The Clones of Woody Harrelson

by: Steven Hart

Sat Nov 18, 2006 at 10:52:09 PM EST

Gee, kids, how's the big game with Cincinnati going?

Maybe Rutgers University will win big. Maybe it'll lose big. Maybe the earth will open up and swallow both teams at the fifty-yard line and the question of What Might Have Happened On That Magic Night will never be answered.

No matter what happens, the big-time football remains a colossal boondoggle, and the justifications being offered for squandering millions on this nonsense convince me of nothing except this - if the Human Genome Project wants to discover a self-delusion gene, it should take blood samples from members of the Rutgers University administration and the Board of Governors.

I'm glad to see that the lonely band of heretics called Rutgers 1000 is more or less spontaneously reconstituting itself, despite the fact that the Scarlet Knights winning a few games has suddenly made the team into a sacred cow. (For purposes of disclosure, I should note that I took two of William Dowling's classes back in my bright college days, and I know no finer English professor.)

Steven Hart :: The Clones of Woody Harrelson

"The old network is spontaneously coming back to life," Dowling said. "We're examining the remote possibility of saving Rutgers from the Division 1A sports monster."

I'd like to think that a big loss tonight might get some of the pigskin cultists to start asking themselves a few belated questions, but as a member of the reality-based community, I'm not optimistic.

If anything, I'm reminded of the film White Men Can't Jump, when Rosie Perez tries to tell Woody Harrelson that "sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win."

Harrelson's character can't comprehend a single word of what she's saying. Reading the newspapers and hearing the radio squawkers carry on about the Scarlet Knights, I get the feeling that character has been cloned, and handed the purse strings of a major state university.

Cross posted at The Opinion Mill.

Tags: SCarlet Knights, Rutgers University, Rutgers 1000, (All Tags)

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The Clones of Woody Harrelson | 2 comments

Dowling is pretty damn good (0.00 / 0)

I attended a class he taught on The Lord of the Rings books, which was one of the high points of my time at Rutgers. i even learned how to speak some lines of Beowulf in old English. we took a picture with the whole class by an old queens building because he figured he'd never be able to teach a Tolkien class again, and he wanted to have a picture to remember it.
Really he is an interesting fellow. He is also right about the football team. Rutgers recent success doesn't prove that we can compete with the rest of the big east. all it proves is that new jersians desperately want a football or baseball team of their own to rally around. Not that we would pay to have one, but we still would like one.

by: buback @ Sun Nov 19, 2006 at 08:27:09 AM UTC

I took Dowling's seminar . . . (0.00 / 0)

. . . on Samuel Johnson and it was one of the high points of my Rutgers years. I'd have liked to have taken that Beowilf course, too.

My English advisor at the time, Bill Vesterman (another top guy), steered me toward one of Dowling's classes. He said, "I should warn you, the guy's crazy." "I like him already," I said, and both statements proved true -- in the best possible way.

by: Steven Hart @ Sun Nov 19, 2006 at 18:07:14 PM UTC