One of the beauties of a long life is the opportunity to develop a personal history on which to base how you see events and how the view of those events changes with time. When we are young, there is frequently very little experience on which to base our decisions and little to assist us in putting things in proper perspective.

Of course, new employers always want to hire “experienced” people but, unfortunately, we gain that experience through encounters over time. And, there isn’t any substitute for time.

This brings me to the conclusion that many of the events presented by the various news media look a lot different to me today than they might have appeared under similar circumstances a half century ago. As an example of this, when the news media gives us first-hand Skype accounts of the revolution in Libya and I observe some of the automatic weapons used by those trying to depose the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, it is easy to see why certain elements of our political society want to limit our personal ownership of some types of weapons. Apparently, they fear the threat of retaliation to their actions.

Thank heaven, and our forefathers, for the Constitution and the Second Amendment. If those “freedom fighters” in Libya were limited to a few small arms and hunting rifles, they would not long survive against Gadhafi’s well-armed troops. There are always two sides (at least two) to every argument, but simply saying you can’t have a weapon of a certain type is as radical under our Constitution asthe person who wants his own personal army. I don’t think I would have understood that at 20 years of age.

On another, unrelated topic, the recent ad in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette seeking a “review” of the University of Arkansas’ basketball program prompts me to think about the changes in sports programs and the athletes themselves in the last 50 years. As a teenager, my view of sports was of a game to be enjoyed and professional sports were made up of athletes who were better than most of the others and who loved the game for the competition. There weren’t as many professional teams as today and the salaries weren’t in the multiple millions of dollars with long-term contracts. Wide spread coverage of everytype of athletic event from youth programs to television paying billions of dollars for football games has changed the game, the athletes and our expectations. Coaches at the college level are paid more like Wall Street bankers than men who are responsible for preparing a team of athletes to compete in a sporting event. And, we have come to expect a “winning team” regardless of the sport or the level of the competition. One of the television newscasts reported on a drop in the average home game attendance under Pelphrey’s tenure as coach. The attendance was reported to have dropped from anaverage of about 17,000 per game four years ago to about 12,000 per game with a corresponding loss of gate revenue. (There’s that money theme again.)

Before I blame the coach for the lower than desired attendance, why don’t we find out if other teams in the Southeast Conference with similar won-lost records and similar size basketball facilities are suffering lower attendance also. Has television coverage reduced the number of people going to the games in person? Are older people, like our household, not likely to make the game in person but able to see it on television making up for some of the attendance loss? How much has the higher cost of gasoline affected attendance, and, finally, is student attendance up or down relative to other years? Maybe theadministration should be more concerned about them (the students) and less concerned about the alumni. Maybe all this has to do with the economy and the expectations of the alumni not coach Pelphrey.

The young men are recruited for college sports with very high expectations and I’m sure many are emotionally unprepared for the pressure of college-level sports or academic requirements. The amount of money spent to recruit players in any and all sports is an indication of what is in store as they move to a new level of competition. It has come a long way in the last quarter century since my youngest son was a walk-on athleteat the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a very low profile inter-collegiate sport - crew, or as most of us refer to it, rowing. He received no scholarship money even though theteam was among the top crews in the United States.

In fact, the coach included the families of the team members as his first line of revenue in his fundraisers.

Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the then professional World Champion Green Bay, Wisc., football team left the Packers at the height of his career to join another team reportedly as a minor owner. I have always felt another reason played an important part in his decision. The game had changed, and was changing at a much faster pace than at the start of his coaching career, and the compensation of the players was changing the attitude of the athletes themselves. Expectations for the Packers to keep winning was an ongoing pressure, and I can’t help wondering if he justwanted to move on while he still had some control over the decision. Vince Lombardi would probably be appalled at professional athletics today.

I don’t know how the Arkansas basketball situation will work out, and if I write to the Board of Trustees it will be in support of Pelphrey. However, we as the university’s supporters have an obligation to look at our expectations for performance and weigh that against the cost -the cost of the stress on the athletes and the cost of education which is the principle purpose of the University.

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Editor’s note: Leo Lynch, a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at prtnews@nwaonline.

com.

Opinion, Pages 4 on 03/16/2011