Bill Moyers examines big-money sports on college campuses and how university athletics and academic studies appear to be flat-out incompatible.
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BILL MOYERS, Host: [voice-over] The name of the game is winning, to be number one, to sell the university’s image and gain the money to do it all again, especially by getting on television. It’s mass entertainment and America’s colleges are providing more of it than ever before. The top 100 big-time sports universities, the ones you see on TV, now take in total revenues of more than a billion dollars a year.
[on camera] With all that money at stake, no wonder our major universities are caught in a conflict of values. It’s hard meeting the objectives of education while supplying the entertainment to sports fans who demand a good show. Surveys reveal that a majority of Americans believe intercollegiate athletics are shot through with greed, fraud and flagrant violations of the rules. And that same public also doubts that universities can or will clean up their own act. For a year now, a major commission has been studying the possibilities of reform. Its report was released publicly today and later in this broadcast, we’ll be back for a live discussion and debate on its recommendations. First, we’ll look at the conditions that created the controversy in our documentary report, “Sports for Sale.” I’m Bill Moyers.
[voice-over] Big-time college sports or great entertainment? But the myth of the student athlete is exploded so often these days and the mission of universities so compromised that reformers say the whole enterprise is out of control. Critics cite recent scandals, including one that reached the attention of Congress. Star professional football player Dexter Manley told a congressional subcommittee that he was illiterate during four years of playing football at Oklahoma State University.
DEXTER MANLEY, Pro Football Player: [testifying] Three years ago, I just began learning to-learn how to read and write.
CONGRESSMAN: You’re doing fine.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Could it happen again? Yes, said a faculty committee, but despite faculty protests, Oklahoma State’s president reinstated seven failing football players. Basketball player Terrell Jackson sued Drake University. He charged that Drake failed to educate him and that coaches urged him to take easy courses. Earlier, a Drake assistant coach was fired for writing academic papers for three players. Miami University in Ohio fired basketball coach Jerry Pierson after he gave an A grade to a player for a basketball theory course he never attended.
1st NEWSCASTER: A 6’7″ junior from Melbourne, Australia, Number 10, Andrew Gaze.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Andrew Gaze, an Australian player, enrolled at Seton Hall University in October, helped the team make the 1989 NCAA finals, then left in April, four days after the tournament ended. While at Seton Hall, Gaze took courses in First Aid, Youth Activities, Creative Movement and Ethics. Coach Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State team won the NCAA national championship in 1983. Afterward, the public learned that Valvano’s new recruit, Chris Washburn, had been admitted to NC State with a total SAT score of 470. You can get 400 for just signing your name and attempting to answer one question. Despite the negative publicity, Valvano was given the additional title of Athletic Director in 1986. Three years later, another Valvano star recruit, Charles Shackleford, was accused of having shaved points while playing for NC State.
CHARLES SHACKLEFORD, Former NC State Basketball Player: I never shaved points at North Carolina State. I did take money from an agent. I was young and I was poor. I was offered money and I took it.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Despite strong support from boosters, Valvano was forced to resign. He left NC State with a $500,000 contract settlement. Criminal activity on campus shocked the University of Oklahoma when a football player was arrested and charged with shooting a teammate after an argument in the athletic dormitory. Eight days later in the same dorm, three other players were arrested and charged with gang rape. One was acquitted. The other two were sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000 each. Three weeks after that crime occurred, quarterback Charles Thompson was arrested by FBI agents and charged with selling cocaine. Thompson was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.
BARRY SWITZER, former Head Football Coach, University of Oklahoma: Today, I’m resigning as Head Football Coach at the University of Oklahoma, effective immediately.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] After all this criminal activity, Barry Switzer, the winningest coach in Oklahoma history, resigned, but the fraternity of college coaching takes care of its own. Untarnished Indiana coach Bobby Knight’s newest assistant is Norm Ellenberger. He was fired for forging his players’ academic transcripts at the University of New Mexico in 1979. See him here with Jim Valvano. Valvano left coaching, but not college basketball. Last year, he signed a three-year $900,000 contract as college basketball analyst for ABC Sports. In the decade of the 1980’s, over half of the major universities which play Division IA sports have been penalized by the NCAA. The worst punishment is for the NCAA to ban a college from participating in a sport. It’s called “the death penalty,” and it’s been administered only once, in 1987, to Southern Methodist University’s football program and then only after an investigative documentary by Dallas television station WFAA.
DAVID STANLEY, former SMU Football Player: [1986 WFAATV Special Report] I received $25,000 to attend SMU.
1ST WFAA REPORTER: David’s mother, Dawn Stanley, says some of the monthly money was mailed to her in envelopes like this one. Note the postmark: October 4, 1985, almost two months after SMU went on probation. She says the initials stand for Henry Lee Parker, Bob Hitch’s administrative assistant. We then talked ended. While at Seton Hall, Gaze took courses in First Aid, Youth Ac-2 with Parker, SMU Coach Bobby Collins and Athletic Director Bob Hitch. [interviewing] Have you done anything illegal after August of 1985?
BOB HITCH, Athletic Director, Southern Methodist University: No. To our knowledge, we have not.
1ST WFAA REPORTER: This isn’t easy. Is that your letter?
2ND WFAA REPORTER: The one in your left hand, really specifically.
1ST WFAA REPORTER: The one in the left hand specifically, with your initials on the SMU stationary?
HENRY LEE PARKER, Administrative Assistant: That is mine, yes.
2ND WFAA REPORTER: Did you write it?
HENRY LEE PARKER: Let me get my glasses.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The corruption involved people at the top. The Governor of Texas, Bill Clements, was the Chairman of the SMU Board of Governors when he and others authorized paying 13 athletes after SMU was on NCAA probation.
BILL CLEMENTS, former Governor of Texas: We — with capital We — we made a considered judgment decision over several months that the commitments had been made and in the interest of the institution, the boys, their families and to comply with the NCAA, that that program would be phased out.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] SMU endured its penalty. Now, the probation over, the college is trying to run a competitive but clean big-time football program. KEN PYE, President, Southern Methodist University: I cannot provide, with all the safeguards that we put in, any assurance that someone of our 60,000 alumni will not do something wrong.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The new president is Ken Pye.
KEN PYE: If however, we find any conduct similar to that, in which some alumni were engaging in five, six years ago, then I will recommend to the Board of Trustees that we get out of big-time football completely. I do not mean if there was a violation of an NCAA rule. The notion that any university can, over a sustained period of time, not engage in some violation of one of those rules boggles the imagination.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Professor of Religion Lonnie Kliever was the SMU faculty representative to the NCAA. He headed the university committee that investigated the payments.
LONNIE KLIEVER, Professor of Religion, Southern Methodist University: I think there is a sense that everyone’s cheating and I suspect that there’s some truth to that sense. However, I think you can draw a distinction between what I call “humanitarian cheating” and egregious cheating. I suppose cheating is cheating, but still, I think there is a distinction between rule violations which really are prompted out of compassion for the needs of a student athlete.
HOWARD WEINBERG, Producer: Example?
LONNIE CLEAVER: A trip home to visit parents over the Christmas holidays, a jacket or a new suit of clothes when the student athlete comes from a family that can’t provide those resources, a —
HOWARD WEINBERG: A new car?
LONNIE CLEAVER: — a new car. [laughs] No, I wouldn’t call giving a new car a humanitarian cheating. Perhaps car repairs might come under that, but certainly a new car wouldn’t come under that. But there is egregious cheating in the game from time to time and from place to place, all aimed at gaining a competitive advantage.
FORREST GREGG, Head Football Coach. Southern Methodist University: Some people think the game went without cheating. I’m not accusing anybody, but on the other hand, I think we all know it’s a fact of life.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Coach Forrest Gregg came from the pros to rebuild SMU football after its two-year suspension. He has been operating under tough new rules.
FORREST GREGG: Some people think you can’t win-there are just not enough smart kids that are great athletes and I don’t think that’s true. [coaching] This is a mind game, men. It’s 90 percent mental. The other 10 percent is what you can do physically. It’s just a matter of whether you want to get it done or not. OK, Captain. Break. [to Weinberg] And we don’t just talk about academics and about education when we’re recruiting. Once they get here, we continue to talk about it and we monitor what they do. If we have someone who’s neglecting his academics, then he may have to sit out a game or two. It’s like a coach told me one time, he said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you guys, but you’re weak,” so that’s the reason we monitor them.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Number 74 is Kyle Carroll, a sophomore tackle from Big Spring, Texas.
KYLE CARROLL, SMU Football Player: It’s really hard to study because you put in such a long day. You know, the first thing you want to do is, you know, climb in your bed and watch a little TV and then turn off the lights. I mean, you know, a normal student, they can take a nap, you know. If they’re lazy, they can take a nap for three or four hours, then get up and study and then do whatever they want, but, you know, with us, our day’s so filled, you know, it’s hard to get going at the end of the day ’cause you’re just so exhausted.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Number 56 is Byron Bonds, a freshman end from Cooper, Texas.
BYRON BONDS, SMU Football Player: Basically, I try to study during the breaks during the day. I mean, that’s when I mainly try to do my homework or try to read a little bit because, you know, after practice, you’re like eating and you want to sleep, you know. That’s all you want to do.
KYLE CARROLL: That’s one thing about college football is it’s not a game anymore, it’s a business. You know, I mean, you’re putting in ‘I an eight-hour days in the heat, you know, like today. It’s not a game, you know. There’s too much preparation and too much work to be called a game.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Number five is Mike Romo, sophomore starting quarterback from San Antonio, Texas.
MICHAEL ROMO, SMU Football Player: It’s a lot of time and it’s a sacrifice. You know, a lot of people think, ’cause they’re paying for our school, that should be enough, but no, I disagree. We’re putting in 30, 40 hours a week and you know, they’re making all this money on the weekends and we’re really not getting much of a compensation for it. .
KYLE CARROLL: Why shouldn’t we get paid? You know, I mean, me and Mike-or Mike and I just the other day in the meeting room figured out, you know, just give us minimum wage, you know, like $3.85 and — $3.85 an hour. Just give us that. You know, that would be enough, you know, for all us. It’s year-round. Even in the off-season, you’re putting in three or four hours a day, lifting weights, running, trying to stay in condition, you know, gaining strength. Now, as far as cutting down the time, I don’t see that ever happening.
ASSISTANT FOOTBALL COACH, SMU: Don’t give up. Strain, strain. Give me some, give me some, give me some. Now, come back up. Feel my thumb, feel my thumb. All the way up, all the way up. As soon as you touch your chin to your chest, you’re done.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON, Associate Athletic Director, Compliance and Academics: This business is supposed to be about kids and listen to that contradiction right there in my own language: this business. OK?
