Big men on campus, cut to size

Ellis Henican: April 19, 2006

Ah, college life!

We send our best and our brightest to the finest universities of the Southland so they can ...

Set up raucous party houses.

Host underage-drinking binge nights.

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Hire exotic dancers to get naked for them.

And in the sullen afterglow, one of these hollow examples of modern manhood fires off a demented e-mail threatening to kill a stripper and cut off her skin.

So these are the big men on campus today? The leaders of tomorrow, giving it the ol' college try?

Let's all hope not.

Eager to blow off a little steam, at least one of these coddled sports stars slipped away on a road trip to our nation's capital, where the male-bonding rituals included getting arrested in a sidewalk assault accompanied by anti-gay slurs.

Apparently, this is what passes for entertainment among today's top scholar-athletes, the highest-ranking graduates of Chaminade and Delbarton and other fine suburban high schools.

The Washington beat-down is the crucial piece in the story behind the story here, hinting at the central character flaw that comes back later to threaten everything.

Tom Wolfe warned us about such plot twists in his novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons," set among the untouchable athletes at a fictional Duke University.

"Lacrosse," one of Wolfe's characters confides, "is one of the only two sports where white boys are the ones with the machismo."

The other one is ice hockey.

Wolfe actually had a gang-rape scene in the book, which he excised from the final manuscript.

Back to real life: Maybe Blue Devils really is something more than a nickname for Duke's athletic squads.

For two 20-year-old sophomores on the Duke lacrosse team, both from high-income suburban ZIP codes around here and fine Catholic schools, the landscape just got even uglier.

At dawn yesterday, police in Durham, N.C., arrested Collin Finnerty of Garden City, a graduate of the highly regarded Chaminade High School, and Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., who played his high-school lacrosse at the similarly prestigious Delbarton School.

Now the North Carolina grand jury has formally charged the pair with raping and kidnapping a young woman who'd been paid to strip at an off-campus party for the lacrosse team.

Now, we have to say loudly and clearly that only two young men have been charged. And neither of them has been convicted of raping anyone. An indictment, of course, is just an allegation. Through their attorneys, Finnerty and Seligmann deny everything.

But still.

For better or worse, these are our young achievers. We sent them out into the world. And whether we like it or not, their actions reflect on all of us.

And if this is what athletic prowess and stellar SAT scores buy today, how can any parent ever sleep at night?

The headmaster of Seligmann's school in Jersey put out a statement yesterday, unreservedly backing him.

"Knowing Reade Seligmann as well as we do here at Delbarton," said the Rev. Luke Travers, "I believe him innocent of the charges included in the indictment."

How could the headmaster possibly know what happened so far from high school and nearly two years away? He can't possibly. But his refusal to face the ugly facts as they are now emerging mirrors all of our own.

He - and we - need to confront this dreadful and unfolding story before it gets too far beyond us and all of us are subsumed in a kind of home-team defensiveness.

Some plain and explosive facts have to be confronted, uncomfortably.

The players are white. The accuser is black.

They come from the privilege of tony New York suburbs. She's a single mom, working her way through a third-tier Southern state college, however unconventionally.

And when the case is ultimately presented, the accused college athletes will have lost all their home-field advantages, figuratively and literally. The promising boys will be swaggering men no more.

The venue will be Durham, N.C.

The accuser will be a local.

In a rare role reversal, so seldom seen, town will stand up to gown this time.