AFTER ANOTHER EPISODE OF Athletes Behaving Badly, University of Rhode Island President Robert Carothers is trying to send a message:
Athletes should be held to the same standards as mortals.Athletes who behave violently off the field will be benched.
Pardon my cynicism, but we've heard those sentiments before. Maybe this time, the story will end differently.
A year ago, running back Lawrence Phillips was suspended from the University of Nebraska football team after assaulting his girlfriend. Coach Tom Os-borne insisted that such behavior was intolerable. But Phillips was back on the team when the Big Red won the national championship. He signed a professional football contract. He got a Mercedes. Then he was picked up for drunken driving.
Phillips didn't get the message.
During this month's baseball playoffs, Roberto Alomar heard another message. The Baltimore Orioles' Alomar, irked at an umpire's call, spit in the umpire's face and made rude remarks about the death of the man's son.
America was outraged. But baseball waved him home. Alomar's punishment was a five-day suspension - next year.
Now, Robert Carothers is trying again.
On Saturday, the football stadium at the University of Connecticut was empty. UConn's opponent - Rhode Island - forfeited the game in the wake of a melee on the campus in which scores of URI football players showed up at a fraternity house and beat up some brothers.
The frat boys' offense was booting out teammates crashing an earlier party. The jocks retaliated with a show of force. Someone threw a blow, and violence erupted.
Carothers visited the fraternity, horrified at the bruises on the victims and the damage to the house. He huddled with his football coach, Floyd Keith. They agreed to forfeit the next game.
While URI boosters, alums and the community of Providence have been overwhelmingly supportive of the college's decision to cancel the game and recommend five players for criminal assault charges, some of the players involved are puzzled. What did they do wrong? Their teammates had been dissed. They were due their revenge.
That's the code of the mean streets that are sending more young people to college these days. College is supposed to be a "safer, saner" place than society at large, Carothers says. But the days are over when toppling goal posts and stuffing Volkswagens were the worst offenses committed on campus. Universities are drawing from communities where drive-by shootings are as common as hot dogs at halftime.
As his football team sat idle on Saturday, Carothers was hosting "Meet the University" day, welcoming prospective students and their parents to a campus that has suddenly become famous for taking a stand against violence. A CBS News crew dogged his steps. He was fresh from an appearance on NBC's Today. A New York Times column had applauded his actions.
It was an unsettling experience for a man who is more intellectual than jock, a poet, an administrator who prides himself on URI's scholar-athlete program. Perhaps that's why the Oct. 7 incident was so shocking. It wasn't supposed to happen in Providence.
Carothers wants to make sure it doesn't happen again. He quickly organized an all-day seminar on violence. He's turning the ugly incident into a "teaching opportunity."
Someone has suggested he would make a good baseball commissioner. He doesn't want the job. And he doesn't want to run for president of the United States.
He just wants to be a messenger:
"I hope the message is that young people are responsible for their own behavior, that there are consequences to what you do. Solving problems with violence is not acceptable."
Whether that message reaches young athletes before they form lifelong habits of behaving badly is the ending that hasn't been written yet.