In Indecent Times

Most of us, it would seem, don't want virtue in our sports. We don't have room for it.

Maybe that's why so many Americans scoff at the Europeans and the South Americans and the Africans and the Asians and their soccer. With all it's drama of heroes and villains, of politics and morality and national tragedy, we just can't relate.

In America, who cares?

This week, the NCAA announced that it will vacate the University of Memphis's 2007-2008 Men's Basketball season. On the one hand, this story is really something, considering that (1) the decision concerns a team that made the Final Four and was generally considered the best in the land for most of the season (2) the controversy centers around the deceitfully concealed ineligibility of Derrick Rose, the college game's best player that year and a young man who may end being one of the most memorable NBA players of his generation and (3) the man captaining the ship at Memphis was none other than John Calipari, the highest paid coach in college basketball and a man who had another Final Four vacated thirteen years ago after scandal involved with cash and - oh yes - prostitution payments to players came to light.

On the other hand, once again, who cares?

Certainly not John Calipari, who'll make over thirty million dollars over the next eight years at his new gig at Kentucky. Not Derrick Rose, who's onto bigger and better things with the Chicago Bulls. Not the University of Memphis, which had been a virtual basketball unknown before the Calipari years put them on the map.

Don't look to CBS Sports: they got their money last March regardless. And don't look to ESPN and or the curmudgeonly, coffee-soused sportswriters of America's newspapers: they're free to issue a few obligatory complaints, but they've got to move on. The Dark Prince, Mike Vick, is quickly approaching.

And who can blame them, we suppose? We've gotten to a point where there is so much money and television and corrosive incentive involved, can we really be surprised when they go this way?

It's even hard to get riled up about Calipari. Sure, in less relativist times, he would be excepted to serve as a moral example, a leader who shaped young men above all else. But as Rick Pitino might say, John Wooden is not walking through that door, fans. Dean Smith is not walking through that door and John Thompson is not walking through that door.

This is the college the basketball we have. And this is the man who, in many ways, is it's new king.

If you want to blame anyone, blame the NCAA - the sniveling, fangless, effete little watchdog who lets this stuff happen time after time. By failing to deter any of the players involved, they end up encouraging rather than discouraging cheating.

And of course, like their revolving door counterparts on Wall Street and in the Steroid-soaked Major Leagues, they coincidentally get rich along the way.

How long till the World Cup starts?