Pay To Play

Your boy's quite the athlete. You've got a six figure income at your disposal. Put the two together, and the lad's off to sports camp, sessions with personal trainers and private coaches. In my part of the country, I see it all the time.

There's a booming business in athletic training, and it's not necessarily geared up to get the lad into college on a scholarship. When money meets a child's spark of interest, the fire's stoked and set to blazing. Pitching coaches, hitting coaches, shooting coaches, defense coaches, offense coaches, rebounding coaches, and on it goes ad infinitum. Junior's performance is a reflection of his parents' financial means.

So what becomes of the little lassie who's not so sporty? Mammy and Daddy want to indulge her interests as well, and so the girl who thought maybe she might like to be a writer or something like that when she's old, around thirty, gets a book packager to give her a leg up.

Unfortunately for Kaavya Viswanathan, her book packager led her down the garden path and straight into a charge of plagiarism. The accusations are flying, but isn't this just a case of the parents getting what they paid for? Their lovely daughter became a published author and got into Harvard, and that's what the money was invested in. It is said that the girl couldn't actually write very well, but the book doctors of 17th Street Productions churned out a best-seller. Okay, so they had to use some stuff from someone else's best seller, but they were hired to fix a manuscript, and, well, accidents happen.

Did Kaavya have Megan McCafferty's books on the brain when she penned her first draft? Highly possible in an impressionable young woman who was undoubtedly under tremendous pressure from her parents to excel. Well meaning folks, Mr. and Mrs. Viswanathan, but sometimes a competitive parent can push too far and send their fragile youth into a tailspin.

How many boys have been coached out of a sport, pressed to do well when all they want is to have fun? Kaavya may have been ghost-written out of Harvard and out of any future publishing deals.

Or she might just write a memoir of the ordeal and show up on Oprah's couch, whinging about her overbearing parents and the mess they've made of her young life.