A few years ago, when my state was facing a major budget crisis and funding for education at all levels was being threatened, I suggested on a statewide message board that funding for athletics should be cut before funding for actual classroom education was touched.  This suggestion ignited a firestorm.  As a joke, I then pretended to be a student who had moved from another state and was astonished and disappointed to discover that my new university had no university-sponsored program in clogging.  I explained that at my previous university, in my former state, there had been such a program in competitive clogging, and that we had even been supplied with attractive powder-blue uniforms and had represented our college at clogging matches all over the nation.  I ASSUMED that this story would be met with derision and would help illustrate the absurd lengths to which universities go to compete in sports.

To my great surprise, many people wrote in suggesting that they, too, thought it was a shame that there were no university-sponsored clogging teams in our state.  They provided all sorts of detailed advice about how to get such programs started and how to help promote clogging at a varsity level.  They were NOT being ironic; they were being perfectly serious. 

Later I discovered, through an internet search, that there are indeed college-sponsored clogging teams throughout the country (!!!) and that one of them, in North Carolina, even wears the powder-blue uniforms I had invented out of my imagination.  Just another example of the old adage that truth is often stranger than fiction.

I was reminded of all this by the discussion, on another thread, about the influence that athletic supporters (I use the term advisedly) have had on the mess at USM.