Nothing But Net (Gain)?

I'm still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life. – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.

The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.

Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like rehabilitation institutions, prematurely sexualizing them, encouraging them to engage in sexual intercourse and then branding thousands of them sex offenders when we catch them on the wrong side of the statutory rape laws.

But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)

Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)

I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.

As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”