On the night of the NBA draft, ESPN should air a two-hour documentary on dead dreams. Instead of godding-up LeBron James, it should do a few minutes with Chris Washburn. Don't hype Tracy McGrady. Catch up with Dontonio Wingfield.

Instead of selling the myth of stardom, ESPN should peddle the chill of reality. Flat basketballs all around. As UC associate athletic director Bruce Ivory put it, "You have LeBron, but not everybody's LeBron. Kids won't see that tonight."

The NBA draft was Thursday night and a thousand dreams crashed and burned. All these kid basketball players seduced by the false promise of The Life, who attended class just to stay eligible, who listened to their advisors or their "friends" or to the errant whisper in their heads. What now?

If they're good enough, they will play overseas. Some will knock around the developmental leagues. A few will go back to school. UC's Mel Levett is one. Too many will have taken the gift of education and misused it.

Making the NBA "is like the lottery," Ivory said. "I haven't hit that yet. Why should they think they will?"

Part of Ivory's job is to expand the dream to include books, classwork and a degree. The lure of the seduction, though, never makes that easy. "They don't come here with (academics) in mind," Ivory said. "This is their first step to being a professional player. That's all they see."

The NBA dream is getting hazier. As many as 12 foreign-born players would be first-round draft picks. The top pick was James, a high school kid. Two college conference players of the year - Troy Bell of Boston College and Wake Forest's Josh Howard - would last until the bottom half of Round 1. Xavier's David West was a national player of the year, but he was taken 18th overall.

College players are getting squeezed. Do they see this? No, Ivory said. "They live in their own worlds."

If you're an out-of-state student, it will cost you more than $19,000 to attend UC next year, before you buy a laptop or a literature anthology. That's 11 percent more than this year. Tell me again what a crime it is that college jocks don't get paid.

Free college is a gift. Why do so many college basketball players blow it off?

"It's all about money," Ivory said. "Money, not a degree, is status in the black community. Being a black man, I can say that. It's a cultural quicksand."

Or as UC grad and basketball player Keith Gregor put it, "A lot of guys I played with came from nothing. Even with a degree, it was like, what am I going to do with this? Just getting out from where they were was great to them." Gregor graduated in four years and now sells medical supplies. "I had no illusions," he said. "I knew I'd be making my living in the professional world, not playing basketball."

Let's not turn this into a sociological debate. We're not sociologists. Let's just agree that having a college degree is better than not having one.

There is only one James. There are thousands of Wingfields.

Work on your degree, then your jumpshot. The former offers a tangible plan for success. The latter is a pleasant, fleeting myth.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com