Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising —Israel's Third Front. Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari. Simon and...
...Pittsburgh became a member in order to preempt plans for a competing league...
...It does, but during the first two years of the uprising at least, many rebels preferred doing it their way...
...When the intifada, or Palestinian revolt, began in Gaza in December 1987, the official Israeli response (and, of course, that of their American "Israel right-or-wrong" supporters) was to blame the Syrians and the PLO...
...Every poll and survey taken since 1988—even those by Jewish organizations—reveals that the majority of American Jews are in favor of trading land for peace, provided Israeli security is assured...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month...
...Since the authors are reporters for The Wall Street Journal, I'm not that worried about their diligence in tracking down the facts...
...The choices available to the Israelis are shrinking...
...Ivan Boesky notwithstanding, greed is out...
...Reynolds also explains how all the assistant coaches have learned to bump "accidentally" into prize recruits in order to evade NCAA rules (which are themselves ridiculous, but that's another story...
...It's not just that a sneaker company will pay a coach up to $200,000 to have his players wear its shoes, or that coaches' basketball camps can net them $400,000— though that's certainly part of it...
...What has happened...
...in the West Bank and Gaza...
...What was initially a disagreement over a minor point quickly escalated until the deal was called off...
...Dissenters' views get a hearing in footnotes...
...More significant, though, Schiff and Ya'ari turn a devastating eye at what the intifada has done to their fellow Jews...
...and so ruthless is Gavitt about having the league seem "big time" in every way that he actually forced Boston College to build a new, state-of-the-art gymnasium, with luxury boxes and the whole bit...
...Then there's this: "[Tate] George is a 6' 6" junior guard from New Jersey whom [Connecticut coach Jim] Calhoun always seems at odds with...
...John's paltry graduation rate...
...Schiff and Ya'ari would surely agree, and they conclude their absorbing and convincing book with thoughtful suggestions that could indeed help lead toward negotiations and perhaps, one day, even reconciliation...
...In the case of RJR Nabisco, no one in the Street's insular community wanted to be left out of the greatest deal of the century...
...Murray Polner Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco...
...Johnson and Kravis strike a deal, only to see it unravel over seemingly minor disputes...
...It is, conclude the authors, especially menacing to the moral condition on which Jews have always prided themselves...
...Like nearly all sportswriters, Reynolds is no fan of Thompson...
...Get rid of the hypocrisy and at least some of the exploitation...
...Yet how long can servicing United States policies stand as justification if the Soviet military threat continues to diminish, if not disappear...
...They are designed, supposedly, to make the system fair, but the NCAA is so out of touch that its own regulations have the practical effect of making already poor basketball players even poorer while making everyone else around them rich...
...My favorite bit of investment banker folklore, however, concerns First Boston's spoiler bid of between $105 and $118...
...For instance, Georgetown's John Thompson has done a remarkable job of getting his black basketball players to succeed at a nearly all-white school, a fact that Reynolds dwells on, if somewhat grudgingly...
...I love college basketball, but even I can see that Gavitt is either a fool (if he believes what he's saying) or a cynic (if he doesn't...
...We should be trying to figure out how to reconnect college sports to, well, to the colleges again...
...Let there be no doubt about it," they conclude in one of their more dramatic passages, "though it developed into a statement of major political import, the intifada began not as a national uprising to throw off the yoke of foreign domination but as a rebellion of the poor, an awesome outburst by the forsaken and forgotten at the bottom of the social heap...
...In one, a Syracuse freshman, looking utterly miserable after a poor game, tells a reporter that he wishes Sports Illustrated had never put him on its cover...
...the two investor groups would split the purchase of stock and control of the company's board, with huge fees for all concerned...
...Bill Reynolds...
...Next time you hear someone rhapsodizing about the virtues of the free market, remind him of this...
...In general, the coaches have tended not to get fired the first time they have a down year...
...The closest thing to a critical look at how LBOs affect the economy comes from Ted Forstmann, a minor Wall Street player with a passionate hatred of junk bonds, who buttonholes anyone who'll stand still long enough for his tirades on the evils of "funny money" financing...
...Larger-than-life figures— everyone from the flamboyant, frat-boyish CEO F. Ross Johnson to the tightly controlled and publicityshy Henry Kravis—are painted in broad, often unflattering strokes against a background of extravagant corporate luxury...
...Gripping stuff, right...
...So what to do...
...A second management bid of $100 is derailed by a long shot from an outside group led by First Boston, which loses out in a subsequent bidding round...
...The two Israeli writers believe that these inaccurate characterizations were indicative of the confusion and ineptitude that has beset Israel since the civil war began...
...If so, is it worth the resulting financial convulsions involved in assuming billions of dollars in debt, slashing R&D expenditures, and often laying off hundreds or thousands of employees...
...And he's right...
...The reason is that Thompson doesn't return reporters' phone calls, which is the barometer by which sportswriters tend to judge the worth of the people they write about...
...John's the New York market, Villanova the Philly market, and so on...
...Burrough and Helyar have stitched together an impressive narrative, but except for the facts already in the public record, it's impossible to tell how much relationship their story bears to reality...
