With the transformation of college football from amateur intentions to a professional game, I thought I'd give brief mention to a piece of history to this conflict. In its earliest days, pro football was actually viewed as a less desirable product than the college game.. largely because people instinctively felt that pay cheapened the competitive spirit. In 1922, Fielding Yost (football coach at University of Michigan) said that paying football players "robs the great American game of many of its greatest character building qualities. The ideals of generous service, loyalty, sacrifice, and whole-hearted devotion to a cause, are all taken away. The game is robbed of the exhilarating inspiration of achievement merely for achievement's sake."
I understand the factors why college football has become a professional (or semi-professional) game now. Universities were experiencing profit windfalls from football.. and superfans & alumni also welcomed more and more money in to the sport, if it could benefit their team. But I still think Yost's assertions hold true. College football was designed as a character builder for students. And was a unique, beneficial situation from pro football. But superfans & circling sports agents don't care about that character-building process.
There was a miscalculation when college football players were strictly forbidden from making any kind of money as college athletes. Other college students are allowed to work jobs & make $ while they study, football players should've reserved that same opportunity. This opened a resentful floodgate.. where now almost everything in playing high level college football is about mercenary profit. College football will likely start to adjust with some kind of salary cap, and forming a separate league containing the highest level programs, apart from smaller schools. Guess we'll see.
I was reminded of an old (original) Twilight Zone episode recently.. The season one episode Mr. Bevis. Basically the story of a nice guy, down on his luck. Mr. Bevis is a single guy, with a beat-up ride, tenuous employment, with harmless (but childlike) hobbies. He is a good-hearted man, who paints a sympathetic character as he loses his job, and his hooptie is totaled in a freak accident.
So Mr. Bevis understandably heads to the bottom of the bottle, until he makes the unexpected acquaintance of a sort of guardian angel (played by Henry Jones, who later was in the underrated, short-lived series: Mrs Columbo)
Haven't reviewed a book for a while, so..
I currently have about 30 Columbus books in my personal library. I didn't wanna collect repetitive biographies, so most of my books cover more obscure and/or esoteric aspects of Columbus' life. But this biography (Columbus: The Grand Design) is kinda unique, because it only covers his earlier life, and ends with his first voyage. Instead of documenting the most famous (or infamous) achievements/days of his life, it's a chronology of events and theories that led up to planning his first voyage. And it's the most insightful report I've read on the people and experiences that influenced him.
It's a detailed recounting of sea voyages Columbus took as a young sailor to the edges of the known world, people he met who influenced his travel projections. Columbus' family, his long deceased father-in-law who left behind important, cutting-edge maps that Columbus studied. The Atlantic islands Columbus lived on, & began noticing non-native plants washing up on their shores.. helping him recognize that land lay further west in the foreboding Atlantic.. Columbus' relationship with Toscanelli, and other progressive thinkers of the time. The Vivaldi brothers who may have been attempting a Columbian voyage 200 years earlier than Columbus, but disappeared at sea.
Columbus' legacy has gone thru a lot of ups & downs over the centuries.. it's an environment now where most (non children's) books are fundamentally written to attack, or to a lesser extent, defend, Columbus' character. But this one was originally written in Italian in the (less Columbus-polarized) early 70s, and is a pretty objective, amoral evaluation. I got an English language edition, that was printed several years later, and it feels like it used high quality, coated paper that's really sturdy. The book feels like a cinder block.
It thoroughly answers one of the enduring questions about Columbus.. How did a seemingly ordinary, self-educated sailor formulate, then execute this game-changing grand design.
contact- nat.rain@gmail.com
With the near extinction of hard copy paper zines, thought I'd do an online Natrrain issue.. Contains some new pages, some old pages that have been edited and/or colorized, and then just some re-released color pages.
Nat Rrain in tech.Nil.color
