More college application theories

A reader writes:

The guidance counselors at my school were notorious for giving horrible advice for getting into college. When I was in high school, my school was considered one of the better public schools in the state and the nation. The bad advice that everybody at my school got was to be well rounded. This is crap. Most universities will take somebody that is very good at one thing no matter what it is over the class president. Anybody can join the chess club, the drama club, and everything else in between.

The most obvious place to excel is sports. And you don't have to be some high school prodigy in basketball or football. The Ivy League is loaded with bad sports teams that need warm bodies. Even the sports the Ivies are good at (wrestling and lacrosse) need warm bodies to sit on the bench, push the starters, and donate to the program when they hit Wall Street after graduation. The second, third and lower strings always donate more than the starters, so being average at your sport and nerdy doesn't necessarily hurt you.

As far as I can tell, the ideal students to admit from the standpoint of maximizing future endowment are the Duke lacrosse team-types: the real student-athletes, not the hired gladiators of the basketball-football arenas (although they have their uses too), but the guys who are a little under the SAT and GPA norm, but make up for it in future earning power and donating predilection: highly masculine, competitive, likely to make big money on Wall Street or in real estate development or the like, and get proud whenever Coach K gets the basketball team to the Final Four and writes a big check to the Development Fund.

Of course, as the Duke brouhaha showed, other elements on campus hate the lacrosse-types.

I wonder how well the admissions staffs really understand their jobs ... I met a prep school admissions director who really understood what he was up to -- he conducted rapid fire interviews of 8th graders to see how much they knew rather than the usual insipid dialogues that pass for interviews in America -- and he had succeeded in dramatically raising the profile of his high school in a decade.

But colleges are bigger and harder to change in less than a generation. The main way for a college to improve its reputation is to luck into a gigantic endowment, which it can use to buy smart students and famous professors. Insider trading has made more than a few college reputations. For example, my old college, Rice U. got the word in 1930 to buy land in East Texas from George R. Brown of Brown & Root, the oil field services giant that was the parent of Halliburton. Sure enough, one of Brown & Root's clients hit the biggest oil find of the era, only to discover that Rice U. had bought up a lot of the promising land in the field. Half a century later, I got a nice little scholarship out of it.

More benignly, Grinnell in Iowa, which now has the fourth largest per capita endowment in America, had two members of its Board of Trustees come looking for investments in the 1960s: alumnus Robert Noyce, who got Grinnell to invest in the little start-up he and Gordon Moore were launching to build his 1959 invention: Intel. And a local businessman hit them up for an investment in his firm Berkshire Hathaway. His name was Warren Buffett. So, now Grinnell pays professors an average of $100k annually to live in a town where $100k would buy a nice house.

But it still takes forever. I recall getting a lot of mail from Washington U. in St. Louis, which has long had a huge endowment, offering big scholarships to National Merit Scholars, but who wanted to go to a college that nobody had ever heard of? Well, by now, it's as fashionable as Duke or Northwestern or just about any non-Ivy other than Stanford. But, jeez, what a long time for its strategy to pay off ...

For the women, field hockey and volleyball are great for getting into good schools. Another obvious strategy is to apply to a major with low numbers (don't apply as a biomedical engineering major to Johns Hopkins or as a history major to Harvard) and switch after getting in. This can be easier at some schools than others. The football team at my school was notorious for football players applying to the nursing school.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The easy way to induce Stockholm Syndrome: Be less brutal than the Americans

I really haven't been following Iran's detaining of 15 British sailors and marines, now released, but I did see (with the sound off) ten seconds of a Brit on Iranian television narrating in front of a large map, presumably explaining how his ship had blundered into Iranians waters. He displayed the perky body language of an enthusiastic young Communication Studies major auditioning to be an ingratiating TV weatherman, which was reassuring. If the Iranians had been beating him with saps too much, he probably wouldn't have been so damn Katie Couric-like chipper. (On this YouTube clip, he's the second marine, the one who comes on at 19 and 52 seconds.)

So, if you are Iranian, how would you induce Stockholm Syndrome in your prisoners? I'd guess that all it take to play Good Cop is to be less horrible than the Bad Cop Americans are to their detainees. They "were not physically maltreated in any way" according to the Guardian (although it might be too early to be sure of that). Don't waterboard the poor Brits or stack them in big naked piles and they'll be so relieved they'll think you're just swell.

