(本文作者毕业于耶鲁大学，曾是该校橄榄球队队员，上一学年在中国地质大学任教)

　　Education is an important theme in youth athletics in the US. Young kids, energetic, rambunctious, cooped up in class, yearn for the relative freedom of the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. They long to kick and throw things and tackle each other, and the fields of organized play offer a place in which to act out these impulses. Kids are basically encouraged, after all, to beat each other up on the football field. Yet for allthe chaos, adult guidance and supervision are never far off, and time spent on the athletic fields is meant to be productive. Conscientious coaches seek to impart lessons in teamwork, self-sacrifice, competition, gracious winning and losing. Teachers at least want their pupils worn out so they'll sit still in reading class.

　　By the time children start competing for spots on junior high soccer teams or tennis squads, the kid gloves have come offto some extent. The athletic fields become less a place to learn about soft values like teamwork than about hard self-discipline and competition. Competitiveness, after all, is prized highly by Americans, perhaps more so than by other peoples. For a child, being cut from the hockey team or denied a spot on the swimming is a grave disappointment - and perhaps an opportunity for emotional or spiritual growth.

　　High school basketball or football teams are placesswheresthe ethos of competition is given still stronger emphasis. Although high school coaches still consider themselves educators, the sports they oversee are not simple extensions of the classroom. They are important social institutions, for football games bring people together. In much of the US they are eventsswheresyoung people and their elders mingle and see how the community is evolving.

　　For the best players, the progression from little league to junior high to high school leads to a scholarship at a big-name college and maybe, one day, a shot at the pros. College athletes are ostensibly student-athletes, an ideal that suggests a balance between the intellectual rigors of the university and the physical rigors of the playing field. The reality is skewed heavily in favor of athletics. One would be hard-pressedto show that major US college sports are about education. Coaches require far too much of players' time to be truly concerned with anything other than performance in sport. Too often, the players they recruit seem to care little about school themselves.

　　This was not always the case. Universities - Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Yale - were the birthplaces of American football and baseball; education - the formation of "character" - was an important part of what those coaches and players thought they were achieving. In 1913, when football was almost outlawed in the US, the game's most prominent figures traveled to Washington and argued successfully that football was an essential part of the campus experience and that the nation would be robbed of its boldest young men, its best potential leaders, if the game were banned.

　　The idea that competitive sports build character, a Western tradition dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today's US. Educators, now prone to see the kind of character shaped by football and basketball in a dark light , have challenged the notion that college sports produce interesting people. Prominent athletes, such as boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball star Charles Barkley, deliberately distanced themselves from the earlier ideal of the athlete as a model figure. Today's US athlete is thus content to be an entertainer. Trying to do something socially constructive, like being a role model, will make you seem overearnest and probably hurt your street credibility .

　　When I was a kid, my heroes played on Saturdays: they were high school players and college athletes. Pro football games, broadcast on Sunday afternoons, were dull and uninspiring by comparison. After all, why would God schedule anything important for Sunday? You've got school the next day.

　　Although I certainly couldn't have articulated it at the time, I think I must already have sensed that throwing a ball or catching passes was a fairly pointless thing to be good at. In the grand scheme, it was a silly preparation for a job. Yet playing sports was not pointless; the point, however, was that you were learning something - a disposition, a certain virtue, a capacity for arduous endeavor - that might be of value when you later embarked upon a productive career as a doctor or a schoolteacher or a businessman. The optimism of those Saturday afternoons was contagious. I still feel that way today.