Take the money and dribble

by David Benjamin

 

“We don’t go steady, ’cause it wouldn’t be right

”To leave your best girl home on a Saturday night.”   

—The Beach Boys, “I Get Around”

 

MADISON, Wis.—Notwithstanding the moral clarity articulated in “I Get Around,” the Beach Boys are among the less appreciated ethical philosophers of the past millennium. More’s the pity, because the burgeoning era of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) marketing in collegiate athletics has thrown into sharp relief one of the Beach Boys’ most urgent moral messages. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about Chucky Hepburn’s abrupt and seemingly disloyal forsaking of his teammates on the University of Wisconsin basketball team.  

To all appearances, Chucky’s absconding from the Badgers to Louisville University is a flagrant repudiation of an American tradition expressed eloquently by the Beach Boys sixty years ago: “So be true to your school now/ Just like you would to your girl or guy/ Be true to your school now/ And let your colors fly.”

You see how, in these four lines of doggerel, America’s surfin’ philosophers have subtly bonded Saint Paul’s stern theology of marital monogamy with a more humanist devotion to one’s social, educational and spiritual milieu. One finds a similar strain of moral guidance in other Beach Boys tracts, including “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows (What I’d Be Without You),” and “Don’t Worry, Baby.” Listen closely, because the Surfin’ Safari ethos delves deep into the human condition—into the importance, for example, of ratiocination, confession, atonement and vicarious forgiveness in the lyrics of “Help Me, Rhonda.” The Beach Boys evoke the power of love to sustain and uplift human spirituality in “Good Vibrations,” a song that skirts the realm of glossolalic mysticism with its hypnotic and contagious dénouement, “Do do do do do do do do do … ” (Etc.)

Of course, I’m not exactly a congregant of Our Lady of Laguna Beach. I’m hardly justified in accusing Chucky Hepburn of being faithless to his erstwhile alma mater. After all, I changed colleges, too, although with an almost three-year interim. And I didn’t do it because I got a better offer. There was a girl involved.

On the other hand, before college, I developed an exceptional affection for my high school, named La Follette after a legendary Progressive politician. In four years there, I experienced a sort of social osmosis, absorbed into a surrogate family of friends, classmates and sympathetic teachers. From ninth grade on, I made a conscious effort to shed my bashful diffidence, to barge in and immerse myself among my peers, to not be on the outside looking in wistfully (or resentfully), but embracing my community, competing and bonding, learning and forgetting, signing up, dancing at dances and cheering at games. 

Later on, I took that adolescent loyalty to an adult extreme, participating in reunion committees, giving the occasional speech and, in the last seven years, sponsoring a scholarship program honoring—and giving money to—young writers. 

My high-school experience tempts me to wonder what Chucky Hepburn has gained and what lost. In an era of soaring college costs, he is and will continue to be a free rider. For three years, he has received, gratis, an education at one of America’s great, historic land-grant universities from which a degrees is a badge of excellence and erudition. As of the most recent rankings and despite a former governor and a current legislature hostile to its mission and principles, UW-Madison remains ranked among the 35 foremost universities in America. In contrast, Chucky’s new school—beyond its tenuous reputation as a basketball factory—is currently ranked No. 195. 

Academically, Chucky faces a precipitous loss of prestige once he receives his degree—if he ever does. He’s not Kentucky-bound with plans to bone up on trigonometry and kinesiology. He’s heading to Louisville to audition for the National Basketball Association …

… which represents a significant risk. Chucky’s position on the team is point guard. By my estimate, there have been at least five previous point guards at the University of Wisconsin better than Chucky. Only one had a career in the NBA. Devin Harris played fifteen years as a professional, averaged 10.8 points per game and appeared in one All-Star game. 

Whatever his fate, though, Chucky is due for at least a one-year NIL windfall. Louisville offered him a Don Corleone deal, made possible by the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s vastly liberalized “transfer portal.” Rather than the NCAA’s metaphorical doorway, I see the new transfer rules as a sort of basking shark that cruises the gyms and playing fields of America higher education, filtering swarms of athletic plankton through its entrails and expelling—from its opposite end—billows of waste that nourish trailing schools of sardines and anchovies. 

Chucky’s job, from now ’til March Madness ’25, is to avoid becoming anchovy chow. But even if he makes it to the NBA, he will suffer a loss of which he might never be aware. 

Regardless of whether you’re a sports star or a mere face in the crowd at Commencement, sticking with the same school from beginning to end leaves an impression most of us cannot forget, even if we want to. Whether you loved it there, slept through it all or got bullied into contemplating suicide, there’s something strangely profound about being true to your school. It leaves an indelible stamp on your identity that ties you to everyone thrown together there who lasted ’til graduation and created along the way memories populated by one another and bonded by adherence to the place where we met, studied and shirked, argued and fought, cheered and lamented, grew together, grew up and grew apart.

I’m not sure if Chucky was true to his school—or schools—before he came to Wisconsin from Nebraska. He might have been one of those blue-chip jocks who spent his formative years as an athletic nomad, skipping from one AAU team to another, transferring from a AA high school to a AAA prep school and upward. Whether he ever had a chance to settle down, hang with regular kids, go to prom and learn the words the school fight song, who knows?

But the regret that I feel, both for Chucky and me, is that he had a chance, after three years in Madison, regardless of his senior-year performance and his NBA prospects, to be revered forever as a local hero. He could have been remembered warmly by a community that’s as true to him as he might have been to his school. He would have been always welcome among a great multitude composed almost entirely of people he had never met, but who would tell him how grateful they were for the slivers of joy he imparted while dribbling, passing and shooting on their sedentary behalf. 

With the blessing of the NCAA, Chucky has kissed all that intangible, non-remunerative crap goodbye. He’ll never get it back, because jilted fans—even the nice people of Wisconsin—never forget. 

So, it’s probably best that Chucky moves on and never looks back to ponder what he so suddenly disdained. He has secured, after all, his thirty pieces of NIL and he’s too young to remember the Beach Boys.