So the Brigham Young basketball team has dimissed one of its top players for a violation of the school's "honor code." This is nothing new--either the honor code or the dismissal of an athlete for violating it, and no one is really arguing that athletes who attend BYU should be required to adhere to said code, ridiculous as it may seem to those of us who reside in someplace other than Victorian England. If these are the dictates of their religion--and if BYU subsists as a private school--then that's their business.
But it should be noted that BYU has not always abided by its own rules. It should be noted that in the early 1980s, when Jim McMahon attended said university, both he and his father made it abundantly clear that they had no real interest in the tenets of Mormonism, and that McMahon was matriculating at BYU because Lavell Edwards had constructed a prolific passing offense.* Specifically, McMahon claims that he spent nearly every weekend partying up the road at a different college campus, that he surreptitiously managed to chew tobacco and purchase alcoholic beverages, that, at one point, he had a campus police officer stationed outside his apartment to ensure that he did not violate the honor code.* That McMahon and his university so clearly used each other to advance their profiles (and, if I may, you can read much, much more about this relationship in a certain book that is now available for a discounted rate at Amazon.com
) could be blamed on either party, but it proves that, while BYU may have its own dictates, it is not above engaging in the same hypocrisy that every major college athletic program in America has, at one time or another. That it happened to occur with one of the four or five greatest players in school history--a player who may have singlehandedly raised the profile of his school more than any other, while simultaneously laying the moral groundwork for his own outrageousness--is something that many at BYU are even now reluctant to acknowledge. *"My son's going to school to play football," Jim McMahon Sr. reportedly told one of the school's lead recruiters. "I don't want him to take all those religion classes."
**My favorite McMahon quote was relayed by his high-school teacher, who, upon informing McMahon that he would have to take a class on the book of Mormon while at BYU, told her, "That's all right. I like fiction."
5 comments:
According to the report of the BYU news conference, Davies first went to the AD then to his coach and THEN to the honor code office. I'm not sure how much evidence was presented regarding McMahon. I'm sure he didn't walk in and confess. Maybe it makes for a fuzzy line but doesn't seem like the same situation.
It's not the same information. You are comparing apples and oranges. It is about a person's honor, admitting, taking responsibility, etc. Not just simply saying later that you drank or partied. If Jim admitted to the university or the university had video evidence, which didn't happen in those days, the outcome may have been different but you are drawing a conclusion based on different sets of facts. Man, you folks love to do that.
I'm not saying that the situations are precisely comparable, only that any school involved in Division I athletics generally has to make ethical compromises somewhere along the line--it seems clear that BYU accepted McMahon with the knowledge that he was not a Mormon and had no interest in either becoming one or in adhering to their honor code (his primary offense, he claims, was that he was spotted carrying a beer on the golf course. As far as I know, he did not deny this report.).
Also, thank your for your input, but I have a policy of not responding to anyone who utilizes phrases like "you folks" when I have no idea which folks he is referring to.
"I'm not saying that the situations are precisely comparable, only that any school involved in Division I athletics generally has to make ethical compromises somewhere along the line--it seems clear that BYU accepted McMahon with the knowledge that he was not a Mormon and had no interest in either becoming one or in adhering to their honor code (his primary offense, he claims, was that he was spotted carrying a beer on the golf course. As far as I know, he did not deny this report.)."
I don't know how it "seems clear" that he had no intention to keep the honor code when he had to promise that he would keep the honor code in order to be admitted to the university in the first place, then he had to attest that he had kept the honor code every semester to continue as a student in good standing. Even if the univeristy suspects that you are not keeping the honor code, without irrefutable evidence, they will rely on that process.
Further, even if he was caught with a beer bottle on the golf course, how do we know that he was not disciplined for that? Drinking a beer is not seen as anywhere near as serious as premarital relations. He would not have been kicked off the team for that.
When your father tells a lead recruiter that his son is attending BYU to play football and not to "take all those religion classes," that seems like a pretty strong statement of his intentions.
From McMahon's autobiography:
"I got caught drinking beer on the golf course, put on probation; caught chewing tobacco, put on probation; caught with beer in my room, put on probation. If I hadn't played football, I wouldn't have lasted, I don't think."
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