HOWARD WEINBERG: It is a business.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: It is a business and increasingly, the business has less and less to do with kids and less and less to do with what’s good for them.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Cynthia Patterson is a former athlete with a Ph.D. in History. She teaches a required course in ethics to freshman athletes at SMU.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: Today, what we want to do is wrap up the discussion on what happened at SMU several years ago — OK? the problems that led to the death penalty and what all that means. Tuesday, you all got to watch the news tape of the show that broke the scandal open and particularly, the interview with David Stanley. What was your reaction to David Stanley?
1ST SMU STUDENT: David Stanley, he took that $25,000. He needed it. I mean, they really needed it. They were like in economic hard times and everything.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: Why did he tell?
2ND SMU STUDENT: Why did he tell? Because he had a drug problem, correct? So, you know, I think he felt guilty for himself. He wanted to get back at someone else.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: Did David Stanley get SMU punished or did what SMU do get them punished?
3RD SMU STUDENT: Now we have a clean program, thanks to him. Otherwise, I mean, we’d still be all-you know, I mean, I don’t care what his reasons were, if they were selfish or not. I mean, the right thing happened.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: Was the death penalty fair at SMU? No? Yes?
2ND SMU STUDENT: Texas and Texas A&M have been on probation and they had been caught for the same thing. Why they didn’t get the death penalty?
BOB HITCH:: [1986 WFAA-TV Special Report] Everybody was focusing everything directly at us. Now, to come back, after we’ve taken our penalty, after we’ve gone on trying to get our program straightened up, to come back something [sic] that could destroy SMU athletics, boy, that is scary. And you’re talking about my coach and you’re talking about coaches’ families and you’re talking about everybody, that’s going on in every place in the country, Dale, then that’s not fair.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: One of the things you hear a lot among coaches is, you know, “Everybody cheats.” Well, then you look at a coach and say, “Give me the names. If everybody’s cheating and you know that people you compete against are cheating, why don’t you give me some evidence of that? ‘Cause if you do, I’ll turn them in and then we can start cleaning this up.” “Well, I don’t want to name any names. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”
[in class] How many of you watched the NCAA basketball tournament last year, the final game? Out of all the millions of Americans watching it, did anybody care that UNL V had been on probation?
4TH SMU STUDENT: All they want is just see them is win and play some basketball, ’cause that was a good basketball team. They really didn’t care if they, you know, were on probation or anything.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: If only 30 percent of Division IA football and basketball players are graduating — all right? — the deck’s a little stacked, isn’t it, if you’re a student athlete? If you want to play major Division I athletics, don’t you have to make certain choices about what you’re willing to do and not do?
[to Weinberg] Now, if the kid is not going to class, I do not believe it is my job or any coach’s job to get up and walk them to class, which a lot of programs do and give a lot of credit for this. This is absurd. It is the kid’s responsibility to go to class. If they don’t go to class, let them flunk and maybe after they flunk a bunch of courses, they will figure out — they’re intelligent — that there’s a direct relationship between going to class and earning good grades. And when they fail to earn those grades, flunk them out. Declare them ineligible. Quit going to all these extremes to find another way to keep Johnny on the court, which is all that we’ve begun doing.
[in class] Until we’re willing to start firing coaches and athletic administrators for 20-percent graduation rates, we can’t expect them to think that’s more important than going 9 and 2, right? In basketball, 24 and 5? Leslie?
3RD SMU STUDENT: Then, they’re going to have to recruit people who are just good students and maybe not as good players, so then, are you really having a basketball team or are you just having smart people who can kind of play?
5th SMU STUDENT: [conducting tour] You know, it’s like it used to be, where athletes could live off campus, but you live on campus with the students, you get to mix with them, know them and then, when we go to football games, we know who you are, who we’re cheering for and who we want to win.
ANDY BRYANT, Director of Admissions: We are going to have occasional marginal athletes come in — there is no doubt about that if we’re going to be in Division I in athletics. My job is to be sure that we meet the bottom-line criteria, that the people we bring in here have a reasonable chance of graduating and that a high percentage of them do graduate in that five-year time period.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Admissions Director Andy Bryant, like President Pye, previously worked at Duke University in North Carolina. Both want to model SMU athletics after Duke, which is famous for its basketball team.
ANDY BRYANT: Having Dick Vitale comment 15 times in a row during 15 times that Duke is on television that, “These are fine young men, coming from one of the most elite academic institutions in the country, they can all speak, we like to interview them,” you can’t buy that kind of publicity.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] But even Duke, which was beaten by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas for the national championship last year, saw its reputation tarnished when all three seniors on the basketball team failed to graduate with their class.
PROFESSOR: [in class] Who was it that said, “A man’s reach exceeds his grasp, else what’s a Heaven for?”
KYLE CARROLL: At SMU, we’re creating, you know, student athletes. I mean, if you don’t make a 900 on your SAT, you’re sub marginal, you know. And I don’t want to name specific colleges, but you know, there’s colleges across this country that, you know, their roster looks more like the Dallas jail cell than, you know, than a college resume.
MICHAEL ROMO: Well, they don’t get paychecks for graduating people. They get paychecks for winning games. Coaching’s a high-stress job and, you know. whether they’re going to be around is if they win or lose.
ANDY BRYANT: I’ll probably be shot by my Athletic Director and Football Coach for saying this, but from my perspective, one of the ways to get rid of a lot of this nonsense is to get rid of athletic scholarships. We have paid gladiators to go out in the field and supposedly represent an institution, but we’re kidding ourselves, in many places, by calling them “student athletes,” because in many places, they are not students. And that’s what-the kind of turnaround that we’ve had to make here. We’ve had to put the student back in the student athlete.
FORREST GREGG: I think we have a game that a lot of people like to watch and I don’t-I would not like to see us tamper with that. I think there are other things that we can do, as far as cost-saving is concerned if that is the big issue and it’s certainly a big issue for everybody. And I would not like to see scholarships cut, I would not like to see the number of coaches cut because if you do, then I think that waters the game down.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] President Pye is counting on SMU alumni and friends to keep the football program competitive. The Board of Trustees has authorized a $2-million deficit. Now, it’s up to the Mustang Club to close the gap. Alumni remember the glory days of the late 1940’s when Doak Walker and Kyle Rote brought SMU football a national reputation, when games were played in the Cotton Bowl before 60,000 spectators. As SMU rebuilds, will alumni and boosters contribute generously if the team doesn’t win or will a history of cheating be repeated?
KEN PYE: President Bok of Harvard said he regretted, but he reached the conclusion that while intercollegiate athletics could be improved, that there were conflicts between the academic integrity and big-time sports that might be irreconcilable. My own experience has been that they’re not irreconcilable, nor is the problem limited to big-time sports programs.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] SMU rejected the option of downgrading its I football to an Ivy League or Division 3 level of play where scholarships are based only on need, not on athletic ability and where games are played more for the students and alumni than for the entertainment of the general public. SMU aspires once again to be competitive in Division I.
KEN PYE: I think eternal vigilance is the price of integrity and the cost of honesty. Most of all, it will require patience in the face of not being as competitive as our culture expects us to be and maybe our constituencies demand us to be.
CYNTHIA PATTERSON: If we want to start eliminating the pressure to win, we can do that, but you also have to give up some other things, too, because we’re going to start changing the whole structure of all this. Reformism that only wants to treat symptoms and not causes is not going to be effective.
KEN PYE: Fifty percent of our applicant pool comes from Texas and high school football is greatly overemphasized in Texas. For us to be the only major university in this state that did not engage in intercollegiate athletics at a time where we were reaching the 30-year low in the number of high school graduates would be taking an unreasonable risk in the quality of our applicant pool.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] SMU beat Vanderbilt 44 to 7, but went on to lose its remaining games in 1990. By season’s end, elements of the press and the public were calling for SMU to lower its admissions standards for athletes in order to win again. Universities use sports to attract attention, to gain an identity, one way or another.
ANNOUNCER: [U.C. San Francisco television commercial] It’s been suggested that you might know more about us at UC-San Francisco if we had a sports program the way other schools do. Take Dr. Nelson Artiga here. He oversees dental care for thou sands of underprivileged patients who might not otherwise have sought treatment. Now, if we had sports teams made up of remark able people like Dr. Artiga, you’d probably know all about us, right? Yeah, probably not.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] When you think of sports spreading the fame of a university, you think of Notre Dame which, for years, has played to a national constituency. On the back of the library at Notre Dame, there is a mural called “Christ, the Teacher,” but to sportswriters, it’s known as ”Touchdown Jesus.” Television increases the demand for Notre Dame souvenirs. Officially-licensed products sold on and off campus bring Notre Dame a million dollars a year. And then, there’s the economic ripple effect.
NOTRE DAME TICKET SCALPER: A hundred and ninety bucks for those two, $175 earlier. The price is going up. And the nice thing is, it’s legal. Free enterprise. I love this country.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Television coverage and rights fees mean so much that the traditional Saturday afternoon football game is played at 9 o’clock at night, Eastern Time, for the maximum full audience. Notre Dame football went international in 1990 by broadcasting its games to Europe and Notre Dame signed its own $38-million contract with NBC for exclusive coverage beginning in the fall of 1991. To get the deal, Notre Dame broke away from a joint contract with the other 63 major powers of the College Football Association. This set in motion the latest round of economic turmoil in college sports. Penn State is moving to the Big Ten. Arkansas is defecting to the Southeastern Conference and Miami is joining the Big East amid a flurry of other realignments spurred by the lust for money from larger television markets. All of them envied Notre Dame, but Notre Dame, good at winning, wants to be known for more.
ANNOUNCER: [Notre Dame Half-Time Spot] If football is all you know about Notre Dame, you’ve got a lot to learn. Take Knute Rockne. Before he coached football, he taught chemistry and he taught in the laboratory of a Notre Dame priest who discovered synthetic rubber. The tradition of research goes on today on campus-in chemistry, in chemical engineering and in many other fields. The pursuit of new knowledge is something we’re proud of at Notre Dame, so the next time you see football, think chemistry.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Last year, Notre Dame, the premier marketer of college sports, was accused of greed and scandals ranging from recruiting violations to steroid use by players. But the legend continues, generated by hundreds of sports writers who watch each game from the press box. The very definition of Division I college basketball and football is to make money and draw an audience by providing a good show. Division I college football and basketball resemble professional sports in attracting corporate money. It’s now “The Mobile Cotton Bowl,” “The Federal Express Orange Bowl,” “The USF&G Sugar Bowl,” and “The John Hancock Bowl.” Bowl game operators paid out $60 million this year to colleges. CBS, confident of advertiser support, is paying $1 billion over seven years to broadcast the NCAA basketball championships. College sports are also like the pros in attracting betting. After the Super Bowl, the NCAA final four attracts the most action. Gamblers seeking an edge always pose a threat to the integrity of the game. In Las Vegas, where it’s legal, Americans bet more than $1 billion a year on sports and it’s estimated that $20 billion are bet on sports elsewhere illegally. Bettors can find the point spread or Las Vegas line printed in most daily newspapers. Tip sheets for bettors, like the Gold Sheet, are sold nationwide. Its publisher is Los Angeles odds-maker Mort Olshan.
