Big men on campus, cut to size

Ellis Henican

April 19, 2006

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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.

Ellis Henican Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

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.