lettertoeditor

Jim Suber: Farm kids face unfair ridicule in athletic world

By JIM SUBER
Special to The Capital-Journal

Sometimes a truth is emitted as a by-product of something else going on.

Being a college football fan, I was watching the Music City Bowl game on ESPN between West Virginia and Mississippi. During a lull, one of the announcing crew held up a copy of Successful Farming magazine. It was the September issue with its All-America team of players from farms and ranches.

"You wouldn't believe how high the GPAs (grade point averages) are on the team," one of the editors told me later after I called to verify a player's name.

But back to the game. The announcer said that West Virginia's senior center, Rick Gilliam, was on Successful Farming's select team. That was when he and the others in the crew started cracking jokes and making banter about farms, farmers and farm magazines, as if to say any real knowledge of college football had to originate from hip young city people employed in jobs and roles such as theirs.

If they really knew the magazine's sophisticated content, they didn't let on. In fact, they joked about its having articles on pitchforks, as if it were for hayseeds and bumpkins. Hearing people "hee-haw" farmers isn't new in small groups or private settings, but hearing it on national television is to me.

They said that Gilliam, a two-time All Big East selection, acknowledged that his teammates tease him for being a farmer. I am wondering why being raised on a farm is fuel at all for being the butt of jokes, no matter how affectionate. Do students single out the offspring of others based on occupation? Are cops, postal clerks, nurses, lawyers, truck drivers and career soldiers joke material?

The farm, by the way, is a dairy near Newville, Pa. It is operated by his parents, Marguerite and William Gilliam, every bit as real as any of the non-farming parents of players one sees on cameras frequently at college football games. I enjoy those parents, but I don't expect announcers to laugh themselves silly because some kid grew up the son of a barber. As a matter of fact, I have never heard an announcer put down any other occupation of a player's parent. Maybe they should in the interest of fair play. Imagine this:

"Joe, they say young Williams' father here used to come watch practice straight from his shift at the limestone quarry. He was so dirty that once in a while the high school staff would ask the father to run around the field to freshen up the boundary lines. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Tee-hee-hee. Back up to you in the booth, Joe."

Another point the episode illustrates is that non-farming Americans spend little time thinking about farmers. This leads me to believe there is an information vacuum out there, and that environmental extremists and other advocates of various causes are beating agricultural publicists to the public with their own versions of agriculture. In other words, farming's enemies are getting a leg up. If the level of understanding today is at the pitchfork and farmer's daughter mark, there should be a fierce scramble by agriculture to correct that.

Oh, I can take a joke. But the young men paid no respect at all to agriculture, or to the magazine's editorial content, which of course is aimed at the most sophisticated and educated farm audience in the world. It claims an audience of 1.5 million, with a subscription level at about 450,000. It is a Meredith publication, based in Des Moines, Iowa. It was founded in 1902.

Obviously, they don't read it in the urban east. One of the editors told me the staff has no trouble finding players for football and girls' basketball teams, but men's basketball is another story. Years ago, basketball was perfectly suited for farm boys. But then schools consolidated, farms consolidated and basketball became a year-round sport dominated by non-farming players from urban areas. Today's college basketball players have no time to milk cows twice a day.

Jim Suber is a former staff writer for The Topeka Capital-Journal. He is an independent regional columnist who writes about rural life and agricultural issues.