A famous poster in the 1960s declared,
“If you’re not part of the solution,
you’re part of the problem.”
After conducting a computer-aided search
of hazing coverage in North American sports sections from 1992 to 2002,
my conclusion is that some sportswriters contribute to an unfortunate
mindset in professional athletics in which hazing too often is regarded
as an activity that is fun, a tradition, and welcome.
Such writers, and by extension the
papers that publish them, do a public disservice in at least three
ways.
One, since one important function of a
newspaper is to introduce readers to community values, sportswriters
that tolerate or promote hazing therefore abdicate their
community-watchdog responsibilities. Significantly, as hazing incidents
involving high school and college athletes increasingly result in
arrests, suspensions and civil suits, newspapers never fail (that I
could find) to hold amateur athletes accountable. It is only in
coverage of professional sports that some newspaper writers tolerate,
or worse, encourage hazing. To be sure, some of this coverage appears
outside the sports pages under local, and in a few cases, national
news.
Two, since newspaper ethical codes
rigidly prohibit bias in all news stories, when reporters cavalierly
paint hazing incidents as harmless
they undermine the standards which professional organizations such as
the
Society of Professional Journalists so vigorously defend. Sports
departments long have chafed under criticisms that they are little more
than a newspaper’s toy department, and these examples of bad
hazing coverage tend to undermine a paper’s attempt to
deliver good, serious journalism.
Three, when newspaper editors stand idly
by, allowing their colleagues free rein to promote, defend, or
glamorize acts of hazing by professional athletes, these editors are at
least as culpable as school administrators who turn their heads to acts
of hazing until an inevitable arrest, injury, or (rarely) death occurs.
In this lecture, I plan to
point to some examples of bad hazing coverage at the professional
sports level. My research and essay
attempt to instruct
(1) reporters and editors so that they go and do otherwise and admonish
colleagues who have lower standards;
(2) readers to detect bias, error, or opinion in media coverage about
hazing; and
(3) athletes and coaches so that they might recognize the
rationalizations and justifications inevitably associated with hazing.
First, let me share some relevant
background information. Significantly, as I have shown in my Broken
Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, newspapers historically and,
perhaps it may be argued, shamefully played a
role in contributing to the culture of hazing by egging on participants
in
news articles and opinion pieces, as well as by emphasizing such
spectacles so that whole communities could turn out to enjoy fierce
“flag rushes” and “battle
royals.” Much of this coverage was in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Back then, after one of these annual hazing
events resulted in a death or lifelong crippling, newspaper editors
were only then quick to
condemn those who they accused of taking a tradition too far. They
quickly distanced themselves from the perpetrators and failed to
apologize for their own days or weeks of breathless coverage that had
built up the importance of an annual initiation in the minds of
spectators, school administrators, and combatants.
Even before hazing took hold in America, similar practices were rampant
in medieval universities in Europe and led to the passage of many
statutes
forbidding the practice. Some of these regulations today can be read
verbatim
in Lynn Thorndike’s University Records and Life in the Middle
Ages. Even
so, hazing continued in Europe long into the Industrial Age and was a
persistent
source of torment and injury for prep school boys at institutions such
as
Cambridge and Oxford.
