The renaissance of Cal football under Coach Jeff Tedford is the toast of this Bay Area sports season, and who am I to rain on the parade? Winning, after all, is more fun than losing. Last year, when I was working on a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine about the issue of more equitable compensation for athletes in the college "revenue" sports of football and men's basketball, players spoke highly of the campus Athletic Study Center, which is administratively independent of the Athletic Department. They also praised Tedford's so-called "academic game plan," a system of communication, support and accountability.
But I also know that college football is a dirty, dirty business, and that historically struggling programs manage to maintain clean hands while turning their fortunes around just about as often as the Statue of Liberty play works.
So I wonder about loose but instructive analogies. Take Northwestern, for example -- seat of Nobel Laureates and perennial doormat of the Big Ten before Coach Gary Barnett arrived a decade ago.
Barnett took the Wildcats to the 1996 Rose Bowl. Barely more than a year later he was carpetbagging his way to a more lucrative job at the University of Colorado. You know, that UC -- the one with the rape scandal earlier this year. Colorado is also where a Buffalo punt returner, Jeremy Bloom, unsuccessfully sued to get the NCAA to let him earn endorsement income from Nike through his side career as a world-class mogul skier. Barnett, meanwhile, collects a legal payoff from Nike for having every Colorado football player's jersey emblazoned with the corporate "swoosh" logo.
The last time I checked Barnett was making $180,350 from Colorado, supplemented by $665,000 from television and radio shows and the Nike deal. Evidently this is the difference between an amateur and a professional.
The specter of Barnettesque negotiations with Tedford already looms over Cal. Thanks to ingenious option clauses in his contract, the Golden Bears' right to continue receiving Tedford's coaching services is contingent on benchmarks for the expansion and improvement of Memorial Stadium. This gambit, which takes the sports-industrial complex's stadium shakedown m.o. to a ridiculous new level, is justified on the grounds that national television exposure of Cal football builds the university "brand." I've searched in vain, however, for evidence that it does anything for the accessibility and affordability of public higher education in our fair state during these troubled times.
The brunt of the blowback at Northwestern from the Barnett era was borne by his successor, Randy Walker, after player Rashidi Wheeler died in August 2001 during a "voluntary" conditioning drill. The coroner ruled the cause of death to be an asthma attack. The university, contending that the culprit was heart arrhythmia caused by use of the now-banned ephedra supplement, wants an ephedra manufacturer to share liability in the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by attorney Johnnie Cochran on behalf of Wheeler's mother.
If the case ever makes it to trial, as seems doubtful, the public will have a look, as I have, at the videotape of the drill made by Northwestern strength and conditioning coaches. This recording was intended for the convenience of Coach Walker, who was prevented by NCAA rules from attending this "voluntary" practice but still wanted to document exactly who volunteered and how everyone performed. On the tape, Wheeler can be seen fighting to draw his last breaths on the sideline while an ambulance is summoned too slowly and the conditioning staff coolly proceeds with the drills -- during which other players also drop like flies. Truly the "Rodney King video" of sports.
Wheeler was one of three Division I college football players who died that year in the course of what is now, effectively, a 12-month college practice and game schedule encompassing not just balmy autumn afternoons but also prime-time slots as early in the week as Thursday and as early in the calendar as August. Were the Centers for Disease Control ever to study this phenomenon, an "epidemiological cluster" might be isolated. On the sports pages, it's fodder for one or two news cycles of "perspective," followed by nervous speculation on whether the affected teams will be able to surmount these "distractions."
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Now, I confess to having no idea whether the University of California is headed down this grim and slippery slope. Jeff Tedford may well be the reincarnation of kindly Coach Henry Rockwell from the Chip Hilton sports stories of my youth. But as someone with an interest in sports in all its dimensions, I do know that the California media are willfully negligent when it comes to telling my fellow citizens the full story.
For Exhibit A, I direct you to the September 5 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, with a propagandistic cover story headlined "He Shoots. He Scores. He Studies." The thesis of the piece, by a New York writer named Stephen L. Cohen, is that UC Berkeley has emerged as a model institution for balancing big-time athletics with academic integrity.
The article's key cited statistic -- a 73% student-athlete graduation rate -- is next to meaningless. In this context the only thing that matters is the academic performance of Cal football and men's basketball players. The 73% figure includes both male and female student-athletes. It also includes those from minor sports like volleyball and swimming, which have less scholarship support and commercial upside, and whose participants aren't disproportionately African American and academically ill-prepared. Yet Cohen's splashily played story contained no supporting evidence beyond a couple of contrived anecdotes.
