It's society, stupid

I was on the treadmill this morning listening to a snippet of the Today show. Katie Couric was teasing an upcoming item about the Duke lacrosse team, suggesting that the recent alleged rape by two or possibly three players might be a symptom of a larger problem: perhaps, the sport of lacrosse is to blame?

Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought, and if I had the remote I would have switched to Good Morning America or maybe even thrown it at the damned television. I’m not picking on journalism in general here, but the group lather that some journalists, and mostly the tabloid TV journalists, have fallen into in order to get eyeballs sucked into their 24-hour miasma. How typical of them to blame the forest instead of the tree. No, it’s not that there are terrorists in the world who want to kill us, it’s that we have something wrong with our airplanes that allow them to be penetrated by terrorists. It’s not the poor screwed-up kid whose parents neglected him, it’s the guns. (Not that I’m pro-gun by any means, but come on. Removing guns from the picture would not have stopped those sick kids from Columbine from massacring their school. They would have simply gone on the Internet and learned how to build a bomb.)

And now TV journalists want to blame lacrosse. This is ridiculous. I’ve watched lacrosse. It seems like a fairly innocuous sport, much less violent than football, or even rugby, which is basically football without protective gear. And the few players that I’ve met, individually, seem like OK guys. I didn’t stick around long enough to listen to the full news “story,” so I could only speculate what the theory might be. Not enough supervision? Coaches and administrators covering up for the players so as not to create bad publicity? The sport not sufficiently violent to expend all the guys’ testosterone? But then again, football players and basketball players have had their share of violent behavior as well. I’ve even met a girl who was raped by a bunch of college football players. The coach gave her a ton of money to make it go away, and she was too afraid to make a case.

But I can only speak from personal experience about lacrosse players based on the few that I met. When I was a sophomore at Syracuse University, a bunch of guys from the Hamilton College lacrosse team came to Syracuse to party with some of their buddies one weekend, because basically there is nothing to do at Hamilton. That Saturday night, I was out at Sutter’s Mill with my roommates. We were having a mellow evening, sitting at a table with a pitcher of beer, and eventually the guys drifted over. I didn’t notice the moment when it happened, but suddenly my three “friends” had split and I’m sitting there with a tall, good-looking blond guy who looked a lot like Eddie Money (translation for those under thirty-five: pop singer from the seventies). We were kind of hitting it off, getting into this strange conversation about Firesign Theater and Monty Python, when I felt this sudden pain in my back. I reached around and felt blood. A lot of blood. And something hard that had torn through my blouse and was sticking into my skin.

My girlfriends were nowhere and even if they were, none of them had a car. The guy, whose name was Dave, took me to the emergency room. Even though it was one in the morning and we’d only known each other about an hour and a half. And he was there when I came out, looking worried. I had three stitches about a half-inch from my spine, a large bandage on the small of my back, and a souvenir – a thick shard of glass that could have been either from a beer bottle or drinking glass tossed into a pail and turned into a projectile.

Dave took my arm and led me back to his car, then drove me back to my dorm. We talked for a while, and then he said he should let me get some sleep. He took my name and address and said goodnight with an avuncular kiss on the forehead.

He sent me a get well card and a couple of letters, and then our very brief acquaintanceship petered out.

Even so, this, from one of those “evil” lacrosse players. Who could have pretended he didn’t know me when the glass hit my back. Who could have ditched me at the hospital. Who could have raped me in his car or in my dorm room. It could have happened. He had sixty pounds on me at least and I was a little doped up from the anesthetic. But I was lucky.

But even if I wasn’t, I would never have blamed it on the sport of lacrosse.

I would have blamed it on bad judgment, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or, horror of all horrors, blamed it on the guy.

But that was twenty years ago. Maybe things are different now. Maybe all our attempts to sensitize young men to sexual harassment and make them sign dating contracts have created a kind of backlash against women. Maybe collegiate athletics are taking too much away from the academic experience, physically and financially, so much so that coaches will do anything to protect their players.

But I’m positive that the solution is not as simple as blaming the sport.

But we do like solutions to our problems to be as simple as the ones on our television shows. Easily identified, and solved in a half an hour, including commercial breaks.