College basketball's historical squabbles
How the modern NCAA was forged on the hardwood, not the gridiron
Sports Biblio Reader 12.13.20
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: Missing the Minor League Cut; Charley Pride’s Baseball Ties; Rewarding Woke Activism; Olympic Breakdancing; The Lost Art of Winter Cycling; Spencer Haywood; Stealing the Sonics; Trading for Ken Dryden; Glenn Stout; Howard Cosell and John Lennon; The Last Betrayal of Dick Allen; Remembering Ray Perkins, Fred Akers and Paolo Rossi
A new college basketball season has stumbled out of the gate, with dozens of COVID-related cancellations and many in the sports media openly lamenting the push forward. It’s quite clear that the NCAA is desperately needing to stage a men’s Division I tournament that didn’t take place when the pandemic struck in March.
The 68-team tournament is slated to be played entirely in and around Indianapolis, the site of the Final Four, and not coincidentally where the NCAA is headquartered. Since the men’s tournament is the overwhelming source of revenue for the entire organization, a second year without March Madness would deliver an even greater financial blow not just to that sport, but much of the college sports enterprise.
Before March Madness became a thing, battles over the staging of men’s college basketball raged in mid-century, leading to the creation of the modern NCAA.
That’s the thesis of Dakota State University professor Kurt Edward Kemper’s recent book “Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball,” published by the University of Illinois press.
Author of the 2009 book “College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era,” Kemper stays within that range of time to argue that despite the attention and resources paid to big-time football, the NCAA as we have come to know it was forged in behind-the-scenes jostling between several sports bodies over basketball.
The NCAA was essentially a toothless organization until the 1950s, when Walter Byers, a former staffer at the Big Ten Conference, became executive director. And it had been barely a decade since the organization held its first basketball national championship.
For many years, the National Invitation Tournament was the sport’s glamor event, played in Madison Square Garden with promotional flair from former sportswriter Ned Irish, whom old-school college coaches like Kansas’ Phog Allen detested.
The truth is, big-time hoops was plagued by scandals not unlike football. Long before the point-shaving scandal that rocked New York University after its unique NCAA-NIT double championship in 1951, college basketball was a disorganized mess.
Liberal arts schools, seeking reform measures to return to a more educational approach, became increasingly eclipsed by Byers’ domineering style. Yet he needed their presence to control amateur sports, his long-held ambition.
By the mid-1950s the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which eschewed commercialized sports, had more member schools than the NCAA, and the upstart body also had allowed integrated teams to compete.
Many of the Southern members of the NAIA were unhappy with a late 1940s provision lifting a ban on black players.
However, it wasn’t just the likes of the Southeastern Conference that balked at integrated basketball at the major-college level: so did the Big Ten, giving the NCAA similar problems at the dawn of the Civil Rights era.
At the 1951 NCAA convention, members of historically black colleges and universities were more vocal than they ever had been. John McLendon, coach at North Carolina College and who learned the game from James Naismith at Kansas, led this charge, which included demands for the basketball tournament to include all-black schools.
Kemper writes that becoming more attractive to small colleges “seeking a level playing field and for black colleges seeking access to the national sporting culture now made the NAIA an undeniable threat to the NCAA.”
Sensing danger, Byers waged war on the NAIA, demonizing it to schools flirting with a new affiliation and pressing upon them the NCAA’s prestige. The introduction of a small-college NCAA tournament kept most of the liberal-arts schools on board, as they compromised the reforms they wanted.
Kemper concludes that by the late 1950s, the NCAA had avoided “almost certain destruction” because of the emergence of televised sports.
That was almost entirely from football revenues that Byers and the NCAA controlled until losing an antitrust suit in 1984 in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the organization a cartel over TV rights.
By then the NCAA Division I basketball tournament was on the cusp of becoming the lucrative March Madness, which earns several billion dollars in TV rights now.
Kemper’s research is diligent and exhaustive, and for those who like the inner-workings of college sports and its history, it’s an invaluable guide to an overlooked chapter in the evolution of amateur athletics.
“Before March Madness” is less a book about the growth of college basketball than about how the sport was leveraged by the NCAA to obtain near total control of amateur college sports.
