The Big Ten's big-time about-face
The conference sportswriters swooned over last month sold its soul decades ago
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The Sports Biblio Reader, 9.20.20
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: College Football in 1918; The NFL at 100; Before the Bengals; World Series Goes Neutral; Naomi Osaka; The WTA’s Original 9; Cathy Freeman; East Germany’s Last Soccer Team; Australian Football’s First Family; Revisiting the Massacre at Winged Foot; Herb Score; Jerry Izenberg; Remembering Larry Wilson
This time a month ago, the Big Ten Conference appeared to be its usual trend-setter in college football, as it determined the COVID-19 situation was too unsafe to play in the fall.
But the postponement dominos didn’t fall, as the ACC, SEC and Big 12 decided to forge ahead.
With mounting pressure coming from Big Ten parents and players—and as two of those major conferences began their seasons last weekend—the first of the big-boy college athletic leagues was made follower.
Earlier this week, the Big Ten announced it would be playing in the fall after all, starting in late October, with an eight-game regular season, followed by post-season crossover games to determine a league champion.
Many of the same sportswriters who in August had held up the Big Ten as a bastion of sanity amidst the madness of playing college football in a pandemic! felt utterly betrayed.
Christine Brennan of the USA Today, a proud Northwestern graduate outdoing even her own considerable hyperbole, and ignoring the likes of the Jerry Sandusky scandal that brought down a Hall of Fame coach, athletic director and university president at Penn State, called this “the darkest day” in Big Ten history. No, really.
Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger, sentenced to covering a crappy Rutgers football program that’s in the Big Ten only because of financial necessity, said the conference that “postponed for all the right reasons” folded “because, well, half the country flipped the hell out.”
He’s writing this from the state with the highest COVID death rate per million, not just in the United States, but if it were its own nation, it would be tops in the world. And that has had 12 percent of its long-term care home residents die from the virus that has killed the elderly exponentially, compared to overwhelmingly healthy college students. Even among the hapless Scarlet Knights.
Both writers complained that the Big Ten was becoming like the Southeastern Conference, and for thinking only about the money.
Well, blow me down!
We here at the confluence of ACC/SEC country—in other words, somewhere halfway between the campuses of Clemson and Alabama—know this to be a geographic insult. But we still find these reactions hysterical and even quite amusing.
There’s also Nicole Auerbach, a college football writer at The Athletic and a graduate of Michigan, decrying the decision because, well, The Ohio Freaking State.
Which ignores the fact that long before the head coach of the Buckeyes sounded off, the coaches of Nebraska, Penn State and Michigan, respectively, had gone on the record as wanting their teams to play in the fall.
Deadline columnizing and everyday Tweeting aren’t expected to contain recent history, much less the ancient variety, but there’s barely a droplet of any to be found.
Surely two Big Ten alumna might know that their beloved conference has been at the vanguard of “reform,” such as it has ever existed in the history of college athletics, before quickly succumbing to the eternal temptations of fame and fortune.
The Big Ten was the first major college sports conference to be created, originally named the Western Conference in 1895, and designed to “clean up” the sport by banning pure athletic scholarships.
The name change took place in 1917, and as Steven Donohue, an Illinois graduate, noted in “Spiral Revolutions,” his history of college athletic conference realignment, the Big Ten was “no more innocent for merely having written rules. Conference arrangements did little to strengthen the amateur code.”
In 1935, the SEC became the first conference to offer athletic scholarships, and until the NCAA got some more enforcement teeth in the 1950s, the Big Ten was swimming upstream.
The Big Ten Network, which began in 2004, set the standard for a 21st century television-based college athletics revenue model that prompted the SEC and ACC to create their own outlets under the auspices of ESPN.
It was a new round in a long history of actions and repositioning that put the Big Ten on top. The first of the big-time conferences may have done an about-face in chasing its below-the-Mason-Dixon-Line rivals this time around.
But as the illustrious past of the Big Ten has shown, it’s never been far from being in the vanguard whenever important moments, and significant trends, in the world of college athletics are at stake. Almost always in a quest to follow the money.