MORT OLSHAN, ”The Gold Sheet”: I think it’s well-established that because of the point spread and the interest in the games that’s created because of the point spread, you could sell commercial time in the third and fourth quarters of one-sided games a lot better than you otherwise would. Television’s really all-pervasive in this industry and is really the companion to sports betting.
BILL MOYERS: It’s simple to blame the current abuses of college sports on the riches of television alone, too simple. The corruption is ingrained in the culture. In 1936, a March of Time newsreel blamed radio.
1st NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: [“March of Time”] And amid the music and cheers is heard a new and jarring note: radio announcers salting their descriptions of thrilling runs with unseasonable ballyhoo for breakfast foods, washing machines, oil and gasoline.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Commercialism has been part of college athletics from the beginning. The first American intercollegiate sports contest, a crew race between Yale and Harvard in 1852, was paid for by a railroad which wanted to attract vacationers to New Hampshire’s largest lake. Sneaking an unfair advantage was commonplace in the early days of college football. In 1894, the University of Michigan’s starting 11 had seven players who weren’t even enrolled as students. At the beginning of this century, Yale athletes were paid illicitly. Football star James Hogan got a two-week vacation in Havana paid for through a secret slush fund worth $2 million in today’s dollars. In 1905, the deaths of 18 football players caused President Theodore Roosevelt to call for reform. Out of football violence and corruption came the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the NCAA. Despite continued negative press, the popularity of college football grew.
2nd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Red Grange was the most famous of football players. That’s Grange carrying now, with the elusive zigzag style that earned him the title, “The Galloping Ghost.”
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] In the 1920’s, Harold “Red” Grange of the University of Illinois became as famous as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey.
3rd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Knute Rockne, Notre Dame’s great coach.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Sportswriter and mythmaker Grantland Rice enshrined the exploits of Coach Knute Rockne and the four horsemen of Notre Dame.
3rd NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: The four horsemen, Crowley carrying the ball, as they rip-
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] College sports began entertaining the nation. In 1929, a new clamor for reform led the Carnegie Foundation to document extensive corruption in intercollegiate athletics. As abuses continued, society grew cynical.
GROUCHO MARX: Where would this college be without football? Have we got a stadium?
1st ACTOR: Yes.
GROUCHO MARX: Have we got a college?
1st ACTOR: Yes.
GROUCHO MARX: Well, we can’t support both. Tomorrow, we start tearing down the college.
1st/2nd ACTORS: But Professor, where will the students sleep?
GROUCHO MARX: Where they always sleep, in the classroom.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] A 1946 theatrical newsreel highlighted the growing business of college football.
4th NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Some universities openly scout, proposition, subsidize or even pay their players. Football talent hunters, either coaches or well-meaning alumni, comb the country for likely high school prospects and offer them inducements to die for dear old Siwash.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] By the 1940’s, college basketball was making money in larger arenas. With business success came new abuses in 1951.
4th NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Bigger than basketball itself were the scandals that came to light: the bribes by the fixers and the games dumped that brought dishonor and jail sentences to young athletes.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] More than 30 players from seven colleges were arrested for point-shaving. West Point football players justified cribbing on exams by citing the time demands of football. President Truman called for an investigation. Reform-minded college presidents convened a task force on sports, but it had little effect. Public ambivalence found voice in Broadway song. The cycle of scandal, outrage and ineffectual reform is often repeated. Television money has made reform even more difficult by increasing the pressure to cheat to win. “To win,” coaches say, “you gotta have the horses.” This is the horse market. Here, 120 of the best high school basketball players in the nation show their stuff. Nike, the athletic shoe company, has invited them and paid their way. The Nike Camp in Princeton, New Jersey begins the July recruiting season and attracts the top college coaches. That’s Jim Boeheim of Syracuse. There’s Bobby Knight of Indiana, who says he doesn’t like recruiting. And in the shadows, there’s John Thompson of Georgetown, who has appeared in Nike commercials. Bobby Cremins of Georgia Tech watches carefully. So does Rick Patino, who’s bringing Kentucky back from probation. And Lefty Drizzell, who was ousted at Maryland and now is recruiting for James Madison University.
BOB GIBBONS, Basketball Scout: For all of these college coaches, literally, their jobs are at stake. They make decisions at this camp on players that they will sign next November without ever seeing them again. So these six days at Princeton are the very essence of what college basketball recruiting is all about.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] As scout Bob Gibbons knows, Nike Camp is about seeing and being seen. Nearly everyone in the game who is anyone is here. Coaches make visual contact when NCAA rules say they can’t talk to players in person.
BOB GIBBONS: This is the beginning of a new crop, so to speak. If you were to compare us to farmers, we’re cultivating this current new group of young players and although we think we may know about them, we don’t. It’s a very inexact science. Every time you watch them play, you learn more, you change your evaluation.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Loopholes in NCAA rules allow coaches to call players on the phone and scouts from recruiting services can question kids during camp and later sell the information to coaches and fans. Clark Francis, the editor and publisher of HoopScoop, has a team of interviewers working during Nike Camp to help him get phone numbers and essential facts about recruits.
INTERVIEWER: As far as your grades, are you going to be eligible?
1st HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Yeah, I done passed the ACT, man.
INTERVIEWER: You did pass it?
1st HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Yeah. I’m already eligible.
CLARK FRANCIS, “HoopScoop”: You’re trying to get information and find out what he’s thinking and, you know, I think it’s, you know, again, very, very important for us to, you know, not just evaluate a player on a basketball court, but to, you know, find out what he’s made out of, too.
CLARK FRANCIS: Say you don’t make it in basketball, I mean, what are your other, you know, plans? What do you want to be after basketball?
2nd HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Work somewhere, make some money.
SONNY VACCARO, Nike Director of Basketball Promotions: A lot of these kids are All-Americans in high school or all-state, all something, and obviously, some are going to fall by the wayside because they’ve made a reputation against lesser people.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Sonny Vaccaro made his reputation signing prominent college coaches to contracts promoting Nike shoes.
SONNY VACCARO: But I think that the importance of the camp is the academic side, you know, that these kids are now playing at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it’s their first 30 minutes of basketball and they’ve put in four hours in the classroom.
TEACHER, Nike Camp: What we want to do to is we want to learn how to concentrate, all right? It’s no good, when I’m lecturing about biology and you’re thinking about last night’s game, right? That’s inefficient use of time. The student athlete must be more focused than an average student, all right?
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] During morning classes at Nike Camp, players are tested. One-fourth read below a sixth grade level, including 10 players who are functionally illiterate.
2nd TEACHER, Nike Camp: Some of you in this room here are probably going to be professional ballplayers, but you have to be realistic about life. All of us are not going to be professional ballplayers, so we have to find out what we’re going to do when ball is over with. Gaining confidence in yourself. There is enough questions on the SAT that deal with simply the basic part of mathematics, that you can pass that. If you get that down, the basic part of geometry, the basic part of algebra and the basic math.
SONNY VACCARO: It’s almost too late and I understand that, but what we’re trying to do here is maybe-in cause and effect, eventually, these kids will pass the word on.
SPIKE LEE, Filmmaker: We’re not naming any names, but there’s some brothers right here now who are reading on the third grade level. Now, I’m not here to scream on you, but that pains me, that hurts my heart.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Student athletes at Nike Camp hear Spike Lee, the filmmaker, who is a third-generation graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta. Mr. LEE: Have you ever noticed how the announcers do it, how all the white ballplayers are intelligent and smart and have the work ethic? [imitating announcer] “Larry Bird — he might not jump the highest, but he has the work ethic and has those fundamentals down.” I’m sick of that. “We’re black athletes; we don’t have to practice.” Michael Jordan doesn’t spend hours practicing. He just wakes up out of bed. Man, that’s not the case at all, but we’re not given credit. When you think about a college, all right, you want to know how many times their game’s being televised nationally, but ask the coach, “How many of your players are graduating? How many of your players are graduating with degrees within four years?” I don’t want to name names, but there are lot of coaches that win a lot of games and none of their players ever graduate. This whole thing is revolving around money. If you can’t help them make money, you’re out of here. You could be great and you get hurt, nobody wants to know you, so what are you going to do then? You have nothing to fall back on.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Clark Francis reports home from Nike Camp to a call-in radio sports show in Louisville. He tells fans how the new talent is doing.
CLARK FRANCIS: You know Cherokee Parks? Cherokee’s a big white kid from California who’s been rebounding, statistically, I think, 14th, 16th on the list and last year, he was the second-leading rebounder in camp. Jermain Brown is kind of interesting. He’s a local player and he was actually one of the leading scorers in camp. Louisville’s the first place-school that he mentioned. I don’t think Louisville’s being as mentioned as much as I, you know, really expected them to be.
LARRY GAY, Assistant Basketball Coach, University of Louisville: Louisville has a program that sells itself.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] University of Louisville Assistant Coach, Larry Gay.
LARRY GAY: In our history, the tradition of Louisville, basically, kids if you ask most of these kids to name you 10 schools that they liked to attend or 10 they know about, Louisville would be in the top 10 simply because of the exposure, the two championships in the 80’s and Denny Crum.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Denny Crum’s Louisville team won the NCAA national championship in 1980 and 1986 and Crum, in his 20th season as head coach, has earned a reputation for sending players to the pros.
DENNY CRUM, Head Basketball Coach, University of Louisville: During the 80’s we had like 18 student athletes in basketball go on to make a living professionally in professional basketball at some level or somewhere in the country. Maybe not this country, maybe they went to Europe and played, or South America, but they made a living professionally in basketball.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Coach Crum has been under fire in Louisville for his players’ poor graduation rates. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that only 16 percent of scholarship players from 1981 to 1990 graduated within five years. Last season, four of the six athletes recruited by Crum were ineligible to play for Louisville. The reason was their failure to meet Proposition 48, which sets the NCAA’s minimum academic standards for college athletes. Players stymied by Prop 48 can enroll in remedial courses at college, but cannot play for a year.
GREG MINOR, Student, University of Louisville: You don’t know how tough our Prop 48 is. If you’re playing basketball all through your life and you have to sit out, it’s very frustrating and I’m to the point where I felt like going home once or twice, but I talked to my adviser and she encouraged me and she set good examples and moves and telling me that I’ll be important to the team next year and all.
BRIAN HOPGOOD, Student, University of Louisville: The only thing you do is sit there and watch.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Six-foot 10-inch Brian Hopgood from Oklahoma City is another Prop 48 Louisville recruit.
