The Wilmington morning star., 1947-01-06
As Pegler Sees 1t
BY WEsTBRoOK PEGLER
Copyright BY King Features

NEW YORk, Jan. 0.-lne SeFS- dICc v DS
business relations, long maintained under a
p1etext of sport, between West Point and
Notre Dame, is a faint, Pickering witch OF
the rhinoceros hide of a mean and corrupt
but attractive American industry. Successful
collegiate football is corrupt because 1t is
hypocritical, as all honest educators know
and as the Carnegie Foundation solemnly re-
ported about Is years ago. This was not a
discovery even then, for at the turn of the
century, when old Skjarsen was rampaging
for old Siwash, a toothsome scandal came
out of Georgia, where it was discovered that
Yankee veterans of the Spanish-American war
had tarried over to play football as ringers
for the university. '
Just about then, too, a young coach named
Fielding Yost had been imported from La
fayette and Bucknell, Pa, to Kansas to in
stitute something which later came to be
known as "a program and had brought with
him a fearsome yokel from Painted Post,
Tenn, who laid low until the Nebraska and
Missouri games and then fetched the backs
through the line clinging to handles On his
belt, to win them both. He disappeared after
the Missouri game, which was played at
Columbia, Mo-, and never saw the bonfires
or tasted the barbecue arranged in his honor
at Lawrence by the jubilant undergraduates
who, !. those days, stayed at home and got
the results by the miraculous electric tele-
graph. 1t was W~oefully reported that his dear
old nav had died in the Cumberlands and he
had cut short his larnin- to return home, tend
the still and shoot revenooers.
Ten or a dozen years ago, by accident,
l tWeaked the memory of Judge Frank Parent,
OF Inglewood, Calf, who had played about a
nlckeps worth of quarterback at ~Rock-Chalk,
Jay-Hawk that enormous year and he remem.
bered the giants name. This and some -oguish
publicity written to twit old Fielding Yost,
by then emeritus at Michigan and a man of
towering ethics and piety, led to the redis-
covery, after all this time, of the vanishing
slde-h1l dodger, now a man of 60-odd and a
person OF local importance in lumber in West
virginia. Kansas invited him back to Lawrence
Tor homecoming day, and Mr.. Yost, too. The
old tackle accepted, but Mr.. Yost ignored
the invitation as a ghoulish raid on a past
buried long ago and covered with a beautiful
growth OF academic ivy. I read later that
Gargantua himself had died, and I picture
him a 'settin' on a cloud with Knute Rockne,
who might be telling him of his youth at
Notre Dame when he fought at stag nights in
South Bend with Gus Dorais fetching his
bucket and Tapping his towel. Mr.. Yost, he
won't be a 'settin' on the same cloud but will
be off there, somewheres, ignoring them
furlously and whanging away on his harp to
drown an old scandal.
About the time that Iowa was taken in
the sin of substituting or PROSECUTING, is years
ago, and Illinois was one of the schools to
sit in solemn judgment on an erring sister,
I enjoyed a visit with an Illinois savant named,
I believe, Professor Goodenough, who spoke.
with rather sinful relish, it seemed to me, OF
the days when, as he said, 1--WE We're all
barbarlans." Illinois had hired a huge Scan
dinavian - or blubbe-eater, as our Morse
nelghbors and friends were called in my youth
in those parts-who had a job as %janitor. The
football team was built around him-an awful
mistake, as they learned when, in competi-
ton, he revealed an almost girlish aversion
to any laying on of hands and to avoid being
tackled, would run the wrong way or flop
fo- a down even before a pass was made at
him. He cost Illinois $500, a dead loss.
So the history of ou- football has gone,
almost from the beginning when the team was
a private group who elected their own cap
tain, hired their own coach and fired him if
he forgot his mental status. Football, in the
pure and primitive stage, was only vaguely
acknowledged by the college MANAGEMENT
Journeys from New Haven to Princeton or
New Brunswick, where Rutgers is, were or
ganized by the young men themselves at their
own expense. l cannot pretend to know the
details of its quick evolution into an official
activity with its own business and propaganda
departments. But, looking back to the twenties.
l appreciate the qualms of Harvard, Yale and
Princeton as they weakened under temptation.
~NS S4AoSo w "
press coops OF even provide electric lights for
Us ink-stained and often drenched or frozen
Wretches of the Fourth Estate. They told them
selves that if they did this they would be
pandering> to the base interest of an undesir-
able element, that is, the public, and yielding
a measure Of their privacy by encouraging
general publicity.
Meanwhile, however, they were counting
the money, turning the crank and grinding
out mimeograph material and had set UP a
reasonable facsimile Of Tex Richards ticket
reservation and box-office departments. They
were swept along on something that I was
tempted to call an irresistible tide and their
last saving p~retense of Indifference to the
press was an occasional show of n~astiness
to some journalist wanting 10 tickets on the
50-yard line for his publisher and party. Like
as not, if not more SO, the bounder intended
to scalp them at $25 each and the Carnegie
Foundation claimed to have discovered that
sometimes this was even too true.
intercollegiate football today no more re.
sembles the original game than grog resembles
branch-water. 1t is dishonest from the presi-
dents office down and an immoral influence on
all concerned and especially on the players,
because young men are hired, one Way or
another, to play as amateurs, knowing they
are pros and knowing that the men of pres
tige, some of them %clergymen, are hypocrites
and casuistical cheats. They and other under.
grads lose respect for the honor and teach
ing of such, and make up their minds that the
whole world is a racket, which, from the
view of a practical cynic, is good %spiritua.
preparation at that.