A toot for the tutors....

Good coaches leave nothing to chance. They have strength coaches for the muscles and tutors for the minds.

The tutors have become the unsung heroes and heroines of the athletic programs. They do it for the money, of course. But most are caring young people who learn to like their "pupils" and work long, hard hours keeping them academically solvent.

That is a theme of an engrossing new book titled Battle's End: A Seminole Football Team Revisited (Knopf). It was written by a British woman named Caroline Alexander who, 14 years ago, was a Rhodes scholar fresh out of Florida State University.

Having never seen a football game in her four years at F.S.U., she was surprised to get a call from the football coach, Bobby Bowden. He had heard she was an excellent teacher and he wanted her to teach remedial English to nine of his freshman players.

Caroline was taken aback when she met her students in a makeshift "classroom" in the cafeteria of the ramshackle old stadium. They were all very young and very large black men, and she nearly cried when one of them told her "We can't write and we haven't got grammar."

Each weeknight for two hours, Caroline had to meet with them and tutor them - not in any special courses to keep them eligible but to raise their sixth-grade reading level.

In a way, the teacher herself emerges as the oddest of the lot. She never was discouraged. She never thought of quitting. She perceived that except for their size and fragile academic talents, they were just kids.

As the year wore on, she began seeing them as individuals: the simple one, the sharp one, the dreamer, the pragmatist.

Another discovery she made was that none of them was stupid. Most were witty and amusing and hugely likable.

And so the year ended and Caroline Alexander went on to teach in Africa and to begin writing historical non-fiction, moving toward the stardom that none of her students ever really achieved.

But she never forgot them. She knew that someday she would have to go back and find out what had happened to them.

That's how Battle End got to be written. Caroline discovered that two of her students, Jessie Hester and Orson Mobley, had careers in the NFL. Two others were in jail, and one had disappeared.

All eight of her pupils are heard in the book, gently guided by their one-time tutor. Caroline now understands who the enemy had been - not stupidity, but ignorance: young people shoved through high school and recruited to build stadiums, athletic programs, and prestige. You are overwhelmed by her intelligence, perception, and compassion.

For us, maybe the most poignant words were those uttered by Greg Allen, who, after a brief career with the Browns and Buccaneers, married his high school sweetheart, fathered three children, and now manages a supermarket.

He is, in short, a pillar of middle-class society. But listen to him...

I would give anything just to be a bookworm, to read, read, read, and just to have knowledge.

And therein lies the haunting thought expressed by Caroline: "I thought if they were exposed, they would all just come to love reading."

And therein also lies the fatal weakness of the tutorial system. Its purpose is not to educate, but simply to get the athletes to pass courses.

"Football Never Unequipped the Athletes for College" (From Battle's End)

It's just too easy to look at these players and denounce them as the barbarians we allowed into the university, or to make them victims. If I had any axe to grind in writing this book, it was my feeling that the public school system is appalling.

Yes, colleges became a powerhouse by recruiting people not equipped for college. But it wasn't football that unequipped them. It was the system that says everyone should go to college, which thus lets high schools off the hook to educate properly.