College Sports

Errol Flynn he's not, but Michael S. Steele swings a meaner sword than your average lieutenant governor. Reviving a brief and less-than-stellar collegiate career as a fencer, Maryland's No. 2 has picked up the blade again in recent months - dueling students, a fellow politician and even challenging his boss, a gridiron star - and says he is discovering new joys in the ancient sport. "It really is like riding a bike," Steele said. "That skill never leaves you." In March, with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. in attendance, Steele thrust and parried with members of the St. John's College fencing club.

Professional sports leagues and college sports generally are doing a decent job when it comes to employing people of color, but the sports world is falling behind in relation to the number of women being hired and retained, according to a recent study. Yesterday, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida released its 12th Racial and Gender Report Card, a comprehensive study of the racial and gender makeup of players, coaches and front office or athletic department employees in various professional sports and college sports departments.

Area colleges and universities have long known that summer camps are a good way to fill vacant campus space during the slow season. And they're finding an added benefit: recruitment. "A lot of our programs focus on attracting young people to the campus who maybe have never stepped foot on a college campus before," said Marsha Logan, administrative specialist for the Office of Continuing Studies at Morgan State University. "It gives them an idea of what being on a campus is like. And it starts them thinking about going to college - and maybe making Morgan their choice."

May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy, by Andrew Zimbalist. Brookings Institution Press. 224 pages. $24.95. If history is any guide, the cracking of bats that will punctuate Opening Day at Camden Yards a week from tomorrow will amount to an all-clear signal for fans to take their place in the bleachers and forget all that messy talk about strikes and contraction that loomed darkly last season. This is unfortunate. For, as Andrew Zimbalist demonstrates in May the Best Team Win, the grand old game's troubles did not evaporate in the warmth generated by last year's last-minute contract settlement by the team owners and players.

It's one of the richest events in college sports - a made-for-TV extravaganza with a $30 million overall payout - but the Orange Bowl won't change the fortunes of the University of Maryland overnight. That's because the university belongs to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which has an egalitarian policy of sharing the checks that roll in from lucrative football bowls and basketball tournaments. The idea is to use the success of any one team to boost all nine schools in the conference and to keep the figurative playing field level.

I LIVE in a region where a lacrosse stick is more likely than perfect SAT scores to get your child into a top college or university. Every parent in Maryland, and particularly Anne Arundel County, knows this, so when my daughter finally got around to picking up a stick - at the advanced age of 12 - my husband and I began to spin daydreams of Princeton and Duke. And, because my daughter cannot escape the messages in this hotbed of lacrosse, she asked fearfully if she would have to give up basketball, soccer, the mall, the telephone, cartoons on Saturday morning and Teen People magazine to excel in this crowded sport.

IF FLORIDA STATE beats Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl next month, as many as a half-dozen teams, each with one loss, could claim they deserve college football's national title. Miami and Oregon State. Washington and Florida State. Oklahoma and Virginia Tech. Each could have one loss and a cause to lobby. Perfect. A complete fiasco. Just what college football is supposed to be. Of course, then we'd hear from the Playoff Pod People, who surface every year, like gnats in humidity, railing against the unfairness of it all and whining about a playoff tournament being the only way to determine a clear-cut No. 1. As if they can't put one foot in front of another because a little corner of their world isn't as clean and ordered as a boot camp barrack at morning inspection.

Let's say the investigations targeted Steve Blake or Lonny Baxter, two Maryland starters who attended prep school. Let's say one of them had received tuition aid from a third party outside his immediate family, then been suspended by the NCAA. Coach Gary Williams and Maryland fans would react with justifiable outrage -- the same outrage that others have expressed over the past three months with seven other top Division I schools falling victim to the NCAA's latest crackdown. What gives the NCAA the right to penalize a school for an infraction that was committed without the school's knowledge before a student-athlete arrived on campus?

THE POUT FEST started at City College last fall. It was interrupted briefly by city school chief Dr. Robert Booker but then picked up again in January. The culprit -- or hero -- is City College Principal Joe Wilson, who has instituted new requirements for participating in extracurricular activities. Students who are absent four times can't participate, nor can those who are late 14 times. Students have to keep a 70 average, as well as a grade of 60 or better in three classes. Some City students -- and even some faculty -- have a problem with this.

Sport is life. How else to explain our fascination? Like other great allegoric vehicles -- religion, theater, literature -- sport is a window unto ourselves, individually and collectively. Consider three recently published books that address, through the games we play, urgent matters of history, money and race: "The Best American Sports Writing of the Century," edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout (Houghton Mifflin, 512 pages, $30 cloth, 776 pages, $18 paper) vividly illustrates how sporting events express the context of their times.