Response to Sports Illustrated's "Praising Hazing"
 by Hank Nuwer

As a national adviser on Alfred University's "Initiation Rites and Athletics: A National Survey of NCAA Sports teams, I express the opinion that Richard Huffer's "Praising Hazing" essay in Sports Illustrated was deceptive, dishonest, and potentially destructive.


It was deceptive because Hoffer labeled as hazing certain team-building activities (such as rookies carrying balls) that the Alfred survey also had ruled out of the definition. He mocked and dismissed what the survey had dismissed--all for cheap laughs.


It was also deceptive because Hoffer gave as a bad example of hazing the taping of Cleveland Browns rookies to the goalpost. His column implied that pro players have the common sense to know when not to let things get out of hand.


Yet sports fans know better. Witness the New Orleans Saints' braining of rookies in a 1998 gantlet or the New York Mets losing of a player's services in a 1999 initiation squabble.


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 -- sure to be taped to the bulletin boards of pro/amateur teams across America looking to rationalize
their juvenile behavior.


I also cry foul that Hoffer ignored the scary over-ingestion of alcohol during hazings at Michigan (hockey), SUNY-Potsdam (women's lacrosse), and yes, tiny Division III Alfred University which (the writer fails to mention), did the survey in the first place because the school's football team experienced initiation-related alcohol problems during the 1998 season (and suffered the 1978 death of a fraternity pledge who was hazed, in part, by varsity lacrosse players).


Finally, Hoffer's column trivializes the deaths of Nick Haben (Western Illinois University lacrosse club) and John Davies (a Nevada-Reno football player who died in an alcohol-related hazing by a sub-rosa club of jocks). It trivializes the problems with alcohol specifically covered in the survey.


I find that destructive.


SI's cover has pictures of six crumb-bum coaches guilty of reprehensible behavior in kids sports.


The next time some hockey player in high school gets sodomized with a broom handle, or some high-priced pro rookie gets a career-ending hazing injury, do run Hoffer's picture with other such stinkers, won't you?


Hank Nuwer
Indiana


hnuwer@hanknuwer.com
http://www.hazing.hanknuwer.com