Against football steve almond summary

BOWLED OVER

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BIG-TIME COLLEGE FOOTBALL BOWLED OVER

FROM THE SIXTIES TO THE BCS ERA

Michael Oriard

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

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This book was published with the assistance of the Thornton H. Brooks Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS All rights reserved Designed by Kimberly Bryant Set in Arnhem and The Sans by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oriard, Michael, 1948– Bowled over : big-time college football from the sixties to the BCS era / Michael Oriard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3329-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Football—United States—History. 2. College sports—United States— Marketing. 3. College sports—United States—Management. 4. College athletes—Recruiting—United States. I. Title. GV950.07 2009 796.332—dc22 2009016597 cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

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FOR COLIN & ALAN

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

PART I. FOOTBALL AND THE 1960S

1 From the Sidelines of a Football Revolution

2 College Football in Black and White, Part I: Integrating the Southeastern Conference

3 College Football in Black and White, Part II: Black Protest INTERLUDE. 1973: The NCAA Goes Pro

PART II. LIVING WITH A CONTRADICTION

4 Revenue and Reform

5 Opportunity, Entitlement, and Exploitation

6 Thinking about Reform Notes Index

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Illustrations and Tables

ILLUSTRATIONS

Protesters and antiprotesters at Columbia University, April 1968

Cartoon illustration of “Coach,” Evergreen Review, October 1968

The 1969 and 1971 Notre Dame football teams

Colonel Rebel and Miss Ole Miss, University of Mississippi, 1975

Oregon State linebacker Fred Milton, February 1969

TABLES

1. bcs Football Programs Ranked by Total Football Revenue, 2006–2007

2. Non-BCS Football Programs Ranked by Total Football Revenue, 2006– 2007

3. Football Bowl Subdivision Athletic and Academic Profiles

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Acknowledgments

This is the third book on which I worked with David Perry at the University of North Carolina Press and the one on which we worked the closest. In addition to David’s routine contributions as editor in chief of the press, I am grateful for his good counsel regarding an early draft of my book. Other members of the Unc Press staff—Jay Mazzocchi, Dino Battista, and Gina Mahalek—are becoming like old friends. Thanks to all of them once again for their many and varied contributions.

Phil Thompson, a player from my generation at the University of Kentucky when it integrated its football team, shared his experiences with me in some remarkable e-mails and items from his scrapbooks. I salute him and thank him. At Oregon State University, archivist Karl McCreary located salary information from the 1960s for me, and the former chair of my department, Robert Schwartz, and the successive deans of my college, Kay Schaffer, Larry Roper, and Larry Rodgers, have been uniformly supportive. I am grateful to all.

My greatest debt, as always, is to my wife, Julie, and our two sons, for reasons too numerous to list but which might be reduced to the fact that they keep my priorities straight. I am dedicating this book to our sons, who in different sports and in different ways made their athletic careers as enriching as mine was for me. I salute them for accomplishing this under much more difficult circumstances than I faced.

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BOWLED OVER

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Introduction

This book is a companion to my Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport (2007). They began as a single volume, which was itself a hybrid: an account of football in the 1960s, when I myself played, leading into an exploration of how the game at both the college and professional levels has changed since then. There proved to be too many narratives to develop coherently, though the necessary bisection was not all gain. What has happened in the National Football League (nfl) in recent decades has powerfully affected what used to be known as Division I-A college football (now the Football Bowl Subdivision)—think only of the lure of million-dollar nfl salaries for “student-athletes” and the impact on college coaches’ salaries as pro coaches began making millions. Many nfl players, in turn, are shaped in part by their college experiences—think here of the sense of entitlement that follows some athletes from college to the pros. In fact, one of the fundamental differences in football today from football in my day is the general sense of a continuous path from youth leagues all the way to the nfl. Boys of my generation knew little about the nfl beyond what they figured out from watching the weekly game on Sunday. Boys today know everything about the nfl that SportsCenter and the rest of our 24/7 sports media and entertainment industries show and tell them. Boys of my generation might have dreamed of playing pro football some day. Like-minded boys today might plot a course—through weight rooms, diet supplements, summer camps, personal trainers, recruiting gurus—for getting there.

Seeing the entire American football world as a whole has its advantages, then, but so does a tighter focus on one part of it. This book considers the part of our larger football culture with the longest and richest history, as well as the most profound contradiction at its heart. From the moment that university administrators in the 1890s realized that the new public passion for intercollegiate football provided opportunities for university building, college football has been torn between the competing demands of marketing and educating. Knowing that the contradiction at the heart of big-time college football is more than a century old is useful when the latest “crisis” erupts. That knowledge should also give us pause, however, to wonder why we have failed for so long to resolve the contradiction.

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While conflicting priorities in college football are anything but new, they have reached a level that seems qualitatively different from how it played out even in my own youth in the 1950s and 1960s. College football since then has changed in two ways: suddenly and gradually. Suddenly, in “the ’60s,” that period conveniently dated from November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, to August 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. The ’60s peaked around 1967–70—the years when Detroit, Newark, south central Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities exploded in race riots, campuses from Columbia to Berkeley exploded in antiwar protests, and Woodstock, New York, exploded in rock music and free love. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, four students at Kent State were killed by National Guardsmen, and hippies became no longer just the kooks in Life magazine but also the kid upstairs in his bedroom with a sweetish odor oozing out from behind a locked door. Football, too, was convulsed in these final years of the decade. Black players called their coaches racist and boycotted practice. White players at the University of Maryland got their coach fired for demeaning them. Demeaning them?! That’s what coaches had always done to motivate their “boys.”

No comparable cataclysm in either college football or American life has occurred since the 1960s, yet the experiences of playing and following the game today are astonishingly different from what they were just a couple of generations ago. The entire history of big-time intercollegiate football since the late nineteenth century has been a tortuous working out of the sport’s fundamental contradiction of being, at one and the same time, a commercial spectacle and an extracurricular activity. But sometime in the late 1980s or 1990s, incremental changes reached a tipping point or crossed a boundary beyond which the contradiction has become unsustainable. While the disruptions of the 1960s, particularly the racial protests on northern campuses, were felt as a genuine revolution, this subsequent economic transformation has not. This second revolution played out in slow motion, but at some point many followers of college football awakened to a realization that the game had changed in basic ways. The simplest measure of this transformation would be the million- dollar salary that became the norm for coaches in top programs in the 1990s, three times as much as just a decade earlier and many, many times the $20,000 or $25,000 salaries of the 1960s.

Obviously, more than inflation was at work here, and the amounts of money now flowing in and out of top programs created a new world. For $25,000, a coach was something like a professor (perhaps a dean) of

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football. For $1 million, he was the impresario of a high-priced commercial entertainment. In college football’s long reign as the dominant form of the sport, from the 1870s into the 1950s, potential revenue was largely restricted to gate receipts. Radio broadcasting rights began paying small dividends in the 1930s; the National Collegiate Athletic Association (ncaa) actively restricted television in the 1950s, fearing the potential impact on attendance. Merchandising and fund-raising (beyond the arrangements between boosters and recruits) were nonexistent throughout the entire period. (For a kid in the 1950s to own a sweatshirt imprinted with “Property of Usc Football,” he had to know someone who knew someone in the University of Southern California football program.) A business plan for athletics amounted to building a large stadium and then selling tickets. The athletic director (or graduate manager of athletics, as he was initially known) was a former coach who got on well with the old boys in the booster club. To oversimplify only slightly, his job was to support his football coach in building a team that could fill the stadium on Saturday afternoons.

Now, those who stage the games are driven by financial concerns to a degree unknown even thirty years ago. As I have attempted in a couple of previous books to understand what football has meant to Americans since we invented our version of the game in the 1870s and 1880s, economics always seemed the backdrop against which the more important stories played out. In recent years, economics have increasingly seemed the story that mattered the most. Generating revenue has been a preoccupation of athletic directors and university presidents since the stadium-building boom of the 1920s, but money was a less powerful driving force when the opportunities for both spending and generating revenue were more restricted.