“Fagging,” a form of servitude that often included
extortion and physical violence in England, was dismissed by one
journalist writing for The Spectator in 1891 as “the right
exercised by the older boy to make the younger do what he likes, and
what the younger generally dislikes.” Such justifications
were especially rampant in dozens of college and university histories
(and even more conspicuous in student newspapers and yearbooks edited
by undergraduates) I have inspected since first writing about hazing in
the late 1970s. Note, for example, the slanting of prose by a
University of Delaware chronicler, John A. Munroe, in 1983 condoning,
or at least defending, early hazing practices as
“modest”:
Freshman Week grew into a useful orientation period occupying several
days at both colleges. Some modest hazing was permitted, with freshmen
wearing mildly ridiculous marks of their status-such as a baby rattle
or teething ring on a chain; such distinctive devices served the
positive function of helping members of the new class to become
acquainted. [The passage may be read online at http://www.udel.edu/PR/munroe/chapter9.html
]
Today, forms of servitude are quite common in amateur and professional
athletics, seen, for example, in its non-criminal form when first-year
players are made to pick up veteran players’ luggage at their
hotels. Another practice around today that dates back to medieval
universities is that of newcomers, be they European scholars or rookie
football players, paying for lavish meals for older scholars or team
veterans. While no one is arguing that such practices as servitude or
forcing someone to “voluntarily” buy a meal are
non-criminal (although the latter takes money out of a
rookie’s pocket as neatly as if his billfold were lifted),
they clearly do contribute to the misguided and widespread notion that
hazing is a part of tradition or the athletic culture. It also ignores
the fact that experts on ritual such as Tom F. Driver have noted that
often violence and ritual go hand-in-glove, a claim that once again
resonated with me in November, 2002 after I read that a professional
hockey
player, Joe Corvo, was charged with beating and groping a female
patron, a
stranger to him, in a public restaurant during the Manchester
Monarchs’ annual
“rookie initiation.”
To be sure, historically, many newspapers in North America and abroad
have condemned, or at least criticized, hazing practices.
When a hazing death
occurred or was suspected, the incident merited large, screaming
headlines and, occasionally, lurid illustrations that suggested the
hazers possessed demonic characteristics. This was as true in 1873,
1894, and 1899, when hazing-related deaths occurred at Cornell
University, as it was in 1928 when a University of Texas Longhorn
football player died from electrical shock while going through
a bizarre fraternity hazing, as it was in 1990 when Nick Haben died of
alcohol
poisoning after his lacrosse club initiation at Western Illinois
University.
It is also important to point out that the preponderance of more severe
types
of hazing—those involving the gulping of alcohol, or improper
touching of
a rookie’s body, or violent assault, or criminal wrongdoing
(e.g., requiring
new players to steal from stores or to take things from others on a
scavenger
hunt)—are far more common after 1983 (though some forms of
objectionable
or dangerous athletic hazing certainly did occur before that date).
[footnote]
Thus, it has taken some sports reporters and commentators such as
Bryant
Gumbel a bit of time to recognize (as Gumbel did in an HBO
investigative
piece on high school hazing in 2002) that hazing no longer is
restricted
to non-criminal activities such as veterans having a rookie push
peanuts
down a hallway with his/her nose or sing a fight song. Gumbel formerly
had
pooh-poohed hazing on several occasions while a morning host on the
Today
Show.
My contention here in this essay isn’t that it is necessary,
or arguably even desirable, that news reporters condemn hazing in news
articles, merely that they refrain from sanctioning such practices as
hazing or presenting them as acceptable diversions for veteran players
as a form of amusement or
tradition.
Today, I must point out, some sportswriters in some newspapers have
condemned hazing in professional sports or they have quoted coaches who
forbid all forms
of hazing. Such news coverage is, as it should be, as objective as
possible
and contains quotations from those who variously condemn and defend
acts
of hazing. Even hazing in professional sports drew widespread critical
news
coverage following injuries to rookies Cam Cleeland and Jeff Danish
after
Cleeland was bashed in the eye with a bag of coins and Danish was
thrown partially
through a window and cut up.
The bulk of the examples I have chosen as models are news stories in
which some sportswriters let professional coaches and athletes get away
with acts of hazing. With scarcely any mention that the fight against
hazing has gone on for some time in amateur hockey and high
school/college sports, these writers
give professional athletes/coaches the idea that what they do is
somehow
fun and socially acceptable, not shameful and cowardly.
