To Kemba Walker: on the merits of reading a good book as well as playing basketball

Kemba Walker’s play this season was truly remarkable, as was his admission that he read his first book this year, his last at the University of Connecticut.Remarkable too, and more than a little sad, is that so few — hardly a fan and only one or two reporters — seemed to notice or care. The thinking seems to be, “He’s going to earn about $2 million next year, so why be concerned with his reading habits?”Felicia Crump, Walker’s campus-assigned tutor, told Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated she had encouraged Walker to read “Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” by New York Times columnist William Rhoden, during the season. The book, on the exploitation of black athletes, was part of an independent study course Walker was taking on racism in sports as Crump tried to help him graduate in three years by doing extra work. “Before the Final Four, Crump suggested that Rhoden’s book would be the first that Walker had ever made it through cover to cover,” Layden reported. “After the win over Kentucky, Walker confirmed this. ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘You can write that. It is the first book I’ve ever read.’”I didn’t read the Sports Illustrated story but I saw Layden quoted in The Brooks File, NBC30 anchor Gerry Brooks’ website. “Everyone who follows UConn admires Walker for the season he had and for his effort to graduate in three years,” Brooks wrote. “But I’m wondering how you graduate from college (in three years no less) having read one book in your life. And I’m hoping Kemba’s quote reflects pride in that he actually finally read a book from cover to cover. And that he plans to read another one.“Because if he’s proud never to have read a book …” That was apparently enough to cause Walker to back off a bit, telling The Hartford Courant’s Jeff Jacobs, “I read a lot of books, but not just start to finish. I might have skipped some chapters.” Brooks and Jacobs were the only Connecticut journalists I found who thought Walker’s reading habits merited mention.Jacobs acknowledged, “Cynics undoubtedly will raise an eyebrow on how this could be at a major university.”Not only cynics. UConn, at 31 percent, had the third worst graduation rate of all the teams in the NCAA tournament, only superior to Arizona and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. First-round opponent Bucknell has a rate of 100 percent, as does Notre Dame and other big-time teams, which means graduating one’s athletes isn’t an impossible dream.Walker plans to “walk” in this spring’s commencement procession, but still has to “finish two or three online classes” and an internship, so he won’t be exactly graduating. But if he almost makes it in three years and actually does it in four, he’ll be an exception.“We’re talking about a young man who was an average high school student, at best, and who had always been more concerned with basketball” at Harlem’s Rice High School, academic counselor Crump told Sports Illustrated. It is disappointing that there wasn’t a teacher at Walker’s high school able or perhaps, willing, to inspire him to read a book all the way through as he worked to achieve the minimum results needed for a star athlete to gain admission to a basketball college like UConn. But it is dismaying that it took a one-on-one tutor to get him to read a book for the first time at our highly regarded state university. It makes you wonder how much reading other “scholar athletes” do as they pursue an education and work at a job as demanding as playing basketball for half of the school year. The problem isn’t new or just for athletes. More than 30 years ago, I did a TV documentary on kids getting into schools like UConn with reading skills that were mediocre and writing that was worse. I remember a UConn economics professor saying he stopped giving essay tests because reading them was so painful. I’m sure things haven’t gotten better.I hope Kemba Walker graduates soon and enjoys great success in the NBA, but mostly, I hope he’ll find more books worth reading all the way through. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.