Sports Hazing Info Site by Hank Nuwer (Links at bottom of page to other sites)
Chapter Five: from High School Hazing by Hank Nuwer
Nick Haben, HS photo
The Nick Haben Story by Hank Nuwer (copyrighted. You can link with my permission, not copy)
Scholastic Press: Young Adult Market
CHAPTER FIVE: HAZING AND ALCOHOL
Tragically, at least one college student has died in alcohol-related sports
initiations or pledging stunts every year from 1970 to 2005, according to research by author Hank Nuwer. Many high school educators
are frantically working on policies that forbid freshman hazing, rookie initiations,
and dangerous student club hijinks, hoping to prevent these kinds of hazing
deaths from trickling down to high schools.
However, recent newspaper stories show that more needs
to be done in the way of hazing and alcohol education programs at the high
school level. At Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, some students
participated in Big Pal, Little Pal, a nonsanctioned autumn tradition in
which older students invite new female students to drink with them.1 Also
in Des Moines, at Abraham Lincoln High School, at least one student participated
in a life-threatening alcohol-related initiation for a social club with a
reputation for heavy partying.2 And in New Mexico in 1997, a fourteen-year-old
Santa Fe High School freshman almost died in an initiation during an event
akin to homecoming. Found passed out on a friend’s property with a blood-alcohol
level of about .30, he didn’t return to consciousness until the next day.
Someone had scrawled a crude phrase on his condiment0stained clothing and
inked “’98” on his head. “We’re just thankful that he survived. He was a
victim of hazing,” the boy’s father told a reporter.3
Alcohol deaths in college student clubs since the 1970s
fall into several categories. Some die from alcohol poisoning or suffocating
on their vomit during fraternity initiations that require chugging large
amounts of alcohol. Some gulp twenty-one drinks on their twenty-first--
and last-- birthday. Some fall to their deaths from roofs or while “surfing”
atop vehicles. Others climb behind the wheel of a car or trust a drunken
student to drive them home. All this occurs even as the general level of
alcohol use in the United States drops a little more each year.
After fraternity pledge Jonathan McNamara died at the
University of Vermont in an alcohol-related tragedy, his grieving father
addressed the state legislature in 1999 to plead for a hazing law and express
his disbelief that such stupid, archaic traditions continue. “I at one time
belonged to a fraternity,” he said. “I had been hazed but that was back in
1966. They don’t do the same things that they did to us—do they?”
A PATTERN OF SELF-DESTRUCTION AMONG TEENAGERS
Several recent cases of alcohol poisoning, teen drunk-driving
deaths, and arrests of high school fraternity members at drinking parities
make educators wonder what has happened to teenagers’ judgment and parental
supervision.
In February 1999, fifty-six teenagers belonging to a national
high school fraternity and three adult chaperones from Mississippi staying
in a hotel in Covington, Louisiana, were interviewed by police after dozens
of teenagers ended up drunk at a party. The incident upset many city residents.
Just six months earlier, a Louisiana State University fraternity has pleaded
no contest to eighty-six criminal charges following the alcohol-related death
of Benjamin Wynne, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) pledge form Covington, during
a 1997 marathon drinking bout.4
Like many young men who have died in alcohol-related club
and fraternal initiations, Wynne first experimented with alcohol in secondary
school. Experts on alcohol abuse say that college students often establish
destructive drinking patterns in high school or earlier. A survey by the
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism indicates that a whopping
40 percent of the admitted alcoholics they interviewed began drinking before
age fifteen. In contrast, a comparatively low 10 percent of those who became
alcoholics waited to drink until they were of legal age.
What California educator and pediatrician Charles Irwin
notes about teen drinking also applies to teen hazing. “Teens don’t see drinking
in terms of its negative effects,” said Irwin. “Instead, they think something
good will happen if they drink; it will improve their self confidence or
help their social life.”5
DRINKING AND ATHLETES
While many college athletes are good students and benefit
from participation in sports, in the last decade researchers have discovered
that varsity players tend to drink about twice as much as the general student
population. Such studies may reveal why initiations often revolve around
a rookie’s perceived ability to handle alcohol.
With underage drinking an act of rebellion for some teenagers
and college students, it is hardly surprising that rookie hazing sometimes
requires new players to continue drinking until all alcohol supplied by veterans
has been consumed or they pass out. Among college varsity athletes, initiations
since 1988 have had scary consequences at Alfred University (on men’s football
team), Kent State University (on men’s hockey team), and Potsdam (New York)
State College (on female lacrosse team). Alcohol abuse among male and female
athletic teams in Canada is under study by two researchers in Calgary. Alcohol-related
initiations have caused severe problems at the University of Western Ontario
and other Canadian schools.