This is not to say that print media endorsement of hazing by teen
athletes is entirely absent. For example, Sports Illustrated columnist
Richard Huffer wore an essay called “Praising
Hazing” (September 13, 1999) that not only implied that pro
players who tape rookies to goalposts have the common sense to know
when not to let things get out of hand, but made light of so-called
“atomic situps” expected of some high school rookie
athletes in which they are blindfolded and duped into doing situps so
that their noses slam into a veteran’s buttocks or
genitals. To his credit, Hoffer warns that high
school and college hazing activities ought to be verboten, but he
ignores the fact that younger, amateur athletes do emulate the hazing
they witness in pro sports. Plus, being immature, they take things to a
dangerous extreme. It would have been only journalistically ethical for
SI to run a rebuttal column mentioning the reports of high school
hazing-related sodomies/sexual attacks in Massachusetts, Canada, Texas,
California, Washington and Pennsylvania, as a sort of counter-viewpoint
to Hoffer's smirky column in defense of juvenile behavior.
[# space]
Notably, decades and a century ago and
now, some of the most vigorous condemnations of hazing printed in
newspapers are to be found in letters to the editor. On November 22,
1903, an anonymous letter protesting hazing
“barbarity” was signed by an “American
Mother” and published in the New York Times. “By
what right shall the student or company of students so maltreat one of
his comrades that insanity or lifelong disfigurement or even death
shall follow and suffer at most expulsion from college,” she
wrote. “Public spirit should rise and protest vigorously
against the continuance of this practice. Let the full penalty of the
law follow murder or assault or misdemeanor in the ranks of the college
as it does in civic life, and hazing—often
a misnomer for cruelty—will become but a hideous
memory.”
Compare the tone and message of the
preceding letter
with this implied approval of so-called mental hazing at Brown
University
that appeared in a front-page article in the same New York Times on
February
21, 1922. Note especially the word “time-honored”
which clearly editorializes in a news article, as well as the apparent
acceptance as fact of mere justifications for hazing
offered—not by psychologists—but mere
undergraduates.
“Now upper class men are substituting mental torture by
methods learned
in psychological course instead of by the time-honored custom of
paddling.
Two of the leading fraternities have adopted the new system and are
pronouncing their work good. Others are expected to follow, as the
results are declared to leave the initiated in a much more tractable
state of mind and imbued with
a ‘proper sense of his unworthiness.”
[space #]
Now let us look at some of the examples
I have culled to use for instructive purposes in this essay. By no
means are these examples inclusive, meaning that they represent hundred
of similar errors or biass that I have located in newspaper sports
coverage of hazing during a ten-year period. These errors can be
located in the text of some articles and in the headlines of some
others. For simplicity’s sake, I have broken these examples
into three categories:
1) Errors of Omission or Commission in Use of Terminology.
Simply
stated, defenders of hazing
are often eager to call their actions anything other than hazing.
Journalists should not make the job easier for them by calling
“hazing” a term that fails to fit the definition of
hazing. Namely, hazing involves any action explicitly
required or implicitly expected of a newcomer by team veterans or
coaches in which the newcomer gives up status temporarily to do
something required by a veteran or veterans—willingly,
seemingly willingly, or unwillingly—in order to gain
acceptance and veteran status in the eyes of teammates. Such activity
may be criminal (prohibited by state statute), illicit (prohibited by
institution or team rules), or both.
What
complicates the matter of criminal hazing is that an action that is
prosecuted for hazing in one state or locale is not prosecuted in
another because state laws on hazing vary significantly and/or because
prosecuting attorneys have shown varying degrees of willingness or
unwillingness to prosecute such instances. Thus, occasionally, some
hazing actions that probably could result in conviction and punishment
go unpunished, although details of what went on may become apparent if
a player or a player’s family launches a civil lawsuit.
What complicates the issue even more is
that some actions that involve risk and/or acts of negligence by hazers
become criminal only if a victim complains or law enforcement
officials/educators intervene when they observe such an act. Thus, a
player asked to drink alcohol by the team may become sick, but his
fellows may only face criminal punishment if the rookie is hospitalized
(or, in the case of lacrosse club player Nick Haben, dies).
