THE FOOTBALL FRANKENSTEIN

...For its own home games, Johns Hopkins issues books of tickets, without charge, to students, faculty, alumni, and anyone else requesting them...

...Consider yourself, for the moment, the athletic director of a major, football-playing university...

...as winding the electric clocks in the gym and recitation halls...

...How much...

...He's got his team—backs, ends, tackles, guards, and centers— all carefully hand-picked from the best that the secondary schools could offer...

...There simply wouldn't be the money with which to go overboard on subsidizing teams...

...What have I got to lose...

...Some are earnestly seeking a cum for overemphasis, as indicated by the adoption of the NCAA code which, incidentally, is scheduled to come up for further consideration at the NCAA's 1951 meeting in Dallas this January...

...More recently, and up through the early part of this year, a number of smaller institutions have followed suit...

...And where do these come from...

...What we were really doing, however, was emphasizing sports—but in a different way...

...The newspapers," recalls Dean Shaffer, "announced when we started the program that we were 'de-emphasizing' sports...

...Why not," suggested his cabbie, noticing his fare's disappointment, "go see the Johns Hopkins-Swarth-more game...

...If your team is a winning one, you're in the chips...

...After the war, bowl fever broke the thermometer...

...Besides the big four there were such preposterous offerings as a Glass, Freedom, Cigar, Pear, Cattle, Flower, Harbor, Fish, and (in Honolulu) a Poi Bowl...

...Perhaps you will get a big bowl bid, which will be good for an extra $100,000 in revenue this season, even after paying expenses and giving the players walking-around money to spend in the bowl city...

...They are convinced that the elimination of gate receipts—and of guarantees^—is the only answer to the problem of keeping college athletics on a reasonable and amateur basis...

...Perhaps the high point was reached in 1948-49 when a whopping 32 bowl games were scheduled over the November-January period...

...Once there was a time when a football star could be lured to a college campus with a scholarship...

...in track and field, and in basketball, lacrosse, baseball, and other team games...

...The alumni demand that Alma Mater keep on winning, and this pressure for never-ending victories becomes another important factor in the football fantasy...

...Already TV has given many an austere athletic chief a nightmare by conjuring up the specter of empty seats and resultant empty coffers while the public stays home to enjoy a game...

...The next year, when Johns Hopkins returns the call, it likewise pays its own expenses and receives nothing from the home team's gate...

...Understandably, this supercharged interest is carried over after graduation by a large percentage of alumni...

...1. The first, of course, is American veneration of the college game, or rather, of the winning variety, and the undeniable fact that a first-rate department of history, zoology, chemistry, languages, or whatever just doesn't hold a candle to a team that has defeated nine formidable opponents in a row...

...One remedy is to give up football...

...some attention should be paid to the physical, as well as to the academic development of each student...

...To keep winning, you've got to get the players...

...The experiment now has gone on long enough to permit Johns Hopkins athletic authorities to make a meaningful evaluation of its results...

...The Football Frankenstein By Watson Fenimore BEGINNING with this past Thanksgiving, running through December, and up to and including New Year's Day, more than 500,000 normally sane Americans will pay upwards of $2,000,000 to take part in, as spectators, the zaniest of all American sports enterprises—the annual staging of post-season college football bowl games...

...Duly deposited at Hopkins' six-thousand-seat stadium, the visitor approached the ticket booth and got out his wallet...

...Any community with a stadium to its name, a glint in its collective eye, and some locally famous agricultural, industrial, or animal product to name a game after immediately became bowl minded...

...Shaffer sees nothing naive in letting a football contest be a test of skill between two teams to be decided upon the field on Saturday afternoon—without all the present extravagant pre-game preparations...

...He would also abandon the practice of having the freshman or junior varsity learn an opponents plays and work them against the varsity all week before the game...

...Football players, naturally...

...Dean Shaffer thinks there are some additions to the program that also would improve the American intercollegiate scene...

...The classic story, however, comes from the East where, several seasons ago, one prominent school uncovered a schoolboy sensation whose working mother was a waitress at a seashore resort restaurant...

...III In another case, also in the Midwest, the star prospect likewise failed to show up on the campus...

...Fortunately, there are signs that the colleges are awakening to the formidable aspect of this football Frankenstein they have created...

...Johns Hopkins, incidentally, is intercollegiate lacrosse champion more often than not and against such imposing schools as Army, Navy, Princeton, and the University of Maryland...

...But that didn't mean the boy's career was washed up—not by any means...

...he asked, as the student on duty shoved a ticket toward him...

...Under the plan, first-year students are instructed in tennis, golf, badminton, and other "carry-over" sports which may continue to be enjoyed in later life...

...The boy's father is not in good health and is not able to work regularly...

...This practice is the recruiting, through financial and other inducements, of future college athletes who will be good enough to give Old Siwash a winning gridiron season and, possibly, land it a coveted major bowl bid...

...Perhaps this would be going too far for some institutions with mortgages on their stadiums and alumni on their necks, but in the opinion of many serious observers, some plan must be found for keeping football without bounds...

...A mere 27 or so post-season bowl games will have been played come the evening of Jan...