Basketball has saved the NCAA before, and as it battles to keep its main revenue source functioning amid a pandemic, it finds itself in another delicate quandary that could determine much about its future course.
For further reading:
A Few Good Reads
LeBron James headlines a group of athletes who won championships during a COVID-affected year. But Sports Illustrated chose to group them together as their Sportspersons of the Year because of their political and social activism, much of which was forged long before the protests sparked by the George Floyd killing this summer. James was also named the recipient of Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, and is joined in SI company with Patrick Mahomes and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif of the Kansas City Chiefs, U.S. Open tennis women’s singles champion Naomi Osaka and Breanna Stewart of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm;
Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has debuted a new flavor to honor Colin Kaepernick, and it’s called “Change the Whirled,” consisting of a caramel sunflower butter base with fudge chips, graham cracker and chocolate cookie swirls and that “celebrates Kaepernick's courageous work to confront systemic oppression and to stop police violence against Black and Brown people.” Like its inspiration, that concoction is vegan;
This week Major League Baseball announced its streamlined minor-league affiliations, around 120 teams in all. That left 43 teams, mostly in small town locales, frozen out. That wasn’t a surprise, and each MLB club will have now four farm teams. Those looking for new places to land include the Burlington Bees in Iowa and the Batavia Muckdogs in upstate New York, among the long-lasting entrants in a minor-league system that scuttled its short-season and rookie leagues;
While waiting for the National Hockey League season to start, the Montreal Gazette this week examined the top trades in Canadiens’ history, and the deal for Ken Dryden that solidified the last dynasty of Les Habitants comes in at No. 2;
The Australian Open is on hold, and as the global tennis season was supposed to begin, there’s still much in doubt, as players, media rights-holders and corporate sponsors are anxious about the continuing uncertainty;
From the You’ve Got to be Joking Dept.: Among the sports to debut at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics will be breakdancing. It’s the latest attempt by the IOC to take advantage of a pop culture phenomenon to attract Olympic eyeballs, especially younger ones that aren’t necessarily riveted to sports;
Cycling writer and author Eben Weiss writes that year-round riders are missing out on a lot by not going old-school and getting out in the great outdoors during the winter.
Sports Book News
On Tuesday, former NBA star Spencer Haywood will appear with the co-authors of a new book about him on a webinar sponsored by Bookshop, the independent online retailer that benefits independent bookstores (disclaimer: Sports Biblio is a Bookshop affiliate). The event starts at 8 p.m. Tuesday and is free with Zoom registration. In an excerpt, Haywood discussed his cocaine addiction, a persistent problem across the NBA in the 1970s.
Now Hear This
Jon Finkel, author of the newly published “Hoops Heist,” how the Supersonics left Seattle, discusses his book on the Jeremy Mills podcast, which originates in the Pacific Northwest;
Glenn Stout, series editor of the “Best American Sports Writing” collections, discusses that 30-year publishing run that recently ended, and his upcoming book, “Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid,” a decidedly non-sports departure, with creative nonfiction podcaster Brendan O’Meara.
Media Lodge Notes
After 23 years covering the San Francisco Giants, Henry Schulman is retiring from the San Francisco Chronicle. He says he still wants to write about baseball without the grinding daily deadlines that come with being a beat writer. He’s among those taking a buyout from Hearst;
Bernie Rosen, who died this week at 93, was a sports broadcasting legend in south Florida in a career that spanned most of the post-World War II era. Among his proteges include Chris Myers, Suzy Kolber and Jane Chastain, the first woman to anchor a local sports broadcast in the Miami market;
Tom Southard, who covered high school and other local sports for the Western Nebraska Observer, died Dec. 6. A proud old-school newspaperman who wasn’t fond of modern technology, he was named recipient of Golden Pica Pole Award by the Nebraska Press Association in July.
Sports History Files
On Dec. 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York apartment by a gunman later identified as Mark David Chapman. The tragedy occurred just before the Patriots-Dolphins game on “Monday Night Football.” ABC color commentator Howard Cosell, a close friend of the former member of the Beatles, announced the news during the game, although he didn’t want to do it. At The Athletic, Rustin Dodd tells the backstory of that memorable occasion, and of Cosell’s friendship with Lennon.