Criticism of too much commercialism and too little academic emphasis in college football is nearly as old as the game, and so too is public indifference to these perennial “problems.” “Everyone” knew that boosters were subsidizing the swift halfbacks and brawny tackles arriving on campus from farms and mill towns in the 1920s and 1930s (after a few decades of less systematic hiring of the occasional “tramp athlete”). But few cared. Big-time college football has always had its faculty critics, joined by disdainful writers in the intellectual journals—the stereotype of the pointy-headed Great Scold is as enduring as the Big Man on Campus and the Dumb Jock—but the vast football public has been largely indifferent to this criticism so long as it did not hurt the prospects for “my team” on Saturday. The most powerful mass media—first the daily

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newspaper with its bulging sports sections, then radio, then television— have always been more boosterish than critical of big-time football, for the obvious reason that they have depended on enthusiastic fans to be their own readers, listeners, and viewers. Local media have tended to have close relations with the home team, and the major football-playing universities tend to be located in smallish towns, where the local sports editor and beat writers have particularly cozy relationships with the football coach and director of athletics. The national media have faced a different need: appealing to the broadest possible audience. Although Sports Illustrated and espn issue periodic jeremiads against the abuses in college football, those tend to be overwhelmed by the weekly or daily coverage of the big games and top stars. Local or national, the mass media have operated under conditions that inhibit sustained criticism.

The media played a key role in American universities’ two great missed opportunities in the twentieth century to address college football’s great contradiction. Had the popular press waged a campaign on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation’s report in 1929, it might have generated enough public support to overwhelm boosters and pressure (or free) college administrators to consider genuine reforms. Likewise, when the ncaa went through the throes of reform in the late 1940s and early 1950s, centered around a proposed “Sanity Code,” indifference or opposition in the press again assured that the reformist spasm, weak as it already was, would pass. The Carnegie Report prompted a few universities to de-emphasize their football programs but had no broad impact on “commercialism” and “professionalism,” the terms commonly used for the twin curses on the game. Intermittent scandals and controversies erupted and subsided until the 1950s, when a cheating ring at West Point, slush funds at West Coast universities that eventually shut down the old Pacific Coast Conference, and continuing rancor in the ncaa between rival factions that viewed themselves as honest and the other side as corrupt or hypocritical seemed to demand drastic action. Instead, out of the wrangling in the ncaa came the athletic scholarship, a solution to the long-standing scandal of “professionalism” by making it legal. (The fact that a scholarship for mere athletic prowess, rather than academic achievement or financial need, was considered a violation of university values until this time points to the very different climate in which college football was once played.)

The establishment of the athletic grant-in-aid in 1956 set the stage for the debates at ncaa conventions in the 1960s that culminated, in 1973, in the one-year scholarship, renewable at the coach’s discretion. I will argue that this little-noted and mostly forgotten reinvention of the athletic

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scholarship marks a crucial turning point for big-time college football. The more obviously consequential events were the College Football Association’s successful challenge to the ncaa’s television monopoly in 1984, then the succession of bowl alignments in the 1990s, culminating in the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, which consolidated two distinct economic classes for big-time football programs and widened the gap between them. The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed so-called student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialized sport while denying them a share in its new bounty.

This slow-motion revolution is the subject of the second half of this book. I will propose that the institution of the one-year scholarship in 1973 was in part a response to the upheavals of the 1960s, the subject of the first half. Here, I present my account of football in the 1960s as a story not about my life in football but about football during my lifetime, from the perspective of one who was there but on the periphery of the events that transformed the game. The beginning and end of the “long ’60s” coincidentally bracketed my own football career. In November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I was a sophomore at Gonzaga Prep in Spokane, Washington, putting in my fall afternoons on the B-squad and awaiting my chance to be a varsity player. In early April 1968, when Martin Luther King fell in Memphis, I was a sophomore at Notre Dame, a walk-on scrub who had not suited up for a single game the previous fall but was about to be given the opportunity to become an actual Fighting Irish football player. In May 1970, when college-aged kids in National Guard uniforms gunned down four students at Kent State, I was a senior, soon to graduate, not participating in spring practice and therefore not prodded to weigh protest against football. (My subsequent brief nfl career coincided with the end of the era. In September 1974, a month after Nixon left the White House in disgrace, I left the nfl after four seasons, cut by the Kansas City Chiefs at the end of a strike-torn training camp.)

During my four years at Notre Dame, Southeastern Conference schools at last began integrating their football teams, but they did not complete the process until after I had graduated. As a senior in 1969, I played against Georgia Tech and Tulane, then against Texas in the Cotton Bowl, when their teams were still all white. My senior season marked college football’s centennial but also became a milestone for other reasons, as major racial protests disrupted football programs at Oregon State, Iowa, Wyoming, Indiana, and Washington. I must have had some awareness of these events

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at the time—my memory is regrettably spotty—but they were far removed from my own experience at Notre Dame. The extraordinary national and world events of my college years, which changed me and my entire generation forever, in my own mind at the time had nothing to do with my life on football fields. I suspect that in this I was more typical than not. Participants are not necessarily the best witnesses, let alone interpreters, of the history in which they live. I make no claim to a privileged understanding of the 1960s football revolution that I describe. I simply offer, not my own story, but a personal perspective on the story of that larger football world of which I was a part.

I am interested in the personal actors in that story, particularly those who were age nineteen or twenty or twenty-one like I was but whose college football experience was so different from mine. But in line with my previous explorations of the media’s role in shaping our football culture, I am more interested in these events as public dramas, staged and scripted by local newspapers and the national media. Football has functioned as a kind of public theater since it was first discovered by the mass-circulation newspapers in New York in the 1880s. Whether or not fans have thought about spectator sports on these terms, they have experienced them in this way. Some dramas are generic to all sporting contests: the Home Team repulsing the Enemy, the various plots for different types of heroes. Others are specific to certain sports: the dual between pitcher and batter, so utterly different from the helmet-rattling collision in football. Others still are dictated by specific circumstances either within or outside the sport; the uproar over steroids in Major League Baseball and the accusations of rape against lacrosse players at Duke come to mind as recent examples. The racial dramas in college football in the 1960s fall in this last category. How newspapers covered (or did not cover) these events created the public drama.

While the two parts of the narrative that follows address different topics, there are important links between them. One is the relationship between coaches and athletes, and their relative positions in the evolving world of big-time college football. A more fundamental one is the central importance of race. The 1960s saw the end of college football’s era of segregation. In the succeeding era of full integration, as black athletes became dominant on the field but lagged behind in the classroom, the key issues facing the ncaa and its member institutions have been racial at their core, though rarely acknowledged as such. (I follow Harry Edwards and others in understanding that African American athletes face more directly and intensely what all athletes face.) As I have noted, I will also explore

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the strong possibility that the institution of the one-year scholarship in 1973—which transformed “student-athletes” into “athlete-students”—was a response to the racial upheavals of the late 1960s.

I bring a personal perspective not just to the events from my own playing days but also to the developments in college football since I graduated. My bedrock experience that has shaped my outlook is easily described: at Notre Dame in the late 1960s, I not only received the best education that my university offered but also enjoyed a full college experience while playing big-time football at the highest level. Since 1976 I have been an English professor at a Pac-10 university, observing college football’s most recent struggles with its fundamental contradiction more or less from the inside; and for the past several years, I have been writing about the cultural history of American football. Expressed personally, my fundamental concern regarding college football today is that my 1960s experience may not even be available to “student-athletes” in our more fully commercialized, higher-pressure football world. At the same time, an athletic scholarship today buys exactly what it bought during my college years. Tuition, board, and housing cost more in real dollars, but they have the same value. Or perhaps less: with less opportunity to receive a real education, athletes today might be taking a cut in real benefits.

Or not. Determining how well big-time college football serves the athletes today is one of two crucial challenges facing the institutions that sponsor it. The other is to determine how well it serves the institutions themselves.

Saturday’s spectacles provide Americans with a unique social and cultural experience. A college football game at Michigan or Alabama (like a basketball game at Indiana or Duke), with its bands and cheerleaders, its pregame tailgating, and its postgame partying, is something like a folk festival or a weekly Mardi Gras, providing a sense of community, meaningful ritual, and sheer pleasure for millions of Americans each weekend in the fall.1 Following the local team, or connecting from afar as alumni, provides passionate involvement in something that deeply matters yet ultimately does not (and so is “safe”) and creates a sense of community whose social benefit is hard to measure but nonetheless is real and powerful. But can universities afford to keep providing that social benefit, and can they provide it without exploiting those who do the actual providing—the young men on the field? Those are the urgent questions of the moment.