...And what would be wrong with that...

...We were reversing the usual practice of having the coaches spend 98% of their time on 2% of the student body...

...In this instance the host college, with considerable jubilation, keeps all the money from its ticket sales...

...We learned that the boy's family had been visited by three men who succeeded in un-selling the boy on Notre Dame...

...And in Baltimore, lacrosse is very much a major matter...

...Hopkins represented the United States in la^ crosse in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics and won both times...

...And by odd coincidence, his mother blossomed out the following spring with a shiny new restaurant all her own—just in time to catch the summer vacation trade...

...Your team normally has a preponderantly winning year and, as a result, draws enormous home crowds...

...The change began well before World War II when such promotions as the Sugar Bowl at New Orleans, the Cotton Bowl at Dallas, and the Orange Bowl at Miami began to slide into the winter picture...

...The athletic department is financed like the chemistry, English, or any other department, from regular college funds...

...We were emphasizing them for the boy who was not already an athletic star...

...Johns Hopkins does, on the theory that if sports are worth having at all they are worth supporting...

...This Utopian state of affairs, from a spectator's viewpoint, momentarily stuns out-of-town visitors who do not know about it in advance...

...The code had been adopted two years previously to eliminate, or at least to bring within bounds, the subsidization of quarterbacks, halfbacks, linemen, and similar schoolboy athletic fauna...

...At its January, 1950, meeting in New York, the NCAA membership failed by a scant 25 votes to oust seven colleges and universities charged with violating the NCAA's so-called "Sanity Code...

...Some six thousand persons in and near Baltimore who are not connected with the University request them annually...

...Once there was a time when, with the football season safely past, only one bowl game was held each Jan...

...About two years ago," Leahy said, "we were very much interested in a high school boy in the Chicago area who was nearly six feet tall, weighed 225 pounds, and was a once-in-a-lifetime prospect...

...Maybe, if the NCAA code can't be made to work, if the colleges continue the mad race for high-priced player talent and bigger and better gate receipts, and if TV suddenly pulls the rug from under the athletic financial structure of some of our larger institutions, the whole present football set-up will collapse...

...Then all of a sudden we got word that he was going to another college" [which Leahy refused to name...

...Don't be so naive...

...She and the boy listened to the offer of free tuition and other considerations if the son matriculated at the Eastern university...

...It has done remarkably well, also, in football, having won the league title several times in the Mason-Dixon Conference, an organization of colleges in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia...

...The Hopkins program was devised by Dean G. Wilson Shaffer in 1934...

...Nothing," was the reply...

...If nothing else will wake up college officials, perhaps television will do it...

...Several factors combine to create such a fantastic state of mind by which football now is permitted to dominate many a campus from early March, when spring practice starts, through the bowl season ending Jan...

...College athletic authorities now sigh nostalgically for such simple, childlike days...

...Perhaps it would not, in every case, eliminate recruiting entirely, but with the major source of recruiting revenue gone, it certainly would minimize this evil...

...It's not the only evidence to this effect, however...

...Both were eliminated in 1938 on the conviction that the great difficulties with college sports are traceable directly to the involvement of large sums of money...

...But that has long since changed, as a result of the green-eyed envy of collegiate athletic directors, leading citizens, chambers of commerce, and other assorted local and academic promoters who cast longing glances at the glamor, publicity, and dollars surrounding the Rose Bowl event...

...Should it be remarked that John Hopkins never has been a so-called national power in the collegiate athletic world, and that not many people would pay to see its games anyway, it would be pointed out that the free admission program includes lacrosse, along with the 13 other sports...

...He could be kept there by being given a few extra nickels for spending money, an occasional new suit, and blocks of tickets to important games which he could sell for himself at spectacular prices...

...The second step—and the one relating directly to the problems of the football-weary colleges of today— was (1) abolition of paid admissions to all Johns Hopkins games and (2) abolition of financial guarantees to visiting athletic teams...

...The boy was willing, but the mother shook her head...

...The failure to expel the seven non-code-complying NCAA schools had great significance...

...Just who pays the freight at Johns Hopkins...

...IV A happier solution, however, seems to have been hit upon by Johns Hopkins University, of Baltimore, whose example could well be studied by other institutions sincerely anxious to do something about the gnawing evils of over-emphasis...

...1. This was the one and only Rose Bowl, at Pasadena, Calif., which provided the opportunity for the two best, or near best, college teams in the land to play for something resembling the year's national collegiate football chmapionship...

...The idea was to limit payments to muscular young men to tuition and stated college fees and to see that they received no substantial monthly checks for such labors WATSON FENIMORE is sports editor of the Pathfinder News Magazine published in Washington, D.C...

...Conceivably, the athletes might even become friends...

...Members of the competing teams, instead of being kept apart before a game, would be encouraged to fraternize...

...It carried, at the moment, at least, the implied admission that deplorable as the frantic bidding for high school football stars may be, it isn't half so deplorable, in the eyes of all too large a collegiate faction, as winding up a football schedule with more defeats than victories...

...He would, first of all, change the current complexity of football preparation...

...The coach who issues a call to the undergraduates for help is just plain desperate...