Leon Hadar had a prophetic article in The American Conservative a couple of months ago, "The Persian Gulf of Tonkin Incident," reviewing the confused story of the murky 1964 event that allowed LBJ to get Congressional backing for a bigger American role in Vietnam. The first North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer was probably provoked by U.S. commando raids on North Vietnam, while the crucial second attack probably never actually happened, just nervous sailors unloading on something out in the dark. LBJ laughed, "“Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

We know now that the Brits' mission was to go up to near the watery border between Iran and Iraq territorial seas and collect intelligence on Iran. Looking at this motley crew, they wouldn't appear to be crack commandos assigned to infiltrate Iran, but they might have blundered over the unmarked and disputed border at sea.

"If the incident occurred where the MoD claims, the British position appears strong but there are sufficient uncertainties over boundary definition to make it inadvisable to state categorically that the vessel was in Iraqi waters at the time of the arrest," said Martin Pratt, of Durham University's International Boundaries Research Unit."

With a GPS system, you should be able to avoid that, but mistakes get made in the military. Or the Iranians might have blundered the other way. Or maybe it was part of a complicated Iranian plot to respond to American abductions of Iranians.

In any case, best to just call it all off rather than fight a war over it.

Judging by the palpable disappointment of Bush supporters at the benign outcome of the crisis, they must have wanted this to be a new Tonkin Gulf. But, as Dr. Phil would say, how'd that last one work out for you?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hatfields v. McCoys

I don't think this is an April Fools' Joke. Perhaps they could call it Yosemite Sam Syndrome:

Disease underlies Hatfield-McCoy feud
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones....

The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.

Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk....

Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."

Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.

Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper...

Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.

Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead. ...

"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Randy McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."

"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded. ...

Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.

"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.

"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."

It sounds like a combination of the genetic and social effects of cousin marriage: bad recessive genes and excessive extended family loyalty, respectively. Update - Greg Cochran says it's a dominant genetic disease, not a recessive one.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Hoax"

From my review in The American Conservative (not online) of the film opening Friday, April 6:

Now, "The Hoax" rounds out cinematic Howard Hughes lore with a comic biopic of novelist Clifford Irving (played by Richard Gere), the scamster who brought the world's Hughes obsession to a crescendo in 1971-72 when he extracted huge advances from the greedy and credulous New York publishing and magazine industries for The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. ...

Exciting more controversy is the film's claim that Irving's fake autobiography helped inspire the Watergate break-in at the headquarters of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien, who, possibly not coincidentally, had been Hughes' chief lobbyist.

While overstated, this is not wholly implausible. Nixon had several shady links to Hughes, such as the tycoon's unsecured $205,000 loan to his brother Donald's Nixonburger restaurant chain. Nixon believed the revelation of this dubious deal may have cost him the exceedingly close 1960 election. A decade later, according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, Nixon was irrationally obsessed with plumbing the relationship between Hughes and O'Brien.

The truth is that we still don't really understand Watergate, mostly because, in sharp contrast to the JFK assassination, the media haven't been all that interested in finding out precisely what happened. The good guys won and bad guys lost, they reason, so why bother with details that might muddy the glorious memory?

It's hard to remember now, but JFK conspiracy theories were highly respectable in the media from the early 1970s until Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK" came out, at which point they became unfashionable. And yet, it was always likely that either the FBI or CIA or both had played a larger role in the overthrow of Nixon than in the Kennedy assassination, as was confirmed in 2005 by the revelation that the FBI's #2 man, J. Edgar Hoover loyalist W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat. But, nobody was ever very interested in Watergate after Nixon resigned.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Where are the African-American baseball players and golfers?

April 2007 is the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking into the major leagues (the subject of my 1996 National Review article "How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America") and the 10th anniversary of Tiger Woods monumental 12 shot victory in the Masters.

Ten years and counting
By Michael Arkush, Yahoo! Sports

Tiger Woods' 12-shot triumph at the 1997 Masters was about more than one man conquering a golf course and his competition. It was about a member of a race long mistreated capturing one of the sport's most prized possessions - the green jacket - for the first time. It was also about hope.

The Masters, which did not have an African-American participant until Lee Elder in 1975, would never be the same. Nor, presumably, would the game itself. Soon there would be other blacks to join Woods on the PGA Tour, surely within 10 years.

Well, it has been 10 years since Woods' historic win, and he is still the only black golfer on the PGA Tour.

Here are my two articles from April 2003 explaining this historic non-trend:

The Decline of the Black Golf Pro

The Decline of the Black Caddie

Similarly, African-American participation in baseball is constantly declining. As I explained in my 1996 National Review article "Great Black Hopes:"

Similarly, a group can tire of a career or pastime even if its members tend to be better than their rivals, if they enjoy more glittering opportunities elsewhere. This helps explain the strange tale of blacks and baseball over the last few decades. Within pro baseball, integration has caused segregation by position. The Negro Leagues starred legendary pitchers like Satchel Paige and catchers like Josh Gibson, but African-American Major Leaguers now concentrate primarily in the outfield, where their edge in speed counts most.