Fewer than two dozen athletic departments break even in any given

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year; as few as a half dozen have done so in each of the last several years. But this superelite depends on the rest, on all of the programs that struggle with annual deficits. A superconference comprised only of the very top programs would have a passionate following only in its schools’ own states and among their alumni. Although the Big East is conspicuously the weakest Bowl Championship Series (bcs) conference on the field, the other five conferences need it in order to have fully national representation. Without the weaker teams within bcs conferences, the perennially stronger teams would have no one to be perennially stronger than. The superelite even need the non-bcs conferences, if only to throw up a Cinderella challenger each year and provide one of the narratives of which football fans never weary. The superelite need the rest, but whether the rest can afford their role is increasingly uncertain.

The first three chapters of this book, comprising Part I, describe the politicizing of football in the 1960s and the two-part racial revolution of that era, set against my sheltered experience at Notre Dame. Following a brief interlude—in which I lay out the case for seeing the one-year scholarship as a belated response to the political and racial turmoil in athletic departments of the late 1960s—Part II then considers the world of big-time college football as it was remade first by ncaa legislation in the early 1970s and then by the radically uneven distribution of financial resources in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapters 4 and 5 explore college football’s fundamental contradiction as it has played out in the ncaa’s dual agenda of achieving academic reforms while relentlessly chasing revenues, then tease out the impact of this dual agenda on the athletes in its fostering of both entitlement and exploitation. Chapter 6 considers the possibilities for reform. Instead of offering yet one more set of proposals to be ignored, I suggest that we refocus the conversation. From any reasonably objective perspective, the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy. For the nonprofit extracurricular activity of a few dozen students to generate as much as $60 million in revenue is obviously crazy. And expecting the athletes who generate those millions to put in full-time hours, at the equivalent of minimum wage, and also be full-time students like everyone else in their classes is obviously crazy.

Yet if big-time college football is so obviously crazy, why does it survive in our temples of higher learning, overseen by college presidents who are some of the smartest people in the country? The answer is equally obvious: because the sport historically has served vital functions in American higher education, and it is not at all obvious that it no longer

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does so. That’s the crux of the issue. It is not possible to think in any meaningful way about reforming college football without thinking also about the nature and needs of the institutions whose football might need reforming.

For me, the second half of this book is no less personal than the first because writing it has meant wrestling with a subject about which I have felt profoundly ambivalent as a beneficiary of a system that seems to fail too many others. Some readers will dimly remember the revolutions of the 1960s, but for many it will be a surprise to realize how recently these events played out. The tale of distorted priorities, on the other hand, is likely so familiar that it might seem not worth belaboring yet again. I have tried to offer a new way to think about it. These are obviously not the only stories that could be told about college football since the 1960s.2 They are the stories that most interest me, and I can only hope that they will interest readers, too.

A final note on sources. Getting reliable data on either football finances or athletes’ academic performance used to be immensely difficult, if not impossible. Beginning in 1970, the ncaa every few years published the results from surveys of institutional revenues and expenses for athletics, but responses were voluntary, there was little consistency in the reporting, and the organization published only aggregate data. Investigative journalists for major daily newspapers periodically gathered the available information on coaches’ salaries, bowl revenues, television-rights fees, or some other aspect of college football finances, but their data were always partial and never wholly reliable.

In the 1990s, when Congress began requiring annual financial reports to document compliance with Title IX, a wealth of data became suddenly available (for each year since 1995). Even here, because accounting procedures varied—including institutional or state support (tuition waivers, student fees, or direct allocations) in football revenue or counting it separately, while treating or not treating indirect costs, capital expenses, and debt service as football expenses—a clear understanding of football finances did not necessarily emerge. However flawed, data for each ncaa institution at least was now available (posted on the U.S. Department of Education’s website).

Around the same time, Congress began requiring the publication of graduation rates, which the ncaa later revised with its own Graduation Success Rate (gsr) to account for transfers. (Under federal guidelines, an athlete in good academic standing who transferred to another school and

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even graduated from that school would count against his original university’s graduation rate. gsrs tend to be about ten percentage points higher than federal graduation rates.) Here, too, the accompanying ncaa press releases always reported aggregate rather than individual institutional data—for all of Division I-A, for example—but as with the Department of Education’s data on revenues and expenses, a little digging into the ncaa’s website could find the figures for individual institutions. Both the federal graduation rate and the ncaa’s gsr compared athletes to students overall (who were overwhelmingly not on full scholarship, increasingly had to work in order to afford their tuition, and often left school for financial reasons). Whether or not such comparisons were appropriate, at least the data were now available.

Finally, the ncaa itself, under the leadership of Myles Brand since 2003, has begun publishing various kinds of financial data on its website for the sake of transparency and to encourage institutional responsibility. In this spirit, the organization in 2008 began reporting revenues and expenses in a new way, still in aggregate form rather than for individual institutions but avowedly with consistent accounting methods that made the data more meaningful and reliable. (Several athletics officials immediately challenged the consistency of even this improved method.) In short, there are now mountains of data on both the financial and academic dimensions of big-time football that were not available even two decades ago. (With a December 2008 deadline for my final draft—and minor revisions possible until mid-March—the figures used are the most current ones available as of those dates.)

Yet the data remain partial and what they reveal not always self- evident. Nonetheless, while direct comparisons between specific institutions are still difficult, the available data can reveal the broader outlines of the institutional range in big-time football, today’s so-called Football Bowl Subdivision. They can help us think more clearly than used to be possible about the ways that tremendous, and tremendously uneven, financial growth has likely affected college football, the universities that sponsor it, and the young men who play it. The data reveal the system of big-time college football more clearly than before, if not the specific institutions and individuals within it.

While care must be taken with the available data, anyone who would understand big-time college football must also be wary of an alternate temptation: to generalize from published anecdotes. Popular sports journalism thrives on compelling personal stories—the famous football player who finishes four years of college still reading at a fourth-grade

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level, the rash of felonies in a particular football program—which are crafted into morality plays that purport to reveal general truths. There is always an element of truth in these stories, but how representative the individual cases are cannot easily be known, and compelling anecdotes coupled with faulty statistics can be particularly misleading. These media- made morality plays are important for my purposes, not as revelations of broader truths but as themselves an important element in the culture of big- time football. “True” or not, they shape what many people believe. And for institutions engaged in an enterprise so tied to promotion and marketing, public scandal is the worst nightmare.

Neither the personal stories nor the mounds of data can provide the most crucial information of all: clear evidence of whether institutions on the one hand and “student-athletes” on the other continue to receive the benefits from big-time college football that both once did. Knowing with greater certainty whether or not they do is a prerequisite for deciding what, if anything, should be done to change the way we now conduct the game. While this book cannot provide that answer, I hope that it clarifies what is at stake in asking the questions.

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PART I FOOTBALL AND THE 1960S

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1 FROM THE SIDELINES OF A FOOTBALL REVOLUTION

I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty —Hair(Broadway opening, April 29, 1968)

Looking back, someone today might conclude that to play football in the 1960s was to choose authoritarian discipline over personal freedom, violence over peace and love, the war in Vietnam over the revolution at home. Period photographs seem to tell that story: athletes with square jaws, square crew cuts, and square attitudes over here, wild-eyed protesters and wild-haired hippies over there.1 Actual confrontations became symbolic dramas, as when Uc Berkeley football players heckled the speakers at the rally in October 1964 that inaugurated the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Or when athletes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 chanted, “Hit ’em again, harder, harder,” while their teammates scuffled with protesters. Or when forty “burly ‘jocks,’” as Time magazine called them, blockaded Low Library on the Columbia University campus in April 1968 to starve out the student protesters occupying the building. In a long insiders’ account of the protests at Columbia, Ramparts (the anti- Time of the era) repeatedly referred to the antiprotesters as “the jocks,” while also noting that the dean whose position they supported was “a former crew oar.”2 Jocks were reactionaries. Football players were quintessential jocks. My country, right or wrong—sis boom bah!

