Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  It had been suggested numerous times that he run for the United State Senate—on the Republican ticket, of course—and impartial observers estimated that he would win, but he declined. ‘I already got me one of the great jobs in America. Goddammit, I enjoy recruitin’. I enjoy flyin’ into some small town in Texas or the Pennsylvania coal fields and goin’ up to some door and knockin’ and thinkin’ as I listen for footsteps, “John Taggart, you old sombitch, you’re bringin’ destiny to this doorstep.” And I can’t wait to see who opens the door, and if it’s the mother, which I always hope it is, I tell her, “Ma’am, I’m here to see if I can borrow your son for a few years and help him become a man.” Because when you got the womenfolk on your side, you got a powerful agency for good.’

  In a strictly profit-and-loss judgment, Jefferson had a gold mine in Honest John, and the state knew it. The stadium was always filled, and if his team appeared on national television twice a year, and then went to a bowl game, the university would have additional income of nearly a million dollars. Curiously, Taggart was not pleased with this aspect of his regime. ‘The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,’ he complained frequently. ‘You look at all our conferences. Ohio State and Michigan on top, followed by the eight dwarfs. I am desperately afraid the bottom teams in all our conferences will have to quit playin’ big-time football. How long can they go one and ten and still collect the necessary funds? I’m not happy to see all the money comin’ my way.’

  He often cited the statements of two coaches as representing his thinking. Darrell Royal of Texas had said, ‘The big schools should govern themselves according to their own needs. I don’t want to be told what to do by Hofstra.’ Taggart did not want Haverford and Colorado College and Pomona laying down the rules for Jefferson, whose problems were infinitely more complex.

  And Frank Broyles of Arkansas had come close to the truth when he warned, ‘The superpowers should combine in a super-league.’ Taggart could see this coming. Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, USC, Penn State, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, Jefferson and perhaps a dozen others, playing among themselves, dividing the television profits and allowing schools like Harvard and Iowa and Washington State and Vanderbilt to play at a much lower level without the headaches of big-time football, or a big-time budget. And then the little schools like Williams and Tufts and Augustana and Reed playing one-platoon informal games, or even touch.

  ‘We big ones have a national responsibility,’ Taggart often said. ‘The nation looks to us for leadership. The boys of this country dream of comin’ to our schools. We set the moral standards for the nation, and if we diminished football, it would be a national catastrophe, for it’s on our fields that the character of this nation is built. I know of nothin’ in American life more significant and worthy than hard, honest football played between equals, and if you bother to look at the television ratings, you’ll find most Americans agree.’

  … Victory is the natural estate of the self-respectin’ man. Victory over poverty through hard work. Victory over enemies through justifiable war. Victory over ridiculous ideas at the ballot box. And victory over death through religion. I do not care to associate with men who are prepared to accept defeat.

  … When a boy steps on my football field he knows that I am the boss. No long hair. No mustaches. No alcohol except beer when we celebrate a victory. No drugs, by God, no drugs. And a decent sense of respect toward authority. In return he is assured of my royalty. I see that he keeps his scholarship, that he gets the money he needs in an emergency, that silly traffic tickets are taken care of, that his name keeps out of the papers if he gets into some minor trouble. And I do my damnedest, night and day, to see that he keeps up his grades and that he graduates. At last count 87 percent of my boys got their degrees, oftentimes in six years, but they got ’em.

  … Three times Jefferson has ranked number one nationally, and we’d have had it twice more except that I had to suspend our all-American quarterback in 1968 and our defensive captain in 1972 right before our big games. I never hesitated one minute. They broke the rules. They were out. Every boy who plays for me knows that the application of our rules is relentless. They are on this team to obey, to be self-respectin’ men, and to win their victories through the only way God allows a man to win anything, through discipline.

  … I sort of get sick to my stomach when some faculty committee issues a statement that my boys should be scholars first and athletes second. Any self-respectin’ man with his head screwed on right must realize that football consumes so much of a boy’s time, fall, winter, spring and summer, that he simply ain’t got time to be a scholar too. If we didn’t have a supply of snap courses, and cooperatin’ professors who know the score, ain’t no way my boys could stay in school. We hire them to play football, and we pay them well to do it, and it’s only after their eligibility is used up that they got time to be scholars.

  … The job of a real woman is to support and console her man while he fights for victory. No self-respectin’ woman would bother with this Women’s Lib stuff. And as for playin’ on the same team with boys, that’s plain revoltin’. Archery and field hockey, that’s what a self-respectin’ co-ed would want, and that’s what they’re gonna get.

  … What am I proudest of during my reign at Jefferson? This may astonish you, but it isn’t the three national championships. Nor my twenty-nine superstars who are now playin’ in the NFL bringin’ honor to this state. No. Believe it or not, it’s this press box we’re sittin’ in. You ever see the old one? What a shambles. I felt ashamed when the big-time sportswriters from The New York Times and Sports Illustrated used to come out here and climb those rickety stairs. So one Thursday at Rotary, I said, ‘Jefferson ought to go first class. If we’re really big time, let’s be big time.’ And within five weeks I had me $500,000 for a press box of which this state could be proud. I taught a whole state to go first class.