BRIAN HOPGOOD: You can’t like, “Coach, can I get in or what?” It’s hard. It’s hard. This is like-it’s like being away from your mother for a year. You know, if you’re a real basketball player and you’ve been playing every year of your life, this is like someone just take like some loved one has gone and left you. That’s the way it is.
DENNY CRUM: If we’re really trying to help kids and we want kids to graduate, then the idea should be you give them an extra year or two, rather than take something away from them. If they need more time to catch up, let’s give them the next year. I’ve been in homes-when you walk in a house, you see no magazines, no books, no newspapers, parents that aren’t educated. Kids that come from that type of environment are not going to catch up in a year or two in college. It takes them a lot of years to make up what they’ve missed for 18.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] In 1989, Crum and Assistant Coach Scooter McCray had their eyes on a star, six-foot, 10-inch Anthony Cade of the Bronx, New York, but Cade hadn’t even graduated from high school.
DENNY CRUM: We recruited Anthony Cade with the intent of him going to junior college and then he, in turn, has to do the work, he has to graduate from the junior college and then-before he can come back to Louisville or any other place.
CLARK FRANCIS: Tarkanian has done this for years. He literally has recruited players that other schools couldn’t touch academically, placed them in junior colleges. He had like a feeder program where he could afford to wait two years down the road and bring them in. Maybe Denny Crum is going to take that approach.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Louisville arranged to farm out Cade to Sullivan College, local private business school. Sullivan Basketball Coach Dave Skinner was excited about getting Anthony, but then, there was a snag.
DAVE SKINNER, Coach, Sullivan College: A requirement that we have is that you either, one, have to be a high school graduate or, two, have a GED. Anthony Cade had neither one. We did not know that at the time we signed him. We found out after a couple of weeks
that he did not have a high school diploma. We asked him if he would work for a GED. He did not want to, actually at that time, work for it, so therefore, we could not accept him at our school and he ended up going to Connors State.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Connors State won the 1990 Men’s Junior College Basketball Championship. For Anthony Cade, rural Oklahoma is a long way from the Bronx. [interviewing] Were you homesick here?
ANTHONY CADE, Student: Yeah, a little bit when I first got here, but you know, I adjusted to things after a while and it got better.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Anthony told me he had dropped out of a Catholic high school in the Bronx during his sophomore year.
ANTHONY CADE: I stopped going to school ’cause I thought I was too good to go to school. ‘Cause I was good at basketball, I felt that I didn’t have to go to school. So I just stopped going.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Anthony spent the last two years playing basketball for a prep school recently ranked number one among high school basketball teams by USA Today and now, he’s scheduled to spend the next two years at one of the top junior colleges for basketball players. [interviewing] What motivates you now?
ANTHONY CADE: Like if I don’t pass, I can’t play next semester, so I have to go to school to be able to play next semester.
ED STEPP, Basketball Coach, Connors State University: Get it up, get it off the glass and get going.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Ed Stepp is the Connors State Coach entrusted with the care of Anthony Cade.
ED STEPP: If you’d rather play basketball or sleep, you go to class and again, a lot of athletes are like that, and so that makes it a challenge for me, as a coach, to say, “Well, this is something that he has to be doing. Let’s see-let’s change him around and get him doing it.”
BILL MOYERS: How did you do it?
ED STEPP: We’re starting out by we go get him, you know, either me or my assistant, at his door, waking him up initially. You know, we get him up, he goes. And you know, you say, ”Well, you can’t cater to a kid like that.” Well, you know, if he didn’t have a problem of some sort, he’d be at the University of Louisville right now.
BILL MOYERS: How did you get him, in such a short period of time, to succeed in obtaining his GED? I mean, in the late summer, he didn’t have it and now he-
ED STEPP: Right. We — my student assistant, Brian McLaughlin, tutored him four or five days a week, every day a couple of hours. He’d go see his girlfriend, get a coke, come back. We made sure we’d go get him and got to be here and got him involved.
DAVE SKINNER: But, see, the problem with Anthony or many of them, every time that he’s not successful, there’s somebody who’s always there to pick him up and do it for him and that’s what’s happening. You know, they’re groomed and they’re prepped. It’s like doing a racehorse. They’re only basketball instead of football.
[to Moyers] Now, Anthony has skills for a kid 16 that are unbelievable. You know, he can go coast to coast to play a point guard, play a two guard, jump very, very well and laced up, he’s very strong. He leaves the floor so quick and has a quick release. He can get it off. I feel like if I could get Anthony through here and Louisville takes him on, I would like to sit back and watch him play on television and feel good, the fact that maybe I had a part of something to do with him being successful.
DENNY CRUM: The tougher the competition you play and you play in, the better opportunity the pros have of evaluating you and if they don’t ever evaluate you, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t make it in another way, but the bottom line is is that you get more exposure in Division I.
ED STEPP: He talks about, “I have guys making $200,000 plus,” you know, and that’s being successful to me. And especially over the period of years and still maintaining that and being able to come back to Louisville and maybe open businesses or join up with teammates and build apartment complexes or whatever.
DENNY CRUM: Most of them do come back. Scooter McCray, who’s on my staff, came back when he finished his professional-got a degree. I mean, kids, when they finish their professional opportunities, they’ll come back and get their degrees here. They want them, we want them to have them and we’ll help them any way we can. But you shouldn’t judge it on a five-year basis and you shouldn’t be critical of kids for taking advantage of their career opportunities if it happens to come before they get their degree.
ED STEPP: We’re all concerned about their education. I’m not for sure whether, you know, college is the answer for a lot of those kids. Maybe a vocational tech is the answer. You know, let’s just have a vocational league and kids, rather than go to college, go to vocational and learn a trade if they don’t make it.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think you’ll go back to the University of Louisville?
ANTHONY CADE: I don’t really know about it, you know. I can’t really say if I’m going to go back there, but I don’t really know how am I going …
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The junior college route around Proposition 48 may get Anthony Cade to Division I where he can achieve the recognition he long ago dreamed of.
ANTHONY CADE: I mean, it’s been a dream since I was like 10 years old. I watched people on TV. I always wanted to be on TV anyway. I watched commercials and see kids on TV, people on TV, so I figured I got a shot at being on TV. Why not take it?
BOB MINNIX, NCAA Director of Enforcement: Only one out of every 10,000 high school player will make the pros. Only 2.7 per cent of high school players will play college ball. That’s all divisions. You have a better chance of being a brain surgeon than you do being an NBA player. That’s a fact.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Players pursuing their dreams at Nike Camp hear about realities from Bob Minnix, an NCAA Director of Enforcement.
BOB MINNIX: The NCAA last year, net receipts from the final four, the net receipts — take-home pay, if you will — was $67 million. The University of Kentucky was one of the schools that was not able to participate last year and they estimated that their probation will cost them $2 million. So you see, this is a high-stakes game, guys, in terms of your academics as well as your recruitment. And it’s high-stakes not only in terms of your eligibility, but also financially.
2nd HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: I think that the people who make the rules cause the problems because if a kid doesn’t have money to buy his own food or to buy things that he needs, he’s going to look to go to someone else and buy it. Why should you say that the school can’t give him money to eat, they can just give him a place to live? If he can’t eat or if he can’t buy things that he needs, what’s the purpose of it? Why do you make him cheat?
BOB MINNIX: It’s the schools themselves who have decided that this is how they want to spend their money, whether it be for more helmets or more basketballs or whatever. But they have not found it necessary, at least in this era, to give the money to the players.
3rd HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: If a school makes it to the fina four, man, the school gets millions of dollars and the players don’t get nothing and it’s the players that’s on the court that’s getting the school into the final four. You know, it’s no such thing as a straight college. Every college, you know, bends the rules.
HOWARD WEINBERG: Does every college cheat?
3rd HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Every college.
4th HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: What do you mean, every college?
3rd HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Every college slips up.
CLARK FRANCIS: You know, where do you draw the lines, when a kid’s parents gets a house and moves halfway across the country or he’s driving a new car, you know, there are certain things that, if you want to figure it out, it’s not too hard. And the NCAA’s investigative staff, they don’t pay their investigators an awful lot of money and they don’t have a lot of them. I mean, they pay lip-service to not cheating, but you know, if they were really serious about it, they’d get quality people and they’d try and get power of subpoena and there are a lot of other things they could do. I mean, right now, it’s kind of a joke, if you ask me.
BILL MOYERS: Increasingly, critics are asking, “Why not eliminate hypocrisy by allowing college players to receive money openly?” In other words, admit that the players make money for their colleges and pay them accordingly. A recent survey of 1,200 professional football players, both active and retired, found that one-third of them had received illicit payments, mostly from alumni, while playing college ball. A majority of those players favors changing the rules and sees nothing wrong with paying players. But the NCAA and major universities fear that their tax-exempt educational status would be jeopardized if the players are paid.
DICK DeVENZIO, former All-American Basketball Player: [coaching] All I want you to do is block a few of my passes, OK? All I want him to do is block a few-no, don’t take the ball from me. I want you just block a few of these passes.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Dick DeVenzio was an academic All-American basketball player at Duke University. He believes that players ought to be paid what they’re worth to the colleges that recruit them.
DICK DeVENZIO: Ifyou just look down, with your arm cocked, and wait till his arm’s down, you can flip it before he can touch it and you can do it all night long.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] The young men who attend DeVenzio’s basketball camp in Charlotte, North Carolina want to know, “Am I good enough to earn a basketball scholarship to college and at what level?” DeVenzio gives them a broader picture.
DICK DeVENZIO: Isn’t it amazing that basketball players wear sneakers — Nikes or Reeboks or Converse or something — and the coach gets paid? I mean, ’cause kids want to wear what the good players wear. I wonder, like-does anybody ever know the type of wingtips that Dean Smith wears? All the little kids are walking around the games in Dean Smith-style wingtips. Anybody doing that? John Thompson wears hard shoes at the game. Let me see. Everybody show your feet to see if you got John Thompson wingtips on. John Thompson, in the Big East, makes half a million bucks a year. People in big-time college sports make big money and so there’s a lot of money going around.
[to Moyers] We’ve forced athletes in a position to claim that their number one priority is academics when it’s not. Nobody’s comfortable yet with just saying that there’s nothing wrong with having big-time athletics or professional athletics associated with college campuses. We have weapons research, we have people studying kooky religions or abstract art and why not professional athletics? I think-to me, it just comes down to people realizing that we have professional athletics on college campuses and there’s nothing wrong with that. [in class] Amateur status, what is amateur status? Do you know where that came from? Amateur status came when a group of rich people didn’t-this is true. A group of rich people didn’t want workers to join their games because the workers were rougher and tougher. They had dirt under their fingernails and calluses on their hands and they dug all day and they got muscular. And when they played in their games, the little rich kids got hurt. NBA players will now be playing in the next Olympics, but in colleges, they say, “Hey, you guys are amateurs.” Why do they say that? So they keep all the money.
