The meeting, Ara Parseghian recalls, took place sometime in the late
`50s, when he was head football coach at Northwestern University. Ohio State University`s Woody Hayes, Michigan State University`s Duffy Daugherty, University of Iowa`s Forest Evashevski and the rest of his Big-10 peers were also on hand, and together they made a vow in the wake of the scandals that had recently rocked college sports. ”We all agreed,” Parseghian remembers,
”that we were not going to cheat and that the first guy who was caught cheating would lose his job. Well, the first guy caught was (former Illinois coach) Pete Elliott, and Pete was dismissed (in 1967), and that came out of that meeting.”
He pauses, leans back in his chair and reflects for a moment on that meeting nearly three decades ago. ”God,” he finally continues with a small chuckle, ”there are some funny stories from those times. Evy used to needle Woody all the time, and they were going to fight in one meeting. Woody got up, took his coat off, threw his keys down and wanted to fight. Evy said, `Sit down, Woody, before you get hurt.` But”-and here his laughter dies-”the more I think about it, yeah, we used to sit around and talk about common problems. That agreement was made. We agreed that if a guy cheats . . . ”-and now Parseghian`s finger cuts across his neck-”and it happened. A `Death Penalty` within the conference for a coach.”
That Death Penalty is now also within the purview of the NCAA, the overlord of college sports, and six months ago it slapped that sentence on Southern Methodist University, where illegal payments to football players were the rule rather than the exception through much of the `80s. Because of this
”Ponygate” scandal-SMU`s mascot is the mustang-the school was forbidden to play football in the coming season and allowed to play only a limited schedule in 1988.
That punishment was the fifth received by SMU in the last dozen years, and it further solidified its position as the most penalized school in the history of the NCAA. But to put this penalty in proper perspective, it marked neither the first nor the final time college sports was smeared by scandal.
As far back as 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a White House conference to discuss cleaning up the wanton violence he perceived in college football.
Twenty-four years later a Carnegie Foundation report revealed that college athletics were riddled with abuses, from the altering of transcripts to illegal payments to players. ”In the United States,” noted the report,
”the composite institution called a university is doubtless still an intellectual agency. But it is also a social, a commercial and an athletic agency, and these activities have in recent years appreciably overshadowed the intellectual life for which the university is assumed to exist.”
hirty-two players from the basketball teams at the University of Kentucky, Bradley University and five other schools were found to have fixed 86 games between 1947 and 1950, and in 1950 a College of William & Mary report on college sports noted: ”The athletic program has . . . steadily sapped the academic standards of the college . . . (and) usurped a dominating position in the college. . . It has weakened the moral fiber of the college and its students and alumni.” As if to prove that point, a number of football players were among the 90 cadets discharged from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in August, 1951, for breaking its sacrosanct honor code.
Elliott`s departure from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the mid-`60s came in the wake of a slush-fund scandal, and gambling by coaches, fixed basketball games, altered transcripts and other academic irregularities dominated the headlines in the late `70s. The `80s were just eight months old when five PAC-10 football teams were placed on probation for rules violations, and a little over a year later Rick Kuhn was convicted of shaving points while playing for the Boston College basketball team in the 1978-79 season. Ponygate and the 1986 death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose have marked this decade`s middle age, and now it moves toward its conclusion mottled with any number of maddeningly familiar problems.
Less than a week after SMU was hit with the Death Penalty, Texas Tech University was found guilty of paying its players and their parents, and the University of South Carolina of loaning and leasing cars to players and of being party to a scheme that allowed those same players to sell their complimentary tickets illegally to boosters at inflated prices. A grand jury convened in Chicago in May to hear testimony about agents illegally inducing possible future clients while they were still in college, and at the end of June, University of California-Berkeley chancellor Ira Michael Heyman noted in his speech at a special NCAA convention, ”We have seen recruiters who bribe high school students, staff who alter transcripts and test scores, admissions officers who admit athletes who are functionally illiterate.”