In fewer than half the of the forty-three states with hazing laws,
willingness of the victim to participate in his own hazing is
irrelevant.
All this is irrelevant at the
professional sports level where even acts of hazing that clearly to me
violate a state law go unpunished by a team or league officials. It is
especially ludicrous to me that the National
Football League chooses to take no action after the two New Orleans
Saints
rookies were beaten by a pack of some thirty veterans, and yet the
league
steps in time after time to fine or suspend players for actions
seemingly less egregious.
High school and college players (and
casual observers) write me occasionally to ask how professional players
can haze with apparent impunity, while schools expel, suspend, or in
other ways punish high school or college players who perform similar
acts of hazing. “Hi I'm a greek from an international
fraternity, and I recently saw on ESPN Sportscenter the San
Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills hazing their rookies,” wrote
Joe Finn on
August 23, 2002 in a letter to me. “They taped them to poles,
poured ice water
and Gatorade on them and made them do silly tricks. If they
can do
this without ANY retaliation, why can't my fraternity do the same?
Because we're not rich football players? This is rude.”
Clearly the question Finn poses is valid
and should be asked by sports reporters and commentators, but rarely
is. The ESPN coverage is all the more remarkable given its
April 2000 series on hazing in high school and college sports
which is still available on its website as of January 2003.
[http://espn.go.com/otl/hazing/monday.html]
In addition, reporters and/or headline
writers inaccurately refer to hazing as horseplay or pranks. More
rarely, I’ve seen an act of negligence
or prank gone wrong called “hazing,” but the term
is inaccurate since it
was done by one veteran to another. On the other hand, if rookies or
fraternity
pledges ban together to take action against older players or members
who
are hazing them, that type of activity generally has been called hazing
in
a handful of civil lawsuits I have seen.
Here are some examples of incorrect
terminology:
A headline writer for The Detroit News on September 24, 2001 wrote
this: “Rookies provide punch in victory over Red Sox, then
endure team prank.” The
“prank” was hazing, albeit non-criminal, in which
the clothes of rookies were
removed by veterans so that the newcomers had to wear bibs and diapers
upon
leaving a ballpark.
In the issue of February 20, 2001, a University of Texas Daily Texan
article headline referred to then NBA rookie Chip Mihm’s
hazing as “being educated at pro level.” Under no
circumstances does hazing by players a few years older
than a victim constitute educating. In fact,
“educating” is what the sportswriter
should be doing here for the public, instead of minimizing the activity
in
what purportedly is a news story.
Another way in which sportswriters do their readers a disservice is by
word or term choices that imply hazing is ordinary or expected at the
professional level. Thus, on August 18, 2002, the Hartford Courant
referred to the “standard rookie hazing” of
first-year quarterback David Carr. The Rocky Mountain News on December
13, 2002 refers to the practice of making rookies sing as an
“old
NFL hazing ritual,” which is accurate but makes no attempt to
inform readers
that hazing is banned. Likewise, the Florida Times-Union on August 4,
2002
carried a story which asserted that “Rookie hazing is part of
the lore of
the NFL,” with the word “lore” implying
that there is something time-honored or even respectable about hazing.
Then again, a sportswriter will accept a coach’s assertion
that hazing is banned, and then note one or two lesser indignities that
rookies have had to submit to. For example, a reporter for the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on
December 11, 2002, wrote that Green Bay’s Coach
“Sherman won’t tolerate hazing,”
then described the ritual in which rookies are forced to spend money to
buy
obligatory food and snacks for veteran players. Simply stated,
reporters need
to call hazing what it is and not let coaches get away with calling
their
teams “hazing-free” when such is not the case.
Here is another example. Sportswriter Bob LeGere of the Chicago Daily
Herald makes a point that Coach Dick Jauron considers hazing senseless,
then a few paragraphs later writes this:
One time-honored tradition that Jauron does permit is the rookies
carrying the veterans' shoulder pads back to the locker room after
practice, which he considers harmless.