A Few Good Reads
As the U.S. Open concludes today at Winged Foot Country Club near New York City, the course that was the host of the 1974 Open—and which inspired an oral history organized by Dick Schaap—was swallowing golfers whole once again. Sunday’s finale will have three players under par so perhaps the destruction won’t be as crushing. Golf Digest explains how Schaap enlisted a dozen reporters, including Red Smith, to record the minute-by-minute account of an event that prompted this plea from the head of the USGA: “We’re not trying to embarrass the best players in the world; we’re trying to identify them;”
The National Football League was founded on Sept. 17, 1920, and on Thursday commissioner Roger Goodell made a trip to Canton, Ohio to mark the occasion at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the league’s birthplace. Thursday’s Browns-Bengals game in Cleveland included a big surprise for Joe Buck, calling the game for the NFL Network, who found out he’s going into the Hall as the recipient of the Pete Rozelle Award, given to radio and TV contributors;
Filmmaker and Cincinnati-area sports historian Cam Miller has produced a short documentary, “Before the Bengals,” detailing the early history of pro football in the city. It’s the latest passion project for Miller, who produced a history of the Covington Blue Sox, a Federal League team in 1913. In May The Athletic profiled Miller, whose work focuses on sports history in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Previous credits include a history of Crosley Field, the longtime home of the Reds, and he’s working on a film of boxer Ezzard Charles;
An hour-long documentary film special, “Freeman,” about the Australian Olympic gold medal sprinter Cathy Freeman, aired in the last week on ABC, and a review in The Guardian concludes it’s “the story of an Aboriginal woman that embodies the essence of Australia, from its ancestral cultural lineage and its stories and injustices of First Nations people, to the power of sport in national identity and the possibilities of what the nation could grow into;'“
More on the 1918 college football season, which like this one was interrupted and delayed by the Spanish flu epidemic but continued on despite worse carnage that the current COVID-19 pandemic;
When the Big 10 football season was on hold, Frank Fitzpatrick of The Philadelphia Inquirer visited the campus and town around Penn State and found no joy in Happy Valley;
Naomi Osaka’s comeback win to repeat as U.S. Open women’s singles champion gets this haiku-ish breakdown;
In 1970, nine female tennis pros risked lifetime expulsion from the U.S. Tennis Association for daring to create the Women’s Tennis Association. The brainchild of Billie Jean King, the effort also reflected the desire of several of her peers at the dawn of the Open era to insist on better pay-days and treatment. They signed symbolic $1 contracts with WTA organizer Gladys Heldman to demonstrate that they meant business. Said Martina Navratilova: “At every level it was just such a huge move, so I’ll keep thanking them for the rest of my life;”
This is from the BBC magazine from September 2015, on the 25th anniversary of the last match for the East German soccer team, which decided to play against Belgium in spite of the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic;
It’s been 30 years this month since four brothers from the Daniher family played for the Essendon Bombers in an Australian Football League match, and they went various and separate ways after that. Greg Baum of The Age catches up with one of Australian football’s most notable families and their memories of Essendon later reaching the first AFL Grand Final that season;
With a harsh COVID lockdown imposed in the state of Victoria least through October, this year’s AFL Grand Final will be played outside of Melbourne for the first time. The October 24 event has been moved to “the Gabba” in Brisbane, and will be played in the evening for the first time. At least 30,000 spectators will be allowed at the venue in Queensland, which has raised some hackles over its border restrictions. AFL regular season finales are this weekend, with Brisbane at the top of the ladder.
Baseball History Files
Vin Scully is on social media, and when I first heard the news, I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. A couple weeks in, and I can confirm that the presence of the retired Dodgers radio legend in the online dens of hell has been a hell of an improvement. He does a video recording of a memory during his career, and thus far has reminisced about a Sandy Koufax perfect game. This week he talked about his 2017 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, during which he narrated Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The show was replayed on a local PBS outlet this week, and Scully talks about his friendship with conductor Gustavo Dudamel;
For the first time since World War II, the entire World Series will be played at the same venue. Major League Baseball announced this week that the final stop in the post-season bubble will be at Globe Life Field, the new stadium for the Texas Rangers. In 1944, the Cardinals and Browns shared Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. The Redbirds won that Fall Classic, which was the only appearance for the downtrodden Browns, consigned to history during a watered-down era. When the vets came back home, Bill Veeck’s club fell back to the American League second division, and three thousand-plus showed up for the Browns’ last game in St. Louis in 1952, before they became the Baltimore Orioles;
From 2018 and published this week at the Richland Source in Ohio, the tale of Herb Score and how he overcame adversity to pitch and star for the Cleveland Indians during the 1950s, and how those travails continued after retirement.
Sports Book News
Japan-based American sportswriter Ed Odeven has published a collection of interviews with Jerry Izenberg, the longtime columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, who turned 90 on Sept. 10. “Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg” is available as an e-book at several online bookselling platforms. Odeven calls this a project that “curates a wide mix of opinions from and about Jerry Izenberg to help people develop a broader understanding of his background, numerous career accomplishments and commitment to the community.”
The interviews include discussions of his work as a boxing writer and his association with Muhammad Ali, and tales of newspaper legends Jim Murray, Shirley Povich and othets who inspired his career.
In January Izenberg announced he wouldn’t be attending the Super Bowl for the first time in its 54-year history, but defiantly claimed “I’m old, not dead.”
Books by Jerry Izenberg: Once There Were Giants | Pete Rozelle: A Biography | Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer’s 58-Year Journey
Lodge Notes
Layoffs at North Carolina newspapers this week included sportswriters at the Greensboro News & Record. Among them is columnist Ed Hardin, the state’s sportswriter of the year in 2019, who announced the news this way:
Hardin’s last column, published on Tuesday, the day before he lost his job, is a memoriam to a local golfer, fisherman, coach and personal friend of more than 40 years named Curtis Wadsley, “the most competitive person I’ve ever known, whether it be on the golf course or on a small pond or a foosball table, which is how we actually met. We were both skipping seventh period at Reynolds and ended up at Choosie Mother’s Foosball Parlor playing for quarters.” Ultimately all we have are our stories, and Hardin’s tribute illustrates how much North Carolina readers are going to miss him.
Just a few weeks ago Gordon Edes was getting back to an in-season groove as the team historian for the Boston Red Sox, after doing webinars and other virtual presentations this spring and early summer. On Friday, he announced he had lost his job, as Major League Baseball teams were making gut-wrenching layoffs due to massive revenue shortfalls.
Before that, Edes covered the Red Sox for nearly two decades for the Boston Globe and ESPN, and had been a sports reporter for 35 years. On Saturday, Edes returned to Twitter to thank well-wishers and to ask for contributions for his entry in the Jimmy Fund marathon walk, a fundraising event for the Red Sox’ longtime charity.
Passings
Larry Wilson, 82, a hard-hitting defensive back for the St. Louis Cardinals who revolutionized the safety blitz, intercepted 52 passes during a Pro Football Hall of Fame career that spanned 13 seasons, then became a front-office executive for the franchise for 30 more years. Current owner Mike Bidwill said this week he considered Wilson one of the most influential people in his life, along with his father Bill Bidwill, who drafted Wilson in the 7th round out of the University of Utah in 1959.
The Sports Biblio Reader is an e-mail newsletter 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. 218, published Sept. 20, 2020.
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