On July 3 newspapers reported that no Virginia Tech basketball players graduated between 1982 and 1986. On July 4 newspapers quoted John Toner, the chairman of the NCAA`s drug-testing committee, as saying, ”Among football players whose schools are testing them and using our laboratories, we know that 50 to 70 percent of our athletes are using steroids.” And on July 8 newspapers noted that former Memphis State University basketball coach Dana Kirk, who was already under indictment for tax evasion, was now being charged with overcharging students at his summer camps to help pay his gambling debts. ”Unbelievable,” Ara Parseghian says in reference to Kirk.
We are sitting in Parseghian`s office in the St. Joseph`s Bank Building in downtown South Bend, deep into a discussion of college sports then (when he was coaching) and now. He, of course, roamed the sidelines of various football stadiums for 25 years, and during all those years-at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern; and the University of Notre Dame-his integrity was unquestioned. Since his retirement as head coach of the Irish following the 1974 season, he has run a successful insurance company from this office but also has stayed close to the game as an analyst on CBS Sports` college football telecasts. Still he demurs at one point and says: ”I`ve never been an administrator, an athletic director. I`ve only seen it from the coach`s side, and I`ve been down here 12, 13 years now. So for heaven`s sake, don`t make me look like an expert. I`m not an expert on this.
”But I have opinions. You`re asking me my opinions, and I`m giving them to you. And doing color (on television) all these years, going to schools and listening to coaches, I hear their problems. They`ve been talking about agents, about drugs, about recruiting and academics for the last-it`s at least 10 years now. That`s not new, and when you look back on it, you see that when competition is there and everybody is trying to achieve the best, you`re going to have this sort of thing-real or imagined-occur.
”I would venture to say that a decade from now they`ll be confronted with more problems, and these problems will be perceived as greater than the ones of today. And they may be. But chances are the guys facing the problems today will then say, `No, nothing was tougher than what I went through.`
” And since that leads naturally enough back to that time when he was coaching, it provides the perfect point for plunging into our interview:
S.M.-Did you see cheating going on when you were coaching?
A.P.-Sure. The point is, it was not going on to the degree people suggested it was. But everybody becomes suspect in a profession after you pick up a newspaper and read, for example, about a doctor ripping off welfare. That gives the whole medical profession a black eye, and people think, ”Every doctor does it.” Bull! Or (Ivan) Boesky, (who pleaded guilty as) an inside trader: ”Damn those businessmen.” Bull! SMU: ”Everybody does it.” That`s one of the worst copouts of the guys who are apprehended. ”Everybody does it.” Bull! The guy who`s been caught says that because it`s the
rationalization that lets him say: ”I went ahead and compromised the rules because I had to face the kind of competition that was doing it. Everybody else was doing it, and that`s why I did it.” But it was the fifth time the NCAA stepped in there. Finally, they had to give them the Death Penalty, and suddenly we`ve all got a black eye. Well, everybody doesn`t do it. There are a lot of good, honest programs out there. But coaches have always done it just as everybody else in every profession in this country has done it.
S.M.-But it seems we`re hearing a lot more about cheating in colleges now.
A.P.-Because, I think, the percentage has gone up. When I coached, I used to say maybe 10 to 15 percent of the coaches are going to do any damn thing they want. I think maybe 25 percent of them are doing it now. But remember, when they do it, each one has his own rung to hang it on in a sense. Why is he doing it? Is he trying to elevate himself? Is he trying to promote himself? Is he trying to get another job? Is he trying to make more money within the job he has? Is he getting pressure to be successful? There are various reasons, and then each individual has a certain degree of integrity, a certain degree of credibility and a certain rationale that allows him to cheat. Where is that? Everybody is a little different. Most of them fall, I think, within a reasonable package of honesty. But there`s always that group, and that group, in my opinion, contaminates everybody in the profession.