  The success of Honest John Taggart and his Jefferson team came partly at the expense of Jeff State, for when he broke up the old conference one year and dropped Jeff State from his schedule the next, the agricultural school was left in disarray. Its big money-making game was gone; its ability to compete for local football players was destroyed, and its position in the affections of the state threatened.

  Under the lash of energetic alumni it fled to a disastrous solution. ‘We’ll go big time, too,’ one of the wealthy alumni said, and he bulldozed a plan whereby Jeff State would build its own massive stadium, seating 55,000 and with a press box at least equal to the one at Jefferson. But when the stadium was finished, at an unpaid cost of $8,000,000, the drab Jeff State team could not begin to fill it even one day a year, let alone six.

  The great concrete hole in the ground became a suppurating abscess; student fees had to be raised to $48 a semester, the bulk of the money going to pay off the interest on the bonded indebtedness. Year after year, playing mediocre opponents, Jeff State compiled records of 2–9 and even 0–11. And as the teams deteriorated, coaches were fired, often with accompanying scandal, and new coaches found it impossible to recruit players who would improve the won-lost record.

  Then ugly jokes began to proliferate. There had always been bad blood between Jefferson, the gentlemen’s school, and State, the farmers’ outpost, and in the old days there had occasionally been riots, as in 1922 when Jefferson had an unbeaten season going into the last game against a badly underdog State. The farmers had won a miraculous victory, to celebrate which they burned down a Jefferson dormitory. It was then that the jokes began.

  ‘It’s lucky Jeff State didn’t end the season number one, because they wouldn’t know how many fingers to hold up.’

  ‘When the astronauts brought rocks back from the moon they sent samples to all the great universities in the country for analysis, but when they got to Jeff State they had no more moon rocks left, so they sent a boy out to a pasture to pick up some, and after six months of intense study the Jeff State lab sent back this report: “We
found no traces of precious metals and no signs of vulcanism, but we can state without fear of successful contradiction that the cow really did jump over the moon.” ’

  ‘This town was invaded by rats, so they mobilized the Jeff State ROTC to fight them off, and at the end of the campaign the commanding officer reported, “Rats repulsed. Our losses minimal but significant. Three of our men lost hand-to-hand combats with enemy soldiers. Two of our men defected to their side. And three of our junior officers married members of the enemy’s female brigade.” ’

  While absorbing such constant abuse, Jeff State was transforming itself into a major scientific center, one of the best of its kind in America. Since it was repeatedly selected by the federal government to conduct major research in foodstuffs, river movements, ecology, building materials and pest control, it not only received huge grants which allowed it to erect a chain of splendid laboratories, but it also stood rather closer to the problems of our national life than the more detached university at Jefferson. Its professors headed significant research committees and served on presidential inquiries. One of its young men was seriously considered for a Nobel Prize as a result of his work on air pollution, and it was expected that he would get it at some future date.

  Because of its burgeoning reputation, graduates of Jeff State found it rather easier to land good jobs than did the graduates of the university, but in spite of such accomplishments, State continued to be held in low esteem by the general public because its football team performed so poorly.

  Then a curious thing happened, one that had occurred in other American states. Legislators elected by the state’s cities were usually graduates of Jefferson University; Jeff State produced the legislators from rural areas, and there were always more of the latter than the former. So the question of football was moved off the playing fields and into the legislature, with both houses of the Jefferson governing body spending days and even weeks debating whether or not Jefferson University should be compelled by law to play Jefferson State in football.

  The legislators split into factions; every bill that came before them was determined not on its merits but, rather, on its impact on the football question. At one point the rural legislators actually passed a bill terminating all funds and perquisites for Jefferson until such time as it placed Jeff State on its schedule, but this frivolity was challenged by Honest John Taggart, who appeared at a public hearing to state, in funereal tones, ‘The one thing that the great state of Jefferson has to be proud of is its football team. We are really big time, and sportswriters across this nation speak of us with respect. I warn you that if you force us to move backward in our schedulin’, if you force us to relinquish the hard-won position we have attained, you will set this whole state back a hundred years.’

  The bill was vetoed by the governor, but at the risk of his political career; rural legislators swore that from that day he could count on them for no support, and they advised their constituents that henceforth the governor was a man to be destroyed; they predicted that at the next election he would be thrown out of office.

  In the meantime, State’s pathetic football team staggered on to one dismal season after another, led by one ineffective coach after another, and with two or three good players recruited from the Pennsylvania coal fields but unable to accomplish much because they had no teammates who knew what big-time football really entailed. Jeff State became a classic case of a fine university being dragged down unnecessarily by an ineffective athletic policy.

  Why didn’t State just quit football and rid itself of this heavy incubus? On frequent occasions the faculty raised this question, but those who did were quietly threatened with dismissal at the best or lynching at the worst. Startled alumni swore that State would rise again. Legislators insisted that the honor of State would one day be restored. And citizens of the area, who had no association with the school except that their tax dollars helped support it, agreed that it would be shameful for a potentially great school like State to abandon football.

