Rep. J. Dennis Hastert and Sen. Paul Wellstone might have nothing in common except knowing the vagaries of the half nelson.
But together, the Republican from Illinois and the unabashedly liberal Democrat from Minnesota seek to ensure a singular opportunity for younger Americans during their college years: thrusting one arm under the corresponding arm of an opponent, generally from behind, and placing the hand on the back of the opponent’s neck.
That’s a half nelson. It’s a move used in amateur wrestling, a sport that unites Hastert, a full-bodied member of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s leadership team, and Wellstone, a bantamweight man of the Left whose cauliflower ears are a reminder of days of being slammed to a mat.
The two are pressing legislation that would help practitioners of the sport they love, to the chagrin of university and college officials, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and colleagues such as Rep. Tim Roemer. Roemer is a conservative Indiana Democrat whose district includes Notre Dame, where he did graduate work, and eight other colleges and universities.
The two are pushing for new federal oversight of college and university athletics in an attempt to boost survival chances of smaller, non-revenue-producing sports such as wrestling.
Like everything else on the planet, athletic departments are in flux. The reasons include financial pressures on all schools and the need to cut costs. But they also include what is commonly known as Title IX.
Enacted in 1972, it requires schools to allocate athletic resources equally for men and women. Title IX remains controversial, especially among men (including male coaches) who feel they somehow have been discriminated against. Opportunities for women have been boosted, but some male athletes have lost out because of the court-approved mandate that the total athletic slots at a school mirror the student body’s male-female composition.
Last week brought a typical example: The University of Louisville announced it was adding women’s softball, golf and rowing but ditching men’s indoor track.
The school’s president said the purpose was to assure gender equity, by raising to 49.5 percent the female students playing athletics.
It’s that forced fidelity to percentages that drives schools and athletic directors batty. The athletic director of an elite small college told me Friday that while he supports gender equity, he firmly believes it would be smarter if the number of programs offered men and women, rather than actual athletic positions, were the criterion.
Thus, if men slightly outnumbered women, you might have 14 sports for men, 13 for women, regardless of the actual positions.
The problem is underscored at big Division I schools with huge, money-making football programs. A big-time football team may have 120 players, with 80 on scholarship. To compensate for those scholarships, those schools may have to scour the land for women of perhaps intramural-level talent in cross-country and crew, and give them scholarships as full as the starting quarterback’s, just to be in compliance.
The easing out of certain non-revenue-generating men’s sports has been the demise of many programs, including nearly three dozen wrestling programs. In recent months, St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., Bismarck (N.D.) State College and Miami of Ohio have indicated that wrestling is a goner.
That frustrates Hastert, a longtime former high school wrestling coach who himself wrestled in high school and at Wheaton College, and Wellstone, a top-notch high school and college wrestler.
Hastert, a member of the Illinois Wrestling Coaches Hall of Fame, has proposed an amendment to a huge, pending education bill that would require four years’ notice by a school’s administration of any plans to change funding for, or to kill outright, smaller sports.
He’s especially sensitive to kids at smaller, or Division III, schools who don’t get big scholarships and don’t have much chance of being professional athletes. “But they love their sports, and maybe they want to be coaches,” he said.
If a school drops a sport, a student can often “be left in the lurch. We’re asking the schools to give notification.”
Hastert is quick to note that he’s not bashing Title IX, which he calls a “wonderful thing.” His wife was a girls athletic coach and still teaches physical education. He recalls when women were relegated to intramural sports.
But he believes that Title IX has unintended consequences, especially in trying to guarantee that athletic slots be proportionate to the male-female breakdown of the whole student body. Seeking to raise women’s opportunities, men’s slots are dropped.
“I believe this is a fairness issue,” Hastert said Friday. “Kids should know what will happen to their sports programs.”
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Wellstone doesn’t go quite so far as insisting on such prior notice. His proposal, attached to a separate bill in the Senate, would bar institutions from killing or reducing funding or participation levels for a sport without providing a public “statement of justification.”
In addition, he seeks a requirement that institutions disclose the capital and operating budgets for each sport, as well as the percentage of the total sports budget represented by each, and that they offer an appeals process.
He, too, was an amateur wrestler and later coached. Unlike heavyweight Hastert, Wellstone was a 126-pounder who twice lost in the finals of the Virginia state championships and was Athletic Coast Conference champion at the University of North Carolina his sophomore year.
Both his sons have wrestled, including one who was a Minnesota state high school champ. The dad maintains that wrestling helped shape his own, initially tough-guy personality in a positive manner by instilling discipline.
The NCAA and the education establishment are lined up against Hastert and Wellstone. Their officials have met with both, and on Friday Hastert received a letter from former University of Illinois President Stanley Ikenberry, now head of the American Council on Education, and Cedric Dempsey, executive director of the NCAA.
They’d be willing to pursue a “multifaceted strategy” to protect student athletes, they wrote, including encouraging colleges to “notify student athletes as soon as a decision has been made and to maintain scholarship funding for enrolled athletes receiving such assistance.”
Hastert and Wellstone said they’re willing to talk, but it wouldn’t seem that the Friday proposal would go far enough, though it likely would please Roemer.
The Golden Domer believes Hastert’s proposal would “set a dangerous precedent of federal government intrusion into an institution’s ability to design its programs or formulate its budget.”
The debate is passionate and may reflect the aggression that is essential to wrestling itself.
While NCAA lobbyist Gloria Dixon insists the number of wrestlers coming out of high school has dropped 37 percent, Gary Abbott, an official with the sports governing body in Colorado Springs, said that’s baloney.
For sure, at least one form of wrestling is undergoing a renaissance, albeit a playfully perverse one.
Unfortunately, I did not have time to contact Hulk Hogan for his views on this week’s House debate on HR 6, the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1998.