THE STORY OF NICK HABEN
The death of rookie athlete Nick Haben, aged eighteen, after a Western Illinois
University lacrosse club hazing incident teaches terrible lessons: first,
alcohol can kill—anyone—swiftly and painfully; second, risky initiations
can go wrong at any time, no matter how long they have been carried out without
incident; third, left unchecked, the kind of rampant hazing in colleges that
killed Nick Haben will trickle down to high school—the frenzied, one-day
high school initiation activities in Des Moines, Iowa and Santa Fe, New Mexico,
mentioned earlier in this chapter will gradually lead to fatalities for high
school students.
At Oswego (Illinois) High School, Nick Haben had been
a popular young man with athletic ability, good looks, and an eye-to-eye
smile. He was also a good student and member of the National Honor Society.
A nondrinker who admitted to tasting two beers once to satisfy his curiosity,
Nick was happy to sip soda at parties. A strong catcher and the most valuable
player on his high school baseball team, he went to Western Illinois University
hoping to play ball, until he learned the team already had six catchers.
Instead, he decided to go out for lacrosse, and he made the club.
Nick and his parents had no idea that the lacrosse club
was in a kind of free fall, having just come off a suspension after some
players had illegally used the team’s gas credit card to fill their own automobile
tanks. Supervision was abysmal, with an adviser in name only. Since being
recruited to the job in 1982, Lowell G. Oxtoby, a heavyset librarian with
a love for antiques and Delta Tau Delta, the fraternity he also advises,
had served as the club’s adviser. But one day, when he came to practice,
some of the players mocked him crudely, and he left the field, hurt and bewildered,
never to return.
Instead of quitting as adviser and alerting the university,
Oxtoby continued to sign authorization slips for travel. He was never aware
that veterans initiated the rookies and portrays himself as a victim of team
deception. “I didn’t know until this incident,” says Oxtoby. “It had been
kept from me completely…. Just as any parent would not know about drinking
or smoking behind their backs unless they see evidence of it, because my
contact was so minimal there was no way I could detect it.”
...He hadn’t even been aware that the lacrosse club’s
president had recently resigned over alcohol problems on the team.
Without an adviser, except in name, the team’s only supervision
was a twenty-one-year-old student coach, Brian Donchez. He was assisted by
student officers Daniel Carey, Anthony Kolovitz, Scott Rakita, and Marc Anderson.
Anderson later said his title was little more than honorific.
On the field, the lacrosse players loved the game and
played hard. Once the game started, the rookie status of the hustling midfielder
Haben and the other players was forgotten. Off the field, however, the players,
in white team jackets, drank beer after practices and on road trips, leaving
the non-drinker Haben to return to his residence hall alone. Because the
club’s good times revolved around alcohol and Nick’s revolved around his
friends, classes, family, and church, only a few teammates got to know him,
and vice versa.
Soon, Nick and the other rookies began hearing scary stories
about the initiation they would have to endure. Although he was frightened
by the prospect and intimidated by some of the veterans, Nick began to think
seriously about drinking to support his fellow rookies as they tried to pass
the inane test of manhood. Nick’s cousin, Jason Altenbern, talked to Nick
the evening before the scheduled drinking marathon and later described Nick
as “scared.”
The day of the initiation, veterans broke the hazing into
afternoon and evening sessions. The annual team hazing was unplanned and
chaotic, much like the club’s own relationship with the university and absent
faculty adviser. Many of the players were also members of fraternities, where,
in spite of a school ban on kegs, young people often passed out from alcohol
during parties. For fun, some fraternity members would become instantly intoxicated
by “inhaling” liquor through a bong, or water pipe.
On the afternoon of October 18, 1990, the lacrosse initiation
began at 3:30 P.M. One of the veterans produced a paddle, delivering a few
stinging shots to the behinds of rookies. A couple of veterans laughed uneasily
during the paddling for none of them had been paddled as rookies. Three or
four veterans proceeded to growl, curse, and taunt the rookies in feigned
anger. Nick and the other eight rookies had to strip to their underwear and
run onto the women’s soccer field to perform odd-looking calisthenics meant
to make them look foolish. The rookies were given vodka, though Nick declined
to drink any, as well as sips from a pail of a foul concoction called rookie
juice, composed of tuna, condiments, pepper sauce, clam or lime juice, a
little beer, and some schnapps. According to veteran Marc Anderson, each
rookie took only a mouthful or two.