That’s just the point. Hazing
endures precisely because perpetrators, whether putting their testicles
on another’s face, asking someone to chug grain alcohol, or
merely forcing someone to endure public embarrassment, excuse their
actions by saying what they’ve done was “no big
deal” or “harmless.” If a coach
considers a behavior to be harmless, he or she should then put the
specific acts allowed into a team policy. Otherwise, dozens of
cautionary tales exist to enlighten coaches where seemingly innocent
silly initiations have escalated into dangerous or illegal acts of
hazing.
II. Enabling.
On occasion, sports reporters fail to offer their readers a context
when they describe a hazing ritual in such a way to make the reader
feel that what
is going on is both ordinary and funny. A headline in the Minneapolis
Star
Tribune for August 14, 1998, carried this misleading message which made
light
of the hazing practice of tying Minnesota Vikings rookies to a goalpost
and
turned the headline into a silly play on words: “Rookies
experience tape delay”
read the headline. Here is an excerpt from what the writer Don Banks
termed
“annual festivities”:
In a camp tradition nearly as old as the pigskin itself, some Vikings
veterans closed their 18-day Mankato stay by taping
linebacker Shawn Stuckey
and cornerback Anthony Bass back to back to the
goalpost after the conclusion of practice.
The story ends with a quote
that implies the reporter regards hazing as all fun and games:
"Funniest
rookie skit I've ever seen in the NFL," said quarterbacks
coach
Chip Myers, a 25-year league
veteran.
To put this story into context, the article appeared one year after a
well-publicized high school hazing incident occurred in Minnesota that
resulted in the passage of a state anti-hazing law. Also in context,
two days earlier, another Minneapolis Star Tribune writer referred to
the taping of ballboys—minors—to goalposts by
players as fun. Kristen Davis wrote this: Some players have a
little extra fun with the ball boys,
occasionally taping them to benches
and goalposts.
Davis wrote that some ballboys
claim not to like the fun and quoted one who said things are worse if
they struggle. Then she quotes equipment manager Dennis Ryan who
presumes to speak for all the ballboys when he clearly states his
misguided opinion that the taping minors to a goalpost
is nothing to worry about in an age of lawsuits and parental concerns
about
the well-being of their children:
Dennis Ryan thinks they like it.
"These guys have something that they can
go back home and tell their buddies about, and I think they're pretty
proud of that," he
said.
Likewise, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on July 31, 2001 carried this
“no big deal” description of hazing when referring
to the arrival in camp of then-rookie
David Terrell of the Chicago Bears:
Terrell expects a hazing period from his teammates, but says it's
nothing he hasn't already endured in high school and college.
Something
similar to the preceding
story also appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on August 20, 1999. A
sportswriter wrote a piece following up a claim by then-Cleveland
Browns head coach Chris Palmer that hazing would not be tolerated.
Instead of pointing out the coach’s hypocrisy, or at least
that he ran things in apparent disarray, she noted that Palmer briefly
“got in on the fun” as veterans chased down and
taped three first-year players to a goalpost. The sportswriter conclude
her piece in a way that made it clear hazing had occurred but included
no quotes from anyone demanding that the coach ought to be held
accountable. Here is how the story ended:
Palmer explained that the
rookies walked through the defensive line "and didn't respect them
properly."
Asked about his
hazing ban, he said, "I don't know if it's technically hazing."
Coulda fooled the
rookies.