Even more unexpectedly, after African-Americans fled Southern segregation, they began specializing in basketball and football at the expense of what had long been their favorite game. Pundits often blame a shortage of baseball diamonds in the inner city. Yet, immigrants from rural Mexico haven't forsaken fastballs for free throws. More astute observers point to the decline of patriarchy in the black ghettos, since a love of baseball is best passed on by fathers playing catch with sons. Perhaps most important, however, is that black Americans have found baseball, with its straight-line baserunning, less suited for expressing their creativity than basketball or football.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Iran releases captured British soldiers

As your mother might say, "Now, isn't that nicer than fighting WWIII?" This was shaping up to be the stupidest conflict since the War of Jenkin's Ear, but, fortunately, sanity prevailed, although, as happens distressingly frequently, Iran's President Borat gets to act saner than America's President Bush.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Good Shepherd," now on DVD

It's a surprisingly respectful history of the CIA (or, as the movie points out, only lame-os not in CIA call it "the CIA") directed by Robert De Niro and written by Eric Roth as told via a central character based on James Jesus Angleton (played by Matt Damon).

Now, Angleton, who ran CIA's counter-intelligence operation for many years, was a pretty interesting fellow, half Mexican by descent (his unWASPy middle name is "hay-zoos"). His many enemies within CIA thought he was a paranoid loon. But, in this movie he's the most buttoned-down boring WASP spy imaginable. Damon's CIA man is so superhumanly affect-less that he never even notices that he's married to ... Angelina Jolie, who seems to have no more idea than the audience why she was cast in a role better suited to, say, Chloe Sevigny (who calls herself "another Aryan from Darien.")

The point of "The Good Shepherd" is apparently for a Catholic director and Jewish screenwriter to show that WASPs are boring, which is hardly the most slanderous thing anybody has ever said about WASPs. De Niro brings his old buddy Joe "I Amuse You?" Pesci out of retirement to play a Mafia don hired by Damon to assassinate Castro. Pesci enunciates the ethnic subtext of the movie:

Joseph Palmi: You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition ... What do you guys have?

Edward Wilson: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

If the alternative is rule by the likes of the twitchy maniacs that Joe Pesci normally plays, the movie seems to suggest, being bored by Matt Damon isn't so bad. The problem, though, is that for De Niro and Roth to get their message about WASP tediousness across, they made whole film a little boring.

That said, it's a relatively serious, informative film.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Children of Men," now out on DVD

Alfonso Cuaron's movie version of Tory Baroness P.D. James' quiet sci-fi novel Children of Men about a world where no baby has been born in two decades is is just about as intellectually brain-dead as V for Vendetta (which I reviewed for American Conservative here), politically correct tripe all the way. If the human race were dying out, what would the biggest issue be? According to Cuaron it would be ... mistreatment of illegal immigrants!

It doesn't get much stupider than that, folks.

But Children of Men has a few advantages over V for Vendetta as a movie. Children of Men has Clive Owen, who has a classic movie star's face -- handsome but world-weary, Cary Grant meets Humphrey Bogart. (Why isn't he James Bond instead of that thuggish-looking guy?) V for Vendetta, in contrast, has somebody in a stupid Guy Fawkes mask.

Second, Children of Men has some distinctive visual direction with loooong tracking shots that excite people who play first-person shooter video games.

As somebody has pointed out, however, this first person gimmick undermines the first advantage -- Clive Owen's great face -- because to get a reaction shot from the star during the two 10 minutes segments without cuts, the cameraman has to laboriously swing the camera around 180 degrees to look at Clive, then back 180 degrees to the action. The one long tracking shot that knocked me out was not the two celebrated shoot-em-ups but a roughly 90 second funereal shot of Clive after his friend has been killed as he wanders aimlessly into the forest -- toward the camera so you can watch him emote the whole way. That's what you pay a movie star to do.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Sorry about the lack of new postings

Computer problems. Does anybody know whether it's yet safe to buy a new computer (desktop or laptop) with Microsoft Vista loaded on it?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Children of Men," now out on DVD

Alfonso Cuaron's movie version of Tory Baroness P.D. James' quiet sci-fi novel Children of Men about a world where no baby has been born in two decades is is just about as intellectually brain-dead as V for Vendetta (which I reviewed for American Conservative here), politically correct tripe all the way. If the human race were dying out, what would the biggest issue be? According to Cuaron it would be ... mistreatment of illegal immigrants!