  ‘The stadium’s already there,’ they reasoned. ‘What would we do with it?’ So the travesty continued. State, with a yearly athletic budget of $1,063,000, was determined to compete with Jefferson, which had $3,900,000 in cash plus the use of five Lear jets.

  St. Jude’s, a church college that had to balance its budget or go out of business, handled its athletic problems rather more sensibly. In the late 1940s when it became apparent that The Saints would never be able to keep up with Jefferson University in football, or with Jeff State in its ability to get funds from the legislature, the priests who ran the school convened their advisors and a group of hard-nosed alumni in a three-day planning session. Spelling out the fiscal facts, Father Sylvester said, ‘Gentlemen, it’s either find an additional million and a half dollars each year for ten years or drop football. There is no middle ground even worth discussing.’

  Those were rather sharp alternatives, and the advisors concluded, ‘It looks like we have only one choice.’

  But a wise priest, who had followed the experiences of other Catholic schools, said, ‘I’m content that we drop football, but as we do so, let’s pick up basketball.’

  So the decision was made, but not publicized. St. Jude’s continued football until all its scholarship boys had graduated, then announced on January 1, 1954, that it was forthwith discontinuing that sport on the intercollegiate level.

  An explosion followed. Alumni, who understood the financial impossibility of continuing, supported Father Sylvester, and so did the student body, but the media jumped on him as if he had profaned the Vatican. Repeatedly, the newspaper accused him of having betrayed the honor of St. Jude’s, of having cut at the heart of a noble institution.

  On the 1928 team St. Jude’s had produced a prodigious tackle, Ev Poroba, who had gained permanent local fame as the school’s only all-American. Reporters now sought him out and wrote doleful stories about how Ev felt that his old school had lost its sense of honor, and one cartoonist showed him brooding at the side of a cemetery where the fame and dignity of his college lay buried.

  But the Jesuit fathers who ran St. Jude’s were not foolish men; they had no intention of being booby-trapped by either the football coach, who deplored the decision, or Ev Poroba, who continued to lament. At the start of the basketball season they presented a team with two towering blacks they had recruited in New York, and with these excellent players the Saints proceeded to mop up the Missouri Valley, then, moving into the Atlantic Coast conference, to throw scares into teams like Duke, Maryland and the North Carolina geniuses.

  In the years that followed, St. Jude’s became one of the real basketball powers. There are few men in this country of more undeviating purpose than a devout Jesuit who has discovered a black high school star six-feet-ten who can average twenty-three points a game and eleven rebounds.

  And if the young giant happens to be attending a Catholic high school in New York, which many do, the recruiting becomes a subtle art, with unexpected complications developing from all sides.

  For one-eighth of the budget St. Jude’s had once spent on a less than mediocre football team of fifty-two expensively uniformed players, it now had close to a national champion in basketball, with sixteen players dressed in shorts and sneakers. And where the athletic department had been losing $265,000 a year, it was now showing a profit of $145,000.

  But if Father Sylvester had ever thought that getting out of the football racket and into basketball would somehow relieve him of ugly pressures, he was soon enlightened as to the facts. In football, which is a game of mass movement, no one player can of himself turn a college team around, not even the greatest star. A stellar fullback can do only so much if his offensive line is weak; and when the defense plays he is not even on the field. Many teams with four great running backs find themselves losing by scores of 28–23 and 37–32.

  But in basketball one real star can mean the difference, because he plays both offense and defense, and he is one of only five players
, not one of twenty-six as in football (eleven offense, eleven defense, two kickers, two run-back specialists). And if a new contender like St. Jude’s is lucky enough to land two superstars, they find themselves in immediate contention for the national crown.

  However, the competition for such superstars is brutal, and St. Jude’s found itself spending as much money to land one basketball player as it used to spend to recruit six football players. As Father Sylvester told his board, ‘I do believe that if in a high school game tomorrow afternoon a six-foot-ten basketball player suddenly broke loose and showed himself to be a potential superstar, with thirty points and fifteen rebounds, by Friday night Frank McGuire would have heard about him in South Carolina, and Digger Phelps at Notre Dame, and Dick Harter out in Oregon. We’re all after the same twelve or thirteen great ones, and our little college competes with Marquette and Bradlev and Villanova and Creighton. Mark my words, if our Catholic schools continue to fight for black players the way we do, we’ll convert the whole black race to Catholicism, which may turn out to be the answer.’

  Various questions have to be asked about the St. Jude’s approach. Last year I visited the $7,000.000 palestra in which the team plays and found it an athletic paradise, something that Kublai Khan might have devised. There were unobstructed seats for 15,400 spectators and a perfect playing surface, but what enchanted me were the locker rooms. The floors were covered with carpeting, even the room for the showers, and the basketball players, when they undressed after a game, simply left their duds on the carpet. Uniformed attendants moved in, picked up the suits, and conveyed them to the laundromat next to the shower. On and on it went, with whipcord blazers and three pairs of shoes for each player, donated by enthusiastic merchants; cars for all the players, on loan from an agency; mounted police protecting them when they moved back to their training dormitory; and adulation unbounded. What surprised me was that all this expenditure was for sixteen young men out of a student body of eleven thousand.