Last Gasp for Amateur Athletics

On all sides, the attack on amateur athletics continues. And the conclusion is rapidly becoming inescapable: the future of amateur sports in this country is exceedingly bleak.

Recent developments have done much to strengthen this impression. Not only have the known forces of evil multiplied their efforts, but the supposed guardians of the truth have shown disturbing signs of weakness.

The Ivy League is supposed to be the last outpost of athletic innocence, but the recent debate on recruiting has shown that even the Ivies cannot agree on what, in fact, is right. Dartmouth sends its coaches out beating the bush for applicants, and says there is nothing wrong with it. Princeton also does a good deal of active recruiting, but its officials are less eager to admit it.

Harvard's official stand on recruiting by coaches is that this is not their normal function. Davis Jackson, Dartmouth's assistant. Director of Admissions, apparently thinks this is so much mouthwash. "It would be a most amazing thing," he says, if coaches were not to recruit. "What else do coaches do in the off-season?"

At Harvard, the impression is inescapable that many of the proponents of a unified policy on recruiting would be every bit as happy if Harvard set its coaches free as they would be if restrictions were tightened all around. Obviously, this type of thinking leads to destruction of what little balanced outlook remains.

Should Alumni Recruit?

And one is tempted to ask: Why is it better to have alumni beating the bush than to have coaches actively recruiting? It seems that abuses to the spirit of the Ivy Group agreement are as easily perpetrated by old grads who always wanted to do or die for Harvard as they are by coaches.

As one Administration official recently admitted, "We aren't pure, not by any manner or means." As a sportswriter working and traveling with a team, one meets alumni who are fanatically interested in athletics. One is told such things as, "Why don't you drop up and see So-and-So sometime? I got him in here on the assumption that he would go out for such-and-such a sport, but he hasn't. Maybe if you talked to him..." Why is a coach any worse than an alumnus with this attitude?

S.I. Proposes Changes

Shaky though the Ivy League is, the outside world won't leave it alone. That insidious publication, Sports Illustrated, last week scored "the opposition of President A. Whitney Griswold of Yale, who tolerates football with only slightly concealed hostility," to its pet proposals: spring practice for the Ivy League and the right of participation in post-season bowls for its players.

The editorial concluded, "Now that Yale has proved it can field one of the country's best collegiate football teams without overemphasizing (another S.I. unproved theory), it is time for President Griswold and his fellow executives in the Ivy colleges to reconsider the bans on spring practice and post-season individual play. This would be a graceful moment to drop these archaic circumscriptions against Ivy football players." One might add that this would be a graceful moment for the Ivy League to slide out of existence, with all of its goals lost.

S.I. thinks it is great that Houston can be allowed to field a cross country team composed of a 30-year-old Polish refugee, three Australians aged 28, 26, and 25, and a 24-year-old Scot. The magazine thinks it is even better that McNeese State College in Louisiana managed to recruit a 39-year-old English coal miner and cross country runner.

Football at Johns Hopkins

And, in the same issue, Sports Illustrated registers alarm that Johns Hopkins thinks there are things more important than football. Despite de-emphasis, the Hopkins' eleven was 7-1 a year ago, but the student body, distracted by Maryland and Navy football, the Baltimore Colts, and soccer, is not very interested. After polling 20 students to find out the reasons for this apathy, S.I. concluded that "the majority of the students seem to blame the school's a athletic policy." Their solution for lack of interest is to pour more money into the game, an answer which is just what must be avoided.

It is obvious that Sports Illustrated went into Hopkins with its opinion already formed, and tried to fit what it found to its theories. When the article says, "The morale of the Johns Hopkins football squad, understandably, is lackadaisical, even if their playing doesn't show it," distortion is just around the corner. Hopkins' coach, Wilson Fewater, although he has never had a losing season, "is, as might be expected, a case study in almost total frustration," the article assumes, with blithe disregard for rationality.

On yet another front, the University of Minnesota has just set back de-emphasis another century or so. For the past few years, Minnesota has been at the bottom of the Big Ten football standing and against participation in bowl games. This season, the Gophers won the conference championship, and the Faculty Senate happily voted to go to the Rose Bowl.

Behind the Senate's explanation that it wanted to avoid a battle with the State Board of Regents lay the obvious reason: Minnesota, was against other schools' playing in bowls, but was perfectly thrilled to be asked itself.

College sports now seem to be a hopeless mess of hypocrisy, cheating, and irrationality. And the trend is for the worse.