...For the last five seasons, including 1950, it has been Mason-Dixon wrestling champion.- The free-admission, non-recruiting, non-subsidization program has never taken away the zest for winning...

...They are taught to pass, kick, and catch a football and are allowed to play the touch variety of the game...

...The clincher on the deal came when one of the men took out an envelope containing 10 $1,000 bills and put it in the boy's hands...

...Additionally, it removes an often serious temptation to schedule games away from home with opponents out of your class to get the nice fat guarantee that goes with a thorough drubbing on your host's gridiron...

...But there are headaches—plenty of them...

...We could make him our standard offer, which is an athletic scholarship consisting of tuition, board, room, and books, and we were assured that he was coming to Notre Dame...

...And the competition to get him is heart-rendingly stiff...

...And after the game there would be a dinner, dance, or some other social activity...

...This seemed like overdoing things a bit, but worse was to come...

...To do it, you've got to keep winning...

...The intercollegiate activities embrace 14 sports...

...It removes at once the possibility that the size of the gate will become a major factor in determining the college's athletic program...

...The team visiting Johns Hopkins pays all its own expenses and receives nothing from the "gate," since there is no "gate" in the financial sense of the word...

...This obviously was a demand out of all reason, and the negotiations collapsed...

...The total cost, including coaching salaries, equipment, and traveling expenses, runs about $40,000 a year...

...Then we might expect to see the game come back as a sport played for sport's sake by bona fide undergraduates who were on the campus primarily to study...

...1, 1951...

...The program is for the benefit of all of the University's 1,500 undergraduates...

...It provides sober evidence that football, with its big money, whoop-de-doo, and press and radio publicity, is now, more than ever, wildly out of hand...

...Tuition, board, expenses, spending money, and $5,000 in the bank at graduation time is the going rate for many a star back today...

...It's free...

...To take the second point first, all Johns Hopkins games are scheduled on a two-year, home-and-home basis...

...He would do away with scouting, excessive skull drills, motion pictures of games, and other extra arrangements accorded football—but few other college sports...

...Happily, this year the fever seems to have abated somewhat...

...Instead, he matriculated at a neighboring college...

...There was the case of the New York fan who arrived too late to buy a seat for the Navy-Notre Dame sell-out in Baltimore's Municipal Stadium...

...The costs and headaches of football were too great...

...The bid was promptly turned down...

...The most dependable source of money, and almost the only source in big-time college football, is gate receipts...

...The exhilaration engendered by such manly physical superiority vicariously permeates not only the student body, but, to a surprising degree, the faculty and administration itself...

...This now represents an enormous, frightening debt...

...Briefly, the Hopkins program takes the dollar sign, and all that goes with it, out of college athletics and Hopkins, at least, is thoroughly satisfied with it...

...Like everything else, the cost of players has gone up...

...Its only critics have been some Baltimore sports writers who would like a high-powered team in their city to write about...

...But you can't depend on that every year...

...It has been Conference winner a respectable number of times in soccer, basketball, track, and other sports...

...The student body...

...To accommodate the crowds and to get even bigger ones, you have built a new stadium, or expanded the old one...

...Later, from his home in New York, the astonished fan wrote the Hopkins athletic department that he not only had been most pleasantly overcome by being allowed in free, but had seen the best small college game in many years of watching football...

...The most celebrated practitioner of this all-out surgical type of cure has been the University of Chicago which cut off the offending limb some years ago by abandoning football completely...

...You've got to keep the stadium filled...

...Even more forceful, if less spectacular, testimony developed just a year ago among the colleges themselves when the August National Collegiate Athletic Association found itself powerless to stop its own members from the one practice which contributes most to our over-riding bowl hysteria and all the other trappings of football over-emphasis...

...But that still is a nearly incredible figure...

...Its 1948 team actually received an invitation to one of the smaller post-season bowl games...

...The first step was the decision to set up a broad base for athletics for all of the school's undergraduates on the theory that...

...Instances of this kind can be multiplied by the dozens...

...A graduate of Colgate, Fenimore did his early newspaper work in Utica and Adirondack, N.Y...

...Investigation showed the school of his choice had promised him a free ride through four years of college, had outfitted his entire family with new wardrobes, sent them all on an expensive summer vacation, and renovated the parents' home...

...There would be one further change...

...He enrolled at another prominent Eastern institution the following fall...

...What I'm interested in," she said, "is a restaurant of my own...

...Okay," consented the stranger...

...Non-book holders who desire to see a particular game may do so simply by presenting themselves at the gate and asking to be let in...

...Before going with Pathfinder, he was a correspondent for the International News Service, working in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Washington bureaus...

...The modern estimate is that these and similar expenses run the cost of college football today to the astounding sum of half a billion dollars on a national scale...

...In their second year they are free to try whatever sports appeal to them, either in the University's intramural program or in intercollegiate competition...

...II What, besides a good coaching staff, is needed to keep winning...

...How stiff was illustrated last month by Notre Dame Coach Frank Leahy in an almost unprecedented-ly frank statement to a Midwestern newspaperman...

...Such goings-on, naturally, cost money...