Visions All Around

On a day when my only significant accomplishments seem to have been getting my passport photo taken and my application for my passport renewal mailed, I've been indulging in a little time travel -- back to previous passport eras, if you will.



My first overseas trip came late in 1969 and it was a doozy. We flew from New York to Tehran. It was a long flight, obviously, and one of my very first times on a commercial airliner. I'd flown in small planes; one of my college roommates was a pilot, and he sometimes flew us to Big Ten football games on the road. I was a sports writer at that time, and ultimately Sports Editor of The Michigan Daily.



The well-traveled line was that the sports staff was the most radical part of the entire Daily staff, which was probably true. Most of us viewed sports, no matter how much we loved them, within a larger political-economic-social context. We investigated allegations of racism and other aspects of the Michigan athletic behemoth that revealed less than flattering similarities to society at large.



Our work led to the university's first-ever censure from the NCAA, a shocking development for its time. Of course, it was nothing compared to the awful scandal that brought U-M's basketball tradition to its knees -- the gifts to the "Fab Five" players in the '90s who, briefly, were the most talented, flashiest class of freshmen and then sophomores in college basketball history.



The university, under pressure from the NCAA, may have over-reacted, to put it mildly, by renouncing the championships and NCAA final appearances by the Fab Five. To this day, the program has not recovered.



I wonder whether there were any Daily sports editors in the '90s who could have helped prevent this disaster by doing their job as journalists better before the errors became irreversible.

The worst word I ever heard a coach utter was the n-word. It shocked me then and it shocks me to this day. The coach that said it was a southerner, who recruited and coached black players, apparently successfully. Not long after he said that to me, he left the university for a place he found more compatible.

I never even published what he said, because I was looking into whether there might be a pattern of discrimination that could be attached to his time at Michigan, as opposed to what might have been a slip of tongue. There didn't seem to be a pattern, and I was debating whether to reveal what he said when he abruptly announced his departure for distant pastures.

***

From Tehran, I took my second international flight, to Kabul. Soon, Michigan sports and U.S. political issues were distant concerns, as we settled into an unsettled part of Afghanistan stuck in many ways back in Marco Polo's time. The Great Silk Road to China. That's where we lived.

But that's another story.

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