My goal was to aim for higher things with this blog, for deeper philosophies, for things that people will think are worth reading some day. I'm dropping all that tonight, because I hate Dick Vitale and he's gone and pissed me off again.
If you are amongst the blissfully ignorant of college basketball -- or, more pleasantly, if you live in a more enlightened time when there is no more college basketball -- you may be unaware of Dick Vitale. He is a majordomo, a shouting man who stands in front of the attraction and promotes it, a professional commentator and attention-getter. He's a hundred and seventy years old (okay, Wikipedia says he's 75, but that's not always reliable), and he has a funny sound to his voice when he shouts. He invariably shouts. It's a put-on -- I've heard several times that people call him at home and he'll answer, sounding like a normal person -- but it's an invariable one; if Vitale's going to talk, he's going to shout.
His field, college basketball (and moreover, all of college athletics), is at an odd juncture in society today. There aren't any other cultures in the world, possibly in history, where institutions of higher learning are expected to provide entertainment for the masses, but they do here, and they make a metric butt-ton of money doing it. It creates several odd juxtapositions -- college students who don't study college, but hone skills to become professional athletes; a college culture (traditionally liberal and subversive) having to include an athletic locker-room culture (traditionally neither of those); deans and college presidents disciplining students based not on academic record or potential but earnings potential. Maybe most jarring, you have top-rank coaches -- men driven to win, to earn championships, to earn money, and to produce elite athletes -- dictating policy to deans, provosts, presidents, and academicians. The effectively illiterate dictating policy in the temple of education.
Most of them have not abused that trust; for every Joe Paterno, there are many, many Pat Summitts. But I don't want to kill the coaches -- after many years in the business of management, I am hesitant to blame someone like Jimbo Fisher for the repeated shenanigans of Jameis Winston; if one of my employees shoplifts crab legs in his spare time, I don't want to be held responsible. (Paterno is different -- he could have called the police when told about a man raping children, and he didn't, allowing the baby rapist to rape again. There's no room for debate on that one.) For the athletes' inappropriate behavior, I don't think you can blame coaches; you have to blame the athletes. It'd be nice if the culture told them that their behavior was unacceptable, but culture's not always great at communicating.
It communicates through its icons and idols, mostly -- if I want to know what the culture that I live in thinks about a topic, I can look up what Lady Gaga thinks, or maybe Jay-Z. President Obama speaks for part of it, for the academics and the elites. Sarah Palin tries to speak for the anti-intellectuals. Fonzie speaks for the ultra-cool (maybe he doesn't anymore and I'm dating myself a bit -- I've been wracking my brain over here, though, and I can't think of anyone else who is in second place, so I'm leaving it the Fonz for now).
Well, ESPN speaks for the sports community, and the highest-paid voice at ESPN is Dick Vitale. And tonight, on live television, he kissed a clearly unwilling and unable-to-escape Ashley Judd, joking that it was for "good luck" for a team about to play a game. Ashley Judd, who was probably too embarrassed to punch him either because of the cameras, the crowd, or the fact that he's an embalmed mummy, has not been reached for comments.
Spoiler alert: Kentucky won. Arkansas, Ashley Judd, the very ideal of consent, and every woman who thought she had a choice of whose lips were smooshed against hers lost, no contest. Kentucky and the sexual assault identity of college sports remain undefeated.