When I read the story of Ed Martin, a black kid who grew up in the segregated South and wanted to be someone, I found myself getting angry. Not at Martin. Yes, he did wrong, and had embraced the cult of worshiping young athletes as celebrities and demi-gods.
He wanted to make a difference and be somebody other than a blue-collar electrician who had fled the segregated rural South. As a boy, he had big dreams in a world that told him he wasn’t allowed to dream at all. If he didn’t always follow the rule book, for too much of his life in the North as well as the South, he had been told he wasn’t even allowed to play.
But after that fateful car accident involving Mateen Cleaves happened, and the resulting investigation revealed Martin’s role in bankrolling the players, it was clear that many people had to have known something about what was going on.
Too many university officials were like Claude Rains in Casablanca; the corrupt little local official who was shocked, shocked to learn that gambling was going on in the casino. Universities, or at least university athletic programs, tolerated people like Martin because they were useful recruiting tools. Besides, they were supposed to help prevent the players from dropping out.
The students themselves mostly thought only of putting up big numbers, and a multi-million dollar contract with the NBA, and presumably thought the world owed them a little cash now. To me, the tragedy was that Ed Martin, a man with considerable gifts of his own, risked everything and violated the law in order to please a bunch of essentially spoiled tall teenagers.
He was, like so many of us, trying to establish a part of his life that he owned, and could control. I suspect that is why so many people, millennials especially, want to be tattooed. Perhaps more than anything else, this illustrates the generational divide. According to a Harris research poll taken three years ago, only about 13 percent of baby boomers had a tattoo.
But almost half – 47 percent – of millennials did. The poll defined millennials as those born between 1980 and 1997. My guess is that the percentage is even higher today.
Personally, on an emotional level, I find this all disturbing. I grew up in a world where the only tattoos I saw were fading anchors and eagles on the arms of men who had been in the United States Navy during World War II, and the numbers on the arm of the nice, if sad-faced man who worked the counter of the coin and hobby store in my neighborhood.
I knew what those numbers represented, and I knew enough not to ask. He had survived the Holocaust, of course, something else I came to associate with tattoos.
Young people don’t think of that. They think of using their bodies to make a personal statement, and of their bodies as a living canvas they can control.
My guess is that very few realize that tattoos change and fade as our bodies change, and that what looks cute when you are twenty may look ghastly when you are fifty. I know that few realize that tattoo removal is painful, expensive and not easy. I do know that polls show that as time goes on, more and more of those who have been tattooed regret it.
All I know is that all lives change, sometimes in a flash. Committing yourself lightly to something that marks you forever may not be the smartest way to go.
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