Jim Sweeney, the head football coach at Washington State University in the late 1960s, called football “a fortress that has held the wall against radical elements.” That was the belief, anyway, and the clean-cut football player indeed looked like the antihippie and antiradical of the era. In a speech in June 1968, Homer Babbidge, the president of the University of Connecticut, described college athletes as “the guys in the white hats— they keep their hair cut short, they’re clean, they’re orderly, aware

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Protesters (top) and antiprotesters (bottom) at Columbia University, April 1968 (Courtesy of the Columbia Spectator)

of the importance of law and order and discipline.” Short hair was the visible sign of deeply held traditional values.3

So much to-do about hair in the ’60s, as if the fate of Western civilization lay in the hands of barbers. At the ncaa convention in January 1969, delegates passed legislation allowing schools to rescind the scholarships of players guilty of “manifest disobedience.” Protesters were the target, but as the Associated Press reported, “Several coaches here have expressed concern over long hairdos, beards, and mustaches by players.” “Long hair and beards not only defy orderliness,” declared the faculty representative from the University of Texas during the floor debate, “but under certain circumstances can be detrimental to

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performance.”4 Take that, Troy Polamalu! In another report from the front lines of sport’s “mod revolution,” the

Associated Press’s Will Grimsley in 1970 mentioned a freshman defensive back at the University of Minnesota who quit football after he was told to cut his hair, as well as the two long-haired tennis players at the University of Florida who hired an attorney after being suspended. According to Grimsley, football coaches in particular wanted athletes who looked like football players, not a bunch of hippies with “Prince Valiant hair bobs, mutton-chop sideburns, mustaches, beards, candy-striped trousers, frilly cuffs and beads.”5 In the 1960s, buzz-cut nation met long-hair nation and Afro nation at the barricades. The buzz cutters won the battles but obviously lost the war.

Well-barbered football players might have looked like Eisenhower Republicans left over from the 1950s, and some no doubt were, but football players were not necessarily more conservative than their classmates. As a student at Notre Dame from 1966 to 1970, I was not alone in playing football while opposing the war, wearing my hair short for football without intending a political statement—and even doing these things without feeling hypocritical. According to Grimsley, both my college coach and pro coach belonged to the “antihair party.” Ara Parseghian at Notre Dame believed that “wearing a beard or a mustache gives empathy or sympathy to a movement that is certainly the direct opposite of what we strive for in college football.” Hank Stram, my coach with the Kansas City Chiefs for four years in the early 1970s, professed “discipline, dedication, duty” and backed them up, as Grimsley accurately reported, with the threat of a $500 fine for overly long sideburns. Mustaches and beards were unthinkable. When I showed up for an off- season conditioning session in the spring of 1974 with a Stanford-grown beard—I was a graduate student from January through June—I might have driven a small wedge into my relationship with Hank, who cut me five months later at the end of the players’ strike.

In the 1960s “the Big Game” and “the Barricades,” terms juxtaposed in the title of a Sports Illustrated article in January 1966, became symbols of an unbridgeable political and cultural divide.6 Football may have been just a game, but it represented “traditional” values cherished by the Right and abhorred by the Left. Routine pregame pageantry, with the national anthem and perhaps an ROTC color guard, took on new meaning in the 1960s. On the other side of the barricades, in our histories and memories of the 1960s, yippies are better known for dressing up in Santa Claus suits

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and tossing coins to passersby on Wall Street or for nominating Pigasus the Pig for president in 1968, but a yippie wearing a football helmet while demonstrating against the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was similarly waging revolution through symbols.7 In its October 1968 issue, the avant-garde literary journal Evergreen Review published a one-act play titled Football, in which the character named Coach (clearly Lyndon Johnson in an overstuffed football uniform) conducts a surreal press conference with a chorus of Reporters after a game that has left thousands of spectators and players crushed, decapitated, or otherwise slaughtered. Jock Lib radicals in Berkeley issued a communiqué before the Big Game in 1970, declaring their “direct opposition to pig Amerika’s death culture as epitomized by gladiatorial football clashes.”8 To some, football symbolized the vital force of Western civilization; to others, it was its murderous endgame.

Football in its many forms since the Middle Ages had always been “a mimic game of war,”9 and American football was understood in that way from nearly its beginning. Walter Camp wrote about “the foot-ball army” and “the kicking or artillery work” in the 1890s, and later coaches, such as Army’s Charles Daly and Harvard’s Percy Haughton, elaborated on those connections.10 One of the Left’s more curious notions in the 1960s pushed that basic idea in a new direction by denouncing football as a territorial game—offenses seizing yardage as they marched down the field—and thus a symbol for American imperialism run amok in Southeast Asia. Insofar as football is territorial, a more apt analogy would be all of that meaningless Russian land seized by Hitler’s troops before being repulsed at Leningrad and Moscow in World War II, the original “red zones” I suppose. As any football fan knows, one team can out-gain the other by hundreds of yards and still lose. Comparably distorted

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Cartoon illustration of “Coach” (Evergreen Review, October 1968)

logic came from the Right. More dispassionate folks today might wonder how unquestioning submission to the coach could be an expression of American patriotism, given the fact that the United States was born in 1776 by rejecting tyrannical authority and rugged individualism has long been one of our most cherished national traits.

Behind the symbols and ideological projections lay a messier reality. Whatever short hair and football meant to Ara Parseghian and Hank Stram, or to any number of their coaching colleagues, we players were individual citizens, not a political team. In playing football at Notre Dame as something akin to a private vision quest, then continuing to play less dreamily in the nfl, I could remain oblivious, or at least impervious, to the fact that for much of the country, football embodied a set of values that most in my generation were repudiating. And I was certainly not alone. A cofounder of Rising Up Angry, a radical underground newspaper in Chicago, had played football at Lake Forest College.11 In his memoir of the sixties, a cofounder of the Liberation News Service, the underground’s alternative to the Associated Press and United Press International, described meeting a “a two-hundred-pound football player” from New

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Mexico State “who has managed to turn on the entire team to grass, rock, and Marianne’s sandal shop” (the local hippie joint).12 Football fans over age fifty remember Dave Meggysey, George Sauer, and Chip Oliver for leaving the nfl in protest or to pursue radical causes or countercultural lifestyles.13 We should also remind ourselves that these men, before they quit, were football players with radical and countercultural ideas. Beyond a certain point on the spectrum of leftward thinking, there was no longer room for football: the sport in its fundamental nature is competitive, rule governed, and physically aggressive, rather than collaborative (with the other team, that is), anarchic, and pacifist. But short of that point, football could coexist with all kinds of countercultural and politically progressive values.

At Columbia the radical students occupying Low Library and the Majority Coalition that opposed them were known to each other, not so affectionately, as “pukes” and “jocks.” In their book-length account of the protest, the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator used the terms “Majority Coalition” and “the athletes” interchangeably to describe the anti- protesters and explained that the athletes “were at Columbia primarily because of their skill in sports and had come to feel like outsiders, bystanders to the academic currents of the University. The visceral revulsion they felt for the demonstrators led them to join forces with those conservatives who intellectually repudiated the Left and who formed Columbia’s political out-group.”14 In Life magazine’s account, one Columbia grad student described the counterrebels as “the so-called ‘jock faction,’ the Majority Coalition of which campus athletes formed the core.”15 Press coverage routinely identified Paul Vilardi, the spokesman and a cofounder of the Majority Coalition, as a former football and baseball player whose athletic career had been cut short by injuries.16

On the other side, however, James Simon Kunen, the protester whose own version of the events, The Strawberry Statement—Notes of a College Revolutionary (1969), became an instant ’60s classic, was a member of the Columbia crew who slipped away from the sit-ins for his daily workouts on the river. A member of the varsity wrestling team organized the kitchen that provided meals for the besieged students. Vilardi himself told the Daily News that he and his friends supported the protesters’ cause, just not their tactics.17

Jocks and pukes, in other words, had more in common than their media stereotypes suggested. One historian of student radicalism has pointed out that, despite the Columbia protesters’ description of their foes as “little

