The bills for a $2.7 million beach house in Madison must be expensive, because UConn basketball Coach Jim Calhoun groused that he doesn’t make enough money.

 

"I'm underpaid," he said to this reporter while walking into the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce breakfast Monday, July 20 at a hotel in Cromwell.

 

Calhoun and his wife Patricia purchased an 1850 vintage 3,300 square foot oceanfront cottage at 43 Soundview Avenue in Madison, CT on November 30, 2005 for $2.7 million. See the property card from the Madison assessor here.

 

Without divulging the price tag publicly, Calhoun mentioned his summer home while introducing NBA All-Star Caron Butler as the Middlesex Chamber's Role Model of the Year.

 

Butler is an American miracle, a street urchin from the slums of Racine, Wisconsin who beat all odds to make the pros via UConn's NBA pipeline. Butler is also a tireless philanthropist and volunteer, giving back to his community.

 

Yet the subject of Calhoun's remuneration lingers five months after his tirade over even having to answer questions about being the highest paid state employee at $1.5 million annually during a severe budget crisis.

 

Since that February 22 blow-up, Gov. M. Jodi Rell has negotiated $637 million in salary givebacks from state employee unions. This week, Connecticut reported an 11 percent decrease in tax revenues during the first quarter of 2009, a $400 million income drop that is sure to result in deeper cuts to state services.

 

Calhoun and his meaty salary continue to be politically untouchable, as he enjoys the adulation of voters, like the friendly 500 packed into a bland ballroom to hear him and Butler speak.

 

More importantly, Calhoun enjoys the patronage of the Chamber and its leadership. For example, Middlesex Chamber president Larry McHugh is the new president of the board of trustees at the University of Connecticut. The joke was made about McHugh being Calhoun's new boss.

 

And without prompting, Anthony Assante, the chair of the Middlesex Chamber, defended Calhoun's salary.

 

"Caron Butler is a testament to Coach Calhoun," Assante said. Assante, a banker, looked like the Beaver, with a green baseball cap and t-shirt over a shirt and tie.

 

"Coach," Assante said, "as far as I’m concerned, you're worth every penny."

 

An argument can be made that Calhoun earns his $1.5 million in state dollars, even in hard economic times. Calhoun has become the face of the state for those Americans who follow college basketball. He sends more players to the NBA than any other school in the country.

 

But he has a 22 percent graduation rate for black players. And at the Chamber breakfast, he revealed his disdain for academic achievement when he suggested that honored guest Caron Butler would not understand a passing reference to "Gone With The Wind."

 

Butler left UConn for the NBA after two years, so chances are he didn't get deep enough in school work to take the "Representing American Slavery" literature class offered by UConn's English department.

 

There, Butler might have heard a critique how the movie version of Margaret Mitchell's paean to plantation life portrays slavery as a benevolent institution populated by Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas.

 

As shocking as Calhoun's implication that a former UConn student like Butler lacks a passing familiarity with an American literary masterpiece, the condescension should shock more.

 

Though Calhoun fancies himself a munificent patriarch, he works in an industry that draws comparisons to the ante-bellum South.

 

No less a writer than New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden penned a book in 2006 called "Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete."

 

One reviewer says Rhoden "examines the damaging effects of what he calls the conveyor belt in the contemporary sports world, where children as young as 11 and 12 are pegged as prospects and viewed as potential sources of income through middle school, high school, and college."

 

Athletes are starting to fight back against the business cartel that is the NCAA. Former college basketball star Ed O’Bannon on Tuesday, July 21 filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to reap royalties that the NCAA collects from licensing images of amateur athletes.

 

But what do kids from the streets know about these kinds of business deals? At age 15, Butler carried guns, sold drugs and habited jails. But he could hoop, and the NCAA was an escape from a warzone that has claimed his handful of childhood best friends.

 

Butler wept as he told the Middlesex Chamber audience that Calhoun was like his father.

 

You've got to think that Butler wonders daily why he was the lucky one who got out alive, why he was the lucky one who could interrupt vacations in the Bahamas to accept awards for charity work, and why can't he use his millions to buy survival for those murdered friends.

 

Urban youth development guru Geoffrey Canada calls it the Superman Strategy: if we haven't got the kids reading at grade level by fourth grade, we have to expend superhuman effort to insure they catch up and make grade level as they age. But we don't.

 

Whether or not Calhoun is a Superman, is it appropriate to expend so much of the rationed youth development dollar on an industry like college basketball that makes so very few rich?

 

The Horatio Alger plot line succeeds with lottery like odds – not often, but when it does, it's huge. The tougher the odds, the better the success story makes us feel.

 

If the rags-to-riches mythology didn't inspire, we couldn't sit at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, listening to pitches for health insurance for pets when millions of Americans lack health insurance at all, congratulating ourselves for lifting one poor child to fame and fortune when millions more remain mired in poverty's pit.

 

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