I think what we`re seeing here-now I don`t want to condemn an entire nation-but what we`re seeing here is fallibility in people in all professions. People cheat. That`s why we have police forces; that`s why we have courts, judges, juries. Not everybody is honest in every profession, in my opinion. There are a lot of guys out there doing good, honest work, living within the rules of their jobs. Then there are those few who aren`t, whatever their reasons. I don`t know what they are; they can vary, and I sure as hell don`t have the answers to those problems.
But the one thing I can say is that there is, in the climate we have today, a lot of publicity on issues that shake us up a little bit. Politics has shaken us up. Ronald Reagan has shaken us up. He tells us we`re not going to deal with terrorists, we`re not going to trade with the Iranians, we`re not going to do that, we`re going to stand tall. Then when he does those very things, where does that leave us? ”That`s politics.” You take the evangelists; they got themselves in trouble with the (Jim and Tammy) Bakker thing. You take Boesky. You can go down the line. I guess I`m harping on a point here, but that`s true in all professions. Now that doesn`t mean the whole country is bad, that every profession is bad. It just means a certain percentage is bad.
S.M.-Admitting that, why are the honest coaches so reluctant to point fingers at the cheaters?
A.P.-The same reason doctors are reluctant to blow the whistle. Have you ever seen a doctor put the finger on another who`s a malpractice guy?
S.M.-No.
A.P.-Same way in this profession. There have been guys reported, but then the NCAA comes back and says: ”We`ve done an investigation. We can`t find anything.” What do you think now? ”They`re incompetent. We`ve given them all this information, and they say they can`t find anything?” Now you`ve got the choice of joining the competition by cheating, right? That`s happened in a lot of cases. And you also get this paranoia from some coaches who think everybody`s cheating and think every kid they`ve lost has been bought. Then this thing builds. Say, for example, I`m sitting in a staff meeting and I ask one of my recruiters, ”Why the hell didn`t we get that kid?”
”Ah, he was bought.”
Wait a minute. That`s the easy way. He won`t ever say, ”We were outrecruited.” Or, ”They have a course we don`t have.” Or, ”His brother went to school there.” It works two ways, is what I`m saying. You may manufacture some things in your mind, report them and find out there is no validity to them. But that doesn`t change your perception of what your opponent is doing, because the competition`s so keen, because you fight like cats and dogs for players, for success.
S.M.-Did you have these same feelings when you were coaching?
A.P.-Yeah. I had the same feelings then as I do today. No different. I knew some coaches were cheating, and I talked about it. It`s a very competitive profession, like everything else in our society, and maybe the percentage has increased because of the competition for the dollar.
S.M.-But then you run into a chicken-egg thing, don`t you? I mean, the way to get more money is to get on TV and to bowl games. But you don`t do that until you win, and you don`t win until you recruit the players, and you need money to get the players. So which comes first?
A.P.-Athletic programs started at universities under the sound-mind-in-sound-body philosophy, and if they really believe that, they`ve got to be willing to subsidize their programs at whatever level they want to be in and even if their teams don`t win. They`re not willing to do that, in my opinion, and in some cases they subsidize the programs illegally.
S.M.-But schools are crying that their costs are already too high, so how can you expect them to subsidize a program that is a big business? Certainly a bigger business now than in your day, right?
A.P.-Yeah. I think that`s probably true. I think when Georgia and Oklahoma challenged the NCAA television contract and won (in 1984), the rich got richer, and the little guy, poorer. It increased competition among the big-time schools, and I would certainly say that from that standpoint, it has become more businesslike now. For example, how can you, as director of a school, change the starting times of games (at TV`s request) to such extremes as 11:30 in the morning and 7:30 at night, when they were originally scheduled at 1:05 or 1:30? Who are you catering to, and why are you doing it? You see, even though I`m now in the TV business, universities have some answers to bring forward to us. To me, they are in a sense compromising their positions. So I think the presidents and the people involved in athletics shouldn`t be making as much noise as they are when they are making all kinds of compromises and are running their athletic departments like a business. They`re willing to do damn near anything to get the TV dollars.