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more than a minority of racist ‘jocks,’” two-thirds of Columbia undergraduates opposed the sit-ins.18 “Jocks,” or better yet “burly jocks,” were more conspicuous than the rest of their classmates, and they were singled out by reporters because they made for good theater, filling a necessary role for a simple morality play. At Uc Berkeley, yes, football players heckled protesters at the Free Speech rally in 1964, but other football players marched against the war at the Vietnam Day protest in 1965.19 Football in the 1960s symbolized a set of ideas neither inherent in the sport nor necessarily held by those who played it. One might well wonder where that stereotype came from.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

American football was always American; it was the context for “American” that changed in the 1960s. What most of the world calls football—or futbol or Fuβball—is soccer to us, and we are not entirely alone in going our own way. Gaelic football, Australian Rules football, and Canadian football thrived at least in part due to similar postcolonial or nationalist impulses. The game that evolved into American football was first organized in the 1870s by students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a few other northeastern universities, led by a Yale student, Walter Camp, “the Father of American Football.” Elite British secondary schools presented them with two options: the rules governing the Football Association (soccer) and the Rugby Union. Harvard alone among the American schools preferred the running to the kicking game, but as the country’s leading university, Harvard had the most influence. Once persuaded that rugby-style football was superior, Yale and the other schools took it up. Camp in particular then set about to make the American version less chaotic, devising the rules that put the ball in play from scrimmage, creating offenses and defenses, and assigning each position its special duties. As the dominant figure at Yale, Camp also developed not just particular offensive systems but the very idea of system itself, with Yale grads like himself returning to New Haven each fall to help train the team and devise tactics for the season. Unable to match Yale’s system, rival schools hired coaches (often Yale grads) in defiance of a fundamental principle of amateur sport. (Paying coaches marked the first step down that long, slippery slope of “professionalism.”) Camp made American football a coaches’ game. Although he would have been appalled by the prospect, today’s “geniuses” on the sidelines owe their multimillion-dollar salaries to him. Likewise, the coaching tyrants of the 1960s derived their authority

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ultimately from Walter Camp. Camp was also a tireless promoter of the new game, teaching sports-

writers and the public alike to think of football as a “scientific” contest of strategy and intricate teamwork overseen by a mastermind coach and coordinated by a “field general” at quarterback. To Camp, a football team was a little like a battalion but more like a corporation run on “scientific” principles. As early as 1891, Camp was declaring in popular magazines that the new American game of football “offered inducements to the man of executive ability,” who could hone his instincts for foresight and management on the playing field.20 It is highly doubtful that all of the players and spectators at the time viewed football as Camp did. Many no doubt preferred thrilling runs or licensed mayhem to intricate teamwork. But Camp’s ideas were circulated in countless newspapers and popular magazines, the most influential mass media of the day.

In a typical remark in a 1910 essay, Camp declared that “each country seems to have a foot-ball spirit of its own, and that spirit can be satisfied only with a characteristic game.”21 This idea that American football was distinctly American in “spirit” as well as geography echoed a long habit of Americans celebrating the uniqueness of the United States among the world’s nations. At the same time, much about American football as it would spread throughout the country over the following decades was indeed unique—not just the game on the field as it evolved away from rugby, but also the pageantry of cheerleaders and pep rallies and pregame bonfires and marching bands, the entire social world of homecoming and the football weekend, the role it played in the American educational system and in binding schools to their local communities. In all of these aspects, football was distinctly American, but by custom, not by ideology. To like football was neither an act of patriotism nor a defense of embattled values.

Ideology hovered around the game, to be sure. Developed by young men at elite institutions of higher education, football from the beginning was marked by its upper-class roots, in sharp contrast to baseball, the more broadly democratic “national pastime.” It did not take coaches long, however, to discover that the brawny sons of mill workers and coal miners tended to be hungrier than the offspring of the monied classes for the game and its rewards. Large numbers of these mill workers and coal miners were newly arrived in the country, and by the 1920s, football was becoming an agent of “Americanization” for new immigrants, as Nagurskis and Carideos were displacing Bakers and Mahans in football lineups and on

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All-America teams. Football was ethnically transformed at the very moment when anxiety over the influx of eastern and southern European immigrants was becoming a national crisis. Notre Dame’s go-it-alone stance within the ncaa, which has alienated much of the football public in recent decades, began in necessity at this time, when anti-Catholic bigotry within the Big Ten forced Knute Rockne to schedule games wherever he could find them. “Fighting Irish” was initially an opponents’ slur, before Notre Dame embraced the name after many years of being Rockne’s “Ramblers” or “Nomads” for their cross-country schedules. Notre Dame was the first America’s Team, but the America that Notre Dame represented in the 1920s—working-class, immigrant, Catholic—was the America of outsiders. Over time, these outsiders entered the mainstream, as the national hysteria over immigration in the 1920s gave way after World War II to celebration of the great American melting pot, with the multiethnic football team as one of its most powerful symbols.

JOCKS AT THE BARRICADES

Football has thus been deeply but unconsciously embedded in a collective sense of “the American Way” since the 1920s or even earlier, but it was only when that American Way was under attack that the game acquired any overt ideological resonance. Long before the 1960s, football had its detractors, though not on political or ideological terms. From nearly the game’s beginning, the twin evils of college football, for progressive and conservative critics alike, were “commercialism” and “professionalism” in their various forms. No one called the sport capitalist or socialist or fascist or any other–ist, and football was American made but not a symbol of America. Even when student radicalism emerged on college campuses, leftist students tended to object to football chiefly for being at the center of an apolitical and anti-intellectual college life that “siphoned off energy that might otherwise have gone into more serious (perhaps even political) activities.”22 The negative stereotype of the football player was the dumb jock, not the reactionary jock.

Nonetheless, an ancestry for the antiprotest “burly jocks” at Columbia in 1968 can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century to football players who engaged in strikebreaking. Historian Stephen Norwood has documented numerous episodes in this fascinating story.

In 1901 football players and other students from the University of California unloaded a freighter during a longshoreman’s strike in San

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Francisco. In 1903 football players and track men were among the students from the University of Chicago who replaced striking stokers for Great Lakes shipping companies. Later that year, varsity athletes from the University of Minnesota “formed a wedge, and blasted through the picket line at the Pillsbury- Washburn mill” in Minneapolis. In 1905 members of the football team, prominently led by their 6´3" star Buck Whitwell, joined fellow Columbia students in breaking a strike of subway workers in New York City. Also in 1905 Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago hired football players from Northwestern to make deliveries during a teamsters’ strike. That same year, football players were among the 200 Yale students who made up about 15 percent of the strikebreakers during a railroad strike. In 1912 football players from Wesleyan served as sheriffs’ deputies guarding a textile mill during a weavers’ strike. During the “Red Scare” of 1919, “nearly the entire Harvard football team” joined an army of more than 200 students to patrol Boston’s streets during a policemen’s strike.

This range of incidents could be distilled into one Ed Rush, a Yale football player from the 1890s who became a professional strikebreaker with a hired army ready to be deployed wherever it was needed during these years.23

As Norwood explains, football players were not uniquely drawn to antilabor activism but were part of the broader male student population that engaged in such activities, motivated not by political conviction but by the unconscious privilege of their social and economic class. Their temporary employers valued the student strikebreakers for their wholesome appearance before the public, in contrast to the more typical “menacing, semicriminal element, recruited from the lower class” to be scabs. The labor and socialist press despised students not as reactionaries but as “rah rah sissies” due to their “enthusiasm for frivolous athletic and social pursuits.” What distinguished football players from their classmates was their brawn—this “formidable array of strength and beef,” as one newspaper reporter described the footballers from Columbia in 1905—not their politics. The college administrators with their corporate interests were the ones with political views: antagonistic to organized labor, they encouraged the strikebreaking. Engineering students were as prominent as

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football players in strikebreaking during this era because they believed that their future profession was threatened by labor unions.24

For college students in the early twentieth century, strikebreaking was sometimes a “lark” (more akin to a later generation’s panty raids than its antiwar protests), though more often it was a virile adventure, an opportunity for proving one’s manhood and as such not so much an extension of football as a comparable experience available to greater numbers. It substituted for the annual “cane rushes” and “Bloody Mondays” in which sophomores had initiated freshmen on nineteenth- century college campuses, but which college authorities had recently banned due to the brutality and mayhem of the practices.25 (Collections of stories about college life much in vogue in the 1890s and early 1900s —Harvard Stories, Princeton Stories, Yale Yarns, Cornell Stories, Ann Arbor Stories, Stanford Stories, and the like—invariably included a nostalgic tale of the freshman-sophomore “rush,” “cane spree,” or similar violent ritual of bygone days.) In short, football players were in no way uniquely marked by conservative or antilabor politics.

