Revisit of early '80s athletes
makes poignant, compelling book

Battle's End: A Seminole Football Team Revisited
By Caroline Alexander
Alfred A. Knopf, $23
Reviewed by Bob Thomas
Special to the Florida State Times

Fourteen years have passed since Rhodes Scholar Caroline Alexander returned home to Tallahassee and found herself tutoring nine black Florida State freshman football players in remedial English.

Growing up within earshot of Doak Campbell Stadium, Alexander had spent countless hours of her youth traversing the campus where she later earned her undergraduate degree.

Her third book, Battle's End: A Seminole Football Team Revisited, is not about football. It is a collection of narratives of the lives of nine academically ill-prepared former players. Battle's End stops short of condemning big-time college athletics and the exploitation of those athletes, despite the assertion of the publisher, who suggests that the young men were cheated of their education.

Tallahassee residents and Florida State fans may be annoyed by Alexander's fact errors, most of which are misidentified players and places in the prologue. The heart of the text is in the following chapters, where each man talks about his life experiences.

Alexander's jaded view of the state's public education system provides a backdrop for the stories.

"There's something skewed about the way this whole thing is looked at," Alexander said in a recent interview. "These guys are not an anomaly. They are representative of us."

The graduation rates, at least, of the former players--Greg Allen, John Feagin, Darryl Gray, Billy Allen, Lenny Chavers, Pat Woolfork, Orson Mobley, Jessie Hester and Quent Reed--do not suggest failure on the part of the university. Four received degrees; five have successful careers; two have served time and a third is awaiting trial. Woolfork was the only one the writer was unable to locate.

Alexander exposes her own naivete, suggesting that everyone in the world loved to read--that it was simply a question of exposure.

"This was painful," she said in the prologue, referring to the players' massive academic shortcomings. "It was so perverse that this situation could come about."

But after the prologue, the players tell their own stories.

"I thought it would be perverse to edit," she said, which explains the sometimes difficult-to-discern text. Yet that may be the most poignant message from Battle's End.

After all, it was Shavers who said: "Didn't they tell you? We can't write. We ain't got no grammar," after Alexander assigned a brief essay.

As we later learn, Shavers is one of the success stories, a degreed law-enforcement professional, proud father and responsible husband.

So, too, is Greg Allen, FSU's all-time rushing leader, who came home to Milton after a brief professional football career, married his high-school girlfriend, fathered three children and provides for them as a supermarket manager. Allen is several credits shy of a degree.

The stories of Billy Allen and Reed, both interviewed in prison, provide striking contrast. Allen, a vastly talented player who failed at professional football, parlayed his talents as a charmer and con artist into a life of drug dealing. Reed, convicted of armed robbery and jailed for parole violation, lacks personality and direction.

In the years since these nine men were thrust ill-prepared into college, the NCAA has come up with more stringent academic requirements. Universities around the country have made substantial gains in academic support as well.

Alexander's work is neither timely nor indicting, but the "whatever happened to" stories of those nine men in her 220-page work, are no less compelling.

Bob Thomas, a sports writer for the Florida Times-Union, covers FSU athletics.