Here`s an example of what I was talking about before. My alma mater
(Miami University) has a football program with a great tradition. The
”Cradle of Coaches” and all that. But we can`t get on national television anymore or even on regional telecasts like we could under the old NCAA contract, and our receipts in football or basketball certainly can`t support those programs. But we think they are important enough to have as part of our university that we subsidize them. We`ve always subsidized the programs because we think the programs themselves are important enough.
S.M.-But you`re talking about programs on a level lower than those of Notre Dame, Michigan, Penn State . . . .
A.P.-Now wait a minute. What I`m saying is that we accept we`re going to have a program here. Now are we going to recognize that it`s not business-oriented, that there are inherent values in the participation itself?
Apparently Miami does. So if you think the tail (athletics) is wagging the dog (the university), then you quit making compromises to bring in the buck. Because if you don`t, you`re just a mercenary. Why, look at Virginia Tech
(where, reportedly, no basketball players graduated between 1982 and 1986). You tell me where the athletic director and the administration were. Whose fault was that? The coach`s? Not totally.
S.M.-But go back to what you said about this being a competitive society. A coach is going to take any edge he can get, and if he`s unscrupulous, one of those edges will be to take advantage of his players.
A.P.-But what`s the athletic director doing? What`s the president of the university doing?
S.M.-They`re supposed to be controlling their coach. Or at least hiring a coach who won`t take advantage of his players.
A.P.-And why were they willing to accept what happened? See, they were trying to find the simple way to finance their program.
S.M.-And besides the big bucks, it`s also undeniable that there are now elements in college sports that weren`t there when you were coaching or, if they were there, weren`t as prevalent or problematical as they are now. Recruiting, for example, and agents and TV and drugs.
A.P.-Yes, I agree.
S.M.-I`m surprised to hear you had any problems at all.
A.P.-Yeah. I had four or five cases (involving drugs).
S.M.-Which drugs?
A.P.-In one case, a very serious case, he was on acid-LSD or whatever. The others, I really don`t know what they were on, I just know they were involved in drugs. What I did, I sought counseling for the kids-university counseling as well as outside counseling-and rehabilitation. That`s all I knew to do. I mean, I`m not trained to deal with that.
S.M.-There was no steroids problem then, was there?
A.P. You`re right.
S.M.-And no real drug culture?
A.P.-That`s right, no. Drugs and agents are the two major problems for coaches today. And recruiting. Coaches are chasing kids all over the damn country now and spending unbelievable budgets to recruit kids. But that`s the way the system works. Competition. One guys decides he`s going to do it a certain way-he`s going to be the one who`s going to sit in the living room a little longer than you; he`s going to see the parents a little more often than you; he`s going to call them more often than you-so you`re compelled to do the same damn thing. But how many times can you tell a kid you want him, that he has a scholarship?
S.M.-Then you hear the stories about coaches writing daily letters to their recruits.
A.P.-Yeah. So in our competitive society-which I think is fine; we wouldn`t be where we are today without competition-but suddenly it becomes a thing where one guy does it, so you`ve got to do it. Then, well, you`ve got decisions to make. You`re recruiting. Some guy comes along and starts buying athletes. You`re losing these kids; they`re going somewhere else, and you find out they`re taking money under the table. Now to not get involved, you`ve got to have a certain basic philosophy that makes you say: ”Hey, I`m not going to get involved. If I can`t win in this profession within the rules, I`m going to get the hell out.”
I went through this at Northwestern. High admission standards, not many scholarships. Well, we (Parseghian and his staff) were sitting there, and I said: ”We`ve got a choice. We`re either going to do the best job we can under the circumstances, and if we can`t do it, we`re going to go do something else and be able to live with ourselves. Or we can cheat and buy players.” I said, ”You`ll have to live with that.” And that was the end of it.
S.M.-Did you take a vote?
A.P.-Everybody agreed. Hey, we agreed. See, it`s like going into a house of prostitution. You`ve got to live with that the rest of your life. You do that, you have that experience, you have to live with it.