It doesn't get much stupider than that, folks.

But Children of Men has a few advantages over V for Vendetta as a movie. Children of Men has Clive Owen, who has a classic movie star's face -- handsome but world-weary, Cary Grant meets Humphrey Bogart. (Why isn't he James Bond instead of that thuggish-looking guy?) V for Vendetta, in contrast, has somebody in a stupid Guy Fawkes mask.

Second, Children of Men has some distinctive visual direction with loooong tracking shots that excite people who play first-person shooter video games.

As somebody has pointed out, however, this first person gimmick undermines the first advantage -- Clive Owen's great face -- because to get a reaction shot from the star during the two 10 minutes segments without cuts, the cameraman has to laboriously swing the camera around 180 degrees to look at Clive, then back 180 degrees to the action. The one long tracking shot that knocked me out was not the two celebrated shoot-em-ups but a roughly 90 second funereal shot of Clive after his friend has been killed as he wanders aimlessly into the forest -- toward the camera so you can watch him emote the whole way. That's what you pay a movie star to do.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

From Commentary:

For $2.95:

Jewish Genius
Charles Murray
April 2007

Abstract –

Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic. But there is a lacuna, and not one involving some obscure bit of Judaica. COMMENTARY has never published a systematic discussion of one of the most obvious topics of all: the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.

I have personal experience with the reluctance of Jews to talk about Jewish accomplishment—my co-author, the late Richard Herrnstein, gently resisted the paragraphs on Jewish IQ that I insisted on putting in The Bell Curve (1994). Both history and the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism in Europe make it easy to understand the reasons for that reluctance. But Jewish accomplishment constitutes a fascinating and important story. Recent scholarship is expanding our understanding of its origins.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

College Fools' Day

My VDARE.com column:

April 01, 2007
Thoughts On College Fools' Day
By Steve Sailer

April Fools' Day is the traditional deadline for American colleges to mail out to applicants their letters of acceptance (thick) or rejection (thin).

The admissions process has been more frenzied than ever this year. Harvard has rejected an unprecedented 91 percent of its record 23,000 applicants. Remarkably, more than 3,000 Harvard wannabes were ranked first in their high school class. The university probably turned down over half of these valedictorians.

Many other elite colleges also saw new highs in applications received. This is due both to the growing convenience of applying to multiple colleges using the Common Application website, and to the ever-growing national (and even global) competition among students to attend a prestigious American college.

College administrations spend vast amounts of money recruiting top high school students. The administrators know that the surest way to acquire smarter, harder-working alumni, who can afford to donate more money to the old alma mater, is to bring in smarter, harder-working freshmen in the first place.

Doing a better job of recruiting is much more likely to have a sizable payoff than trying to do a better of job of, well, educating the kind of students you already get. …

One curious aspect of the college craziness: the seeming self-contempt with which white students at many elite colleges derisively refer to the predominantly white makeup of their schools' student bodies.

Take the Princeton Review's Best 361 Colleges guidebook, which summarizes students' opinions of their schools. An undergrad at well known little Colorado College in Colorado Springs, a school that is only two percent black, declares: "The typical Colorado College student is white and from an upper-middle-class home in a metropolitan suburb, but wishes this weren't true …" It's common for students quoted in Best 361 Colleges to lament the lack of ethnic diversity on their campuses, and to call for their administrations to do more to bring in minorities.

Is this the much discussed (but surprisingly little observed) phenomenon of White Guilt? Or is something else going on?
[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Apply Early, Apply Often

Awhile back, I recommended that ambitious high school students should apply to a lot of colleges, far more than the 4 to 8 of high school guidance counselor lore.

Not only is there a sizable randomness factor in acceptances, there is another, semi-independent source of randomness in financial aid offers. So, if you can't afford to pay more than $40,000 per year, multiplying the probabilities for acceptance times generous financial aid can point out the discouraging unlikelihood of getting the deal you want at the school you want.

Some vastly rich private colleges, such as Harvard, offer "need blind" admissions and fully discount to meet financial need, but the odds of getting into Harvard are 10 to 1 against. Schools that are easier to get into are generally harder to get highly generous need-based financial aid from (although they are easier to get merit scholarships from).

My son brings home the story of a girl at his high school who applied to two dozen colleges … and then at the very last moment added two more and had to beg her teachers and counselors to write recommendations a couple of months after the official fall closing date for such requests.