Passings
Dick Allen, 78, was the 1972 American League MVP for the Chicago White Sox, and enjoyed a productive and fiery career that many, including Allen himself, thought worthy of Hall of Fame inclusion. Over 15 seasons, he posted a .292 average, 351 home runs, 1,119 RBIs and a .912 OPS. He had been actively campaigning Cooperstown’s Golden Days Committee, and in 2014 fell one vote short of qualifying.
Allen, the National League Rookie of the Year with the Phillies in 1964, played in Chicago only three seasons, but admitted in later years he enjoyed that experience most of all. Many think his contributions helped keep the White Sox, who were looking to move elsewhere, in the Windy City. Said former White Sox teammate Goose Gossage:
“He was a real man. There was zero nonsense in him. And when it came to baseball and he was in the dugout, we listened. He once said: ‘Why don’t you (bleeping) guys watch the game? You might learn something.’
“Boy, you could hear a pin drop. You talk about badasses. He was a true badass.”
How badass? Allen made the cover of Sports Illustrated during that 1972 MVP season, juggling baseballs with a cigarette dangling between his lips. Here’s how John Iacono captured an image that was classic ‘70s.
Mitchell Nathanson, author of “God Almighty Hisself,” a 2019 biography of Allen, wrote this week that the Hall of Fame’s inaction was ultimately a betrayal of the man and his career. The Golden Days Committee was to have voted the day before Allen’s death, but pushed back consideration to 2021 because of COVID:
“True that, but for the fact that the rest of the world had discovered the wonders of Zoom back in March. And but for the fact that the rest of the Hall’s business—the election of the winners of the Ford Frick Award for broadcasters and the Spink Award for sportswriters—had not been similarly postponed. . . .
“Dick Allen had learned decades before not to put his faith in the baseball establishment. He was too real, too authentic, too willing to speak his truth for those insistent on foisting sugar-coated fiction upon consumers of what was once our National Pastime. From the beginning baseball never wanted Dick Allen. But his greatest gift to us was that he gave himself to baseball anyway.”
For further reading:
Ray Perkins, 79, was a successful NFL coach when he shocked the New York Giants to succeed Bear Bryant, his college coach at the University of Alabama. Although he compiled a respectable 32-15-1 in four years, the pressure of following in Bryant’s footsteps was fierce, and after four seasons he accepted a lucrative offer with the downtrodden Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a stint that didn’t last much longer. Patriots coach Bill Belichick recalled this week when Perkins hired him as a Giants assistant in 1979, it was a “life-changing moment for me.” After serving as athletics director at Alabama, Perkins retired in Tuscaloosa. He’ll be buried there on Monday;
Fred Akers, 82, won 86 games in 10 seasons as the football coach at the University of Texas, where he also succeeded another legend in Darrell Royal. Akers abandoned the wishbone offense in favor of the I-formation, which suited eventual Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell quite well. The Longhorns came close to winning national titles, twice in fact, and they were losses Akers could not seemingly shake off, although he lived in Austin in retirement;
Paolo Rossi, 64, had a sketchy soccer career with the Italian national team before his hat trick in the 1982 World Cup elevated the Azzurri to their third championship. Banned for two years for his role in a match-fixing scandal, he looked rusty in the early stages of the tournament before thumping his three goals past the favored Brazilians in the semifinals. He scored the first goal in the finals against West Germany, as Italy captured its first crown since 1938. Rossi, who had been battling lung cancer, helped win two Serie A titles for Juventus after that, but retired at age 30 due to injuries;
Charley Pride, 86, who broke the color line in country music, pitched in the Negro Leagues during their final years and was a minor league prospect in the Yankees’ system. Even after he became a Nashville legend, Pride kept his connections to baseball, becoming a part owner of the Texas Rangers and serving on the board of the Negro Leagues Museum, which awarded him its Jackie Robinson Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. The Rangers issued a statement Saturday after Pride’s death due to COVID-related complications.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 227, published Dec. 13, 2020.
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