There's something to offend everyone in the allegation that a Passaic High School coach pressured teachers to change an athlete's grades. All the repressed injustices for those of us who lack strength, speed, and therefore sponsorship peek out through the pits in our subconscious like symbolically freighted prairie dogs, as we follow the story of Patrick Sylvester -- football player, star basketball player, whose coach supposedly intervened when the kid's grades dropped below a C-average.

Athletes have to maintain a minimum grade-point level to continue playing, and this technicality threatened to knock Sylvester out of the game more effectively than would a 300-pound defensive end with a glandular problem and a bad home life.

What makes this such a big issue is that it's not just about Sylvester. Most people I know, whether or not they follow sports, agree that the status of athletes overall is basically unfair. People in this country worship football, basketball and baseball players in ways that our more enlightened European counterparts usually reserve for, well, soccer players.

Worst of all is that if you're a good athlete, odds are you have been a good athlete from a very early age. So from an athlete's first agile baby steps, he (for it is usually a ``he'' who receives this kind of treatment) is never in any real danger of looking like a geek -- you know, the way the rest of us do.

As children, athletes are respected and feared by their peers, and receive endless sheets of subsidized pizza from adults. As high school students, they have a guaranteed social niche, and are tacitly allowed to throw the occasional rotten orange at the dorks hanging out in front of the library. In college, grateful alumni supply them with scholarships and bail money. As adults, a lucky few make enough cash to start up their own medium-size Canadian province.

None of this holds true for any other kind of prodigy. Child actors are feared by no one, at least until they start pitching their own scripts. A 12-year-old concert pianist's social niche consists largely of lonely 40-year-old opera singers and a bee-like swarm of psychiatrists. Chess masters suffer a miserable childhood so that they may survive to enjoy a really terrible adulthood.

But athletes -- figuratively and literally -- get away with murder.

This is ironic because, barring incidents of outright corruption, sports is about as fair an endeavor as we have. Politics, image and personal connections are irrelevant on the playing field. Nothing matters except your otherwise useless ability to get a ball through a net, hit a ball with a stick, or get a ball past a line of extremely hostile fellow millionaires.

That's why unfairness eventually falls upon the athlete himself -- for, one bright, dewy morning, you turn 40 and you're done. You're not as fast as the new guys who know less about the game, one knee doesn't bend, the other knee bends both ways, and your rotator cuff hasn't been the same since the Anaheim Angels' batting order lined up and had their way with it.

Mr. Sylvester is, in the end, not a beneficiary of all this. He is its chief victim. The real scandal is not that his coach -- again (I can't say this often enough) allegedly -- asked for his GPA to rise magically above toe level. The crime is that this 18-year-old's grade-point average dropped below a C!

And in 20 years' time, when the best of his athletic prowess is used up (profitably or otherwise), and he finds himself with no other discernable skills, this is not going to be his coach's problem, or his teacher's problem, or any problem at all for the dorks in front of the library. It will inescapably be Mr. Sylvester's problem alone.

Everyone who wants to cut him so much slack right now will magically evaporate, the day he can't carry the ball anymore.