[to Moyers] I think a tradition started and it was a nice one. People liked it, they bought into it, that-in the past-my father would be a good example. He’s one of those people that went to college and would not have gone had it not been for athletics.
DICK DeVENZIO’S FATHER: I was hoping that Dick wouldn’t have gotten on this crusade because I felt that he is — well, I — naturally, my son, I feel he’s extremely intelligent and it looked to me like he was against the people that could do something for him. You know how we fathers are. And I said, “Dick —” he said, “Well, no, I’m just saying what I think and what the truth is.” I said, “Yes, I know, but couldn’t you soft-pedal it somewhat?” But now, I’m glad he didn’t because he’d be like a lot of the rest of us. We just went along and go along with what the establishment.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Dick DeVenzio has campaigned for nearly a decade against what he calls the “economic exploitation” of college athletes. In books, newsletters and other media, he has urged players to organize protests to improve their situation.
DICK DeVENZIO: [in class] What if somebody said to Barry right now, “We’d like you to go to Nevada-Las Vegas and we’ll pay you $20,000 under the table to go.” Would you go?
5th HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Under the table? Yeah, I probably would.
DICK DeVENZIO: You probably would? OK. As long as it was very much under the table, right? OK, see, that’s the problem. I think that the NCAA turns athletes all over the country into criminals when everybody in the world has the same desires. He’d like to make money. They tell him, “No, you got to play for school spirit,” and some of you are so into the applause that you’re hoping to get someday that you don’t even hit the books. You’re not even getting-you’re not even on the way to getting an education. When I went to Duke, after my last year, I made some critical comments about the basketball program there and people said, “Oh, you’re not grateful for the education Duke gave you.” I said, “I don’t see that they gave me anything. I was named one of the top five basketball players in the country and had A’s in high school.” I said, “Duke gave scholarships to everybody that made Parade Magazine’s first five and had all A’s.” I said, “They made a good bargain.” All these colleges around the country that are bringing guys in and recruiting and recruiting and recruiting to get these guys, they’re getting a great bargain giving you an education to fill up their gymnasium and make all the money they make.
6th HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: You know, you go through those four years, you wait your turn, you know. You got-
DICK DeVENZIO: Why do you have to wait your turn if you have value now? Jennifer Capriatti’s only 14. She didn’t wait her turn.
7th HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: You can’t play basketball forever. I mean, there are people that aren’t going to worry about classes ’cause they’re making money.
DICK DeVENZIO: OK. Time out right there. Good point again, but what if they say this? “You guys can make all the money you want and we’ll put it in a trust fund and you can never touch it unless you get a diploma.” Want to talk about educational incentives now? You put right here up $100,000 and say, “DeVenzio, you can’t have this until you get a diploma,” watch me, ’cause we’re all pretty competitive, so you know how I’m thinking. Watch me. I’ll get that diploma. [to Moyers] The system is now structured that if the guy turns out to be Magic Johnson, he uses Michigan State for two years, goes on the Lakers, becomes a millionaire, everybody loves him. IBM will pay big money to have him speak at their conventions. You know, nobody’s saying, “Oh, Magic, he didn’t graduate. Stupid. Poor priorities. Why would he do that?” Now, nobody says that about Magic Johnson ’cause he made it, but the system is structured that if a kid doesn’t make it, he was a jerk. Not everybody should be the guy that comes out and runs around for exercise. I mean, that’s a nice concept, but some guys are Olympic potential and they need to get up at 5 in the morning and swim till 7 and then they need to go to class and come back from 1 to 2 ’cause you can’t win the Olympics with a nice “run around” mentality. [in class] Colleges should be in the business of educating. I’m going to repeat that for emphasis. Colleges should be in the business of educating, not in the business of restricting economic opportunity.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] That colleges often fail in their primary mission of educating student athletes is only part of what Alissa Kaplan discovered at Iowa State University and reported in the student newspaper, The Daily.
BARBARA MACK, Associate Professor, Journalism: [in class] How many articles did you write?
ALISSA KAPLAN, Student, Iowa State University: Oh, I would say about 40 or 50 or so.
BARBARA MACK: And what was the outcome of those?
ALISSA KAPLAN: The outcome of those? I think it sparked a lot of discussion on campus. [to Moyers] It all started in the beginning of 1989. One professor on campus told me that he thought one of the basketball players was functionally illiterate. I wrote about that in a column. It later caused a lot of problems and he was forced to retract what he had said. But it got me to start thinking about that something was wrong with this university, like other universities, when illiterates are admitted just so they can play for a team. One of the other reporters at the student newspaper found that 10 percent of the men’s basketball and football teams were charged with felonies and last year was out of the ordinary in terms of athlete crime.
BARBARA MACK: It was sad for Iowa State to have to see two varsity players, one of whom had the potential to have a very good career in basketball, shot outside a fast food restaurant.
ALISSA KAPLAN: One of them had a knife, the other had a rifle and it’s been said that they may have needed drug money fast. Who knows? Nobody really knows for sure. But they went in and took people hostage and held up the Burger King and it’s a little bit ironic because their pictures are hanging up on the wall inside that restaurant. When it got really out of hand was when I wrote one column that summed up everything I had written about, from athlete crime to lower academic standing of men’s basketball and football players and how-everything that was wrong with the system. Then, we started to receive phone calls after that column appeared, here in my apartment and they were from students and from people identifying themselves as athletes and they were basically threatening me.
TOM WITOSKY, “Des Moines Register”: When I was a political writer, I was able to keep my name in the phone book. I did that for 10, 12 years, wrote some pretty nasty stories about some people. Four months as a, quote, “sports project” reporter, I had to get myself an unlisted phone number because people were calling me up, wondering-you know, yelling at me, stuff like that and I just didn’t want that-I think it’s a sad commentary on our society that they care a lot about issues that are basically not real important in the whole scheme of things.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Because there are no professional teams in the State of Iowa, college sports have a monopoly on the loyalty of fans. When the Iowa Hawkeyes play the Iowa State Cyclones, bragging rights are decided for a year. Many Iowans have close connections to the state universities their families have attended for generations. They expect education from their colleges, but they expect entertainment, too.
ALUMNI: We come down to Cedar Rapids last night. It’s usually a three-hour drive. This car left at 4:30 this morning.
1st STUDENT SPORTSCASTER: The fans are sure fired up.
2nd STUDENT SPORTSCASTER: They sure are. I think they’ve been out since about sunrise this morning and Black and Gold is certainly shining through today.
1st STUDENT SPORTSCASTER: I can’t believe the people here having bratwurst at 8 o’clock this morning.
2nd STUDENT SPORTSCASTER: Bratwurst and other things, too, so they will be fired up for the game.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Network television first refused to schedule the game between Iowa and Iowa State. Then Iowa’s top politicians and a consortium of local TV stations lobbied ABC-TV to allow a statewide telecast. The network insisted that all its commercials be carried and dictated an early start. Sports producer Bob Helmers.
BOB HELMERS, Sports Producer: We kick this game off at 11:15 in the morning. They normally kick off at 1:07 here. Iowa didn’t get a rights fee for this one, so they did that for the people at home, but, I mean, there’s a lot-I mean, they kicked off at UCLA-Michigan game, they kicked that off at 11:15 also and they did that for money. So it feeds itself. It’s like, you know, a raging dragon eating its own tail. More money, more sports, bigger programs, more money, bigger sports, more programs, you know. It just keeps going.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] To get choice seats for football and basketball games at most major universities, fans don’t just buy tickets at face value anymore. They donate a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to the athletic department for the right to buy tickets. These donations are 80 percent tax deductible. The IRS classifies them as charitable contributions to education. In this way, the public pays for big-time sports while wealthy individuals and corporations get a write-off on their tax returns and get the good seats.
TOM WITOSKY: People ought to know who gets the good seats, I think, and why they get them, who gets in free, how much corporations are sinking into this thing. I mean, football-sports in this state is a big deal.
1st SPORTSCASTER: Touchdown! Nick Bell [sp?] for the Iowa Hawkeyes.
2ND SPORTSCASTER: Fumble! Fumble!
1st SPORTSCASTER: He fumbled the football and the Cyclones might have it.
President GORDON EATON, Iowa State University: Frankly, I think the media make far too much out of it.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Iowa State President Gordon Eaton.
GORDON EATON: I was kind of mildly amused when I moved to Iowa to find that the Des Moines Register didn’t have a business section. It had a sports section, the last two pages of which it devoted to business. Of course, now, they’ve taken a step in the right direction — on Mondays, there is a business section — but that tells you what the relative values in a state out here in the heartland of America really are.
3rd SPORTSCASTER: Coach Walden was out on the field, giving the referees an earful.
1st SPORTSCASTER: Now, Walden’s really been working that head linesman. Now, the referee goes over there and tells Jim about where he better stay along that sideline.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Iowa State hired football coach Jim Walden in 1986 after the NCAA put the school on probation and cited its previous coach for cheating.
JIM WALDEN, Football Coach, Iowa State University: The general public’s perception is, “Everybody’s cheating, stealing, robbing and exploiting,” and I haven’t yet figured out what that word means.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Walden has had a reputation for emphasizing academics in his 13 years as a Division I head coach.
JIM WALDEN: I’ve graduated 52 percent of every kid I’ve ever given a scholarship and yet, I keep reading where I’m a bum and I’m a two-headed monster because I’m a Division I football coach. And all I’ve ever done is try to help young men be better persons and be better people. I want to win games, but never at the expense of my young people’s educational prowess. I want them to get degrees because I have a sign in my dressing room that says, “If you come here and stay and graduate, you will be a winner.” I just don’t want someone to tell me that I can only pick from one specific group of gifted educational students because that’s not our way of life. We resist that in America. “Don’t tell me I can’t do something. Let me have a chance.” Isn’t that the American way? But the educational systems of our colleges today say, “I declare you dumb and you can’t make it here because you can’t write this certain score, you can’t meet this certain standard.” That’s un-American. .
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] During the 1989 fraud, racketeering and conspiracy trial of sports agent Norby Walters and his colleague, Lloyd Bloom, revelations about the education of Iowa college athletes created a scandal. University of Iowa star running back, Ronnie Harmon told the court he had received $54,000 from Walters during his junior and senior years of play at Iowa and as his academic transcript showed, it was just that, play. Harmon took courses in bowling and billiards, but got a D in watercolors, putting him on academic probation the year he led Iowa to the Rose Bowl. In response to the embarrassing transcript disclosures, Iowa President Hunter Rawlings suggested that all freshmen athletes be “redshirted,” or kept out of play for a year to focus on their studies. Gordon Eaton appointed a faculty committee that sought to raise entrance requirements for athletes at Iowa State.