According to Norwood, student strikebreaking ended around 1923 and never again reached the same level, even during the Depression.26 With a great influx of working-class and immigrant students, colleges (particularly urban and state colleges) became less elite over the 1920s and 1930s. Many of these new students had radical political ideas. At the same time, football players increasingly occupied a world apart, as college football expanded into a commercial spectacle packing enormous stadiums around the country. The radical student movement of the 1930s—“when the old left was young,” as one historian casts the era—seems virtually a template for the expanded student radicalism of the 1960s. And within that movement in the 1930s were precedents for the jocks-versus-pukes conflict that rocked Columbia in 1968. In fact, Columbia was a key site in this early period, too. In April 1932 football players and other athletes at Columbia attacked the students who were leading a one-day boycott of classes to protest the expulsion of Reed Harris, the muckraking editor of the campus newspaper. The jocks likely cared less about the specific reasons for Harris’s expulsion than they did about his editorial the previous November attacking football as a “semi-professional racket.”27 On that occasion, several of them had “threatened to beat [him] up.” The left-leaning journalist Heywood Broun responded to the turmoil at Columbia with a joke about the football players’ educational priorities, not their politics. Siding with the protesters against President Nicholas Murray

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Butler “and his football favorites,” Broun suggested that this was “the first time in the history of American education [that] football players were observed fighting to get into class.”28

Accounts of labor strife and political protest at USC, UCLA, and Cal in 1934 and 1935 portrayed football players in similar roles. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike in May 1934, a physics professor at Cal and the employment office at Usc recruited football players as strikebreakers. After the longshoremen’s walkout expanded into a general strike in San Francisco in July, Usc football star Homer Griffith was singled out as “one of the heroes” in breaking it.29 A few months later, a group of “vigilantes” at UCLA that included police and “brawny athletes” (recruited by an assistant football coach, who told them “to remember where your jobs and eligibility come from”) broke up a protest over the suspension of five radical students.30 “Husky football players” also roamed the campus to ensure that student demonstrators did not persuade others to join the boycott of classes.31 When students at Uc Berkeley organized a sympathy protest, a dean there recruited “conservative undergraduates from the Greek houses and the football team” to break it up. As the caption to a photo in the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Examiner put it, “football players ran the protesting students off campus.”32 The following spring, Cal football players, “egged on by the coach,” broke up another rally, this one to support a student expelled for having communist affiliations.33

Football players at the University of Michigan were also involved in antilabor incidents in the 1930s, though on which side is unclear. In an era before athletic scholarships, when coaches and boosters often arranged employment for the school’s athletes, Michigan players routinely received summer jobs at Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, with light duties that allowed plenty of time “for a bit of pre-season” practice. (Outside criticism ended that part of the arrangement.) According to an account in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, in the summer of 1937 Michigan coach Harry Kipke instructed his 50–75 players employed at the plant “to ‘co-operate’ with the office in spying” on their fellow workers. The Worker reported with pleasure, however, that “none of them exert themselves in the ‘co-operating,’ as they have a sense of fair play.”34 I have not been able to corroborate this incident, but another journalist cast at least some Michigan players in a very different light, placing them among “the gangsters, gunmen, pugilists[,] . . . football players, cops and convicts” who made up the plant’s Ford Service Department, a private

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militia under the direction of the sinister Harry Bennett that was deployed in a continuous dirty war against organized labor.35

This small handful of documented cases leaves uncertain the extent of such activity,36 but on their own these cases suggest that football players tended to be reactionary. As one prolabor writer from the time concluded: “The real cure for college radicalism, school officials discovered, was football.”37

What we know about college football in the 1930s suggests a more complicated picture, however. As American universities became more democratic in the 1920s and 1930s, their football teams became even more thoroughly democratized. Reed Harris could denounce college football as a “semi-professional racket,” after all, because football players tended to be those brawny sons of steelworkers and coal miners, many of them recent immigrants to the United States, who were lured to campus by jobs (real or phony) or cash from boosters, as well as by the chance for an education and entry into the great American middle class. The fathers of football players were much more likely to be longshoremen than shipping- company executives and the athletes themselves to feel like paid employees rather than eager schoolboys. During a period when the ncaa had no oversight powers, scholarships were not sanctioned, but “subsidization” was rampant. At the University of Pittsburgh, where players’ subsidies were tied to a carefully worked-out system, the football team in 1937 demanded cash payments before they would agree to play in the Rose Bowl at the sacrifice of the income they could earn over the Christmas vacation.38 Stanford players likewise lobbied successfully for $50 each for playing in the 1940 Rose Bowl.39 In 1938 two football players quit at Auburn when their demand for higher pay was refused, and a player at Louisiana State University was kicked off the team for trying to organize a players’ union.40 There were likely more such incidents, but these are the only ones that I have found.

There is no reason to assume that football players in the 1930s were disproportionately reactionary or even apolitical. Whether or not they were open to free speech and communism, many working-class athletes would surely have sympathized with striking longshoremen and labor unions. Recall that in the incident at Cal in November 1934, the dean recruited not just any football players but “conservative undergraduates from the Greek houses and the football team.”41 A literal reading of the sentence is likely the sound one: the football players who participated were the conservative members of the team. It would make sense that coaches, as managerial

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professionals with middle-class salaries, were more likely to be conservative. New York University coach Mal Stevens in 1934 praised football for providing an emotional “safety valve,” without which “we might turn to bolshevism, communism or some other form of social unrest.” Another coach at an unnamed eastern college “bawled out” a player who spoke out for “the liberal management of the school paper.” A player at Harvard got in trouble with his coach for sending a letter of support to a pacifist meeting. (All of these incidents were reported in a radical magazine, the Student Advocate, not the mainstream press.)42 Again, we have no idea how representative these few coaches were. Moreover, civic leaders and university administrators also used football itself for progressive purposes in the early 1930s, when they staged postseason “unemployment games” to raise money for various charities (the long-running College All-Star Game was created as one of these benefit games). Football teams of the 1930s were undoubtedly made up of individuals with varying political views that were not reflected in popular stereotypes.

The 1930s radicals who reported the incidents of strikebreaking and rally busting on campus tended to criticize football players not for their politics but for their anti-intellectualism and condemn the sport for the way it was run and not for its inherently reactionary nature. In King Football: The Vulgarization of the American College (1932), Harris accused the players who threw eggs during the strike at Columbia of expressing their opposition to “the forces of intelligence” and not of liberal or leftist ideas. Other progressive commentators such as James Wechsler and Edward Cole were less condescending to athletes. Wechsler described them as young men too wearied by their football labors for politics, who were warned to avoid meetings of the Social Problems Club but were recruited by a coach (responding to his own administrative bosses) “to help ‘mop up’ the radicals.” For Cole, the players were just “the hired hands . . . employed at a new task . . . stamping out this menacing, contagious disease” of student radicalism. Both Wechsler and Cole saw football players essentially as exploited workers who would awaken to the harsh realities of Depression America in due course. Citing a recent article in the Nation, Cole noted that some “‘ex-football players,’ cheated of their expected careers” (the reward for a college education), were now longshoremen, and that “the militancy of West Coast labor is due in great part to the ‘awakening’ of some college athletes.”43

The sweeping ideological pronouncements about football in the 1930s came from the Right, not from the Left. In 1935 William Randolph

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Hearst’s New York Evening Journal editorialized (on radicalism at Columbia): “For some reason which the psychologists can perhaps explain, football and Communism don’t go well together. We never heard of a soap-box orator who made a team. We never heard of a good halfback who cared two straws for Marx or Lenin.”44 In personal letters and public addresses over the 1930s, the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, John L. Griffith, claimed a direct connection between athletics and “the American Way,” which was obviously superior to “the Communist way, the Nazi way or the Fascist way.”45

Yet what distinguished the American Way from the Communist way suddenly disappeared during World War II, when “self-reliance” and the “quickness of unchanneled wit” learned on football fields became potent weapons against Fascism. According to the sports editor of the Omaha World-Herald who used these terms in a 1942 column, our Russian allies shared these sporting traits with us. Football suddenly was no longer anticommunist, only anti-Fascist. From the radicals’ side, the American Communist Party in the late 1930s, under the banner of the Popular Front, softened its criticism of commercialism and exploitation in college football, and its Daily Worker began reporting on the sport in more or less the same manner as the mainstream press—a strategy for forging stronger ties to sports-loving American workers. After the war, in a 1946 column, sports editor Lester Rodney celebrated college football as a “democratic game” that is “played hard and honestly and with high team spirit and amateur verve.” (Rodney personally preferred pro football because its players—its workers, that is—were openly paid.) Rodney, of course, assumed that American workers and Russians shared a common passion for democracy.46

My point is simply this: long before the 1960s, football was recruited for ideological purposes, but it could mean pretty much whatever a writer wanted it to mean as the times demanded. And football players were always more varied and complexly human than their stereotyped images.