...One of the reasons is that Calhoun thinks he is not as committed to basketball as Calhoun would like him to be...
...People are expecting too much," he complains sadly...
...With the Israelis "battering away at defenseless civilians, it is hardly surprising that thousands of Palestinians—many of them innocent of wrongdoing—were badly injured, to the point where some remained handicapped," they write...
...Bryan Burrough, John Helyar...
...Unfortunately, I don't know how much of it to believe...
...The Big East has escaped the kind of major recruiting scandals that have plagued big-time basketball schools like Kentucky and Nevada-Las Vegas...
...With a social life...
...His life doesn't seem to be confined inside the borders of the court...
...He is a student...
...Finally, in protracted overnight negotiations, the board decides to sell to Kravis for $109, rejecting a $112 management bid because of concerns about its underlying financial assumptions...
...Yet according to Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of Ha'aretz, an Israel daily, and Ehud Ya'ari, Israeli Television's Middle East specialist, neither played much of a role...
...The "barbarians" he envisioned were the junk bond hordes eager to tear down yet another company for the sake of the fees...
...And the only real hint as to any opinion held by the authors themselves is the book's title, which is taken from one of Forstmann's spiels...
...New American Library, $19 95...
...No, the answer, it seems to me, requires stepping back and looking at the Big Picture—looking beyond whether an assistant coach should visit a kid three times instead of four...
...That billion-dollar figure explains why college basketball cannot be reformed, at least not anytime soon, for it speaks to something that is elemental about college hoops today: it is the single greatest cash cow in all of sports—more so than college football (which has far fewer games and much greater overhead), and certainly more so than professional sports, which have to pay their performers something approaching their market value...
...Don't look for the NCAA to offer guidance...
...He has a social life...
...Pay the players...
...A billion dollars...
...Questions about the company's ability to service its debt are raised, but only by characters anxious to learn how high they can push their bids without inheriting a bankrupted wreck...
...Unswayed by Johnson's veiled bribe—an offer of post-LBO directorship seats and the opportunity to watch their own stock holdings grow as much as four-fold—members of an independent board appointed to evaluate the offer issue a press release instead of keeping the deal quiet until the last moment...
...The rest of the time, he added, his life was consumed by the horrors of recruiting...
...as a result, no one bothered to ask whether their competitive instincts were leading them over the precipice...
...David P. Hamilton Big Hoops: A Season in the Big East Conference...
...But now their nation "was repeating the mistakes made by the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam...
...Barbarians at the Gate, a fast-paced account of the intricate financial deal-making and breaking in the record-shattering $25 billion sale of RJR Nabisco, never really examines serious issues, although it succeeds admirably in depicting the Wall Street culture of investment bankers and lawyers who grow fat on the consulting fees generated by takeover deals...
...As fiction, the basic storyline would be unsettling enough...
...Once it occupied the moral high ground, but it now sits diplomatically isolated, an American client state, economically bankrupt, as immoral as any other sovereign nation...
...But he could never be described as a college student—he was brought to America to play basketball, and after the basketball season ended, he went home...
...Competition was the only watchword—the plan's architect barely hesitated when he realized that a deferral of that magnitude would have increased the federal deficit by a full 2 percent...
...Money has become an unseemly obsession...
...Johnson and his management group, worried by the fact that their stock is undervalued at $55 a share, propose an LBO at $75 to the company's board of directors...
...What American Jews appear to want to see is Israel once again perched on the moral high ground...
...Well, so much for reforming college basketball...
...Last year every game but one was televised (the Big East runs its own mini-television network...
...Providence College, the team I root for, got in because Gavitt wanted to continue living in Providence...
...There are also the rituals of recruiting, which have an absurdist feel to them: grown men groveling before I7-year-olds who may or may not be able to read...
...or whether college atheletes should be allowed to hold part-time jobs (right now, they're not...
...I don't know all the steps that should be taken—and I especially don't know what to do about the degradation of recruiting—but there are at least two changes that would be both simple and right...
...they ask, in horror...
...Should management take as its primary goal the task of increasing the trading value of the company's stock...
...It was born a scant 11 years ago, the brainchild of former Providence College coach and athletic director Dave Gavitt, who is widely hailed as one of the great geniuses of sports marketing...
...Reynolds, alas, has also lost perspective: he gives l'affaire Gaze less than a paragraph, and calls the criticism "media sniping...
...Ultimately, what's scandalous about the Big East is not Boston College's unneeded gym, or Andrew Gaze's year at Seton Hall, or St...
...For one thing, it has destroyed the "veil of hypocrisy and self-deceit that what Israel had practiced for over 21 years was a 'benevolent occupation...
...The novelistic style also prevents the authors from stepping outside the narrative to provide an objective assessment of the buyout...
...But a billion dollars...
...Imagine that—he's a student...
...The biggest scandal in the Big East last year was the importation of star guard Andrew Gaze from Australia to play for Seton Hall...
...Simon and Schuster, $22.95...
...Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about what's wrong with college basketball...
...One coach told Reynolds, somewhat pathetically, "You get into this profession because you like to coach...
...Is the spate of takeovers and LBOs really Adam Smith's invisible hand in action...
