Lax Attack

This is not an apology for the young lacrosse players accused of rape down in North Carolina. If it's proved, to a jury's satisfaction, that they did it, chuck'em in prison for however many years such an offense warrants; if not, set the athletes free, clear their names, and let them go about their lives. The real curiosity is why this particular alleged gang rape has received the amount of press normally reserved for a cute blonde's disappearance, an unproved Page Six scandal or Dick Cheney passing gas at a public gathering.

The real reason for the Duke University onslaught, it says here, is because the media, mostly comprised of upper middle-class white men and women, are feeling the financial squeeze as prestigious universities, such as Duke, raise their tuitions at an astounding rate, pricing out some academically qualified students who'd normally waltz onto their campuses. Such as the offspring of Boomer journalists who now, after years of paying for the private school K-12 educations of their one, two, three (hardly ever four or more) kids, can't make enough appearances on cable shows to pony up the $40,000 and rising per annum that the elite universities demand.

And so, perhaps unconsciously, they're taking it out on lacrosse players in general, and the Duke team in particular. Any number of prominent writers who attended the country's finest universities simply assumed when their kids were born that "legacy" acceptances were in the Grand Plan. Out of control inflation at private schools, however, got in the way, and now young Michael, Dylan and Sally, who aren't eligible for financial aid, are sometimes forced to attend less fancy bastions of higher learning, the ones where former Taliban apologists aren't accepted. It leads to uneasy cocktail party conversation in Georgetown and Chevy Chase parlors.

The hubbub over the Duke players arrested, both from affluent families, has reached such a fever pitch that the jokes have instantly reached the Beltway mainstream. Even Rich Galen, a Republican consultant who didn't study economics or philosophy at a campus with pristine ivy or manicured lawns, got into the act on April 21 in his semi-regular e-mail newsletter (mullings.com). He wrote, with humor that eluded me, "I've just about had it with everyone. First of all we have these continuing stories of Members of Congress acting badly. Either they are guilty of outright bribery and corruption, or they're acting in a way that is so close to the edge that they make the Duke lacrosse team look like a Brownie troop selling Thin Mints in the garden center parking lot."

I expected better from Galen, who indicts an entire squad's character based solely on media reports. The New York Times, as usual, has behaved in a manner entirely predictable. Slate's media critic Jack Shafer notes in an April 20 column that the Times' blanket coverage-there's a lot of that going on at the paper, whether it's about Jared Paul Stern or the who-cares news that the insufferable Katie Couric will become the new CBS Evening News anchor-began with a front-page story on March 29 and "returned to the story almost 20 times since." Is there any doubt that the "town & gown" theme will hit 50 in just a matter of weeks? (The May 1 Newsweek, in search of another shameless lifestyle treatise, ran a cover story headlined "Sex, Lies & Duke.")

Shafer concludes: "Something untoward happened to the accuser on March 13, but exactly what that something is I can't tell from the Times trial of the Duke students. I'm prepared for the prosecution to shred the lacrosse players' evidence and convict one or more of them, but if I were casting my ballot based on the press coverage to date, I couldn't vote guilty."

That makes sense. Of course, if the allegations at Duke were treated like the hundreds of similar alleged criminal acts that occur each year, Shafer wouldn't know or care enough about the story to even venture a preliminary non-guilty vote.

One of the key themes in this when-Iraq-is-relatively-quiet or Bush-won't-admit-he's-shredded-the-Constitution sensationalism is the dismissal of lacrosse itself as a sport for pampered, rich white kids. True, it's not stickball from the nasty city streets, where many journalists pretend to have grown up, but it's not exactly water polo either. The corruption, to the extent it exists in lacrosse, doesn't touch the payola, intense recruitment and lenient academic rules for prized football and basketball players. There was another Slate column, Dave Jamieson's April 7 entry which contained this gross generalization: "[Lacrosse players] gain entry into top colleges, start careers in New York, marry trophy wives, and put lacrosse sticks in their kids' cribs."

MORE MUGGER AT NYPRESS.COM XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I happen to know a lot about the game-although was never good enough to compete-because I grew up on Long Island where, along with the entire state of Maryland, most of the sport's top players hailed from at that time. It's since spread to parts of Jersey, Connecticut and tonier parts of Virginia, but you don't have to be a millionaire's son to play the game.

In fact, one of my older brothers, an all-state attackman for Huntington High School's team in 1968, was able to attend the University of New Hampshire on a scholarship because of his prowess at the game. There's also a lot of typecasting thrown about saying that lacrosse players are pigs, rich dumbos, misogynists, bigots and general creeps. That's probably true for a minority, although the same could be said for basketball, swimming, football and baseball Big Men on Campus, not to mention student politicos, protest organizers or pre-law candidates.

When I attended Johns Hopkins University, historically the New York Yankees of collegiate lacrosse, in the mid-70s, I went to almost all the home games on campus and enjoyed them immensely, mostly for the social occasion. Also, as an editor of the Hopkins News-Letter I came into contact with many of team's biggest stars.

As a sophomore, I wrote a controversial editorial slamming JHU's lax superstar for unsportsmanlike conduct during a game with the University of Maryland. That didn't win me any points with the school's athletic director at the time-a real asshole-but the players took the comments in stride and shortly after I got together with my target on the team, hashed out our differences over beers-the drinking age in Maryland was 18 at the time-and became friends.

A year later, when the student government tried to withhold the paltry $5400 subsidy allotted to the News-Letter because of unfavorable articles, I led an ultimately successful petition drive to overturn their action and was helped by nine lacrosse players in gathering over 1000 signatures from a student body of less than 2000.

Author Alan Gurganus concluded a histrionic April 9 Times op-ed by saying, "When the children of privilege feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing, we must all ask why?Boys 18 to 25 are natural warriors: bodies have wildly outgrown reason, the sexual imperative outranks everything. They are insurance risks. They need (and crave) true leadership, genuine order. But left alone, granted absolute power, their deeds can terrify."

What garbage. It's normal for young men (and women) to have outsized sexual appetites, but that "imperative" certainly doesn't "outrank everything." The media's lust for an easy story that plays on class warfare is more terrifying by a long shot.