The chasm has widened. In 1974 I went to a 76er basketball game and what I saw depressed me. Now I’ll admit that in 1972–73 they had the worst team in the league, maybe the worst team in the history of any sport, but now they weren’t so bad. It was a sparse crowd, if you want to call 1,385 spectators a crowd, with many blacks in the audience. But when the Flyers hockey team played in the same arena a few nights later, there was hardly breathing room with 17,007 in attendance, and I saw not one black spectator.* I suppose this de facto segregation will continue for a few more years, then diminish. When the present period of tension subsides nationally I expect to see suburbanites coming back to basketball and blacks turning to hockey, both as players and as spectators. In the meantime the double boycott is deplorable. Anything that can be done to diminish it should be.
The goal of American sports must be to provide every man or woman an equitable opportunity to develop his or her skills to maximum capacity. Arbitrary limitations because of sex or race are offensive and must be extirpated.
If I were a young minority boy or girl with athletic talent, I would compete furiously in high school to win a college scholarship, but when I got to college I would insist upon an honest education.
If I proved to be exceptional in college, I would strive for a professional contract, and ask for as high a wage as I could command, but while I played I would be careful to acquire skills which would enable me to earn a decent living when I had to retire. I would want my owners to help me find a job, as they help white players.
And above all, I would not allow myself to be made a pattern for less-gifted minority youth to mimic. I would level with them, warn them, and try to show them that there are hundreds of jobs which offer a more productive lifetime experience than sports.
*Such reasoning about the 76ers received a reversal at the opening of the 1975 season. When the team came up with three black superstars—George McGinniss from the Indiana Pacers (ABA), Joe Bryant, a LaSalle college hardship dropout, and Darryl Dawkins, a sensational eighteen-year-old high school player from Florida—the Spectrum was filled to overflowing, and a cynic observed, ‘We’re not against black players. We’re against black players who lose.’
SEVEN
Colleges and Universities
This chapter deals mainly with football and basketball, because those are the areas in which our academic institutions face their most pressing moral and financial problems, and in which, during a time of financial stringency, they cannot escape making certain value judgments. I shall be speaking a good deal about money, for which I apologize, but money is at the root of the commercialism that has overtaken certain schools. And I shall not be speaking much about track and field, swimming, baseball or women’s sports, for which I also apologize, because they are not beset by the problems of outrageous recruiting.
Research began four years ago when I belatedly joined a dinner party at which a spirited conversation was under way. The party took place in a state which I shall call Jefferson. It was not in New England, nor was it New York either, for schools in those areas had long since given up big-time football; its characteristics are drawn from seven or eight representative states.
The men talking so spiritedly were doctors, lawyers and successful businessmen. Each had attended some fine university—Michigan, Stanford, Harvard or Jefferson itself—and all had doctorates or the equivalent.
They were discussing the military strategy of one of history’s principal leaders, and from the reverence in which they held him I judged that it must be either Hannibal or Julius Caesar, for his command of tactics was outstanding. But then someone spoke of him as if he had been living within the past decades when his statesmanship was supreme, and I knew then that they were talking of either De Gaulle or Churchill. Finally I could control myself no longer, so I burst into their intense conversation to ask, ‘Of whom are you speaking?’ And a doctor turned to me and snapped impatiently, ‘Honest John Taggart, of course.’ He was the football coach at Jefferson, the man we have already seen in Chapter II jetting into that small Texas city to recruit Artemius Crandall.
In the conversation that followed, and in the months that I was to know these men, I discovered that nothing in their lives, not even their families, was bigger than Jefferson football; when the season came around they flew to the away games and knew the stadiums of the United States. They arranged scholarships for likely halfbacks, contributed regularly to the university’s athletic fund, made special donations to help build a $680,000 press box at the stadium, and found their cultural and spiritual life within the athletic framework of a university which most of them had not attended.
The more I investigated Jefferson the more apparent it became that this state and its university epitomized the current intercollegiate scene. Attendance at the stadium was growing, but the budget faced increasing trouble. Basketball prospered, but minor sports were threatened with elimination. Recruiting of players from city playgrounds far removed from the state continued, but few of them had any right to be in an institution devoted to learning. And the hysteria with which the citizens of Jefferson idolized their teams was representative of general American attitudes.
In the rest of this book I shall be using two special terminologies. Instead of repeating the cumbersome ‘colleges and universities,’ I shall often use the word schools. This has wide acceptance in sportswriting and is most useful; I was tempted to use only the word college, but it has come to mean the small institution; Pomona is a college; the University of Texas with its thousands of students is not. I tried also academic institutions, which is accurate but which sounds terribly antiseptic or correctional. Schools is a useful solution. To my shame, I shall have to use repeatedly those horrible phrases ‘big time’ and ‘going big time’ to describe the antics of schools that seek to enter the semi-professional ranks, often with inadequate resources. I shall not use these phrases in quotation marks, but the reader can imagine the marks and my distaste.