I sent a letter to the editor of the Times, which duly declined to publish it, and I shared the letter with Steve Gladstone, Cal's crew coach and then-outgoing athletic director. Gladstone graciously wrote back. "No doubt that the statistics presented in Stephen Cohen's article cast us in a most favorable light," he said. "Nonetheless significant academic progress has been made over the past years and without question we have a long way to go." OK ...
As alluded to earlier, I'd already had my own brush with the Los Angeles Times Magazine, which is ineptly quarterbacked by an editor named Drex Heikes. Last year, aware of my pursuit of an investigative book about the death of Rashidi Wheeler (who hailed from the Southern California town of Ontario), Heikes handpicked me to write a related article about the work-study conditions of college football players. The piece focused on the day-to-day struggles of a Cal defensive back, James Bethea (who went on to try out with the Oakland Raiders this summer but got cut at the end of training camp). The story, "Welcome to Plantation Football," advanced arguments for NCAA reform made by a former UCLA player, Ramogi Huma, who is organizing a quasi-union of student-athletes with the backing of the United Steelworkers, and by State Senator Kevin Murray.
After describing the desperate lifestyle of players with inadequate housing and food allowances, and detailing Bethea's particular hustling strategies, my original copy included this passage: "At least Bethea didn't do any of the other things, some truly dangerous, that you hear about if you talk to enough players. He didn't fence his books at the second-hand store on Bancroft Way. He didn't cash his summer stipend checks while blowing off the classes. He didn't deal drugs, or take any himself. The day he rushed back to the voluntary practice from the State Assembly committee hearing without having had a bite to eat, he didn't give himself an energy boost with one of those over-the-counter ephedra supplements. (Defending a wrongful-death lawsuit by Rashidi Wheeler's family, Northwestern University is claiming that Wheeler -- whom the coroner said died from an exercise-induced bronchial asthma attack -- did just that.)"
Alas, editor Heikes, a University of Oregon alumnus and football season ticket holder, didn't like those last two sentences. He crossed them out and substituted: "He didn't trade complimentary game tickets in return for a break on his rent, which is why Oregon defensive end Quinn Dorsey has been suspended for the first four games of this season."
For Exhibit B, I give you San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Gwen Knapp's September 19 essay, headlined "Necessary Cynicism." Knapp -- whose work I generally admire -- defended the NCAA's Byzantine 487-page manual on player eligibility infractions. College sports regulations are needed to catch cheaters, she argued, and don't warrant the "rhetorical extremism" to which they're so often subjected. Proposed solutions, from paying the players to getting Congress involved, "are at least as absurd as the problems."
The piece de resistance of Knapp's column was an interview with Foti Mellis, Cal's associate athletic director for compliance. It so happens that I knew the guy from his perfect record of having never once returned an email or phone message of mine during the reporting of my LA Times story.
In fairness, I did have one conversation with Mellis when, at the conclusion of my interview with Gladstone, the athletic director walked me into Mellis's office to get answers to "technical" questions for which Gladstone didn't know the details. "I'm just here to help these kids get as much as they possibly can under the rules," Mellis told me, with what seemed a little too thick an application of snake oil.
I pointed out that Cal based the housing allowance portion of athletic scholarships on campus dormitory rates - when in fact only a small percentage of Cal students live on campus and the Bay Area is a very expensive housing market. Mellis had no answer for that one.
I asked him to confirm the figure players had given me for their stipend: $764 a month, plus one daily meal at the "training table."
"Please don't publish that number," Mellis said. "It's off the record. If it gets out, it will put our program at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting."
To which I replied: "What -- the families who are making decisions about where their kids go to school and play aren't entitled to basic disclosure of the numbers?"
Mellis had no answer for that one either.
Exhibit C appeared as a standalone box in the Sporting Green on October 27. Headlined "Graduation rates," the item reported that the NCAA had just released statistics for student-athletes who entered college in 1997-98 and graduated within six years. "Sixty-two percent of the Division I student-athletes graduated, 2 percent more than the overall student population. Further breaking down the athletes, 70 percent of women athletes graduated, and 55 percent of male athletes got their diplomas." The accompanying box for Bay Area schools showed that Cal graduated 64% of its student-athletes, including 55% of its male student-athletes. There was no breakdown by sport.
The Chronicle didn't run my letter to the editor rebutting this nonsense. Why am I not shocked?