Well, it turns out that while she was accepted at a number of colleges, many of them stiffed her on financial aid. Fortunately, those last two, the 25th and 26th she added to her list, gave her acceptable financial aid packages. She would be in trouble today if she had stopped at merely 24 applications!

A medical student seconds my theory:

I think you've figured out the secret to getting into a good college, something I discovered myself about 8 years ago. When I was in high school I wasn't motivated to do a whole lot other than my homework, some SAT classes, some hospital volunteering, and a bit of debating my senior year.

That said, I went to Cornell in the Ivy League when a lot of the other "smarter" guys who had gone to my average suburban public high school had to settle for the public U. of Michigan or the like.

Our high school basically pushed hard the idea of "boiling down" colleges you'd want to go to to about 4 your senior year, and then applying to those. I've always been a life long skeptic, and the way I looked at it was that if these top schools have acceptance rates of about 10-20%, you should try to apply to a good number of them to get a spot. I applied to 9, I got into Cornell and Tulane, even though I was overall a mediocre applicant other than my grades and SAT score. I didn't even bother with backup schools, because I knew I could go to U-Toledo any time I wanted and perhaps later transfer to Michigan.

There was one guy who was valedictorian the year before me, who did *everything*. He ended up at U-M, because the only other places he applied to were Harvard and Yale. My year, the other Indian guy in my class (who was a lot more motivated than me) applied to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan. He also went to Michigan - quite disappointed because getting in there certainly doesn't take staying at school everyday until 6 pm for 4 years and winning a whole cabinet full of debate, mock trial, and science olympiad awards; this guy could have easily gotten into Cornell, U-Penn, or Northwestern.

When I applied to 9 colleges my year, it was practically unheard of in the state of Ohio. The guidance counselors and school teachers discourage it purely because it means more paperwork for them.

I'm just amazed that some of these kids spend so much of their youth slaving away at these extracurriculars, and then completely screw up their college chances by applying to too few schools.

The Princeton Review offers a hint of one of the more Machiavellian angles of what's going on behind the scenes that causes your high school guidance counselor to give you the bad advice to limit your number of applications.

"The second possible scenario in safety schools might go something like this: Johnny's app sleeps with the fishes. Admissions committee's might not be receiving the quality apps they want from a certain high school. To hammer their new message home, an admissions office might reject an applicant or several applicants from that high school to set their new agenda in VERY clear terms. Basically, it's a message to the high school that hey, they're not gonna take students of this low caliber—whatever that caliber might be—anymore. Didn't think admissions counselors were such playas, did you?"

In other words, your high school guidance counselor doesn't have your best interests at heart. He has, at best, the interests of future student bodies at heart. If your school develops a reputation for applicants turning down admission offers from colleges, the colleges might retaliate on subsequent applicants from your school.

I don't know, but I suspect that this mostly happens at the elite prep schools that have lots of students apply to famous colleges each year. At run-of-the-mill high schools, counselor over-workedness is a more likely explanation.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Odd Couple

NCAA Basketball Final: the Odd Couple -- Defending champion Florida's most distinctive player is 22-year-old junior Joakim Noah, 6'11" 230 pounds, who is the son of the half-African French tennis player/singer Yannick Noah (who looks like Milli Vanilli) and a blonde model babe. Yannick's French mom was on France's national basketball team. Young Noah is the most boyish-looking (to the point of seeming almost girlish) power forward ever (see UCLA fans having fun with Noah and Photoshop here, but Noah's Florida had the last laugh again today). Yet, he's hyper-aggressive.

In contrast, Ohio St.'s best known player is 19-year-old freshman Greg Oden, who is 7 feet tall and 280 pounds. Facially, he looks like he's 49 and just finished a 25-year sentence at San Quentin for killing the pimp who slashed him with a straight razor. I ran into the great Patrick Ewing when he was 38, and even that magnificent old warrior looked about a decade younger than Oden does at 19. When Oden showed up to high school as a 14-year-old ninth grader, his frightened classmates guessed he was 30. On the inside, however, he's kind of a nerdy guy (he took calculus as a senior in high school and enjoyed it) who mostly seems to play basketball because that's what you are supposed to do when you are 7 feet tall and 280 pounds of muscle and gristle.

Oden reminds me a little of another Ohio St. prodigy/oddity, football running back Robert Smith (not the Robert Smith who leads The Cure), who took a year off from football at Ohio St. because practice was getting in the way of his favorite classes. Smith, who looks to be about half white / half black, is a dedicated amateur astronomer. After he led the NFL in rushing in 2000, he retired at 28 because he had all the money he needed and he could still walk.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer