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June 24, 1999 Good to be the king  Tom Farrey, ESPN.com
Each day from Tuesday through Friday, ESPN.com examines the relationship between athletes and non-athletes, through the lens of one New Jersey high school where tension exists. Today: The athlete.
BERNARDSVILLE, N.J. -- So these are the glory days.
If you ever wondered what Bruce Springsteen was singing about, spend a day, or even a couple of hours, in the cleats of Dave Melitski, three-sport star of Bernards High School in this tony community an hour or so west of New York City, close enough to the business capital to mine its riches, but distant enough, its citizens hope, to filter its more threatening elements.
Malcolm Forbes is from the area, and so is Meryl Streep, and Mike Tyson once lived here with Robin Givens, but the hero of Bernardsville in recent years, the person who has probably gotten his name in the local paper more than any of those celebrities, the guy who has brought honor to the town and thousands of people to their feet, is Melitski, all-state quarterback and college-bound baseball prospect.
Feel, if you can, the adulation from cheering parents and students as Melitski, in the state baseball championship, dives headfirst into first base to prevent the final out. Contemplate the camaraderie he shares with boys he has played with since his Pop Warner days, as they slap hands in their red-and-white uniforms at the end of another victory. Imagine the sense of ownership that he must have in a school in which everyone knows your name and freshman girls you've never met tell you how much they love your father, who has been teaching there for 35 years.
"Dave Melitski," says fellow student Lisa Kaune, "has the power."
The power?
"Yeah," says the sophomore punk-rock devotee who considers herself an outsider. "Because he's like, head athlete. He's untouchable at our school."
The power. It doesn't come from any organizational chart or vote of the student body. But as sure as acne, it does exist at most high schools across the country, experts say -- and athletes historically have owned a fair chunk of it.
"Athletes bring a form of social capital that I think accrues to them because sports are used as a way to present the school to the public," says Jay Coakley, a University of Colorado-Colorado Springs professor and expert in the sociology of sports. "Sports provide a profile for schools as a basis for promoting themselves and establishing an image. Athletes gain some social capital that they can use to kind of cash in, then, on the status system in the school."
At first blush, that wouldn't seem to count for much at Bernards. The 500-student school is small, less than a third the size of Columbine, the Colorado high school that put a magnifying glass to the relationships between athletes and non-athletes. Bernards has an award-winning band, a well-rounded offering of extracurricular activities, and an academic program that produced four National Merit finalists last year out of a graduating class of 175.
Still, as Melitski walks the hallways of this school with his baseball hat on backwards, he stands out. Teachers ask him about upcoming games, or how his neck is doing. After all, Melitski literally broke his neck while in the service of Bernards, in a wrestling match last year. The accident put him in a brace and kept him from playing football this year, but bravely, he still went on to play baseball.
Just about everyone connected with the school knows that story. As an athlete with 12 varsity letters, Melitski agrees with students, like Kaune, who say athletes get special advantages. "I definitely do," he says, "because in our school we have an exemption policy that if says any athlete taking a gym class can be exempt (and instead) gets a study hall because they're playing a sport after school. Most of the kids in the outcast groups don't have that privilege." What he doesn't understand why Kaune's group of friends -- the students with odd haircuts and clothes, the ones who never go to the same parties -- would resent him and other athletes. He's never asked them if, or why, but he's sure they do hate him, based on several run-ins with them. "Like last year, I had this incident where my friends were joking around and pushing each other in the lockers and I got pushed into a girl, and she was like, 'Don't bump into me, jock!' " Melitski says. "And I was like, 'Whoa' -- he laughs dismissively -- 'whatever.' And I just kept on walking. "The next day this girl comes to school wearing a shirt that says ALL JOCKS SHOULD DIE. It had my football number on it and a slash through it. I was like, 'What did I do? Where did that come from?' " "I don't know," he says, turning introspective, something that might not have happened if not for Columbine, which has made athletes like him start to watch their backs, out of fear that they could be the next target of some angry kid's revenge. "I guess there is that hatred there. But I don't remember doing anything to them." Anything more than what he considered harmless fun, at least. "When I first heard about the Columbine thing, I thought it was really bad because people died," Kaune says. "But then I thought, it's a victory for all the kids who are different. It's a horrible thing to happen, but in a way good came out of it because it kind of scared the rest of the (athletes) to back down. Now the kids in our school think we're going to do something like that. "Maybe they'll know not to bother with us too much anymore." Wednesday: Kaune and friends talk about their underground publication Creative Violence, what athletes have done to anger them, and what they plan to do next.
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Melitski introduces himself.
Bernards student Lisa Kaune says good came out of the Columbine massacre.
