I’VE gotta get something off my chest. My conscience has been bothering me since Peter Warrick, now the former leading candidate to win the Heisman Trophy, was busted for discount shopping in the extreme.
Ever since, every time ESPN or Fox Sports News or CNN/SI reminds us that Warrick’s criminal conduct essentially disqualified him from winning the Heisman, I wince.
Every time the suggestion is made that Warrick, because he’s the star of the No. 1-ranked Florida State football team, was cut a huge break when he was suspended for only two games and had a felony theft charge reduced to a misdemeanor, I wince some more.
On Oct. 9, ABC’s Lynn Swann, before the FSU-Miami game from which Warrick had been suspended, asked Warrick, “Do you understand at this point the gravity, the seriousness, of what you’ve done?” On Oct. 11, this column praised Swann for conducting a get-tough interview with Warrick. That gnaws at me, too.
Warrick, a senior, was busted for handing a retail clerk $21.90 in exchange for roughly $400 in dry goods. That made him just another criminal, albeit a star criminal, in the morally bankrupt NCAA system.
But I did much the same thing my senior year in college. A fraternity brother was the night manager of the pizza joint closest to campus. We’d hand him a dollar and he’d hand us about $10 worth of pizza. In 1972, that was enough to feed five or six of us.
We did this about once a week for an entire semester. We’d have done it more often – as often as we chose – except the pizza had the distinct aroma of freezer burn.
I never considered myself a criminal. I never considered that what I was doing to be stealing pizza. I was liberating pizza. I was beating the system and it was heady stuff, the kind of high-five stuff we joked about then and joke about 27 years later.
Like many college students, we didn’t have money, but we weren’t flat broke, either. We didn’t have to do what we did in order to eat, but we were eager to do it.
The rationalization – not that we bothered to stop to rationalize it – was that we weren’t stealing. We were spending money – a dollar – in exchange for $10 worth of pizza. Like Warrick, we were engaging in a four-finger discount.
Unlike Warrick, we weren’t caught.
We gladly seized the opportunity, the way we messed with the pay phones and the soda machines in the dorms. It seemed both the right thing to do and the rite thing to do. It was heady stuff, not like a thrill murder, but like scoring a touchdown off a triple reverse.
This is nothing new as it relates to the college mentality. The word, sophomore, after all, is taken from the Greek word, meaning “wise fool.”
Yesterday, I spoke with a younger colleague who worked the other side of the caper. He tended bar to get through college.
“Friends would come in who I knew had no money. They’d put a dollar down and I’d pour them a $4 pitcher of beer. At the time, I didn’t consider it the wrong thing to do, I considered it the right thing to do.”
My father was an honest man. In 1936, as a Depression-raised, Jewish kid from New York, he went to college at, of all places, Mississippi State. I wear his class ring, Class of ’39. He was there on a basketball scholarship. For a free college education, he’d have gone anywhere.
His eyebrows raised in larcenous pride, my father told me more than once how he helped himself get by: He’d sell game programs and pennants at Mississippi State football games. He pocketed more money than he was supposed to keep. He’d “make” four bucks a game when he was supposed to make two.
Come to think of it, I never asked him how he was able to afford a class ring.
I don’t know Warrick’s personal set of financial circumstances. But I do know the mentality that pervades college campuses, yesterday, today and tomorrow. There isn’t a dorm room on a college campus that doesn’t contain silverware purloined from the cafeteria.
I’m not suggesting that Warrick’s offense be excused, only that, based on empirical knowledge, it might be provided some reasonable, tangible and mitigated context.
Consider that Warrick is now synonymous with scandal, his candidacy destroyed for a Heisman Trophy that has been awarded to some young men of far more dubious character.
Consider that Warrick received the same suspension that Lawrence Phillips received at Nebraska after dragging his girlfriend – a Nebraska student – down a flight of stairs, then beating the daylights out of her. Consider that he has been painted with the same strokes by the same brush.
Who knows? Warrick may turn out to be a career criminal. Or a solid citizen. Or a preachy sports columnist who’s always whining about how we’re on the road to hell. *
SPEAKING of ethics, Evander Holyfield-Lennox Lewis II, a pay per view rematch made for suckers, approaches. Reader P.V. of NYC has a good question:
If all the people who watch pay-per-view boxing matches on illegal “black boxes,” discarded those boxes and began to pay for the bouts, would the promoters, the networks and the cable systems begin to charge less for pay-per-view boxing?
The answer is no. Pay-per-view’s profiting parties have established $50 as the going rate for “attraction” fights, not because that cost absorbs the unpaid fees of signal pirates, but because they’ve found that they can get away with charging 50 bucks. *BARRY LANDERS, 17 years the radio voice of the Islanders, calls his first NHL game in two years when he fills in for Kenny Albert on tonight’s Rangers-Avalanche (WEVD, 1050 AM). Landers will work two other Ranger radiocasts, Nov. 20 and Dec. 4.
Lookalikes: Bob Negrin of Manhattan submits Jim Fassell’s laminated play card and the menu at the International House of Pancakes … All these guys pointing to the heaven after scoring touchdowns, you’d think one of them would point to the offensive line.
If the Mets were to land Ken Griffey Jr., they’d move even closer to an entire lineup that doesn’t run to first base … Tony Paige, WFAN’s affable boxing man, will be inducted next week into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.