GORDON EATON: Well, the uproar and the outrage that came from the
public, many of which made the observation that they pay taxes to support the university or they were contributors to the Development Foundation, all rose up and let us all know very clearly that they wished to have something to say in this issue.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Alumni, coaches and the Athletic Department, headed by Max Urick, protested that raising admission standards for athletes would damage Iowa State’s competitiveness and would be discriminatory.
MAX URICK, Athletic Director, Iowa State University: I think that it has been proven that statistically minorities score lower than non-minorities and I think that if we raised the entrance requirements and based the entrance requirements on a standardized test, then I think that we’re in danger of violating perhaps one of the basic purposes of a land-grant school and that is providing opportunity to the common people, to everyone.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] You can’t get into Iowa State just because you graduate from an Iowa high school. Iowa State has higher standards than that for regular students, but makes exceptions for athletes.
GORDON EATON: We admit only those who graduate in the upper half of their class and if they don’t graduate in the upper half of their class, then we look at their performance on standardized test, the ACT. Right now, the NCAA regulation says that you may enter and play under scholarship if you’ve got a 15 or above, so we have to make exceptions for athletes and others that we admit under that rule because our own standards indicate that if you’re not in the upper half of your class, you need a 24 or better.
JIM WALDEN: We used to say, “How do we fight the drop-outs in high school?” ”Well, get those kids involved with what?” “Athletics.” So then, isn’t it a mindset that to save young people, we used to use athletics as a criteria for saving them, keeping them in school, getting them involved. “Get them excited, get them in athletics.” Education is a marriage — healthy body, healthy mind — and some people need to go beyond recreation. They need to go beyond P.E. We have honors programs for the gifted, then why can’t we have athletics for the gifted physical? A football player comes to college with a scholarship so he can play football. He wants to play football. He wants to come out of here. He wants to be involved with what he likes to do. He knows he’s got to go to education and he’ll fit that in, but you can’t think for him like a person who doesn’t and you’re trying to make decisions for him. He wants to be out here at 3 o’clock. He doesn’t want to be in the library today. He wants to be out here, practicing football, ’cause that’s what he’s grown up loving to do.
GORDON EATON: They may come here primarily to play football and have that uppermost in their mind, but they’re going to find that, in fact, they can’t play football if they’re not first students. And I think that’s very reasonable to ask of every student.
BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] It might seem reasonable to ask every university to admit athletes under the same criteria as ordinary students, but however much President Eaton wanted to equalize admission standards, he found that pressures from boosters and alumni made it politically impossible. No change meant another victory for the entertainment business. At least, that’s how some here saw it.
BARBER: Got too expensive for me. For 16 bucks a game, I think I can put my 16 bucks someplace else. And then, it’s if you want a good seat, you have to contribute to the Athletic Club and I just don’t plan on doing it. I can’t afford it. Put it that way. There’s no way I can afford it.
CUSTOMER: Take it in the name of the shop and make it deductible.
BARBER: Yeah, you bet.
CUSTOMER: It’s sort of like Roman bread and circuses except the Romans didn’t have to pay $16 for a not-very-good seat and you didn’t have to have the lions in the classes.
BARBER: And as far as school actually goes, they don’t have that much time for school unless they’re an exceptional student, I don’t think. They’re not really responsible to anybody but alumni and alumni are the ones that — how would you say? They call the shots, you know. They say if-what was it? If your entrance exams or entrance qualifications go up, the alumni says, “I’ll quit donating.” Well, he talks. You’re going to listen to him and that boils down to money again. It’s business. I used to enjoy one game. Now, what, I can start at 10:30, 11 o’clock and go to 6:30,7 o’clock at night? That’s ridiculous.
CUSTOMER: It’s entertainment and it may serve a therapeutic purpose in getting out the aggressions of middle-aged and elderly people like us who can’t play games. We can go and hate without doing any real damage.
BARBER: It’s strictly big business. How are we doing, Jack?
MAX URICK: Every year, we have to find one million new dollars to operate our program in the style and manner in which it was operated the last year and that’s-you know, you look ahead and you know, five years from now, my gosh, I wonder where in the world’s that money going to come from? Mr.
TOM WITOSKY: The reality is is that most college athletic departments in this country aren’t making money. I mean, everybody says, “Gee, all this money, TV money that goes into it, all that. I mean, how can they help but not make money?” Some will say, ”Well, they’re spending too much money. If they spent less money, then there’d be more money left over.” Well, yes, but then you can’t compete in the Big Eight against the Oklahomas and the Nebraskas.
MAX URICK: I think that all of us are a bit paranoid in the athletic business and if we see our competition maybe upgrading their facilities, we’re wondering whether or not we can remain competitive with our outdated facilities. But when television says, ”We’ll give you $600,000 or $700,000 to move your game from Saturday to a Thursday night, well, you know, it’s very tempting when we find ourselves in a financial pinch. But still, you’re compromising your principles of missed classes, of your patrons, your loyal patrons. Now, after they’ve bought a ticket, now they get moved to a Thursday night when they have to drive any distance, are unable to get there. So these are tough decisions that I think not just an athletic director should make, but I think a university should make.
BARBARA MACK: You can’t look at the problem and try and come up with finite solutions because if you do, you’re coming up with yet another in the unending string of band-aids that we’ve had, trying.to figure out what college athletics ought to be and what college athletics ought to mean. We haven’t dealt well with it. I think the problem that we see in college athletics is nothing more than the reflection of the national problem that we’re struggling with about the quality of our education and the quality of our schools. If you ask me what the most serious problem in college athletics is, I’d say it’s high school. I would say the most serious problem in college athletics is the fact that you take young men who are in 7th and 8th grade, at a very influence-able age, at a very dangerous age and you take those kids and begin pointing them, at that point in their lives, toward being athletes and telling them that it’s good enough to be an athlete and that you don’t have to be a very good student. I’d say the problem starts in 7th grade.
TOM WITOSKY: Colleges should have never gotten into this racket. You ain’t going to tear it down. How could you stop it? What are you going to do with all these stadiums? If the University of Iowa decided or Iowa State decided, “We’re not going to have college athletics anymore,” or ”We’re not going to be part of Division I, we’re going to go to Division 3,” there would be such a hoorah, you know, I don’t think the college president that tried that would be in office for very long. I mean, there’s lots of people, lots of very influential people who like to go to football games and who like to go to basketball games.
JIM WALDEN: Has anybody decided that athletics is part of the American culture? And then, those that don’t like it might as well forget it because those that do like it are entitled to it. But it’s too much of the people that don’t want something — they don’t understand football, they don’t like college athletics because they’ve never broken a sweat in their life — they want to get it stopped because they got this idea that it will mean something to them, something they do like will benefit and blossom and grow if we could just eliminate college athletics. There’s a lot of people that really believe if we didn’t football here this week, that we would be a better university, that these 50,000 people that came in here two weeks ago would rather not be here and we could give them something better, like we could go butterfly hunting. And you see, if that’s what they want, they should go do it.
GORDON EATON: Nobody set out to design a system this poor that abuses youngsters who need all the help they can get and we didn’t get there yesterday afternoon, either. It took a long time to get to this position. And I think it’s unrealistic to imagine that, by the wave of a wand or by a congressional decree or mandate, that it’s all going to go away. I think we have to de-escalate and we have to de-escalate in unison.
MAX URICK: There are as many issues as people you talk to and that’s OK. We just don’t need anyone doing anything crazy on us. We’re not talking about a matter of life and death, OK? Look, college sports is a game, nothing more, nothing less. It’s a game that’s played by amateur people-17-, 18-19-year-old young men and women play these games.
HOWARD WEINBERG: But a very expensive game.
MAX URICK: A very expensive game.
[ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION]
BILL MOYERS: Can college sports operate as a big business and still keep faith with the student athlete? Well, that question was at the heart of the work of the Knight Foundation Commission which issued its recommendations today on the reform of intercollegiate athletics. Of the 22 members on the commission, 14 are current or former college presidents. Not surprisingly, in the report, they recommend that higher education put its own house in order. First, the report says that authority over sports be placed squarely in the office of the president. Second, the report calls for a crackdown on cutting academic corners in the admission of athletes. It says their eligibility to play ought to depend on progress toward a degree and that graduation rates for student athletes ought to be similar to those for the student body at large. Third, the Knight Commission says athletic costs must be reduced, that athletic scholarships should cover the full cost of attendance for the very needy, that the freedom of booster clubs to provide independent funds for sports be curbed, that the university control the income of coaches and that athletics be supported by general university funds. The last section of the Knight Commission report concerns certification. It calls for annual audits at every institution and for the NCAA to certify the integrity of athletic programs. Well, let’s begin our discussion of these proposed reforms with the Co-Chairman of the commission, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of Notre Dame University, now Emeritus. Father Ted, so many have tried before and failed. What makes you think the commission can now succeed?
Rev. THEODORE HESBURGH, Co-Chairman, Knight Commission; President Emeritus, Notre Dame University: Bill, I think that we have a window of opportunity here. I think the American people are fed up with the kind of chicanery we saw in your film tonight and I think we recognize that’s maybe one percent of the 250,000 youngsters who engage in sports in colleges and universities and find it very wholesome and graduate. Bill Friday and I here have 65 years of experience between us running clean athletic programs where over 95 percent of the students graduate and we’ve had good competitive teams and we have graduated our student. And I tend to be positive about this. I think we have to focus on the heart of the problem, which is on this maybe one percent of people who engage in sports in colleges and universities who are in the sports that involve big-time money, big time exposure. And I think the president just has to say, ”We’re going to clean this up.” I think the time is right to do it. It reminds me, Bill, of something we worked together on in the civil rights movement. When we got to 1964, people were so fed up with apartheid in America that in one law one day, we eliminated it and changed the face of America. I think if we can get the university presidents and college presidents to say, ”We’re going to take charge, we’re going to be backed up by our boards, by our faculties, by our students and by our alumni and we’re going to insure academic integrity, which means you don’t get in unless you can make it and when you get in, you graduate or if you don’t make progress each semester, you don’t play.” Secondly, there’s no money floating around there. It all comes into the university and the university disposes of it as it should and does in other departments. And finally, we feel so confident that we’ve got this under control that we ask an outside auditor to come in and look at the whole thing, have access to all the players, the coaches, everything, and then make a public report.
BILL MOYERS: Well, you say-you talk about the presidents and the reports says that “Presidents should control the NCAA,” but the report doesn’t recommend that they — the college presidents — have a majority of members on the Executive Council of the NCAA. I don’t understand how presidents can control the NCAA if they can’t control the Executive Council.
THEODORE HESBURGH: Well, actually, the presidents establish the agenda for the NCAA. The presidents have the vote in the NCAA and they can instruct their people on the council to vote this way or that way or they can establish a different agenda. I think the last meeting in Nashville of the NCAA proved that the presidents, if they make up their minds to take over, can take over and can make a change and I’d say you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait till the next meeting.
