MO. ATHLETES GET WIN FOR FREE SPEECH
Missouri state representatives Rick Brattin, a Republican from the Kansas City suburbs, and Kurt Bahr, a Republican from outside St. Louis, are people you probably don’t know. You might never have heard of them had they not set out to right what they believed was a terrible wrong when more than 30 black University of Missouri football players threatened to boycott a game until the university president resigned last month.
Brattin and Bahr took it upon themselves to introduce a bill that would punish future acts of free speech by college athletes by revoking scholarships for anyone who refuses to play for a reason unrelated to health.
These two believe college athletes should be seen and not heard. They believe one of the finest displays of the good in college sports this year was in fact not good at all. They believe we need to take the student out of student-athlete. If you’re there to play football, then just play football and leave the thinking to the real students.
These guys got away with their idea until someone other than them actually heard about it. Once that happened, their jig was up. While trying to bolster Mizzou’s football fortunes within the SEC, they lost to a foe even Alabama might have trouble with: the First Amendment. Less than 24 hours after publicly bragging about the bill, they withdrew it Wednesday, with a fellow legislator calling it “misguided” and “offensive.”
While it’s not surprising in today’s culture and political climate that two politicians would concoct an idea like this, it’s also instructive to see that it died such a sudden and well-deserved death.
Brattin and Bahr were not happy that the Missouri football players were able to say they were going to sit out their Nov. 14 game against BYU until university President Tim Wolfe resigned in the wake of protests over racial harassment on campus, which included a hunger strike by a graduate student. Once venerable head coach Gary Pinkel said he supported his players, Wolfe was gone.
This clearly was too much for Brattin and Bahr. No one could ever doubt the power of sports to effect change in our society after that moment. What had lingered for weeks at Missouri was over in a few hours, thanks to the undeniable clout of football on a college campus. But for all the excesses we worry about in bigtime sports, this was a breath of fresh air: football players not separated from the rest of the student body, but rather an integral part of the mix, joining other students to fight for something important to many.
Can you guess who didn’t love this?
“We cannot have the student body, or in this case the football team, going on strike and forcing out a school president,” Brattin told USA TODAY Sports’ A.J. Perez on Tuesday night. “That cannot be allowed.”
Brattin also told Columbia, Mo., radio station KTGR that when players “engage in this type of behavior, (administrators) should say, ‘No, you’re here to play football.’ ”
So the dynamic duo concocted an idea. They’d tie their freedom of speech ban to the use of state money for athletic scholarships. “There are going to be ramifications,” Bahr warned.
This is as good a time as any to take a look at the Missouri student-athlete handbook: “The University of Missouri does not receive state appropriated funds to operate its intercollegiate athletics programs, thus, similar to private business, the Mizzou Athletics Department must operate solely from what revenue it generates.” Oh. Never mind. The irony in Brattin and Bahr’s little jaunt through the college football landscape at the Missouri taxpayers’ expense is unmistakable. As we move into a high-octane, full-of-excess bowl season in which universities readily ship teams full of so-called studentathletes off to playoff sites, Missouri actually is the one school where the football players’ greatest victory occurred right on campus, with and among their fellow students.