Paul Hewitt Talks with US Congressman Steve Cohen About Cohen's Comments

(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

It makes it worse that the people he is referring too are, in general, African- American youths.

That isn't the quote that upset Hewitt. It was the other three, specifically the way that Cohen spoke about Thaddeus Young. Young, who happens to hail from Cohen's district in Tennessee, was a 4.0 student in high school and left Georgia Tech in good academic standing.

It wasn't just the fact that Cohen blatantly insulted a former player of Hewitt's. Cohen also basically said that getting an education is worthless endeavor for these kids, and that the majority of them simply do not care about schooling. Again, I don't know what he was intending when he said it, but even I got a sense of racial undertones when reading it.

Not surprisingly, Hewitt was upset when he learned of these comments and demanded an apology from Cohen (follow the link, Hewitt's comments are long and, for the most part, scathing in nature).

"Saying a young man choosing to go to school at Georgia Tech, whether it’s one year or four years, is a mockery, I just didn’t think that was an accurate statement and I thought it was somewhat damaging," Hewitt to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We know what we have here and the type of kids we bring here.

...The value of an education for a college basketball player is as significant as for anyone in the country, and I don’t think we should ever downplay that."

Hewitt and Cohen spoke over the phone, and apparently they were able to hash out their differences peacefully. In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, Hewitt said that he was "satisfied with their conversation", but didn't get into what was actually said.

The most ironic part of all this?

Hewitt and Cohen agree on the age issue. Hewitt supports a system similar to that of baseball, where players can go straight to the pros, but if they go to school, they need to spend three years there (personally, I say two years, because it will mean more talent will end up in the college ranks, but the three year argument makes it very easy for a kid to earn his degree in that time if he attends summer classes for each year).

This is what I will leave you with. The gist of what Cohen was saying was essentially correct, and if those quotes came from a group of friends (regardless of race) talking sports, then it is what it is.

But if you are a congressman representing a region that no doubt has a black population, then you cannot be quoted in the New York Times using such rhetoric.

The bottom line is that there is a perception that "jocks are dumb", which isn't entirely untrue. But there are plenty of kids playing a Division-I sport at a very high level that are incredibly intelligent and that could succeed in another career path, just as there are plenty of morons out there that simply are not athletically gifted.

People drop out of college all the time. Musicians, actors, construction workers, and even guys like Bill Gates leave school before earning their degrees to pursue careers. There are also a lot of professional athletes that go back to school to earn their degrees.

Remember the uproar over Vince Carter's decision to go back to North Carolina to graduate during a playoff series?

So while the NBA's age limit is an exploitative rule that is in place to allow the NBA (and, to a certain extent, the NCAA) to maximize their profit margin, using stereotypes and generalities to argue the issues is not the way to go about changing it.

There is a silver lining, however. Maybe this little dust-up will bring the problems of the 19-and-1 to the forefront, and will help in eventually getting it overturned.

You're currently logged into Facebook

Do you want to share your Bleacher Report activity on Facebook?