The return of Chip Hilton
Sep. 16th, 2002 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaI thought about mentioning this in my other journal , but it seems more general interest rather than a Chron-specific criticism.
Beautiful contradictory articles in the sports section today. Some old white guy praising the re-issue of the "Chip Hilton" series of sports books for 8-13 year olds. For those of you who haven’t read them, which I assume is ALL of you, the basic theme is that Chip Hilton, a god-fearing, authority-obeying, good-student-who-attends-class, star jock is confronted with some kind of adversity, (team-mates who cheat on tests, Crosstown High’s unfair advantage in recruiting, girls who would distract from THE TEAM or THE GAME, etc.) and through hard work and the coaching of appropriate authority figures, Chip and team emerge victorious in the end. I guess they modernized the "jargon" (I read them too long ago to know if that is metaphor for racial slurs) as an example for today’s youth.* In these books, coaches, teachers, parents, and the clergy never fail to give the right advice.
Then a couple of pages later we see the example of a real coach. Cal Women’s Basketball coach was fired for firing an assistant who became pregnant. She denied she told the assistant to get an abortion or be terminated herself. This alone might not have been the end for Coach Stanley, but it seems the University had already had to pay off on a lawsuit in 1997 where it cost them $20,000 because she called a student a "black bastard". Stanley denied this and claimed she hadn’t said that at all. Her defense? She says she told the student, "I will kick your black ass, you bastard."
Oh, ok then.
I read almost all the Chip Hilton books as a kid and though the difference between the fictional and real life coaches above may not have been quite that far, it was an early lesson in not believing everything you read.
I
Beautiful contradictory articles in the sports section today. Some old white guy praising the re-issue of the "Chip Hilton" series of sports books for 8-13 year olds. For those of you who haven’t read them, which I assume is ALL of you, the basic theme is that Chip Hilton, a god-fearing, authority-obeying, good-student-who-attends-class, star jock is confronted with some kind of adversity, (team-mates who cheat on tests, Crosstown High’s unfair advantage in recruiting, girls who would distract from THE TEAM or THE GAME, etc.) and through hard work and the coaching of appropriate authority figures, Chip and team emerge victorious in the end. I guess they modernized the "jargon" (I read them too long ago to know if that is metaphor for racial slurs) as an example for today’s youth.* In these books, coaches, teachers, parents, and the clergy never fail to give the right advice.
Then a couple of pages later we see the example of a real coach. Cal Women’s Basketball coach was fired for firing an assistant who became pregnant. She denied she told the assistant to get an abortion or be terminated herself. This alone might not have been the end for Coach Stanley, but it seems the University had already had to pay off on a lawsuit in 1997 where it cost them $20,000 because she called a student a "black bastard". Stanley denied this and claimed she hadn’t said that at all. Her defense? She says she told the student, "I will kick your black ass, you bastard."
Oh, ok then.
I read almost all the Chip Hilton books as a kid and though the difference between the fictional and real life coaches above may not have been quite that far, it was an early lesson in not believing everything you read.
I
