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COVERING
COLLEGE COACHES: AT THEIR FEET, OR AT THEIR THROAT
BY JAMES CAREY
Indiana University's president, Myles Brand, along with the trustees of the school, have taken some heavy weather over their decision to retain Bobby Knight as head basketball coach. They deserved it. Knight should have been fired over twenty years ago when his public behavior began to deteriorate and later yet when he began tossing chairs across the floor or marching his team off the court during a game with the Soviet national team. Knight's detractors, and many of the faculty and administration at Indiana are among them, have been waiting for the Woody Hayes type incident to provide the occasion for his dismissal. Once Indiana officials had a "smoking gun," however ambiguous Knight's choke hold on his former player Neil Reed, it was a disservice to them, to college basketball, to us all, to let Knight off the hook with a modest fine, suspension, and reprimand.
That said, there has been plenty of sanctimony surrounding the case. Knight was saved not only because the president and trustees were toadies and cowards, nor solely because he had the support of IU fans, allegations which conveniently get everyone else off the hook. The fact is that Bobby Knight is perhaps the most powerful public figure in Indiana and very few people from the governor on down are willing to cross him. Nor is this peculiar to the Hoosier state. Legendary college coaches -- Frank Broyles, Bear Bryant, Tom Osborne, Woody Hayes come to mind -- wielded enormous clout with legislators and public officials because of the simple fact that their teams and their success were the most visible symbols of the state at large. And this clout was exercised, in case after case, to implicitly hold hostage university budgets, building programs, and academic enterprises, even if never publicly mentioned. Such coaches had and have easier and more potent access to power brokers in state politics whether c.e.o.'s or elected officials than does any college president.
These facts are hardly secrets among sports writers but are conveniently forgotten in the periodic eruption of scandal in college athletics. Nor is the source of the power unknown: it comes from the uncritical coverage lavished upon coaches by the news media. These legends are made, made by sports writers and not merely those from the hometown paper who operate as part of the coach's personal publicity apparatus. Sports journalism generally is blind to politics and power and sports writers willfully ignore the implications of their own work in promoting and sustaining the omnipotence of college coaches. Of their relationship to coaches it truly can be said, they are either at their feet or at their throat. They can do everything about college athletics but cover it.
Even if we absolve journalists for their political ignorance, there is something unforgivable in their feigned journalistic ignorance. It did not take much investigation to discover that Knight followed a practice common among coaches of motivating players through verbal abuse and such abuse frequently involved physical contact. After hours sports writers talk about it all the time. They not only talk about it, but they observe it, at practice, around the gym, and on the playing field. They may not have sources that will attest to it, even anonymously, such is the potency of coaches, but their eyes and ears would be testimony enough if only they would risk using them. Such reporting would dissolve legends, of course, reveal the ugliness of the game, and make college sports a less attractive beat.
We all know the truth. College athletics is a corrupt and corrupting enterprise. The forces of commerce entered education first through athletics and have spread through every nook and cranny of such institutions. It is not only players, coaches, athletic departments, admissions and grading standards and an honor system among students that has been corrupted; it is the whole bloody enterprise.
Still, college athletics speaks to a genuine need. I am not only thinking of the support big-time sports provides to minor sports and women's athletics or the rallying point teams provide for the identity of institutions with their faculty, students, and alumni. At least in the state universities, athletic teams provide one of the few (one is tempted to say only) points of identification between ordinary citizens and the states they inhabit. In states without professional teams -- Nebraska for example -- the university is the focal point of state pride, indeed is the most pregnant symbol of the existence of the state at a time when a sense of place is under threat of extinction.
There are solutions to such problems, ways of detaching intercollegiate athletics from the structure of universities while preserving their valuable functions, including the provision of a sense of place. However, there are forces, well beyond toadying presidents, that will prevent any rational solution to the problems of college sports. Alas, there are interests, including those of pharisaical journalists, devoted to preserving the corruption so ardently criticized when a coach's hand gets on a player's throat.
James Carey is the CBS Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He was the Dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana until 1992, and is the author of Television and the Press, Communication as Culture, and James Carey: A Critical Reader.