Unfortunately,
because the “no big deal”
excuse is used by hazers to justify any sort of hazing action
whatsoever,
reporters ought to be doubly vigilant about what they write. See these
claims
made by hazers:
Asking an initiate to swim can be
dangerous. A Colgate University freshman marooned on an island then
drowned when he tried to make it to shore. A fraternity pledge at the
University of Nevada-Reno drowned the fall of 2002 while with other
pledges past midnight in an on-campus lake. A University of Texas
spirit club (members fire the cannon during Longhorn football games
after a touchdown) pledge named Gabe Higgins died in the Colorado River
after being asked to drink alcohol and perform exercises. But here is
how The Journal News, in a well-written, balanced story, quoted
Hendrick Hudson
(New York State) soccer players describing the practice of marooning
rookies
on an island so they would have to swim for shore as "just a little
joke.":
Soccer team co-captain Henry
Leon said it was no big deal.
"Every year, it was a tradition that we did this," said Leon,
a
senior. "You take a freshman,
and you take them out and leave
them somewhere. It was just a
tradition, but we decided to
change it and make it more fun ... It
was no more than a 20-foot
swim."
"We left them in a
place where they live
close enough, maybe 10
minutes walking," he said.
Leon said he and other players
became worried when they
returned in an hour, and the
two students were
gone. But, he
added, "we knew
they were definitely alive and
where they were. The whole thing
was totally a joke."
One stranded student said 10
team members drove them to the
reservoir in a four-car caravan. The
teen-ager said he wasn't
forced, and the entire episode "was not really
that serious."
"We didn't need to
be initiated," he said. "The only reason we
were on the
teams is because we were good athletes. It was
just a joke, and
everyone blew it out of proportion."
Likewise, in another well-written,
balanced article published in Maclean’s on March 6, 2000, a
former University of Vermont hockey player says this about hazing:
Other Canadian players
maintained that this year's UVM hazing was
relatively mild compared with former initiations -- but similar to what
they went through in junior hockey in Canada. Benoit Lampron, now in his
last year on a hockey scholarship, admitted that when he was hazed at
UVM
in 1996, players were stripped naked and forced to do push-ups in the
freezing water of Lake Champlain -- a practice that was stopped after
one
player suffered an asthmatic attack. As well, there was an event called
"the olive run" where freshmen were made to carry olives between their
buttocks while being struck with wooden cooking spoons. Lampron admits
that, to outsiders, this makes the hockey players look like "perverts."
But he quickly added: "This is pretty much what we do in Canada. There,
it's no big deal."
Hazers have made
similar claims about hazing being no big deal even after they have been
charged with sexually assaulting a rookie. My point in using the above
quotations is that sportswriters need to put claims by hazers into
careful context when hazers minimize their actions or rationalize them.
Perhaps the best caveat is that for years before the New Orleans Saints
1998 incident, sportswriters covering the team again and again
emphasized the entertaining aspects of hazing.
For
example, on August 3, 1997, Brian Allee-Walsh of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune found several forms of hazing to be entertaining enough
to highlight them in his article headlined “Rookies Keep
Cool-Headed During Hazing”—a play on words since
all rookies were given shaved heads by
“razor-wielding” veterans. Here are some excerpts
from Allee-Walsh’s article:
.
From now on, the phrase "a little off
the top" will have new meaning for the New Orleans Saints'
1997 draft class. The veterans have seen to that.
Hair today, gone tomorrow. It is the
rite of passage
into the NFL.
Veterans have razzed rookies since Day 1
of the league's inception, so the goings on in Camp Ditka are typical
of NFL camps. Rookies are at the low end of the totem pole.
Consequently, they are required to carry
veterans' helmets and shoulder pads off the practice field, fetch
blocking dummies and water carts and perform other such menial tasks.
And while Coach Mike Ditka soon changed
his tune about hazing after the injuries to the rookies in
1998 produced talk of a lawsuit, he had plenty say about the fun and
joys of hazing in the 1997 piece by Allee-Walsh: "I don't mind the
razzing,” said Ditka. “I think it's part of the
price you pay.” Ditka also asked players to cool their hazing
in 1998 but only because the 1997 hazing ritual had gotten out of hand
and caused widespread property damage.
