percent and 65 percent of tuition. However, if this student also wants to participate in athletics, under the bylaws, we cannot award this prospective student-athlete the exact same aid that any other applicant to this university would be entitled to receive.
This conundrum is clearly antithetical to the Division III ideal that student-athletes be treated like any other student on campus. At many institutions, I fear, Bylaw 15.4.9 relegates student-athletes to an apartheid class -- excluded from opportunities available to any other university student solely because of their participation in athletics.
Arleigh Dodson is correct -- there is a major problem with Bylaw 15.4.9. However, it is not the problem he sees. If Mr. Dodson's conference has a problem with schools awarding academic aid to unqualified athletes as a means of circumventing the 'no consideration' rule, it should deal with it by raising conference standards. But rather than denounce the standards as too lax or cynical, I would hope that Dodson would be equally concerned by a bylaw that deprives students of the opportunity to receive the same aid any other institutional applicant can receive, solely because those students seek to represent their colleges athletically. That is the true absurdity of Bylaw 15.4.9.
Scott Placek
Head Soccer Coach
University of the Ozarks (Arkansas)
Baltimore paper like others
As a Baltimorean, athletics director and sports information director at a woman's college, it was impossible to read Donald Fritz's letter in the December 2 issue of The NCAA News and not wonder with true amazement what version of the Baltimore Sun he reads. His claim that the Sun gives "absolutely equal" coverage to women's college sports could not be farther from reality.
While the Sun does an exemplary job of balancing coverage between boys' and girls' high-school sports, I have been told point blank by a female sports editor at the Sun that women's college sports simply do not have the readership base to warrant the type of coverage given to men's college teams. Horses get more column inches in the Sun than women's college sports. I'll never forget the day I searched the Sun sports pages for any article on women's sports of any kind. The closest I found was a story on a filly that pulled an upset in a feature race at Pimlico.
If the December 5 paper can be regarded as typical, here's what you'd find: men's college sports got 1641/2 column inches while women's college sports got 281/2. For us, a good day is when they print our teams' game results (no copy, just results) under the proper heading (for example, our women's soccer score ends up under the women's soccer heading). We have had plenty of other days when they chose to print no results at all, or printed them in the wrong spot (for example, field hockey under the men's soccer heading). The only time I lament not fielding a football team is on Sunday mornings, when the college results clog a minimum of two full pages of ink.
Women are badly under-represented in the sports pages, and the Baltimore Sun is no exception.
Donna M. Ledwin
Director of Athletics
College of Notre Dame (Maryland)
Opinions -- NCAA has abdicated I-A postseason responsibilities
Dick Fenlon, columnist
The Columbus Dispatch
"Of course, this needs to be sold to the bowl people and to the networks, but surely they'll buy:
"A rematch between Ohio State and Michigan.
"Just think about it. A rerun of all the pregame hype and hoopla. Michigan Week revisited. Earle in his fedora again, fired up more than ever. Senior Tackle II. Blabber shows on the radio ad nauseam. Bigger and better and mucho more blatant player boasts.
"The regular-season game, the preliminary match won by Michigan, 13-9, was an anomaly, you know that. Just as Florida State's 24-21 win over Florida on November 30 was totally out of character. Danny Wuerffel wasn't knocked down 25 times, he simply slipped. Joe Hollis didn't really mean to call those plays, he merely got his wires crossed. Those things happen. It's why you do it all over a month or so later at a neutral site.
"I'm kidding. The bowl business, the so-called national championship selection process, both of these are sick.
"There is one word that covers the whole ball of wax.
"It has five letters.
"It is G-R-E-E-D. It is an arrangement between the big names and the big conferences and the bowl promoters and the TV networks -- a money lust -- that knows no seemly bounds. The Big Ten will send seven of its teams to bowls this season. From these, it will make $23,986,000. Do seven Big Ten teams deserve to be playing in a postseason that is the closest thing there is to -- though it is certainly a long shot removed from -- the NCAA basketball tournament?
"Hardly. Teams with 6-5 and 7-5 records land in bowls not because of their accomplishments, which are minimal, but because of their ability to deliver fans and TV audiences. Were the NCAA basketball tournament to be run this way -- the qualifiers to be picked in such a cavalier manner -- we might never have heard of the Cinderellas that have added so much to its history. Would Indiana State and Larry Bird even have gotten a bid?
"The football postseason is being orchestrated not by a tournament committee of the NCAA but by the commissioners of the power conferences and the bowl promoters, with TV networks weighing in heavily. In effect, the NCAA membership has ceded much of the authority not only to a group of members playing their own hands but to partners totally outside the realm.
"You may have read that a few of the NCAA Presidents Commission are getting a little nervous about the arrangement. As well they might, if college football is about competition and opportunity for both the high and mighty and the not-so-high-and-mighty, rather than all about money and looking out for No. 1."
Frank Windegger, athletics director
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"The major-college football bowl selection process isn't working. And it's time we fix the problem.
"Brigham Young University, winner of 13 of 14 games and ranked fifth in the country in both major polls, has been denied one of two at-large bids to any of the three alliance football games.
"Brigham Young has a better record and a higher national ranking than four of six of this year's participants, including both at-large selections.
"What is the basis of such a decision? It's possible to conclude that it is anticipated revenues rather than the quality of competition.
"But what about the Brigham Young student-athletes who endured the rigors of training, practice and a long season? What about its fans who supported the program with their attendance, loyalty and hard-earned dollars?
"Let's take a closer look.
"Wyoming won 10 games and lost two. The losses were by a total of seven points, one in overtime and one in the final seconds of the game. Notre Dame and East Carolina finished with records of 8-3. Rice finished 7-4. Their seasons have ended.
"But Stanford and Michigan State finished their seasons with 6-5 records and are playing each other in a bowl game. California, which lost four of its last five games and finished 6-5, and Wisconsin, which did not finish in the top half of its conference, are both in bowl games.
"The time has come for the NCAA to step up and design a national playoff, one that truly rewards regular-season play and one that is governed by a nonpartisan NCAA committee. It's time for a system in which the revenues are shared in some manner by all Division I-A institutions.
"A postseason playoff has worked well in football at all levels. It has worked in basketball, and it has worked in every other men's and women's team sport sponsored by the NCAA. It can work in football, too, and the time is now."
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