COLUMN: Reading the newspaper, from back page to front

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99A reporter once confronted Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and asked him why, despite his position as one of the most powerful men in America, he insisted upon reading the sports page first thing in the morning. Why didn't he read the the front page or the editorials instead? Tonight, in case you've just crawled out from under a rock -- or the Van Pelt stacks -- we play Princeton for sole possession of first place in the Ivy League. With any luck at all, we'll all be reading about "man's accomplishments" tomorrow in the sports page of this very paper, specifically the accomplishments of our men's basketball team. I realize that many of you couldn't care less about Penn athletics or sports in general, but for me at least, collegiate sports has a special place in my heart. In my opinion, college athletics represent much of what we admire about the human race. Hard-fought games played for the sake of competition, athletes battling their personal limits as much as their opponents. It's easy to admire those who enter into such competition. Collegiate athletes dazzle us with their skill as well as their love of the game. Furthermore, there are no labor strikes in collegiate athletics. The NCAA, needless to say, has never had a work stoppage and there's something to be said for that in this day and age. My love affair with collegiate sports, however, began long before I could consciously compare them to their professional counterparts. My father is a sports columnist for The Chattanooga Free Press and has been for as long as I can remember. Since my parents are divorced, time with my busy father usually meant time shared with his job, which was just fine with me. While most of my friends were sitting at home on fall weekends, I was off with my dad at some college football game. In the southeastern United States, I should add, there's little else that can compare with spending Saturday in a football stadium. Since I was with my father, I could wander all around, talking to reporters in the press box and players in the locker rooms. Seeing as how I was the only 10-year-old wandering around the locker room, players treated me well, gave me their T-shirts and jerseys and always took time to talk to me. In the winter, football ended and basketball season began. My dad didn't cover as much basketball as he did football, but he always made it to the college tournaments in March. I had gone to six straight Southeastern Conference conference championships by the time I was 15. When Shaquille O'Neal, then of LSU, got into a brawl with Tennessee's team in 1992 and was ejected from the tournament, Georgia's power forward, who was sitting next to me, lifted me up above the crowd so I could see. The year before, I watched Kenny Anderson single-handedly lead Georgia Tech back from a 24-point first-half deficit to defeat an LSU team led by O'Neal and Chris Jackson in the NCAA tournament. In high school, I watched as Duke's Grant Hill battled Glen Robinson of Purdue in the NCAA regional finals. For some of you, none of that seems too exciting. But for a sports fan, experiences like that are ones you remember forever. At home, I remember my mother, a teacher and part-time coach, sitting on her bed grading English papers while watching whatever college basketball game was on ESPN that night. She used to drag me to her high school games to keep statistics on the bench alongside her. Tonight, big-time college basketball pays a visit to our campus. Duke-North Carolina is big-time college basketball. Arizona-Stanford is big-time college basketball. And, in its own Ivy League way, Penn-Princeton is also big-time college basketball. I'm not going to try and convince all of you who aren't sports fans that you should care about tonight's game. Realize, though, that there's something special about cheering on your team, rooting for them to win. We'll have plenty of time later to read about ethnic strife in Bosnia, civil unrest in Sierra Leone and economic instability in Russia. For the time being, though, we should turn our eyes to the Palestra and to the sports page. I think Earl Warren was on to something when he made that remark about man's accomplishments. Let's all just hope that Penn's accomplishments are on tomorrow's back page.