Ron Harper announced earlier this week that his prodigious son, Bryce, will forgo his final two years of high school eligibility to pursue a professional baseball career.
Bryce, 16, who was the first high school sophomore to be named a first team All-American by Baseball America and has been called “the LeBron James of baseball” by Sports Illustrated, will take classes at the College of Southern Nevada over the summer and receive his GED in the fall.
If everything goes as projected, Bryce would be eligible for the 2010 Major League Baseball Draft, and most analysts predict that he will be selected with the first overall pick by the Washington Nationals.
Harper, a catcher who batted .626 with 14 home runs and 55 RBI in 2009 for the Las Vegas High School Wildcats, is an unquestioned physical marvel, and he has a legitimate chance to flourish one day in the professional ranks.
Nevertheless, many skeptics have been critical of Bryce’s father for placing such an inordinate amount of pressure on his teenage son and for making a mockery of our nation’s educational system.
“There are going to be critics. I can’t worry about what people think,” Ron Harper said. “People are going to see what they want to see and say what they want to say. I think this prepares him for life, playing the game of baseball.”
The patriarch of the 6’3”, 205-pound phenomenon continued to defend his decision and he assured his detractors that his son will be afforded with a quality education.
“People question your parenting and what you are doing. Honestly, we don’t think it’s that big a deal. He’s not leaving school to go work in a fast-food restaurant. Bryce is a good kid. He’s smart and he’s going to get his education.”
It is fair to presume that Bryce Harper will not be serving food to Walter, Donny, and the Dude at an In-N-Out Burger location at any point in the future. Few precocious athletes have ever garnered the attention that Bryce Harper has, and some of his feats on the diamond have become things of legend.
Sports Illustrated wrote in their issue last week that Harper hit a 570-foot home run over: “The right field fence, two trees, another fence, a sidewalk, five lanes of traffic on elevated South Hollywood Boulevard, and yet another sidewalk, until it finally landed in the brown, undeveloped desert.”
Still, for every successful wunderkind like LeBron James, there are always sad stories of young athletes whose potential went awry. For reference, one simply needs to recall names like Todd “Marijuana-vich” Marinovich and Jennifer “five-finger discount” Capriati.
Todd’s father, Marv, once said, “Some guys think the most important thing in life is their jobs, the stock market, whatever. To me, it was my kids. The question I asked myself was, ‘How well could a kid develop if you provided him with the perfect environment?’”
What is “the perfect environment?” Hopefully, Bryce Harper will find it.
http://www.newyorkyankeesnews.com/colin815/weblog/7690/will-bryce-harper...
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