After posting a tribute to Zig Ziglar yesterday, I worry in posting today I am either embracing negativity, unwilling to change or just stuck in the past. All things I do not want to be. But I have been upset by events in major college sports this past month. So I thought I would speak my mind. And my thoughts had me remember an odd sports controversy that took place during the fall of my sophomore year in college and wonder whether that controversy was prescient of events that are occurring today.
In the fall of 1982, one of the strangest football controversies ever was at Swarthmore College. Swarthmore was in the same conference as my college -- Franklin & Marshall. So I was aware and amused by it. The controversy made the front page of the New York Times Sports Section and the national TV news. Here is video from NBC news in November of 1982.
Maybe it was my Maryland Terrapins announcing they are moving to the Big 10 (now 14) this past month. Maybe it was the cover story, Modern Irish, in Sports Illustrated last week that talked about how Notre Dame football had compromised many of their long standing policies towards treatment of football players. Maybe it was the article in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Battle for the Soul of College Football. Maybe it was the end of the Duke vs. Ohio State Basketball game that I turned on Wednesday evening and just knew -- despite Coach K's worried look on his face -- that Duke was going to win. It was inevitable. Maybe it was just getting tired of hearing college athletic administrators and even coaches use the term "branding" too much this year when referring to their athletic programs. Maybe it was the sticker price for the elite colleges in this country being $60,000 a year, and me getting closer to having to face that reality.
Maybe it was all those reasons and more that got me thinking about the Swarthmore College football controversy of 1982 again. I used to think it was ridiculous that members of the Swarthmore community in 1982 complained that their team won too much. Wasn't the point of sports to do your best and if that meant winning every game then all the better. The reasons for the controversy never seemed to get fully explained except to equate football success as potentially compromising the values of the institution. In Swarthmore's case it was the academic values. There was an investigation of the academic standing of all football players as some felt that in order to win the school's admissions standards must have slipped.
The investigation never turned up any proof that Swarthmore had compromised admission standards. Football players at Swarthmore did just as well in class as other students. At the time, the investigation just seemed to reveal a prejudice or paranoia (maybe both) in the community towards football. One of the most amusing revelations from the story was that one of Swarthmore's best players played under an assumed name (Rockwell Thisby) because his parents objected to him playing football.
But when you consider some of the events of the last month and seeming lack of consideration for anything other than pursuit of more sports dollars, you start thinking maybe Swarthmore's agony over victory had a point. Clearly major college sports have made all sorts of compromises in order to support athletes who could perform at high levels. But many of the traditions of major college sports seemed to present some boundaries to college sports just seeming to be a cash grab. These traditions included long standing rivalry's, conference affiliations, and differences between institutions that made places like Notre Dame, Duke, even Northwestern seem special and unique.
The loss of the traditions as well as the sense that, to win, all schools have to behave the same way, to me seems to erode any of the sense of the specialness of college sports.
As I sat there and watched the Cameron Crazies jump up and down and support their team Wednesday, I thought of the article I read earlier that day How Maryland went Broke: Inside the Athletic Department's Decline. Maryland President Wallace Loh in explaining the move to the Big 10 said "Number one, by being members of the Big 10 conference, we will be able to insure the financial sustainability of Maryland athletics for decades to come." It was all about the dollars. No mention at all that Maryland would now be associated with some of the greatest public universities in the world. And no mention of sadness in the loss of their traditional rivals in the ACC.
If you have the time to read the full article on Maryland, it just becomes shocking the amount of money these institutions have to raise every year to remain both athletically competitive and financially viable. You think that this money has to be raised through the efforts of young men and women who are 18, 19, 20, and 21 years old mostly. You think that the institutions (and some very highly paid coaches - please tell me why Coach K worries about anything) have had to compromise much more than academic values to raise that money. You begin to understand better why President Loh said what he said. But to me all these thoughts also made what at the time seemed like an illogical sports controversy at a small college 30 years ago this month much more reasonable today.
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