The team was released for dinner. Nick gathered with his
fellow rookies before the initiation and drank some olive oil and ate half
of a load of bread. He had heard somewhere that it was important to coat
your stomach before drinking. The team’s rookies went back to the practice
field for more hazing and to choke down cheap, bad-tasting wine. Veterans
inked a different number on each rookie’s face, then ordered him to do more
calisthenics.
Of course no one can know exactly what was on Nick’s mind
by this time. Perhaps the couple of sips of alcoholic rookie juice made it
harder for him to abstain from drinking more. After performing calisthenics,
the team went to the house of veterans Jim Boyer and Steve Kadlec in Macomb.
They drank some more while the veterans bombarded them with eggs and rubbed
food in their hair.
After washing up at one of the residence halls, the rookies
went to a wooded area not far from the practice field. The rookies, under
the supervision of a handful of veterans, guzzled alcohol while they participated
in a scavenger hunt, displayed the head of a dead squirrel, and leaped over
a campfire into a nearby river. The veterans, drunk and glassy eyed, were
surprised by Nick, the perennial abstainer, who joined the rookies in the
swilling of an astonishing amount of tequila, whiskey, gin, vodka, vermouth,
beer, and cheap wine. Because the only benchmark available to Nick that night
was alcohol consumption, his actions probably reflected his desire to show
the veterans his commitment and loyalty to the team, which was so great that
he put aside his usual reservations about liquor.
When at last veteran John Bilenko—a young man who says
his attitudes about alcohol were formed by images of his father drinking
occasionally hard in social situations—finally yanked a bottle of tequila
from Nick, it was way too late to keep him from falling into a coma. Some
fluid spilled from Nick’s lips and he keeled over. Instead of panicking or
calling 911, the veterans, determined to finish the initiation, put the rest
of the rookies through silly stunts and delivered pep talks about how the
lacrosse team had been one of their most important college experiences. No
one was worried about the teammate passed out on the ground. Every one of
them had seen people pass our before, and everyone expected at least another
one to pass out before the initiation was over. “Before we heard Nick was
dead it was one of the best times I ever had,” said Anderson. “The night
was fun. I’m glad I had the experience, the brotherhood, the bonding.”
Predictably, newspaper editorials summed up Nick’s death
as a failure to resist peer pressure. Few commentators were perceptive enough
to analyze how sports, alcohol abuse, and hazing had become so intertwined
in high school and collegiate life. The press also tended to be judgmental,
portraying the lacrosse veterans as full-blown villains instead of students
who had somehow gotten through high school and college with little knowledge
about the complexities of group behavior.
A TERRIBLE VISIT
The next morning Alice Haben was at her job as church secretary, finishing
some arrangements for the trip that she, her husband Dale, and teenage son
Charles were taking to Macomb that very weekend. Two policemen entered the
building a little after 10 A.M. to speak with Reverend Philip M. Dripps in
his office. He came out, gathered himself, and broke Alice Haben’s heart
in a few bleak sentences. Nick had been found dead on the dormitory room
floor of a lacrosse team veteran. A coroner would do an autopsy that afternoon.
No one from the university phoned with details, according
to Alice Haben. She had to rely on the coroner and a family relation who
worked at the college to find out about Nick’s last hours.
At first, after hearing the reverend’s news, Alice had
a moment of hope. Knowing that Nick didn’t drink, she conjectured that the
victim must have stolen her son’s identification. But the coroner confirmed
that Nick had indeed been the young man who had died from drinking at a party
or some sort of initiation. In a fog, Alice went home to break the news to
her husband and son, and then made arrangements for Nick’s body to be brought
back to Oswego for a Sunday funeral.
On Saturday, after hundreds of relatives, friends, and
strangers had come to the funeral parlor, Alice and Dale Haben brought Nick’s
high school friends home. They sat with Charles, telling him story after
story that brought his older brother to life again.
“It’s 1 A.M.,” a relative complained to Alice. “They have
to go home.”
“No,” she said. “They don’t.”
THE LACROSSE CLUB’S REACTION
Nick’s death had little impact on the drinking habits of students at Western
Illinois University. During the month after his death, two more students
suffered from alcohol poisoning but survived. None of the lacrosse players
thought they would be welcome at the wake, and that knowledge agonized the
more sensitive members of the team. A few more hardened members rationalized
that it had been the rookie’s fault for breaking his own vow not to drink.
But veteran Mark Molzer disagreed and addressed the team in a meeting two
days after the burial, saying, “We’ve gone too far.”
