Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  The student body, having anticipated the horrendous season that lay ahead, had groaned when Davis’ appointment was announced, and that night they hanged him in effigy, ‘the only coach in American collegiate history,’ says Davis, ‘who was hanged before the season started. Somebody in that crowd was clairvoyant.’

  The presidents had brought with them a man I did not know, either in fact or reputation, and he turned out to be the gem of the morning. He was a tall, well-groomed scholar with a deceptive Irish brogue that could have been a New England heritage, an obvious love of sports and a genial approach to the follies of this world. He was George H. Hanford, executive vice-president of the influential College Entrance Examination Board of Princeton. For the past six months he had been on leave, conducting a preliminary study for the American Council on Education to determine whether it should launch a full-scale investigation of college and university athletics similar to the famous report issued by the Carnegie Foundation in 1929. His findings, published in a mimeographed edition of a few copies, were titled An Inquiry into the Need for and Feasibility of a National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics. In other words, Hanford had been applying his considerable intelligence to all the questions dealt with in this chapter.

  He did not provide answers. His Inquiry was merely an outline of the complexity of intercollegiate sports; scores of enticing topics could have been developed into chapter length, but Hanford merely said, ‘Here is something worth looking into.’ What he provided was an outline of contemporary problems under headings such as these:

  Sports in society today

  Amateur vs. professional

  Alumni attitudes

  Minorities

  Women

  The counterculture

  Congressional attitudes

  Commercialism in college athletics

  Professional sports and the media

  Competitive excesses

  Economics

  Sports and education

  Moral issues

  Sports and human rights

  I was particularly interested in one section which reflected his reaction to my Criterion III: Sports have an obligation to provide public entertainment. Hanford tackles this presumption in a section titled ‘Intercollegiate Athletics as Entertainment.”

  There is no doubt that big-time college sports programs are in fact in the entertainment business whether they like it or not … It is on the issue of whether they should be in the business in the first place that opinions differ. Those who argue against the proposition do so mainly on the philosophical ground that public entertainment is neither traditionally nor properly a function of higher education, period. Those who support the proposition do so on essentially three grounds. First, like it or not, the institutions have assumed a responsibility which they cannot now abdicate. The second ground is economic. Even though college sports may not pay for themselves, they provide a focus for alumni, taxpayer and legislator attention which has an indirect payoff in general financial support for the institution. The third argument is philosophical and rests on the logic that colleges and universities have traditionally and properly been providing entertainment of many kinds over the years. They see inconsistency in the logic of those who find lectures, concerts, recitals and plays acceptable but disapprove of football. They find intercollegiate sports, big-time and low-profile, less corrupting on the whole than some other features of higher education. And they call attention to the desirability of an institution’s cultivating a variety of constituencies for economic support and that big-time sports in particular attract such support. The inquiry found validity in the argument of both camps and suggests that the issue for consideration in a national study is related not to sports entertainment as entertainment but to sports entertainment as big business.

  I was gratified to find that Hanford’s concern with the problem was much the same as mine; he was not, however, willing to accept as an axiom my belief that collegiate sports were obligated to provide entertainment.

  In every area Hanford pinpointed the hot issues; in each he indicated how a national survey ought to proceed, if one were authorized by the Council. His slim report should be published for the national audience; it is available to experts and no one should make major decisions in this field without consulting it.

  In some ways, the best part of the report is the voluminous Appendices, A through I, which give the basic data from which Hanford worked. These are remarkable documents, well worth detailed study. Only one hundred copies of the Appendices were mimeographed, and I suppose the supply has long been exhausted, but they should be available in major study centers. I list the subject matter:

  A: Alvarez, Carlos, a law student at Duke University: Current litigation involving intercollegiate athletics.

  B: Atwell, Robert H., president of Pitzer College: Financial problems of intercollegiate athletics.

  C: Beasley, Jerry, doctoral candidate at Sanford: State politics of intercollegiate athletics.

  D: Brown, Roscoe C., Jr., Director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs, New York University, assisted by six experts: The black athlete.

  E: Froomkin, Joseph, head of a firm specializing in the analysis of public questions: General factors influencing sports in the post-secondary field.

  F: Ireland, Bernard P., director of admissions at Columbia College: New circumstances influencing the conduct of intercollegiate sports since the Carnegie Study of 1929.

  G: Lowi, Theodore J., professor of political science at Cornell: Campus, society and the place of amateur sports.

  H: McKeown, Mary, doctor of education, University of Illinois: Women in intercollegiate athletics.