The University of Jefferson is located, thank God say the faculty, some one hundred and eighty miles southwest of the capital, Franklin City. It is not a land-grant university, but it has always been the political darling of the state legislature and receives copious public funds. It is the socially elite institution, not only of Jefferson but of several surrounding states as well, and the doctor or politician who wishes to succeed in this region has a leg up the ladder if he has gone to Jefferson. If he also played on the football team, he is assured of a high position within his profession.
For the first fifty years of this century Jefferson participated in a tripartite athletic rivalry with Jefferson State, the land-grant agricultural college, and St. Jude’s, the Catholic school in Franklin City. In basketball St. Jude’s was often able to beat Jefferson, and in baseball Jeff State usually triumphed, but in football, which was what counted, Jefferson claimed the title. The three schools were also in a regional conference of seven schools, and Jefferson regularly won that championship too.
It is important to remember, however, that it was the competition among the three Jefferson schools that really mattered, and a losing season in the conference could be salvaged for either St. Jude’s or Jeff State if in the closing days they managed to defeat Jefferson. Some of the notable football games in American collegiate history were played between these schools; it was difficult, in those years, to find a ticket, and from 1899 through 1950 there was never an empty seat in any of the stadiums when they met.
But starting in 1950, with the arrival of Honest John Taggart at Jefferson, things began to change. ‘We’re going to go really big time,’ Taggart announced, but this could be done only if the alumni chipped in with financial help. Taggart then developed an amazing scouting network manned by some hundred and fifty Jefferson graduates who proselytized high school prospects across the nation; he also cultivated faculty members who would allow the athletic department to run its affairs in its own manner and who would give high marks to athletes who needed them. His
prize in this regard was Dr. Mary Armbruster, in astronomy, who marked on what she herself called ‘the A-B-C system. A for athletes, B for boys, C for co-eds.’
In 1951 Honest John had a winning team, 10–1, and with the leverage this provided he dropped the first shoe. He proposed that Jefferson quit the piddling conference it was in and move into one of the big-time conferences that had an opening. The next year he insisted that Jefferson remove Jeff State and St. Jude’s from its schedule. He had no problem with the Catholic school, for as we shall shortly see, it was getting fed up with the 48–0 beatings the new Jefferson University was administering, but with Jeff State the situation was quite different.
It was vital that Jeff State keep Jefferson on its schedule; its whole athletic program would face disastrous consequences if this one big money-maker were lost. But Honest John was adamant. ‘You can’t have a big-time team with a small-time schedule,’ he pointed out, and Jeff State was dropped.
As we saw in Chapter V, Honest John soon had his big-time budget up to $3,900,000, which he controlled more completely than any governor of the state had ever controlled his. In fact, the nearly half a million dollars which Taggart received from his Boosters’ Club, car pool and Beef Boys was his to dispose of as he wished, as were the various special funds he solicited from ardent businessmen, like the fund for building the new press box and the one for covering a practice field with Astroturf ‘so that the boys will be accustomed to it in their regular games.’
The $680,000 for the press box was an interesting story. In late May one year Taggart told the Rotary Club in Franklin City, ‘I say it’s a disgrace for a state like Jefferson to go really big time and then to seat reporters from The New York Times and Sports Illustrated in a strictly third-rate press box. It demeans everything our boys try to do on the field, and it cheapens the national reputation of our state.’
By the first of July, Taggart had collected more than half a million dollars, with assurances that he could have whatever more he might need. Labor unions set aside overtime requirements, and materials were hauled in free by trucking concerns, so that the press box could be dedicated in mid-September at the opening game against Oklahoma. It was mentioned favorably in newspapers throughout America, a magnificent structure which allowed the sportswriter to sit in comfort during six home games each year. It also contained luxury boxes assigned to those who had contributed over $50,000, and these also were used six times a year, but the favorable impression created by the new quarters encouraged Honest John Taggart to announce proudly, ‘Now Jefferson is really big time, and the entire state can be proud.’
When the press box was finished, Honest John decided the time was ripe for a move he had long contemplated: erecting a lavish dormitory for his football players. He explained the project to legislators and potential donors: ‘No coach can exercise control over his team unless the members live together. I want my boys to be insulated against the ugly pressures that develop in your normal university. I want to know what my boys are doing twenty-four hours a day. What they’re eating, what pills they’re taking, what their mental habits are.’ His arguments were so reasonable that he was quickly given $1,450,000 to build what cynics christened The Taggart Hilton, an athletic dormitory so resplendent that the young men who lived in it for four years would rarely ever in the remaining years of their lives occupy any hotel room half so grandiose: a special kitchen, a bowling alley, a billiard room, half a dozen television sets, a weight room, a sauna, a magnificently appointed infirmary, and not a single bookcase. Here the footballers lived in splendid isolation, protected from ideas or challenging bull sessions or any student who might be reading The National Review or Harper’s. Other students dubbed this gilded prison ‘Hall of the Primates … where we keep the animals.’ When Coach Taggart heard this calumny he growled, ‘The students who say that are the same radicals who spit on our flag.’
Taggart was skilled in collecting money. But he always spent it with an eye as to what it could accomplish for his team. As we saw in Chapter II, he was able to recruit vigorously, for he had the cash to travel to distant towns and to take some enticing offers to the high school players he found there. In this he was aided by the wealthy men of his state, for they provided him with a fleet of five private jets which he and his coaches could use throughout the year.
