Playing Through

With all due respect to Courtney Paris, she has things exactly backward.

A month ago, Paris threw down the gauntlet. I'm not quite sure what a gauntlet is. I believe it's some sort of glove, which doesn't really make sense. Why a basketball player would be wearing a glove of any sort is beyond me, but, anyway, the All-American center at the University of Oklahoma threw one down.

Paris, a senior, announced that if she and the Sooners didn't take home the national championship – something they have never done in her four years in Norman – she would repay the cost of her scholarship, conservatively valued at $64,000.

"This program and university have given me so much support," said Paris. "I feel like I want to give them something back that's really special. If I can't do that with a national championship, I want to give back my scholarship, because I don't feel like I've earned it."

The pledge was met with immediate praise, especially as it came at a time when the smart guys who had wrecked the global economy were content to reward their colossal failures with multimillion-dollar bonuses.

"This is a classy thing to do," Mary Jo Kane, a sports sociologist at the University of Minnesota, told The New York Times. "She has such a sense of responsibility and commitment. Instead of ducking or making excuses, she's saying, 'I didn't accomplish what I came here to accomplish, but I'm going to make up for it, if it takes my entire life.' What a concept, especially played against the backdrop of AIG. All these tone-deaf executives should listen to Courtney Paris."

Never mind Wall Street execs: It is inconceivable that any of the handsomely paid coaches here at the University of Texas would hold themselves similarly accountable. Times may be tough, but apparently they're not so tough that big-time college athletic programs have any qualms about paying lavish salaries to coaches who, let's be honest, really only work four or five months out of the year. Sure, running the Longhorn football colossus is an immense responsibility. But coaching soccer? Volleyball? Tennis? These are little more than comfy sinecures. Fail to live up to expectations, and chances are, the worst those coaches will be met with are shrugs of indifference.

But back to Paris. I'm afraid she's fallen prey to what Marxists would call "false consciousness." Somehow, she's under the impression that she owes Oklahoma a debt and not the other way around. Yes, the university has given her and her twin sister, Ashley, scholarships and educations (both, I should probably add, were students of mine during a brief stint at OU), but when you consider everything Paris in particular has contributed to the program, it is clear they exploited her labor. She is, after all, the first college basketball player, male or female, to collect more than 2,500 career points and 2,000 rebounds.

Courtney Paris has more than earned her keep. How many coaches at UT can say the same?