Commentary : Winning at Any Price Costs Too Much

When I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade, President John F. Kennedy announced a visit to my hometown, Dallas. For those of us who remember that time, who lived through it in the shadow of the assassination, our lives have never been the same.

I have often told people, corny as it sounds, that football played a major role in the renaissance of Dallas. If Brooklyn died with the Dodgers’ leaving, Dallas was reborn with the Cowboys’ winning.

These days, I think often of Dallas, and of the shame and horror of the assassination. I remember the physical education teacher who shattered the calm of a Friday afternoon, screaming, “None of you will ever forget it--it happened in your hometown!”

The Kennedy chapter was, for me, the death of innocence. And then there was football, the joy that took our minds from grief.

So maybe it’s not surprising that memories of that time are linked, for me, to the nightmare now encircling my alma mater, Southern Methodist University--once known as “the pride of Dallas.”

Now in the throes of the worst scandal in its 75-year history, SMU--and Dallas--are undergoing a redux of shame. Sports Illustrated said it in a flaming headline: “Shame on You, SMU.”

For the zillionth time in what seems a zillion years, SMU has been slapped with probation by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. The NCAA has given SMU the so-called death penalty, taking away its football program for 1987, most of 1988 and plying it with sanctions into the next decade.

Though not so severe, measures such as these are not foreign to Southern Californians--particularly graduates of USC. Like USC, SMU is a private school attended more often than not by sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. As is true of Los Angeles and USC, many in the business elite of Dallas were groomed at SMU.

Parallels run deeper. Dr. James Zumberge, current president of USC, came directly from SMU. L. Donald Shields, past president of SMU and a casualty of its latest crisis, came to Dallas from the presidency of Cal State Fullerton.

Football has played a famous--and infamous--role on both campuses.

In 1982, USC was hit with a two-year probation. An assistant coach, Marv Goux, was charged with ticket scalping and funneling profits into bonuses for players. He had done so, the NCAA reported, from 1971 to ’79. Punishment included no bowl games for two years, no television appearances for two.

Most recently, at SMU, boosters operated a slush fund from which gridiron amateurs were paid. The fund was in the tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And then, it was reported Monday that arrangements had been made to provide sex for football recruits, ideally in return for their signature on a letter of intent.

The football coach, athletic director and Shields have resigned. The current governor of Texas, Republican William P. Clements Jr., announced that as outgoing president of the SMU board of governors, he knew of such payments and did nothing to stop them. He said “a commitment had been made” to the “boys and their families,” to whom ethics must mean nothing. Clements rubber-stamped the “gradual phase-out,” calling it the “only honorable thing to do.”

I read such stories with anger and disgust. This is not the SMU I knew. Such people were a part of SMU, but were isolated, remote. Never have so many been made to look so bad by so few.

Even so, the sins of the overzealous were much in evidence during my time, 1970 to 1974. At the campus paper, we wrote of coaches paying athletes for good tackles, recovered fumbles and the like. Once, in the middle of the night, an entire floor of undergraduates was evicted from a dormitory. The football coach wanted the rooms for “my boys.” Football players ate in separate cafeterias, lived separate lives. I look back on such episodes and realize winning at any cost has captivated SMU--and the oligarchy that runs it--for years. The assassination played no small role. Dallas’ “can-do” character is in many ways a hallmark of excellence; in others, a pathway to shame.

SMU has produced many fine talents, and not just Eric Dickerson of the Rams. There is Beth Henley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote the Broadway and Hollywood versions of “Crimes of the Heart.” Playwright Jack Heifner (“Vanities”) is from SMU, as is Floyd Bloom, one of the chief medical researchers in the country, now based at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. Bloom hopes to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.

Some years ago, I met Don Meredith, the Cowboys’ quarterback of the 1960s and an SMU All-American. With the exception of Doak Walker and Dickerson, no athlete is more linked to SMU. To my surprise, Meredith lamented that SMU was the kind of place where rich kids posing as students believed money could buy anything. Some of those same people were recently fingered by the NCAA. Then they were students, now they are called boosters.

So SMU bought itself a nationally ranked football team and is now paying the price. Crimes of the heart.

In a speech at SMU, circa 1971, William Sloane Coffin Jr., then the chaplain of Yale University, angered fraternity members by saying, “The world needs good men, and SMU is turning out nice guys.” Moments later, he said, almost in prophetic warning, “If you don’t stand for something, you’re apt to fall for anything.”

Coffin, the outsider, might have understood the place better than anyone else. SMU is a metaphor not just for Dallas but the nation. It is America’s obsession with No. 1--and damn the consequences.

Well, we are now seeing the consequences.