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General News    H4'ed 2/6/10

The Dumpster in the Shadow of the Super Bowl

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Myron Rolle

As he lived alongside Super Bowl XLI, Myron Rolle was basking in the glow of a successful season at Florida State University. It is rare for a first year player to start for Bobby Bowden's football powerhouse. Myron Rolle had done it. He was also so advanced academically he enrolled at FSU as a sophomore. His success came as no surprise to the people back home in Princeton, New Jersey. They had watched the teenager excel in every facet of life, from school and community leadership to the arts, and from the classroom to the playing fields. His two-sport athletic exploits earned him "#1 Athlete in the Nation" designation from Rivals.com and his football prowess saw him named "#1 Overall Prospect in the Nation" by Scout.com and The Sporting News.

The recruiting battle over Myron Rolle was intense. Football programs from Miami to Michigan to Oklahoma to USC pulled out all the stops. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent around the country to curry favor with him. After al, young men like Myron Rolle could mean TV time and a BCS Bowl birth and millions of dollars to a university. Institutions of higher learning are under tremendous pressure to fund their educational mission. The University of Florida alone must find $7 million each year now, just to pay Urban Meyer and Billy Donovan, two of their more renowned professors of sports technology.

One day when Myron Rolle was a senior in high school he got a cell phone text message. Florida Governor Jeb Bush wondered if he could hang out with the young man on his next visit to Tallahassee. The text message might seem contradictory until the importance of FSU football to the former governor is taken into account. After all, Jeb Bush engineered the demise of all affirmative action programs in Florida's colleges and universities and drove minority enrollment to modern record lows. Jeb Bush fashioned a standardized test into a weapon. He dropped the FCAT like a cluster bomb on tens of thousands of 9 and 10-year-old Black children, nipping their potential self-confidence in the cradle. He lobbed it like a grenade into inner-city high schools and smashed the hopes of a thousand Myron Rolles. They got a piece of toilet paper called a certificate of completion rather than a text message. Then again, none of them was 6'2" and ran the 40-yard-dash in 4.53 seconds like the governor's young friend.

Myron Rolle returned from Oxford University to play in the Senior Bowl last month. Going into Super Bowl XLIV he is a Rhodes Scholar, the first major-college football player of his generation to win what is considered the world's most prestigious postgraduate academic scholarship. He plans to play on a Super Bowl winning team some day. He also plans to be a doctor and open a clinic for the indigent in the Bahamas. His pal in Tallahassee, Jeb Bush, is now the former governor of Florida and a former member of the board of Lehman Brothers. While still governor, Bush put Coleman Stipanovich in charge of making decisions for the multi-billion dollar Local Government Investment Pool and the Florida Retirement System.

The now resigned Stipanovich made $1.5 billion in bad investments, $842 million of them purchased through now bankrupt Lehman Brothers. The pension fund now holds $756 million in worthless paper related to the housing market meltdown, almost 8% of its cash holdings. The state's short-term investment fund is faced with similar losses. Jeb Bush won't be losing any sleep over it, though, because the vulnerability has been dumped on Florida's 1.1 million current and retired state workers, hundreds of school districts and local governments, the state-created Citizens Property Insurance, and the state treasury.

Darnarius Green

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