  I: Springer, Felix, doctoral candidate at Columbia University: The experience of senior colleges that have discontinued football.

  Anyone offering a course in Sports in American Society, and there are many such courses being given today, could well use these two documents as syllabi, for Hanford lays out the problem, and the Appendices provide the study data.

  It is quite obvious that intercollegiate football and basketball, as now played, are semi-professional sports in most schools and professional in others. This should be publicly acknowledged; I see nothing to be gained by denying it and much to be lost. My concern is therefore how best to administer a professional entertainment program within the normal guidelines that now operate, and I would wish to hear no complaint that ‘Things oughtn’t to be this way in a self-respecting institution of higher learning,’ because they are that way and our society intends that they remain that way. We are faced with a fait accompli, but we can administer it somewhat better than we are now doing.

  Our colleges and universities should divide themselves into four groups, with the understanding that a school might elect to be in Group One for certain sports and Group Two or Three in others. The decision would be left to the school, but once it was made, the school would place itself under the jurisdiction of the group it has chosen.

  Group One would consist of those schools who wished to compete in a super-league, with all its television contracts, bowl games and national publicity. In these schools, perhaps thirty-six in number, players would be paid a salary for performing, and I would think they might therefore want to be unionized, as are the members of dance bands which play at college festivals. To bring some order into recruiting, which might otherwise become even more vicious than it is now, I would propose a national draft of the best five hundred high school football players, and the best three hundred basketball players. Group One schools would assemble at some neutral point, or conduct the draft by telephone as the pros do, and would select in reverse order of last year’s standings. I grant that this would tend to diminish the perpetual superiority of football teams like Notre Dame, Oklahoma and USC, for they could no longer pick off the prize apples, as they now do, but it might produce a larger crop of first-class teams and save the sport for all of them.

  It would be practical, I think, for the super-team
s to pool their recruiting resources and support one master group of scouts who would tour the high schools and send back reports which would be computerized for all to see. This works in the pros, and we are speaking now of a junior pro league, so I believe it would work there too. This would not prevent Ohio State from maintaining its select group of super-scouts reporting personally to Woody Hayes, but it would enable the lower teams in the standings to draft wisely and thus improve their chances.

  If such a draft is not initiated, I see no alternative but to continue the present insane procedure which led some two hundred and fifty colleges and universities to compete for one black high school boy who could not possibly have understood any college class, and for several of them to send highly paid coaches to live in his small town during the latter part of the season, so as to apply daily pressure on him to register at their schools. The excellent series of articles on recruiting assembled by reporters from The New York Times and published in their issues starting on Sunday, March 10, 1974, outlined the lengths to which high school players were being corrupted by college scouts, and since then the situation has worsened.

  For some years the NCAA had a sensible, if complicated, rule that no institution of higher learning ought to enroll a boy who could not read or write at the college level. The experts devised a list of criteria—school records, scores on generalized tests, predictability scores—which were to be applied to all applicants, and if the young man showed that he could not possibly maintain a 1.6 average in college, which is about a D, he should not be considered college material. Anyone with a good fourth-grade education should have been able to bust the system for a 1.6, but it was appalling how many would-be professional athletes could not.

  Various scandals arose when extra-eager coaches at either the high school or college level altered grades to enable their athletes to pass the 1.6 barrier, and so much pressure was put on college coaches to play ineligible men and thus risk reprimand that the NCAA junked the 1.6 and substituted a 2.0 rule which took all the onus off the college and placed it on the high school. Now all that is required is for the high school, even the weakest in the nation, to certify that a boy has averaged 2.0 during his high school career, and he is entitled to play in college!

  The chicanery that such a rule encourages is scandalous. Not only do many high schools grant a 2.0 average if a warm body appears in class without slugging the teacher, but those who do try to maintain standards will now be under extreme pressure to grant a promising athlete any grade he requires to bring his average up to 2.0, whether he attends class or not. Bill Hunt, who rides shotgun for the NCAA, told The New York Times:

  Violations of these academic rules are definitely on the increase. You have the high school figuring out what it takes to get a 2.0 for the boy and then giving such a grade where needed. We’ve had boys go into their senior year with a 1.7 average and get a 3.0 average in their senior year so they have a 2.0 for high school. Sometimes he hasn’t even attended classes in his senior year. If we’d made the rule a 2.5 needed average, they’d have given the athletes 2.5 averages.

  Deplorable conditions have been allowed to proliferate. Numerous cases have surfaced in which high school faculties have given honest grades showing that students in their classes have not come even close to passing, only to have athletic departments falsify official transcripts so that young athletes turn up with A’s and B’s where they originally had D’s and F’s. I have six such cases on my desk as I write.