Not even Taggart could have afforded the air travel he piled up if he had had to pay commercial rates. To operate a Lear jet for one hour, with its two professional pilots, costs about $800, beyond the cost of the airplane itself, which was one million dollars. Taggart and his staff flew about four hundred hours during a recruiting season, which would have cost the university $320,000, but Honest John received this free from his supporters, who found delight in helping him fashion a big-time power.
As a consequence of his money and his jets, if a likely prospect appeared on a high school team in the Pennsylvania coal regions, Taggart could compete nose-to-nose with Notre Dame, Alabama, Pitt or even Penn State. Because Jefferson was somewhat removed from the centers of population, and because Taggart had learned that it was wise to keep in touch with each prospect at least once each week, his phone bill ran over $47,000 a year, but it was money well spent, for he kept enlisting some of the best boys in the country, and they kept earning Jefferson huge sums.
To help him, Taggart had a staff of fourteen additional coaches, three trainers, two medical doctors, three equipment managers, four press agents and two traveling secretaries. A cynical newsman from the college paper once wrote: ‘At Saturday’s game our side had fifteen coaches in action, theirs had fourteen. On the field there were six top officials in black-and-white stripes, four lesser men to handle the lines, and two men to indicate yardage on the far side. That’s forty-one grown men to supervise the play of twenty-two boys. Was something out of balance?’
Taggart’s great strength lay, however, neither in recruiting nor in coaching, but in the personal assistance he was able to give the boys he brought to the campus. Each year he would recruit some ninety freshmen, even though he knew that he would ultimately find places for no more than sixteen or seventeen. He signed up the extras, he told his associates, ‘so that Woody and Bear and Ara can’t get their hands on them.’ At all the big-time schools one soon learned that the games were really played not between the universities and not between the players, but between the coaches, for the players came and left, but the coaches continued. When Michigan faced Ohio State in a game which would decide the championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl, the signs at the motels read:
Will the Roses go
To Woody or Bo?
And later on when Alabama played Jefferson, bumper stickers throughout the state said:
Honest John will dare
To tackle the Bear.
Taggart had to be aware that he was the team, and not the boys, but he did all within his power to build their egos, keep them a happy group, and find them jobs when they left. When he read Gary Shaw’s book about how useless members of the University of Texas squad were terrorized until they voluntarily surrendered their scholarships, which could then be passed along to more likely prospects, he was appalled. Never in his life had he driven a boy off his squad merely to save the few dollars of a scholarship; after he had identified among the ninety incoming freshmen the twenty or so that Jefferson could use, he took each of the others aside and laid the facts before him. ‘Son,’ he would say, assuming his avuncular poor-folks voice, ‘you just ain’t gonna make this team, and I know that’s a grievous disappointment. But I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. You’re gonna keep your scholarship for as long as you want it, and you can suit up every day and learn the plays on the B squad and scrimmage ’em against the varsity. And once a year, I promise you, I’m gonna take you to Oklahoma or Penn State or even Notre Dame, and we’ll have Lewie send your picture back to your hometown paper provin’ that you’re a real football player. And you got all the privileges of a first-squad man, because I got boundless ad
miration for a boy who’ll stick it out, because a winner never quits and a quitter never wins.
‘On the other hand, son, if you should want to relinquish your scholarship right now, and let me use it for some other aspirin’ boy down in Arkansas or North Carolina, I would be most proud to have it, because I could put it to good use. And in return I’ll find you a job that’ll pay you just as much, and you’ll have your whole day free to crack books the way your momma wanted you to.’
Taggart maintained a happy squad, for he delivered on his promises. With the aid of enthusiastic alumni, and businessmen who had no connection with the university, and doctors and lawyers like the ones I had met, he paid his athletes well, finding them automobiles, jobs for their wives, summer employment for themselves, and tutors to write their papers for them. He was especially adept at handling black players from impoverished homes, for he had been a poor boy himself and knew the anxieties that accompanied that doleful estate. Frankness and honesty were the keys to his success with blacks: ‘Carter, I just plain and simple can’t find your wife a job in this prejudiced town, at least not one I’d allow her to take. But Mrs. Bannister—her husband owns Western United, the food chain—she understands the problem, and if your wife wants to baby-sit once a week for Mrs. Bannister’s daughter, who has three rambunctious kids, he’ll pay your wife one hundred dollars an hour, and I advise you to take it and keep your mouth shut.’
Taggart’s salary was $37,000 a year; it could have been much higher, but he said, ‘It would be improper for me to earn more than the president of the university. If you want to raise my salary, raise his first.’ He had a radio show on Sunday mornings and a state-wide television show on Sunday night; his sponsor was Western United; his incidental income $113,000. He spoke frequently at business gatherings for a fee of $4,000, and admiring men in the community who appreciated what he was doing for their state saw to it that he invested his money profitably in a score of different ventures guaranteed to succeed. He was worth, conservatively calculated, close to $2,000,000.