It isn’t as if the
Saints’ problems as a result of hazing were anything new
either. Sportswriters were well aware, or should have been, that in
1994, at a nightclub during a rookie initiation, New Orleans veteran
Lorenzo Neal sucker-punched and broke the jaw of a number two draft
pick, Mario Bates, after Bates refused to submit to mild servitude
required by Neal,
the buying of a drink.
III) Allowing Hazers to Denigrate the Hazed
Reporters covering professional hazing
again and again quote teammates and coaches who make fun of rookies
embarrassed by the hazing they go through. Since the
reciprocal nature of hazing is such that the rookies who are abused
then become the abusers, these quotations in print add further
humiliation to what they have already endured. And while I
won’t deny that a reporter has the right to use any
quotations he or she obtains for a news story, I think the least a
reporter can do is get quotations from experts on athletic hazing such
as Norm Pollard of Alfred University who can
put those quotations in some context. Or, perhaps even better, they
could quote someone such as a now-chastened former New Orleans Coach
Ditka who has
since come out against physical hazing in the strongest possible terms,
although
he did permit razzing and acts of servitude even after the
Cleeland-Danish incident.
Quotations from veterans that are smug
or arrogant at the expense of rookies, as they stand, allow a reporter
to, in effect, write stories that add insult to injury or insult after
a hazing has occurred. For
example, here is a selection from “Giants Give Extreme
Haircuts To Rookies” by Buster Olney of the New York Times on
August 22, 2002. Note the writer’s use of
“low-grade hazing” as if it were fact, not his
opinion:
The Giants rookie Ryan Deterding may not keep the haircut administered
to him by the team's offensive linemen, and he may not fully appreciate
the artistic
vision required in its formation. But Deterding probably knows
instinctively that no other human in the world has a haircut like his:
a shoehorn of hair cut on the left side of his head, a ragged rectangle
mowed across the other side,
with a tuft of hair hanging on the front, as if someone had tacked a
hand broom on his forehead.
Deterding was one of a half-dozen rookie linemen
to get the haircuts, in a ritual of low-grade
hazing. "Those guys look like the Three Stooges," Giants
Coach Jim Fassel said, grinning. "That's embarrassing."
[space #]
The experts in the Alfred University
collegiate survey on hazing did conclude that athletes seem to be much
in need of team acceptance and rituals marking player status as rookie
and veteran. For that reason, Pollard and his colleague Nadine Hoover
concluded that positive or humorous initiations such as skits could be
acceptable, and that small symbolic acts of servitude such as carrying
team balls (but not other acts of servitude such as carrying luggage)
might post an acceptable boundary. Athletes themselves and even Ditka
have argued persuasively that the signing of fight songs in camp by
rookies is a harmless tradition, as well.
My own view is that such activities can
only be acceptable if there are league and team rules that set clear
limits as to what can and cannot be deemed acceptable as an initiation
before degrading acts of hazing take over. Such guidelines would also
be useful to sportswriters who then would have to think twice before
writing news stories that put illicit or illegal acts of hazing in a
favorable light.
.
Selected Works Cited
Driver, Tom F. (1991) The Magic Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites
That Transform Our Lives and Our Communities. New York:
HarperSanFrancisco.
Nuwer, Hank. (1990) Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing. Atlanta:
Longstreet Press.
Nuwer, Hank. (2000) High School Hazing: When Writes Become Wrongs.
Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts/Scholastic.
Nuwer, Hank. (2002 rev. ed.) Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities,
Sororities, Hazing & Binge Drinking. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Pollard, Norm, et al. Initiation Rites and Athletics: A National Survey
of NCAA Sports Teams. Alfred, NY: Alfred University.
Thorndyke, Lynn. (1944). University Records and Life in the Middle
Ages. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bio: Hank Nuwer is an Indiana journalist and journalism professor. He
is the author of three books on hazing and is a past adviser to Alfred
University on its NCAA survey of hazing among college athletes.
Hank Nuwer in 1981