FOOTBALL AND THE COLD WAR

In the 1950s the American Way was again threatened from without, and football became more explicitly “American” as “America” itself became more highly charged with the onset of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. In the world of sport, Americans confronted the Soviet Union most dramatically in the quadrennial Olympic Games. According to the

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Olympic spirit, no one was supposed to keep national scores, but of course everyone did, and Americans collectively cheered—and sighed in relief— when the United States triumphed in Helsinki in 1952 on a burst of gold medals on the final day, despite reports of billion-ruble Soviet investments in state-run athletics for propaganda purposes. When the Ussr outmedaled and outpointed the United States in Melbourne in 1956, the American press made much of the Soviet superiority in women’s events and obscure sports like Greco-Roman wrestling and rifle shooting, while the red, white, and blue team continued to dominate in men’s track and field. After describing Charley Jenkins’s upset of his Russian challenger in the 400 meters, Newsweek declared the lesson of the 1956 Olympics: “A country can no more train a man to win an Olympic gold medal than it can train him to write a Nobel Prize novel. There is a most un-Marxian creative aspect to Olympic victory.”47

The contrast was between amateur and state-run sporting systems and not between distinctly American or Soviet sports, but Cold War politics sometimes spilled into the coverage of homegrown sports like baseball and football as well. Football was particularly vulnerable to criticism and ripe for celebration. Wire-service stories in the early 1950s informed American readers that the Soviet press was maligning football as “a carnival of murder and mayhem” and “part of a capitalist plot to whip the toiling masses up into a ‘bestial’ frame of mind for World War III.” Football, we were told, “was designed to brutalize American youth and prepare it to take its place in an ‘army of bandits and haters of mankind’ under the United States policy of militarization.”48 In the Cold War climate, a sportswriter’s tirade over proposals to reform college football could take strange turns. In 1951 Dick Hyland of the Los Angeles Times denounced a plan to eliminate the recruiting and subsidizing of football players as “another step along the path to making all individuals faceless creatures of a Socialistic machinelike, humanless state.”49

That such lunatic notions could appear in a major metropolitan newspaper tells us much about the era. Chicago Bears owner George Halas evoked a similar image during congressional testimony in 1957 in his case to counter the threat to the nfl of antitrust law (another communist plot). Presenting two photos to the members of the House committee—one of mass calisthenics in a stadium emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, the other of football at Chicago’s Soldier Field bordered in red, white, and blue—Halas asked the congressmen which of the two they believed the American public wanted.50 More generally, new sets of symbols and

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metaphors were simply available in the 1950s to impose on old problems, as when a sportswriter referred to a rebellion of players at the University of Washington as a “Husky Soviet.”51

Such casual references suggest an emerging mindset that would make football an ideological flash point in the 1960s. Its fullest Cold War elaboration has to be Dementia Pigskin, a paean to American football written in 1951 by Francis Wallace, one of the best-known American sports journalists of the day. After a stint as one of Knute Rockne’s student press agents at Notre Dame in the early 1920s, Wallace covered sports for several New York dailies (where he broke the story about the “win one for the Gipper” halftime pep talk and helped popularize the nickname “Fighting Irish”). He then became a regular contributor of both fiction and nonfiction to popular magazines (several of his serialized football novels were also made into Hollywood films). In the major phase of his long career, Wallace wrote the annual “Football Preview” for the Saturday Evening Post from 1937 through 1947, then for Collier’s from 1948 until the magazine folded in 1957.

With Dementia Pigskin, then, Wallace came before the public not as a crank but as a football expert with credentials spanning three decades. Coincidentally, as a screenwriter he was also one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a group founded in Hollywood in 1944 to defend, as its statement of principles put it, “the American way of life” against “the rising tide of Communism, Fascism and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change” it.52 The little-known MPA began the anticommunist blacklistings in Hollywood that were later taken up by the painfully well-remembered House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Despite calling himself “prominent” in the founding of the organization,53 Wallace does not appear in the published memoirs and histories of the MPA and anticommunism in Hollywood. Next to Walt Disney, John Wayne, and numerous others, Wallace was a small-time Hollywood player. But he was a big-time sportswriter, and the concluding chapters of Dementia Pigskin were his personal contribution to the anticommunist crusade in the name of football.

Chapter 32, “Intangibles,” described the lessons taught by football, beginning with reflections on loyalty as the finest human quality and the one most “inherently American.” In declaring that loyalty “is inculcated in youth by nothing so much as football,” Wallace invoked a long tradition of valuing teamwork and school spirit as character building. Now, however,

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in the context of an America threatened by godless enemies, Wallace translated the loyalty learned on football fields into loyalty to “family, friends and faith . . . to marriage, to country and to God.” Football erected a bulwark against the “determined attack against loyalty to fundamental beliefs” that was currently under way, against the new “smart” attitude that laughs at “religion, marital fidelity, individualism as against the master state, and patriotism.” Wallace chiefly blamed “a communistic control room” for the present assault on traditional American values, but he also faulted the naïveté of “otherwise good Americans” that made them the communists’ unwitting accomplices. Fortunately for them, “football doesn’t buy any of that. The football nut still loves his good old American corn. So did the boys who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and the other boys who still follow the American flag and believe in the American ideas.”54

Both the bizarre logic and the seamless move from civic virtues like individualism and teamwork, learned through football, into “family, friends, and faith” are breathtaking. Communists’ loyalty to their own cause, after all, was presumably what made them frightening. Insofar as football taught loyalty, why would it foster loyalty “to marriage, to country and to God” rather than to cohabitation, internationalism, and dialectical materialism? Wallace’s assertion that individualism in football was anticommunist appears particularly ironic from the perspective of the 1960s, when conservatives would make submission to the coach’s authority football’s paramount virtue.

From “Intangibles,” Wallace moved to “Tangibles” in the following chapter, where he slipped back into commonplaces. He likened being “in shape” for football to military preparedness—invoking the truism that “games are not won on Saturday afternoons but during the long, punishing pre-season training period, the weekly practices during the season itself, and the psychological treatment during all of this.” Likewise, football’s combination of “trained personnel, knowhow and team-work”—Walter Camp redux—modeled the American system of private enterprise, “which has amazed and dominated the world” and “is still the hope of the civilized part.”55

Dementia Pigskin then concluded with a chapter titled “Analogies,” in which Wallace returned to his more extravagant ideological claims. After a section called “Football as a Way of Life,” the next one, “Political and Ideological Analogy,” began by citing the recent national trend “toward the left—away from individuals toward governmental controls and ‘democratic socialism,’” in which some poor dupes slide all the way to

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“outright socialism” or “eventually communism.” Against this threat, Wallace offered “football thinking on current political and ideological systems.”

According to Wallace, both football and the American form of government evolved “from the old brutal push-and-pull rugged individualism.” In turn, both football and the United States must beware the dangers of a “showy razzle-dazzle offense which leaves itself vulnerable” because it is not grounded in the old fundamentals. (This is only an analogy, of course, but by such reasoning, Woody Hayes’s three- yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense soon to be developed at Ohio State would express 100 percent Americanism, while trick plays would be akin to a communist plot. The nfl’s pass-happy Los Angeles Rams of the 1950s would be dangerous subversives.) Also, the American Revolution rejected a British system in which “a man had to be born a star and never had a chance to work himself up from the reserves to the varsity squad or earn stardom on his own abilities.” Today’s socialists embraced the opposite heresy, perversely insisting on “an equal share of production” for everyone: “Every man on the squad is entitled to a letter and there shall be no All-Americans.”

