Fight On Still Matters To Me
Dear Athletic Director Bohn –It broke my heart to read your letter of 10:20pm last night in my inbox this morning, as you reinforced support for one of the most immoral and unscientific decisions a body of bureaucrats has ever made in the history of college athletics. This decision to cancel the 2020 football season has no basis in science, as the overwhelming evidence pointing to both the extraordinary ability to effect successful mitigation and the complete lack of severity or mortality in college age youth attests. This is a “mob” bureaucracy decision, rooted in any number of factors, but it was not made with the best interests of the student-athlete’s health in mind.I will bet you any amount of money you want that there will be more COVID now as a result of this decision for these athletes than there would have been in the confines of a structured season. Of course, that is an obvious and common sense conclusion anyone could have reached had that actually been a priority.I have loved the ethos and spirit of the university more than any person you will ever meet since the day my father died almost 26 years ago, leaving me all alone in the world as a 20-year old Trojan with nothing but the spirit of Fight On to get me through the world. I consider being a Trojan part of my identity as a person. But I am devastated to see the university I love so willing to throw “fight on” out the window, and punish these innocent young people for no reason whatsoever with such a profound disregard for science, facts, and data.History will not judge this decision favorably, as your letter so arrogantly suggests. I am not a belligerent member of the USC family. I am one of about four people on planet earth who has defended to the moon the retention of Coach Helton, whom I adore as a person and member of the Trojan family. I have never written a letter like this, and never will again. But this is a matter of right and wrong for me, and what you have done is a heartbreaking letdown of your fiduciary duty to these young men. When the mob comes, sometimes what the men and women of Troy are supposed to do is FIGHT, not surrender and capitulate. I manage the money of more Trojans than you would believe, and I cannot tell you how disgusted my clients are by this decision.I will be a Trojan for the rest of my life. But for many of us, that now means something very different as it pertains to our relationship to the University of Southern California. One day, I hope the University will re-find Troy. I didn’t leave USC; it left me. And yesterday, it left it’s entire student-athlete community behind by supporting this outrageous decision.