BILL MOYERS: Bill Friday, you’re the other Co-Chair of the Knight Commission and the former president of the University of North Carolina. Your report says, “The fundamental premise must be that athletes are first of all students,” but you don’t recommend in the report that athletes be admitted under the same criteria as other students. Why?
WILLIAM FRIDAY, Co-Chairman, Knight Commission; President Emeritus, University of North Carolina: Well, I think we are working toward the new set of standards here of admission, the computation of academic performance at the end of each quarter or semester and then evaluation, the rate of-the numbers that you graduate year by year in intercollegiate sports. The admissions standards of each institution, though, are matters in the hands of the institutions, Bill, and they have to be acknowledged as such.
BILL MOYERS: Well, doesn’t that leave an opening, then, for the continuing abuse of standards by one institution that can then out-compete with others that don’t? And you saw in the documentary two presidents, President Pye of SMU and the President of Iowa State who tried to raise their standards and the public beat them back down, their own public.
WILLIAM FRIDAY: Well, I’ve said all along that we set the minimum everybody has to meet and that is the rule now and we say in here what should be done with reference to Proposition 48 and more credit requirements and we’re raising the standard, no doubt about that and 1
BILL MOYERS: So what about the school that doesn’t go along?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: Well, I don’t know what the answer to that would be, except that you go back to Father Ted’s point of the integrity of the institution and the president setting the standard here that we’re all going to be. The fundamental point here, in all of this discussion, is that eight out of 10 citizens in this country feel that there’s been an erosion in the integrity of the institution because of what has been taking place. These recommendations are aimed at overcoming and correcting that condition and stopping that erosion.
BILL MOYERS: Dick Schultz, you are the Executive Director of the NCAA as well as a former coach and an athletic director. Nowhere in the commission’s recommendations do you propose uniform accounting and budgeting procedures for athletic departments. Why not, if you’re trying to achieve uniform financial integrity?
DICK SCHULTZ, Executive Director, NCAA: Well, I think that’s a good question, Bill, but you have to look at the institutions themselves. First of all, you would have to establish some uniform financial reporting for the universities themselves and I think you would find that to be a very difficult situation. It’s very difficult in higher education just to compare the expenses and revenues of one institution to another institution, let alone the athletic departments. And in most cases, the athletic departments are budgeted through the normal university process and have the same type of accounting procedures.
BILL MOYERS: And do you think you can get something uniform by cooperation, by uncoerced standards?
DICK SCHULTZ: Well, I don’t know that that’s necessarily important from the financial standpoint. I think that the NCAA’s responsibility is to come up with minimum standards. I think the value of this report is that it does two things. First of all, it says that this responsibility belongs with the university. “Universities, you have abrogated your responsibilities and this is why the NCAA has had to have an enforcement program.” The NCAA was really started to deal with broad policy issues and championships, but because universities themselves failed to assume the responsibilities on their own campus, we suddenly find ourselves as an enforcer, which was not really the main purpose of the NCAA when it started. So what this report is saying is something that I’ve said for a long time. You can’t legislate integrity. We can pass more rules, we can triple the enforcement staff. That’s not going to solve the problem, but we can solve it very simply if the universities — their presidents, their trustees and most importantly, their alumni and boosters — will make a commitment to have honorable programs. And one of the toughest things is going to be to sell not the president or the athletic director or the coach on these fundamentals, but to sell the people who support that program.
BILL MOYERS: The NCAA is the colleges and universities around the country and the question is, can you really expect the NCAA — these colleges and universities — to police themselves?
DICK SCHULTZ: Well, I would hope so and I think they’ve done a much better job of policing themselves than the general public gives them credit for. Now, there’s an awfully lot of misperceptions that take place in intercollegiate athletics. Just comparable to the question that was asked earlier, how can the presidents control the NCAA if they don’t control the Executive Council? The council has two responsibilities. They can introduce legislation and they can make determinations and interpretations of rules between conventions. The business of the NCAA is conducted in convention and the presidents control that. The President’s Commission has the same authority as the NCAA Council. In fact they have more authority and if they can order the agenda, they can determine whether a vote is going to be a roll call or not and they do hold the vote. The only way the president doesn’t vote is he or she delegates that to somebody else. So the power and control is there right now if they want to exercise that and I think in the last two years, you’ve seen a very strong move on the part of chief executive officers to take control. And as Father Ted said, I don’t you think you’ve seen anything yet. I think you’ve just seen the first stages.
BILL MOYERS: Cliff Wharton, you’ve been a chief executive officer of universities, the former chancellor of the State University of New York and the former president of Michigan State. Let me ask you about the Knight Commission’s Report last recommendation, certification. It calls for-you all call for “independent authentication by an outside body of the integrity of each institution’s athletics program,” but I wonder how’s that going to be done?
CLIFTON WHARTON, Jr., CEO, TIAA-CREF; former President, Michigan State University: Well, I think it’s vitally important, first, that it is independent and outside, not because it is not possible for the university to conduct such a review itself, but also, it is a critical way of showing the wider community that in fact, what we say about the integrity of our programs is in fact true. We have a tradition within higher education, as you know, Bill, of having accreditation. We have outside accreditation of our programs in the academic area and this, in a way, is bringing within that tradition the athletic program. From my perspective, it is another aspect of what I consider to be absolutely crucial if we’re going to really deal with what I consider to be a major crisis. The review that was shown in your film brought home to me more forcibly than ever the fact that I believe that higher education is at a critical juncture and we are at a critical juncture because one of the most vital institutions in our society, which is dedicated to not only the pursuit of knowledge, but also the pursuit of truth and especially the transmission of basic values in our society is having its integrity undermined by the abuses that have been taking place. Now if, in fact, the recommendations of our commission are indeed followed — and keep in mind, as all of us know, they are broad outlines. It going to be very critical for the presidents to assume control, but all of us know that a president has a very limited scope and span.
BILL MOYERS: You only work 15 hours a day nowadays.
CLIFTON WHARTON JR: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Or more.
CLIFTON WHARTON JR: Or more. And under those circumstances, we can put into place various structures to try to exercise that control, but we will still have to have an outside group to come in on a regular basis to make certain that, in fact, what we wish to happen is in fact taking place. We do that with our finances now. We do it on the academic side with accreditation.
BILL MOYERS: But who’s going to do it in regard to athletics?
CLIFTON WHARTON JR: Well, in this particular case, one of the things that you may want to get into is the experimental program in certification which the NCAA is undertaking — and Dick Schultz can give you a good description of that and I think the commission was quite impressed with the way in which that particular experiment or pilot project is being conducted — and we think that it has the elements of producing the kind of outside assessment and certification that will meet the broad mandate of the commission recommendations.
BILL MOYERS: Well, every time I have been asking questions like this, people say, ‘Well, Dick Schultz will take care it. We’ll pass it over to Dick Schultz.” And that brings up Professor Murray Sperber who teaches English and American Studies at Indiana University and is the author of a book that influenced us a great deal as we did our work on this documentary, College Sports, Inc.: The Athletic Department versus The University. I have here an excerpt from your book, Professor Sperber, where you write, “The NCAA cannot solve the problems in college athletics because it is a major cause of these problems.” Is letting the coaches and athletic directors run the NCAA like putting the foxes in the hen house?
MURRAY SPERBER, Author, “College Sports, Inc.”: Well, it has been, certainly in the last generation, and the NCAA, in many ways, has functioned as a trade association for the athletic directors and coaches and they have had their way. Now, at this last convention, the presidents asserted themselves symbolically and various measures were passed, but many of them don’t come on line for a number of years and the NCAA has a history of the coaches and athletic directors sort of unwinding these reforms so they never come on line. So I must admit I’m very skeptical. I see the Knight Commission as another attempt at symbolic reform. Now, hopefully, if enough of these attempts reach a critical mass, you might have some changes, but as your film shows, there’s such systemic problems in college sports that much more than good will or-Mr. Schultz, who is the Executive Director of the NCAA is a very competent, hard-working individual, but I believe he’s inside a system that simply isn’t working and needs very radical change. I’m not sure that the Knight Commission report will do it. I think they put such a stress on the presidents. The gentlemen here were all very strong presidents of their institutions and were in charge of their institutions for a great many years. Now, your film showed the other side of it. I read another report recently that said the average president is in office only four to five years and also you saw at the end Gordon Eaton of Iowa State. Well, he came out with these reform suggestions on college sports three weeks before he left and it was real easy to do it before he left, as opposed to three weeks into his presidency.
BILL MOYERS: What about that, gentlemen? To me-I’m a graduate of the ”Yes, but” school of journalism and I’m just wondering if your optimism isn’t misplaced when you consider the record that Professor Sperber looks at, that little historical section in the documentary. What makes you think it really is going to be different now, Cliff Wharton or Bill Friday?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: One of the things that’s in this document that you haven’t heard before and there’s a lot of stress on and that is the Governing Board. We have a lot to say to the trustees of these institutions.
BILL MOYERS: Like Governor Clements of Texas, who was on the SMU board when the–
WILLIAM FRIDAY: The ones that will be given this authority under this kind of mandate. Now, I acknowledge what you had on the film — I’m sorry about that — but I really believe when trustees understand, Bill, that you raise an issue as fundamental to the institution as its own integrity and character and the influence that has on the young people who come there, if they cannot understand that and stand up to it, then they should get off the board-
BILL MOYERS: But others have said that in the past. We saw the record in the documentary. I mean, what about the systemic condition that Professor Sperber says cannot be solved from within? I mean, isn’t it going to take some action elsewhere?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: Well, I believe Professor Sperber has talked about the faculty as the agency of the institution that’s got to do this, but some of the weakest testimony we had was from faculty representatives before this commission.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: In the sense of their inability to cope with the problem that you characterized in the film. And I believe that you have to go to the central authority base, which is the Governing Board and the president and they both make it clear to everybody.
BILL MOYERS: But you saw that clipping in the film from the Des Moines Register that said “Regents get special break on tickets,” because of their contributions and influence. I mean, aren’t you looking there to the fox to patrol the hen house?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: All I’m saying is that it’s time to take a stand. You know, if we don’t, we’re lost.
THEODORE HESBURGH: Bill, I keep coming back to this, but I think we got a window of opportunity. I think if you were to take a poll in this room tonight and say, “How many want to see this thing cleared up?” they’d all vote for it. And I think we can clear it up. And the fact is it’s been cleared up traditionally in a number of institutions. I mean, you could name them, I could name them. I don’t want to embarrass them. But there are institutions that graduate more athletes than they do the normal students who are there for four years. It can be done, but as Bill says, you’ve got to say, “The integrity of this university is more important than money, it’s more important than publicity, it’s more important than winning games. Integrity is what we live for.” That’s the value system that Cliff talks about and we can, I think, say to presidents, “If you all get together on this”-and I don’t say you’re going to get 100 percent for virtue, but let’s say you get 90 percent of the presidents saying, “We’re going to do this and we’re going to tell our boards that if they don’t back us up, we’re not going to be here anymore and we’re going to tell our faculty, ‘Get your backs up. We want to have academic integrity, we want to graduate youngsters who come here to school,’ and tell the alumni and the boosters, ‘No more money floating out there. If you want to collect money, fine, but give it to the university and we’ll decide how it’s going to be spent,'” I think it can be done and I think you can bring in someone to say, “I’ve looked at it and it is being done.”
