SUPER BOWL PROMISES FAME, FORTUNE - AND DELUSION.

Byline: Earl Ofari Hutchinson

WITH all the Super Bowl hype going on this weekend, I keep thinking of University of Nebraska running back Lawrence Phillips.

Phillips was arrested and sentenced to probation and counseling for assaulting his girlfriend. He was suspended from the team. When Nebraska coach Tom Osborne reinstated him there were howls of outrage from the media and campus women's groups. Osborne didn't relent. Phillips went on to have a big game in Nebraska's national championship victory over Florida in the Fiesta Bowl.

Phillips had barely gotten his uniform off when Osborne told him to "go pro." Osborne claimed he did it to save Phillips from further difficulties (harassment) if he stayed at Nebraska. Spare me.

Osborne certainly must know that the average shelf life of a pro football player is three to five years. With no degree, no professional training, and no real future, what will ex-jocks like Phillips do when their playing days are over?

Osborne got his national championship, massive media exposure, a huge revenue boost for his football program, and an inside track on blue chip high school recruits. Phillips and company made this possible. Now he was expendable.

Phillips is no exception. Thousands of black athletes are rudely dumped after the coaches have squeezed the last inch of athletic mileage out of them. It happened to me.

I starred in football in high school and college. Books were a vague afterthought. Coaches fawned over me as long as I produced on the football field. When I was injured, that changed. My football usefulness had ended.

After a frustrating first year in college I was put on academic probation. The coaches and alumni were suddenly too busy to help me find a tutor, mentor or get proper counseling. I learned the hard way that without a degree and professional training, my career prospects were dim.

Many black football players still haven't learned that lesson. They dream of big pro paydays. This is pure delusion. The chance of a black high school athlete making it in the pros is one in 18,000. Only 2.3 percent, or 215 of the 9,500 college football seniors, will be drafted by the NFL.

A group of black high school athletes was told that the odds against them making a pro team were nearly impossible. Fifty-one percent still believed that they could beat them.This might be worth the sacrifice if colleges would educate them. Many still refuse. The 1994 report card on the graduation rates for black athletes at 50 Division I schools was an abomination. The majority of the schools graduated less than one-third of their black players. Four graduated none.

The coaches and administrators at these schools go through verbal contortions in an effort to rationalize their failure to educate their athletes. They insist that the non-graduates transfer, drop-out of sports or turn pro.

This is nonsense. Only a tiny percentage of the more than 8,000 college players are eligible for hardship status in the NFL. Few of them choose it. Most of the athletes don't transfer. Those who dropout succumb to the intense pressure of trying to juggle practice and travel with their supposed classroom duties.

Many football players waltz through three or four years at colleges and still emerge as educational cripples. Their course curricula is the tip-off. How many courses in algebra, English, history and chemistry do they take? Now, how many physical education, craft and general studies courses do they take?

Many blindly pursue pigskin dreams for another reason. Football, more than any other sport, mirrors the best and the worst in American society - competition, greed, selfishness and violence, as well as the spirit of cooperation, organization, achievement and heroism. It is also an exclusively male preserve, rife with the sexism and misogyny. It's America's masculine rite of passage.

Football reinforces the prized male virtues of strength, toughness, and aggression. Male fans engage in ritual bonding. They identify with players, assume their personality and have a socially-approved outlet to act out aggression, often times against women. The staff at women's shelters routinely put extra operators on their hot lines during the Super Bowl every year to handle the increased number of complaints of spousal violence.

Football resembles a military camp with a rigid hierarchy, defined roles, iron-clad rules, and an emphasis on discipline, order and heroism. O.J. Simpson is the best example of a defrocked hero whose exploits remain frozen in the public mind even after he crashed from public grace.

There's a message in the tragic saga of the fallen American sports hero: African-Americans must demand that colleges educate and prepare black athletes for careers outside of sports.

Black professionals and educators must create academic self-help programs to recycle young blacks from sports junkies to serious students. They can provide educational scholarships for academically sound athletes and establish career counseling, job and skills training programs.

Black parents whose sons or daughters are involved in athletic programs must hold coaches, teachers and school administrators accountable for their children's courses, grades and campus activities. If their sons or daughters don't perform in the classroom, they don't get to perform on the field or the court.

Super Bowls provide fame and fortune to the Deion Sanders and the Emmit Smiths, but for countless others it provides only delusions.

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Photo Super Bowl A ticket to delusions. Associated Press