...One can find, scattered about in the book, any number of other incidents that show starkly, if unintentionally, the degree to which that pressure warps values...
...The book's most interesting contribution is its description of how these billion-dollar Wall Street deals are really driven by the participants' egos...
...It cannot be done with dignity," one former coach says...
...The Israeli troops "were brutalizing the Palestinian population because the intifada had brutalized the [Israeli Defense Forces...
...The NCAA has become a joke: an organization so weighted down with bureaucracy, it offers rules as arcane and nit-picky as anything found in the Federal Register...
...Confusion reigns...
...Many players in the Big East graduate (St...
...John's is the big exception), and some of them even major in real subjects...
...Because Reynolds, a Providence sportswriter, has written what amounts to an extended apologia for the Big East, he is quick to point out that the Big East schools are better than most...
...The reality is we need players...
...If "programs" are going to be big-time money-makers, they also ought to be big enough to share at least a small portion of the wealth with the people who are making it all possible...
...Not that the call for such reform has reached what you would call a roar, mind you, but did you see how much CBS agreed to pay the NCAA for the rights to its annual basketball gala, the Final Four...
...And the second...
...Changing that rule in the early 1970s was the single most destructive thing the NCAA ever did: it robbed athletes of their one chance to act like real students, to become part of a school, without the pressures that come with big time college sports...
...Joseph Nocera...
...What this "roar of protest" has led to was entirely unexpected: the embarrassment of the PLO as it has sought—not always successfully—to lead the various factions among the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians...
...What is certain is that the status quo is dangerous to all parties...
...That much money goes a long way towards justifying exploitation of the baldest sort and hypocrisy on the grandest of scales...
...If this constitutes "better," then it's time to take a few steps backward...
...The first would be once again to forbid freshmen from playing on varsity teams...
...Above all, they insist over and over again, Israel must come to terms with 1.7 million Palestinians who do not choose to be governed by them...
...Not to worry: Gavitt forbids the cameramen to pan the empty seats...
...Even if you give the Big East schools their due, you still cannot read this book without getting the gnawing feeling that something is terribly wrong...
...Kravis, always on the lookout for a high-profile deal to hang his name on, preempts Johnson's bid with a $90 tender offer...
...includ[ing] Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian entity...
...But, like all New Journalism, this book relies heavily on reconstructed dialogue and characters' inner thoughts reported as truth—even when, as on at least two occasions, encounters between two characters are described wholly from one perspective...
...beating the opposition is in...
...Harper & Row, $22.50...
...And 30 nights a year out of 365, you get a chance to do what you went into the profession for...
...Answers to these and related questions will have to wait, at least as far as Bryan Burrough and John Helyar are concerned...
...His league was explicitly formed with an eye to major media markets: Georgetown brought the Washington market, St...
...Which is not to say that the PLO has no devoted followers among the overwhelming number of people in the occupied territories...
...its own contract with CBS runs into the millions of dollars...
...Since Boston College is the league's perennial doormat, most of the new seats are empty...
...that way, Boston College games look big time, even if they're not...
...Don't do it under the table, thus teaching college athletes about cynicism and deceit...
...Their solutions embrace "administrative withdrawal" from the occupied lands and a "confederative arrangement...
...Bring it out in the open—admit that athletes are doing a job for the university every bit as much as a professor or a lab assistant or a student who works in the computer room to make a little spending money...
...College basketball has become filled with a kind of grinding, unrelenting pressure that turns otherwise decent men into growling ogres, the kind that gives people ulcers, and that causes them to lose perspective...
...The Big East Conference, the subject of Bill Reynolds's book, which is written in the John Feinstein, A-YearIn-The-Life mold, is as good an example of the state of college basketball as you're likely to find...
...Rather, it is the delusional belief that this television league Gavitt created has, as he put it, "made it better for the kids...
...But according to Burrough and Helyar, the deal foundered when one of Johnson's partners, the investment bank of Salomon Brothers, refused to allow a hated rival—the junk bond house Drexel, Burnham, Lambert—to assume the leading role in the bond financing...
...It has long been known that college basketball has a peculiar appeal for television producers, combining as it does the rah-rah excitement of oldfashioned college sports with an extraordinarily high level of skill...
...Seton Hall had a wonderful, storybook year, making it to the NCAA championship game, and Gaze was an important contributor to the team's success...
...presented as fact, it's downright ominous...
...All the same, they write somberly: "It is not clear that in this bitter battle for the soul of Israel, the forces of reason [will] prevail...
...The league makes gobs of money for all the schools...
...Because it exploited an almost-expired tax loophole that would allow its investors to defer nearly $3.5 billion in taxes, the bank was able to eclipse both Johnson and Kravis, forcing a second bidding round at the last minute...
...Third parties come and go, unable to obtain credible financing...
...And how long can the Israelis deceive themselves into believing that American Jews back their policies on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...Its supporters have long since abandoned any ethical arguments on its behalf, in favor of the questionable "strategic alliance" fantasy...
...Right after Kravis's tender offer, for instance, an agreement between Kravis and Johnson threatened to bring the proceedings to an early close...
Vol. 21 • January 1990 • No. 12
