Scholarship Winner Quotes

Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need-—through the appeal of vicarious success—-to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.

I met them in Minneapolis when the Society hosted a brunch for this year's winners and gave us these oversized checks they had us pose with. The picture made the front page of the Le Sueur News Herald. It was really embarrassing because I'm smiling with my eyes shut. And if that wasn't bad enough, Russ made a huge copy of the photo, replacing the background with a highway scene and the check I was holding with a sign that said NEED RIDE TO STAR TREK CONVENTION.

He helped start the March of Dimes, did numerous benefits, worked for Jewish refugees in World War II, and established a $5,000 college scholarship fund for young essayists and orators. The fund, begun during the Texaco shows of the 1930s, was tainted when the first winner was discovered to have plagiarized his piece word for word. But Cantor stayed with it for a decade, putting a dozen youths through school. Cantor died Oct. 10, 1964.

In the wake of Columbine, many people have come forward to share their own stories of hidden pain with me. I find it striking how many of those stories come from so-called perfect kids: the science-fair winner, the track star, the young musician offered full scholarship to the conservatory of her choice.... In many cases, though, these kids were able to fly under their parents radar precisely because they were the shiny pennies, hiding the terrible pain they were in from their parents as capably as they did everything else.

Harry Mount hints at the possibility that I was admitted to Magdalen in 1960 because my father had been senior scholar there a quarter of a century earlier. I was, in fact, the winner of an open scholarship; Mr Mount should learn the difference between genetics and nepotism.