BILL MOYERS: Well, let’s take some specifics that have particularly to do with coaching. Coach LaVell Edwards, you have been the head football coach at Brigham Young University for 19 years now, almost as long as I’ve been in public television. Your quarterback, I think wasn’t it? — won the coveted Heisman Trophy last year. When college presidents — sitting to your right there — talk about reform, they’re talking about changing the way you do your business. It comes down to you. They want to reduce practice time. They want to make winning less rewarding financially and — horror of horrors — they want to bring all coaches’ outside income through the university. No more endorsements of sneakers that we saw in the film there, hundreds of thousands of dollars for a coat. What do you think about–you’re the ox who’s being gored. What do you think about those particular recommendations that you change your behavior?
LaVELL EDWARDS, Football Coach, Brigham Young University: Well, there’s a number of thoughts that have run through my mind in the last couple of days. Yesterday, I was on —
BILL MOYERS: Like quitting?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: Like I’m glad I’m at the age where it doesn’t make any difference one way or another whether I coach that much longer, but I was on the committee yesterday with the President’s Commission Committee on coaches’ compensation and that may do so much there in point that it may surprise a lot of people. I think one of the major problems we have is one more of perception than it is substance. I mean, the film was obviously well done and well documented. I’m not sure how much of a percentage of the people out there that that-I mean that showed really nothing on the things that are being done, that are being done well.
BILL MOYERS: But the Knight Commission wasn’t appointed because of the documentary. It was appointed because of the great concern
LAVELL EDWARDS:: No, no, no. I’m not saying. I’m saying the perception out there is that we do have a major problem and we do. We are addressing it and there have been a lot of things that have taken care–that are being worked out. Now, from the coaches’ standpoint, compensation-I don’t know of a coach out there in America today that’s not-wouldn’t be pleased to have whatever endorsements, whether it’s shoes, whether it’s apparel or whatever, work through the university. That’s the way most of them are handled now. That’s the way ours are handled. I think Roy Williams was there yesterday from the University of Kansas. That’s the way his is handled. Reform, I’m totally in favor of. We have no problem at our place with the 20 hours. That’s about what we do anyway.
BILL MOYERS: Twenty hours of
LAVELL EDWARDS:: A week, where we have…
BILL MOYERS: — practice…
LAVELL EDWARDS:: — yes, practice…
BILL MOYERS: Well, does anything in here bother you?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: There are some areas in there that we would have to take a look at. I think…
BILL MOYERS: What, for example?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: Admissions. I think as long as we’re one of those schools that have a fairly high admission standard that we have been able to bring in students, a few students that qualify under HEAA that would not necessarily qualify under the normal student body admissions and someone has to make that decision. Is it important enough for us to have the kind of a program, whatever? As long as we do, then obviously, that’s an area we need a break.
BILL MOYERS: Someone? Who makes that decision?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: No, our particular place, I would imagine the president does or the admissions officer or someone. The coach doesn’t make it. One of the problems that I had with the convention, with reform, is the fact that the coach being on the firing line-you know, we’re given a lot of challenges. In other words, you know, we’re responsible for their winning, we’re responsible for their conduct. We’re responsible for their progress, we’re responsible for their graduation. So what do we do? We cut out a coach, we cut out two or three graduate assistant coaches that we are now using…
BILL MOYERS: For budget reasons?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: Yes, right. That’s a major problem. You know 70 percent of the athletic departments in the country are in the red, are not making money or whatever. It’s easy to say that we ought to pay these kids or they ought to be getting this-that’s another perception out there. College athletic programs are not rolling in money, as many people would have you believe.
BILL MOYERS: Why did you all not address the issue which I’ve read so much about over the last 24 hours of actually paying students a modest stipend to be full-time players, just like I was paid when I worked for the school newspaper at North Texas State?
THEODORE HESBURGH: We do pay them. We’re giving them an education that’s probably worth $20,000 a year, but it’s worth much more-
BILL MOYERS: But that’s not what they’re asking for.
THEODORE HESBURGH: No, no. We looked at that. We looked at all of these panacea-but we said, “That’s not a solution, that’s capitulation. That is giving up, that’s quitting.” And we don’t think you have to do that.
BILL MOYERS: Is there anyone of you who thought that this report doesn’t go far enough?
CLIFTON WHARTON JR: Oh, I suspect that, given the discussions that we had, Bill, there were areas where a few of us would have wanted to go further and other areas where probably some of us would not have gone quite as far as it was there. That’s true with any group.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think this addresses the basic issues?
CLIFTON WHARTON JR: I think it provides probably one of the best frameworks for potentially addressing, in a successful manner, this particular critical set of problems. If I could just add further to that, in connection with one of your earlier questions about the likelihood of success of the recommendations, I think that, to a very great degree, it will depend upon whether or not there is what I would call a critical mass of presidents and boards, with the support of faculty and alumni, which do indeed adopt, in some form or another, the basic principles that we have put in there at the very end of the report and which use that as a basis for cleaning up their particular program. Now, I stress a critical mass because one of the greatest difficulties that a university or college president has to deal with is the argument that, “If we do it by ourselves, we will not be competitive. The others will be doing something different.” If, in fact, a certain critical number in a particular conference or a whole conference adopts this particular program, then the one or two that are reluctant to do so will then be on the outside. And I think that the meeting that was held, the NCAA convention in Nashville, was a very good indication that once a critical mass of presidents said, ”Yes, this is a critical problem, this is a position that we think is important for us to adopt,” and they did it, then you begin to see some genuine movement. But I would also say, at the same time, it is not going to happen overnight. These recommendations are going to take quite a bit of time for full fleshing out of implementation and that’s one of the reasons why the Knight Foundation — I think, very wisely — is providing a continuing support for the commission for an additional year because we’re going to continue in business to watch what is taking place.
MURRAY SPERBER: Bill, I’d really like to challenge the members of the Knight Commission on the certification business, the outside auditors. I am all for that, I think it’s a wonderful idea that people will come in and examine the academic part of the athletic program as well as, even more important, the financial part. As
LAVELL EDWARDS: said, I think a huge number of schools are losing money. Mr. Schultz has been on record that very few are looking at any surplus. But where I’d like to challenge you and I was not clear today at the press conference about this or reading the report, I think the books should be open. I think athletic departments should open their books. Father Hesburgh talked about a window of opportunity, an appeal to the public. From my own research, I have really come to the conclusion that if the public could see the waste, mismanagement, sometimes downright fraud in athletic department financing, I think there would be a huge outcry. I think it would reach this critical mass that Mr. Wharton talks about. So with this certification, I would like to see the books opened annually, not simply a report that the president signs, the sort of cover sheet-the whole books, the press being able to go in and all of this. But do you think this would come about and how do you feel about that?
LAVELL EDWARDS:: I think it will come about. I really do.
BILL MOYERS: Not many colleges do that nowadays, do they, open their books? Even public universities —
MURRAY SPERBER: In my own research, it always ended up me and my lawyer and very shallow pockets against the athletic department
and the university’s lawyers and very deep pockets. And one athletic department told me, “We’ll fight you to the State Supreme Court,” although I always had the public Freedom of Information laws on my side.
BILL MOYERS: Did you address this in your deliberations?
THEODORE HESBURGH: He probably encountered one of these situations where booster clubs are separately incorporated and we have no jurisdiction-
MURRAY SPERBER: No, I just wanted to see the public’s-
BILL MOYERS: What about the booster clubs? Someone said to me earlier this evening that in his community, the booster clubs often are dominated by people who did not graduate from the university, have no educational or loyal commitment to the university-
THEODORE HESBURGH: Or a sense of what a university is.
BILL MOYERS: What do you do about that?
THEODORE HESBURGH: You take charge and you say, “Ifthe booster club wants to collect money, it has to come to the university. No one is authorized to use outside money collected for the university in their own judgment. The judgment has to be according to the budget the university has for an athletic department.” And I think that can be done. I mean, we don’t have a booster club. We have alumni that contribute, but they got to contribute to the university. They can’t give anything to the athletic department.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think it’s realistic, Bill Friday, that you, as the president of the University of North Carolina, could actually crack down on a booster club that didn’t really care about the university but cared about the game?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: Well, in the case you put, they are separately incorporated and the administration has no control over them. But I would agree with Mr. Sperber. I think we ought to come as far as we can in insisting on the public information flow here because that’s one of the reasons for these recommendations, to remove the suspicion that’s here.
BILL MOYERS: Are you optimistic, like Father Ted Hesburgh is and like Cliff Wharton is?
WILLIAM FRIDAY: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Are you, Dick?
DICK SCHULTZ: I don’t know. I think that when universities open their books for everything that they do, it’ll be very easy to open the books athletically. I think that there’s a reluctance on the part of institutions to open their books, period, unless they’re mandated to do so and I think if you look very carefully, you’ll find that that’s the case many times in other departments other than athletics, so that’s the only thing that, I would say. I think that if you can establish an atmosphere where universities are willing to publicly expose everything that they do financially, there won’t be a problem doing that athletically.
BILL MOYERS: Well, the inscription on the University of Texas, where I graduated, on the tower says, ”You Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free,” but a student ran successfully for college president-for student body president on a single platform of changing that inscription from “You Shall Know the Truth and It Shall Make You Free,” to “Money Talks.” I think that’s what you all are up against, but thank you very much for all the work you’ve put in and for being here this evening. This part of our game is over. There’ll be another Saturday. These scandalous excesses of college sports that the Knight Commission has talked about and our documentary reported are embedded in the culture and it’s no simple matter to reform because in many cases, the sham of the student athlete is supported by some coaches, sportswriters, sneaker salesmen, television networks and some educators. In the words of Milton Berle, “Many schools lower their test requirements because they have a specific end in mind and a few tackles and halfbacks.” But the public is at fault, too. If the world of sports has gone crazy, as a columnist for The New York Post wrote last week, “It’s because some of us fans — many of us fans — have become fanatics.” The Knight Commission didn’t address our responsibility, but that was done some years ago by the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, who said, “The public, in the last analysis, pays for the colleges and the universities. It wants something for its money. It’s been taught to accept football,” — and basketball — “it can, I am confident, be taught to accept education.” Maybe. I’m Bill Moyers, with special thanks to the Knight Foundation Commission and to PBS. Good night.
This transcript was entered on May 18, 2015.