  Various fly-by-night outfits have taken the next logical step. For a fee they will print up a fake transcript of a school that never existed and award grades that would win a boy a scholarship to Harvard.

  But the operation which represented the ultimate in athletic professionalism was a college athletic placement service operating out of suburban New York. This flourishing agency undertook to find a scholarship for any likely high school athlete, and to charge only 10 percent of whatever the scholarship paid. It landed more than five hundred scholarships. Before the agency was launched, the owner cleared his plans with the NCAA, which gave approval, but when they saw how big it was becoming, and when they appreciated the cynicism it was engendering, they petitioned the court to issue a cease-and-desist order on the grounds that it might encourage professionalism in college athletics! I can understand why our nation, in time of war, might seek to uncover citizens who speak exotic languages, and I can even understand why the AMA might pay an agency to locate good prospects for advanced medical training, but it baffles me as to why our colleges should need help to find athletes to whom they can give large scholarships.

  A scandal of nationwide proportions threatens to break over the athletic establishment, and the way to avoid it is to make playing for the super-league a strictly professional affair, with no emphasis on academic suitability. Let the boy be drafted in an orderly procedure without regard to his academic ability; let him be offered a decent salary with the opportunity of acquiring a degree if he wants one and has the capacity to do the work, and then let him move on to the professionals in accordance with the rules of their draft.

  Nothing I have been saying must be interpreted as a charge that all high school athletes are deficient academically. The best are equipped to succeed in any American university, or European either. Let’s take the specific cases of Bill Bradley, Jerry Lucas, O. J. Simpson and Calvin Hill. The two white basketball players were intellectual stars at first-rate institutions, and could have been straight-A students wherever they had wished to enroll. The two black football players were equally intelligent, two sophisticated young men who would have been an adornment wherever they went, whether they played football or not.

  The majority of athletes I have known fall into this category. The other day I ran into Ron Johnson, stellar running back for the New York Giants. I wanted to talk with him about football; he wanted to talk with me about my book on Spain. In the Dolphin locker room I started to interview Dick Anderson, their star defensive back from Colorado, and he wanted to interview me about a novel I’d written on his state. The athletes I’ve been associating with during the past three or four years were all-American brains, capable of any achievement, and no system needs to be devised to protect them. If, under the plan I advocate, they were to be drafted by Michigan, they could easily handle the Michigan academics.

  But there is another group, and a most numerous one, composed of young athletes physically able to play for any college but mentally prepared for nothing more advanced than the fourth grade. It is these who must be protected. And the place to start is at the beginning of college. These young men must not be deluded into believing they are going to get an education. They are going to play for money in a supervised system, and if they have the will, they can gain an education free on the side. But the one will have little relationship with the other.

  A major objection to a high school draft is that it would constitute peonage, because it would force young men to attend colleges they did not themselves elect. This is a substantial accusation, and it can also be made against the present draft of college seniors onto professional teams they might not have chosen. But today, if the college star wants to play with the professionals, he must abide by their rules and play as drafted. If the high school graduate wants to play for one of the university super-teams he must abide by their draft. If he prefers total freedom of choice, and many bright boys would, he can ignore the draft and enroll in some good school not a member of the super-league. Such young men will have made a conscious choice to forgo the publicity that would accrue to them at a football school and the possible professional contract that might ensue. Freedom of choice would be protected, but at a price. To continue the present frenetic system of recruiting demeans everyone. Read what many coaches have testified to as the humiliation of recruiting arrogant boys who should never be in college in the first place. An orderly draft would restore dignity to a profession that thrives on dignity.

  How could such a super-league be created? T
he NCAA is aware of the necessity for such a change and has proposed that the best of the 136 teams now playing Division One football be reorganized into a Division One-A. The following would be eligible: all teams in the seven major conferences—Atlantic Coast, Southeast, Big Ten, Southwest, Big Eight, Western Athletic, Pacific Eight—plus seventeen proved independents like Notre Dame, Penn State, West Virginia and Pittsburgh. The new division would contain 76 schools; the remaining 60 would spend less money on their teams, issue fewer scholarships, and compete as at present. This is not at all what I had in mind. Throwing together all the teams in the present conferences would merely prolong present imbalances. Of the 76 proposed members, at least 40 could not field major teams; we would merely have a new name with all the old problems. I would much prefer a hard-nosed super-league based on reality, and we do not begin to have 76 schools who could qualify for that.