When the lacrosse players walked on campus, voices grew
quiet and then loud. “Killers,” one student whispered to a passing veteran.
Oxtoby, the club’s absentee adviser, was also distraught.
“A young man is dead,” said Oxtoby. “Who knows, he might have been president
of the United States. He might have been a doctor, and certainly he had a
soul.” If Oxtoby had refused to sign vouchers for travel money and forced
the team to shape up, close down, or get a new adviser, a death might have
been prevented, as Nick’s mother learned from depositions, private investigations,
and police reports. As a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, Oxtoby
knew about hazing. During the 1980s, one of the country’s leading hazing
experts and author of a study condemning hazing, Dr. Frederick D. Kershner,
was a member of Oxtoby’s own fraternity.
A SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
Soon after the funeral the Habens pieced together the last minutes of their
son’s life from conversations—in which the word “hazing” surfaced now and
again—and from a private investigator whom the family hired to re-create
Nick’s last day. Alice Haben learned that veterans and rookies had taken
Nick’s still body to the room of Anthony Kolovitz and Andrew Reese in Henninger
Hall. A Western Illinois University resident adviser named Michael P. Reimann,
a paid employee of the university, helped prop a cushion under Nick—apparently
for protection from suffocation in case he vomited—and left him alone without
calling for medical assistance or reporting the incident to the police.
Incredibly, as Nick lay gurgling, Kolovitz came back at
2:30 A.M. and went into a lounge to sleep. Reese came back late too, awoke
early in the morning, heard Nick wheezing, went to the bathroom for water,
and fell back to sleep. The two could be called insensitive, but thousands
of college students might also have failed to identify the situation as a
crisis.
Sometime after 8 A.M., Reese noticed that Nick’s face
and body had turned purple from a lack of oxygen. Now in a panic, he summoned
Kolovitz. Instead of phoning police, the two phoned other lacrosse veterans
to find out what to do. One player advised them to call the authorities and
an ambulance.
They waited too long: Nick died right in front of them.
By the time the police arrived, rigor mortis had already stiffened Nick’s
body. His blood-alcohol content was .34.
Frightened and upset, Reese and Kolovitz told a police
officer that Nick had passed out at a party. Not until about two hours later
when Nick’s resident adviser talked to campus police did the officers have
any idea that a hazing incident had taken place.
A thorough and professional investigation by the university
police followed, with the suspension or expulsion of twelve players. The
action prompted an angry letter from Barbara Rokita, mother of one lacrosse
veteran, to the Western Illinois University student newspaper, accusing the
university of turning its back on the team. “These boys have lost a friend
and cannot even grieve for him,” she wrote. “They are so consumed with fear,
anger, confusion and pain.”
A CONTROVERSIAL COURT CASE
Days after her son’s funeral, Alice Haben happened to turn on the television
and see a CNN program about hazing. Information about the organization called
CHUCK flashed on the screen. Alice Haben called one of the show’s guests,
Eileen Stevens, who listened to her plight, sent related literature, and
gave her a crash course on hazing. Reverend Dripps put the family in touch
with Robert C. Strodel, a respected author and attorney from Peoria, Illinois,
who agreed to explore the possibility of pressing criminal or civil charges.
“Is there any justifications for such a cruel and barbaric
practice?” Reverend Dripps wrote about hazing his United Methodist Church
newsletter. “We simply cannot stand by and allow the present situation to
continue unabated or unchallenged…. A new climate of civility and reason
needs to be created not only in our colleges and universities but also in
our home communities. This will not be an easy task. The forces of evil and
indifference will no doubt combine to stave off such efforts to dissolve
the practice of hazing.”
The Habens’ case against the lacrosse team was shaky,
according to the judge who first heard the case. Illinois’s hazing law was
ninety years old, and the judge concurred with the team members’ attorneys,
who attacked its language.
In response, the state’s attorney of McDonough County,
William Poncin, visited the Haben house and listened carefully to Alice Haben,
who argued against putting the young men in jail with hardened criminals
and for making the point that hazing and underage drinking are a deadly combination.
She wanted rookies and pledges to know they had the right to refuse to participate
in hazings. She wanted older members to know they would be held accountable
if they broke the law and hazed. “We weren’t out for revenge,” said Alice
Haben. “We wanted to correct a problem.”