Neither football nor life worked that way, Wallace reminded his readers. Hitler and Mussolini tried socialism, “and we’ve seen where they wound up.” Fortunately, Americans created a system that “defeated nazism and fascism,” “saved communism” despite itself (the Red Army presumably played an incidental role), and “is still financing British socialism.” And this system was grounded in the principles at the heart of football:

We established a new American system based upon achievement—a system which emphasized opportunity, incentive, initiative, hard work, competition; which rewarded the star because he provided the margin of victory. The team helped the star and the star helped the team. America was made by the teamwork of ball-carriers and linemen; by the willingness to play on the scrubs while working for the chance to make the varsity. By following the direction of the coach (who had earned his job, too) this combination produced our knowhow. The system emphasized such things as courage, loyalty, respect for law, sports-manship and all our other native virtues.56

In this mix of truisms with nonsense, on behalf of American exceptionalism (and American football exceptionalism), the italics are all Wallace’s; he needs no help from me. Wallace could have drawn certain

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elements of his game plan for America from the MPA’s 1947 pamphlet cautioning Hollywood filmmakers against “the More Common Devices Used to Turn Non-political Pictures into Carriers of Political Propaganda.” Among the warnings were these: “Don’t deify the common man” and “Don’t glorify the collective.”57 And I was destined to become an offensive lineman. Sigh.

TOUGHNESS

I would certainly not argue for any direct influence of Dementia Pigskin on Americans’ thinking about football. Rather, I take Wallace’s manifesto to be an unusually explicit statement of ideas that remained unspoken, mostly unthought, until a Great Threat called them into play. Like the early 1950s (during the HUAC hearings and the Korean War), the late 1950s (following the launch of Sputnik) were particularly ripe for linking football to anticommunism. Longtime sportscaster Bill Stern, a Francis Wallace of the radio booth, in a 1958 broadcast pointed out that Harvard, Chicago, New York University, and City College—all “hotbeds of communism”— either had no football team or, in Harvard’s case, did not fully support it. Stern invited his listeners to consider the connection.58 In this same spirit, in the occasional public speech or interview, a coach would declare football “our best defense against Communism” or the source of “the toughness necessary to survive the next war” or some similar Cold War tonic—ideas in turn mocked by the game’s critics.59 The men who founded the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame in 1958 explicitly envisioned an organization for perilous times. New York Times sports columnist Allison Danzig described their outlook this way: “They look upon football as a vital force in the life of the nation, developing the rugged virtues and tough leadership qualities indispensable for the survival of a free world menaced by a ruthless and conspiratorial tyranny.” The foundation’s first president, Chester LaRouche, declared that the Hall of Fame honored football heroes of the past “to remind our youth and all our people through great historical exhibits and through print and over the air, that there shall be no softening of our fiber as we face the task of world leadership.” In receiving a gold medal at the foundation’s first awards dinner, President Dwight Eisenhower, a former Army player and coach, celebrated football and other sports for instilling the competitive spirit, morale, and fitness needed in the “great contest” with a foe (unnamed but unmistakable) who was “ponderous, persistent, deadly, . . . clever and

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powerful” and “out to win by whatever means and at whatever cost.”60

This was the Football Establishment speaking on a formal occasion. I doubt that many ordinary citizens in the 1950s thought about football in such explicitly pro-American, anti-Soviet terms. Rather, with the Cold War as the backdrop against which all of American life played out, such full-blown Cold War rhetoric broke out on occasions of self-conscious pontificating. Interestingly, after the Russians’ launch of Sputnik in 1957, there was a distinctively Cold War argument against football as well as for it: the game was a distraction from universities’ serious business of training scientists and engineers to achieve victory in the space race. As an editorial comment in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 put it: “Many critics of football are crying ‘overemphasis’ more loudly than ever these days, now that the American educational system stands accused in some quarters of falling behind Soviet Russia’s in classroom standards.”61 As both an activity and a symbol, football remained supremely malleable for ideological purposes.

The aspect of Cold War football with the deepest roots was the cult of toughness, a perennial part of American football culture since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century but particularly pronounced in the popular media in the 1950s and 1960s. As at the turn of the twentieth century under Teddy Roosevelt, this obsession emanated even from the White House. In 1956 President Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness to address the “muscle gap” that exacerbated the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union; and in 1960 President Kennedy wrote in Sports Illustrated that the physical weakness of “The Soft American” (his title) was “a menace to our security.” Sportswriters had been assuring anxious parents since the 1930s that football, when properly organized and supervised, was safe for their children. In 1962 Look magazine’s Tim Cohane once again told parents that high school football was safe but fortunately not too safe, because “football teaches a boy to cope with the risks of physical danger and pain, risks often inseparable from the activity of living itself.” American technology and material abundance were our national glory but also our potential downfall. As Cohane put it, football “demonstrates the value of work, sacrifice, courage and perseverance. These lessons are especially salutary in our modern society with its delinquency problem, lack of discipline and physical softness.”62 A similar emphasis on stoicism and deferred gratification, struggle and competition, in sports like football marked the 1890s and the 1920s. Promoting these particular virtues had more to do with anxieties about industrialized, bureaucratic, and affluent modern American life than with

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the Cold War more specifically. (Note that Cohane attached no political coloring to football’s character-building traits.) The Soviet Union in the 1950s simply posed the looming threat of the moment.

Toughness has no politics, but it acquired political resonance in the 1950s and 1960s. The cultural rebellion of the 1960s—free love, getting high, doing your own thing—rejected the cult of toughness. Football meant competing rather than sharing, making a kind of war rather than love, working hard rather than having fun, enduring pain rather than pursuing pleasure, deferring gratification rather than demanding it now, hanging in rather than dropping out. Yet as such, football’s deepest conservative impulses belonged as much to the Old Left as to the Old Guard.

THE COACH

The ultimate instiller of toughness was the football coach. And the coach as tyrant, who belonged to a long and surprisingly much-honored tradition by the 1950s, became the central figure in the college football rebellions of the 1960s.

Sometime in the 1950s, a story akin to an urban legend spread even to the remote Pacific Northwest where I lived: Bear Bryant, head coach at Texas A&M, had a “pit,” a hole in the ground into which he sent two competitors for a starting position to take on each other, no holds barred. Whoever emerged from the pit played that week. The story was a little like the tale, usually whispered at night around a campfire, about the escaped maniac with a hook instead of a hand who prowled Lover’s Leap. Bear Bryant was a boogeyman of my football childhood.

Apparently the story was apocryphal, but it was little more brutal than the facts of Bryant’s coaching career as Bryant himself and some of his players later described them. At Kentucky in 1946, according to the Bear’s own account, when he took over a team of underachieving, pampered stars, “we ran off a few and worked some of them extra hard, and they quit, too, and I probably made more mistakes and mishandled more people than anyone ever has. But we got the rest of them motivated, and they started winning that first year.” This is the forgotten episode in Bear Bryant’s career; the next one became the basis for his legend. At Texas A&M in 1954, the new coach took two busloads of players to godforsaken Junction, Texas, for preseason training and returned with one bus half full. The survivors became famous, long before they were immortalized as the

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“Junction Boys” in a book by Jim Dent and Gene Stallings in 1999 and an espn movie in 2002. Bryant’s own comment in 1966: “Well, you say, what kind of coaching is that when you lose about 100 boys and keep only 27? I have to believe I wouldn’t lose that many today, because I’m not the driver I was and I probably don’t demand as much, but let me tell you that was the beginning of a change in attitude at a&M.”63 Actually, Bryant did not change all that much from his impetuous youthful self when he moved on to Alabama in 1958. The “pit” might have been apocryphal, but the Kill or Be Killed Drill at Alabama in the early 1960s was real: three linemen facing off in a circle to kick, bite, slug, or do whatever else it took to prevail. Bryant built his coaching career at three universities with the fierce and dedicated survivors from his brutal practices.64