I once read a short story about a man meeting a star school athlete 20 years on. The once glamorous champion is now a shabby bore talking endlessly of long ago matches and insistently showing off the newspaper scraps which are all that remain of his forgotten triumphs. When his friend tries to go on his way, the faded hero clutches his arm, desperately reluctant to see his glory day memories fade back into reality.

In Jamaica this painfully familiar tale often has a more tragic ending. School athletes - envied by boys and flocked by girls – frequently end up here not pitiful bores but criminals. Encouraged to focus all their energies on sport, many fail to gain even a rudimentary education. A lucky one in ten thousand might become professional athletes. But the normal career path for the illiterate is gunmanism.

Sporting contests often produce fascinating drama and sometimes generate a compelling sense of national unity. They can also have lasting symbolic resonance - Joe Louis’ knock out of Max Schmelling became not just another boxing match but an emblematic repudiation of Nazi racism. And in future years Brian Lara’s 1999 Sabina Park double century might well come to represent a last stand of the West Indian identity against American television pop culture.

Once upon a time the sports arena was a moral theatre where how you played the game mattered more than the result. But as recent cricket bribery revelations have shown, money’s cold power can render even national pride meaningless.

Participants whose livelihood is at stake are understandably earnest about winning. But even at the professional level most athletic triumphs are fleeting. The vast majority of games are just ways of passing time pleasantly which no grown up onlooker takes too seriously.

It is a sad spectacle to see adults treat a game whose result will be forgotten in a week as a life and death issue. What matters it now who won the 1988 Manning Cup or 1976 Champs? But it is a serious thing when adults virtually destroy young people’s lives in puerile wish fulfilment. Which occurs too often in our most popular sport, football.

What Pele calls ‘the beautiful game’ can be an immensely attractive spectacle and is the greatest war substitute ever invented – Britain, France and Germany now battle only in the World Cup. But all pretence of sportsmanship has vanished in today’s game. Diego Maradona was a gifted athlete but a pathetic human being with seemingly no self respect or concept of decency. He scored a goal with his hand and boasted of it, was kicked out the World Cup for drug use after swearing to the world he was ‘clean’, and is now a pitiful cocaine addict. Yet he was and still is idolized by millions. Many argued after his 1994 drugs expulsion that he should be allowed to play despite everything, because he was still the world’s best footballer and nothing else mattered.

This same mindset makes many local school authorities encourage impressionable teenagers to ignore their studies in the quest to win the Manning or Dacosta Cups. Some even reportedly ‘buy’ players, as if they are running football clubs and not academic institutions. Now it is understandable, if not excusable, when illiterate men with few other distractions from life’s problems become violently upset when their team loses. But there can be no defence for educated persons who lose perspective in the same manner.

What are high school principals thinking when they have boys on the football team who cannot read and write at 18? Do they care nothing for these young men’s future when their brief moment in the sun is over? Do they think a few months of glory will compensate them for the lack of ability to earn a living as an adult? Don’t they see that they are practically manufacturing criminals?

But instead of reprimanding such boys for their academic shortcomings and making them do something about it, many school authorities pamper ‘ballers’ deemed essential to the team’s chances and tolerate their most arrogant and disruptive behaviour. These youngsters naturally come to think of themselves as ‘stars’ to whom ordinary rules do not apply and carry this sense of entitlement to special treatment into adulthood. The indiscipline of Walter Boyd, and countless others like him, did not start when he played for Jamaica - it was ingrained in his schoolboy days. Lamenting over such wasted talent now is shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. The time to address the problem was at age 10, not 25.

But football is not the only culprit. The same mentality is at work in track and field. Coaches intent on winning Champs have ruined scores of talented teenagers who might have gone on to gain glory for their country and themselves. The Jamaican athletes who have gained international success in recent years have usually been second tier high school runners here. They were not urged to overstrain their immature bodies (nor, as rumour has it, to take drugs at times) to win points for the alma mater. Is it not criminally unconscionable for those who should be protecting youngsters’ welfare to sacrifice their future for short term and ultimately meaningless goals?

There are some athletic programs that emphasise overall development and not just physical prowess - Munro College is a shining example. But such a sense of responsibility is all too rare.

It would be foolish to ban sports from schools or to discourage boys from playing them. Youngsters seem to have an instinctive love for sport which no power on earth can change. But this enthusiasm should be channelled and used as a carrot leading to more lasting accomplishments. From the very earliest days the message should be drummed in – no homework done, no exams passed, no football. The current academic standard for athletes – 45% in at least 4 subjects including physical education – is pitifully low, but it is a start.

Sport is often a mirror reflecting a society’s values. “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” the Duke of Wellington allegedly remarked. Witnessing the selfishness that those in charge display towards young athletes, one is tempted to say that the Jamaican war against crime is being lost on our football pitches and running tracks.