Years and many court hearings came and went. Alice Haben,
guided by the unflappable Poncin and supported by dozens of Oswego neighbors,
won at last: the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the old state hazing law and
the twelve lacrosse veterans were put on trial. They were convicted not on
the charge of hazing but of serving alcohol to a minor. Judge Larry Heiser
was mindful of the impact of conviction on the lives of the defendants—young
men who had not intended to hurt their friend and had been prosecuted for
actions that hundreds of thousands of other college students had done without
consequence.
“At the time it happened I thought we pretty much were
scapegoats,” said Anderson, who believed the university should have carried
out a full-blown investigation of hazing instead of banishing those involved.
“The problem is not just us, and the problem is a big problem.”
Judge Heiser gave the defendants community service assignments
and ordered them to tell their story to the author of this book. If they
complied with court supervision, the charges would eventually be expunged
from their records. Most of the young men carried out the Judge’s order and
made this very chapter possible. Others, such as the student coach Brian
Donchez, refused to get in touch, perhaps on the advice of their attorneys.
Anderson and Molzer apologized to Alice Haben individually, and she wrapped
her arms around them both. “We lost a friend that evening,” Molzer later
said. “I feel terrible about it.”
The Habens then settled with eleven of the twelve defendants
for a total of $530,000, after dropping one young man whose family had no
insurance. The Western Illinois University student newspaper criticized the
judgment, saying Nick “was ultimately responsible for his own demise.” The
columnist wrote, “In an effort to assign blame for the loss of their son
the Habens are ruining the lives of twelve people who are a lot like their
son: young, naïve, and mired in the need to be a part of something at
any cost.
Defendant Marc Anderson disagreed with the paper and condemned
press coverage for not investigating the widespread hazing problem. He sometimes
imagines his own mother’s reaction if he had died instead of Nick. “Ethically,
should I have had sense enough to realize that it’s not normal to be in the
condition [Nick] was in?” Anderson asked himself. He still wrestles with
that question and the consequences of the event—which in his mind have dashed
his dream of one day becoming governor of Illinois. Anderson stresses that
the trial made him look hard into his own should and “has made me a better
person.”
The trial over, Alice Haben says she hopes one clear message
was sent to the high school and college youth of America: “If it’s not a
positive initiation, if it’s not going to help someone, [you] have no business
doing it.” She adds, “The decision to have an initiation should not be left
up to students any more than they should decide whether to drink and drive.”
AFTERMATH
Alice Haben eventually left her job at the church but continues to visit
any high school interested in hearing her speak about hazing. With William
Poncin, she lobbied for a tougher Illinois hazing law and enlisted the aid
of her state representative from Oswego. In 1996, a law that includes provisions
for felony hazing was passed, and Illinois governor Jim Edgar approved a
measure permitting prosecutors the option of seeking a three-year prison
term in hazing incidents that result in severe injuries or death.
“If you can make anything positive out of what’s happened
to her son, I think she has in creating a hazing awareness movement,” Poncin
said in a recent interview.
Now and then Alice Haben walks over to Nick’s old high
school. Oswego High School renamed its baseball Most Valuable Player Award
the Nick Haben Award and erected a trophy case in his memory. At the top
of a wood plaque, above Nick’s picture, is an inscription from hazing activist
Eileen Stevens: “Let us always remember the true meaning of brotherhood—a
fellowship: an interaction between individuals sharing the same goals, ideals
and principles. Never let that camaraderie be blemished by apathy or any
form of indifference or abuse. Continue to work together, learn together
and care for each other.”
ALCOHOL AND HAZING IN HOLLYWOOD FILMS
Hollywood movies about high school hazing, especially the 1993 cult hit Dazed
and Confused, may serve as a challenge to teenagers, giving them a kind of
benchmark for how far to take their hazing. In fact, in a 1998 incident,
two of the three Williamsville (Illinois) High School males accused of paddling
seven freshmen boys with a shop-made paddles said they were inspired by scenes
of hazing in Dazed and Confused.
For college fraternity males, the movie Animal House serves
a similar purpose, providing a rationalization for hazing. Phi Gamma Delta
pledge Scott Krueger at Cambridge’s Massachusetts Institution of Technology
(MIT) in 1997 was shown that film before beginning the breakneck drinking
rituals that put him in a coma and then ended his life.
Both Dazed and Confused and Animal House depict drinking
and hazing as cool, exciting things for young people to do. Dazed and Confused,
a cult video favorite that spent twenty-three weeks on a video best-seller
list in 1993, may lead students to conclude that initiations are a vital
part of their entrance into high school and high school organizations or
teams.
While these movies cannot be solely blamed for the rise
in teen drinking and hazing, neither can their influence on susceptible young
viewers be totally dismissed.
