Carolina Blues: Disillusionment and the Modern Sports Fan

The first time I ever saw Julius Peppers play football was sometime in the fall of 1997. Though I hadn’t heard of Peppers before, my uncle convinced me this guy from Southern Nash High School was going to be a superstar at UNC—my college team of choice—so we needed to check him out. In spite of my nascent adolescent fears about the big, scary world that existed at high school football games, I went, and I stood on hollow, cold, metal bleachers and thought this is what it meant to be growing up. Most of what happened at that game has been lost thanks to the passage of time, but I can still vividly remember how Peppers towered over the opposition (and his own teammates) and basically turned the contest into a one-man show. Even though it’d be years before I enrolled at Chapel Hill, I was thrilled with the prospect of a guy from my own backyard tearing it up on the football field at Kenan Stadium on crisp Saturday afternoons. Once Peppers got to Carolina, I watched from afar as he did indeed become an incredible defensive back for the Heels, earning first team All-America honors his junior season. At 6’7” Peppers was even able to contribute to the basketball team before heading to the NFL, where he’s found a great deal of success. Though I don’t think about Peppers often these days, I still consider him to be a superior athlete and a source of pride for me and my university.

A few nights ago, just before I fell asleep, I found myself straining my tired eyes to view what appeared to be an academic transcript, more than a decade old.  My fatigued brain couldn’t figure out where it had come from and why someone had decided it was a good idea to post it online. As discovered by N.C. State fans and widely disseminated by the News & Observer, the transcript and the downright atrocious grades contained in it ostensibly belonged to Julius Frazier Peppers. As I scoured the list of acronyms and digits, I realized the only classes that provided a lifeboat to the rapidly sinking GPA were in the African and Afro-American Studies department—the same division that has recently been implicated in a far-reaching scheme of conducting dozens of sham courses that either never met or had puzzlingly minimal requirements. The majority of the students in many of these questionable classes were athletes, mostly football players, so questions have naturally arisen as to whether there was some kind of ‘understanding’ between the athletic and AFAM departments to keep athletes eligible. Though the connections between what has taken place as late as 2011 and as early as the late 1990s have not been definitively proven, it seems hard to deny that something was going on. This latest revelation comes on the heels of more than two years of uncertainty, investigation, and self- and NCAA-imposed penalties related to academic cheating, improper benefits to players, and inappropriate ties to agents that violate NCAA rules. The resulting mess has cost several people their jobs and several more their eligibility to play college football. Now that an independent investigation is underway to tackle these claims of academic fraud—which may spill over into men’s basketball—it appears this saga will drag on a good deal longer.

Being a sports fan, for me, has always been about entering a world outside the bounds of reality. It’s always been about shelving rational and civil discourse and rooting like hell for your team to beat the crap out of the other guys. It’s always been about seeing a human being launch into orbit and slam a rubber ball through a metal rim and nylon hoop--no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, no matter what other pressing concerns are going on around you. The unabashed glory of sports also has a flip side—the way that it draws us in and clenches us with its talons means that we will occasionally get carried away; we’ll shout obscenities we’ll soon regret, and we’ll feel intense pangs of sadness in our gut when a stupid ball rolls under someone’s glove. It’s a strange existence being a sports fan. But no matter how high the highs are and how lows the lows are, it has typically been segmented and contained into one compact portion of life, separated from the real world. This isn’t true at all, of course. But it’s the shimmering façade I had constructed, one that has now reached a perpetual state of defacement and desecration.

Disillusionment has become the natural product of so much reality crashing into the sporting world all at once. The man we believed to be an upstanding and exemplary coach turned out to be shielding a child molester in order to protect the good name of his college football program. The guys we cheered as they blasted homeruns turned out to be jacked up on steroids. Professional football teams have been caught offering bounties for taking out opposing players. Long-standing collegiate conferences have been collapsing thanks to a desperate rush for money. Many of the best cyclists have been doping during impressive Tour de France runs. Even badminton players sometimes do the unthinkable and throw matches on the sport's biggest stage. The list of these types of egregious actions seems endless and constantly growing. Sometimes I fear that if the sporting world continues on its current path, I’ll one day view the pastime with the same lifeless lack of interest as I do most discussions of tax policy. What once was a way to avoid the stressors and burdens of life has grown into nothing but. One day, you’re in the stands, seeing nothing but touchdowns and high-fives. The next, all you see is exploitation, crass commercialism, and the misguided predominance of sports over any other of life’s necessary concerns. It’s jarring and disheartening. As a fan, there’s only so much you can take.

Julius Peppers, though not my favorite Tar Heel athlete of all time, does represent for me the period in which I grew from casual childhood fandom handed down from my parents to an individual who has “Carolina fan” indelibly attached to his identity for the rest of his life. This current predicament has been shifting my long-established view that everything ever done by the Heels was right and perfect and I won’t consider the alternative forever and ever amen. But now, what do you do when it appears the school you have followed so closely may have put the wool over your eyes in order to be successful? How do you come to terms with the very real possibility that much about what you believed about your alma mater has been untrue? What will I do if they have to take down those banners in the Dean Dome?

Of course, scandals in college sports are rampant and constant, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. Major programs often blur the line between professional and amateur, bringing in athletes to make money for the university all while requiring them to attend classes and keep up grades, even if they are unprepared or have little interest in doing so. The dirtiness involved in exploiting unpaid young people is conveniently overlooked a lot of the time, because frankly, college sports are a great deal of fun. As college sports—football in particular—have grown exponentially more popular in recent years, the question grows ever more pressing: do the benefits of running a successful (profitable) athletic program at the university level outweigh the costs?

I don’t have a lot of answers to these questions, so I try to get back to the basics.  Like many Carolina fans, I recognize that the academic integrity of the University of North Carolina should be paramount to any other consideration. If the University cannot manage to be both a well-regarded public institution of higher learning and a powerhouse athletic program, we must always err on the side of academics—no matter how badly it hurts the wallet or our plans for Saturday afternoons. Our society can likely weather the scandals and indignities of professional sport, but when athletics poison the academic well, we compromise everyone’s future. Those institutions exist to prepare the next generation by educating them and teaching them to lead lives as decent human beings. Shoe contracts, stadium expansions, and TV deals should have no seat at that table.

I don’t blame Peppers for any of this. He was and is an outstanding athlete. He showed an incredible amount of humility and generosity by admitting the transcript belonged to him and then donating $250,000 to a UNC scholarship fund for African-Americans. I can’t help but think he was likely steered towards the University of North Carolina when he shouldn’t have been by people who should have known better. And that’s the whole problem: there are adults who should know better than to allow these systems to exist. Adults who shouldn’t have to depend on an unpaid 18-year-old kid passing an Introduction to Drama course so that he can maintain his job and his million dollar contract. This kind of thing goes on all over the place, I know, but that doesn’t make it any more right.

I claim no inside sources. I have no idea how this issue will play out. Whether it’s a lack of leadership, lack of oversight, or insight, there has been an incredible void of anything that should have been done during this debacle at UNC. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a wonderful place, with an outstanding faculty, a gorgeous campus, and a diverse and talented student body. It’s simply not worth it to sully the strong legacy established more than 200 years ago for the glory of playing in a second-rate bowl game in Charlotte. Hopefully, the new phase of investigation will get to the bottom of this issue once and for all, and we will finally be able to accept the truth, fix the problems, and move on. I really do hope those banners stay flying in the rafters in the Smith Center for the next 100 years—but I only want them there if they were won fairly. We shouldn’t accept them any other way. Because even in this muddled world, I do know that the right thing is to shed light on the truth. Even if we won’t like what we find.