Glory Redux : New Round of Honors for a Scholar-Athlete Who Built a Life Around Service, Not Plays

Willie Bogan’s neighbors in Altadena still don’t know.

His colleagues at work never suspected.

Even his wife, for a long time, was in the dark.

“When I met him and first married him, I didn’t know a lot about what he had accomplished because it wasn’t something that he talks about,” Carmen Bogan sighs. “It wasn’t until I got a chance to look through some of his old papers and awards that it sank in all of the outstanding achievements that he’s had.”

What she saw was a dizzying string of scholastic and athletic honors that even the most creative resume writer would never have dared to dream up.

Summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College. Phi Beta Kappa. Dean’s List. All-Ivy, All-New England, All-East football teams. The Academic All-American, National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame Scholar-Athlete awards. The NCAA Post-Graduate Scholarship. A Baltimore Colts eighth-round draft pick.

Then, the “ultimate honor,” an Oxford University Rhodes scholarship, followed by a law degree from Stanford.

But that was then, and this is now. And, at age 40, Willie Bogan’s accomplishments are very different: the sort of ordinary ones that conventionally successful Southern California lawyers like himself manage with little fanfare--paying the mortgage on time, working 14-hour days, winning cases for clients, making quality time for kids.

“It’s not like you stick out your hand when you meet somebody and say, ‘Hi, I was an Academic All-American,’ ” Bogan explains. “It’s a rare day I think of myself as even having been a Rhodes scholar.”

Like the champion ballplayer who retires, or the child actor who matures, Bogan has learned the reality of what happens when an early spotlight suddenly fades.

Until today , that is, when the floodlight finds him once again as he joins five other outstanding men being admitted into the GTE-sponsored Academic All-American Hall of Fame at a full-frills awards luncheon in New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel.

For college athletes, being named an Academic All-American--for an usual combination of sports and scholastic achievement--is one of the highest honors they can receive in their school careers. Beginning last year, the College Sports Information Directors of America organization began choosing a select few former Academic All-Americans to be Hall of Famers--”those student athletes whose achievements beyond their academic years are of the highest level in their chosen fields.” It is new recognition for the scholar-athlete that comes amid a growing controversy over whether colleges are emphasizing winning sports programs to the detriment of athletes’ educations.

Joins the Elite

Though his name is hardly a household world--notwithstanding a scheduled appearance on “The Today Show” this morning--Bogan joins an elite group of well-known personalities inducted in 1988, including Sen. Bill Bradley, Rep. Tom McMillen, Heisman Trophy winner Pete Dawkins, and sportscasters Pat Haden and Merlin Olsen. Bogan was honored as much for his post-collegiate commitment to working with the Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club and the Los Angeles Urban League as for his successes as a lawyer, said Jim MacEwen, the GTE communications vice president who participated in the selection process.

At a recent visit to the Watts/Willowbrook Club, Bogan was treated like a returning hero. “He comes around quite a bit, and it lets the youngsters know that someone important cares about them,” says club president Roy Brooks about Bogan, the club’s legal secretary/treasurer and a member of the board of directors.

“But Willie doesn’t really like to blow his own whistle, so I have to tell them that he was a Rhodes scholar. And a kid came up to him after one of his talks and said, ‘Would you sign Rhodes scholar on my T-shirt, please?’ ”

All in all, it’s the kind of recognition that anyone else would be shouting from the rooftops. Not Bogan, who barely whispered news of the Hall of Fame award to his office colleagues.

“He said, ‘Oh, by the way,’ and then proceeded to tell me,” recalls Alex Steinberg, his law partner at the Manhattan Beach firm of Steinberg, Miller, Bogan & Goldstein. “Still, I’d say he’s more demonstrably pleased by this than most anything I’ve seen him react to.”

Ask Bogan how he feels, and the soft-spoken Alabama native has to pause and think. “It’s just a thrill,” he says quietly but firmly. “When you’ve gone through a period when you’ve been a star and things came to you, it’s very hard when things stop coming. I’ve had to adjust to that. But what makes this award so special is that it’s happening now.”

Born in rural Alabama in 1949, Bogan was the middle of nine children--”the lost child,” he says--and the third eldest son. “The story is that after two girls, my father prayed for a boy--and got seven in a row,” Bogan laughs.

Willie was 2 when his father left farming and found factory work in Albion, Mich., a small industrial town 90 miles west of Detroit. With his mother keeping house and his father the sole provider, “money was tight,” Bogan recalls.

To help, each child found work as soon as they could. By age 7, Bogan was a paperboy.

Despite its size, the Bogan family was close-knit and very religious, which Bogan credits with helping all nine children turn out well. But the third son, especially, never bragged about his accomplishments.

“He’s always been that way,” says his older brother Dan Bogan, vice chancellor for business administration services at Berkeley, “It goes back to the way we were brought up. Our parents said you don’t have to toot your own horn if you’re doing good things. Because people will see by what you do.”

In Albion (population 12,000), where the ratio of whites to blacks was three to one, racism was not part of small-town life, Willie Bogan recalls. “We all went to the same schools, patronized the same stores and had the same opportunities available to all of us.”

Nor did the size of the town limit the size of his dreams. “In a small town you can afford to dream big because the numbers don’t look so intimidating,” he maintains. “People used to tell me, ‘Boy, you’re going to be President of the United States someday.’ And it didn’t seem like that was so crazy at the time. Clearly I wanted to be somebody.”

At first, Bogan didn’t dare dream about becoming a professional athlete because he was slow to develop physically. “I figured since sports might not pan out, I was going to make it through academics,” he says. He soon found another bonus to getting good grades. “I didn’t get all the attention I wanted at home,” Bogan admits. “But if I did well in school, then the teachers liked that and paid more attention to me.”

By his senior year, Bogan was Albion High School’s undisputed star. Not only a straight A student ranked fourth in his class of 200 and an outstanding member of the football, basketball and track teams, he also worked as a part-time janitor in the hours he had left.

“I was his big brother, but he was my idol,” Dan Bogan says. “I really respected his ability to focus on doing well and to structure his time in things he thought were important. Still, we used to kid him about being a perfectionist because he was so neat and so hard-working and so thorough and the whole number.”

Decided on Dartmouth

Pushed to go to college by his parents, he was accepted at both the U.S. Naval Academy and Dartmouth, whose football coaches were salivating to get the 6-foot-4, 205-pound defensive back on their squads. “I don’t think I understood initially what the Ivy League was,” Bogan recalls. “My coach, unbeknownst to me, had filled out a questionnaire that Dartmouth sends to coaches around the country indicating that I might be qualified to get admitted.”

Though to his parents, “the notion of their son in a dress uniform was very strong,” Bogan decided on Dartmouth because “when it was all said and done, I just realized I did not not want to increase my chances of having to go into the Vietnam War.”

Only in retrospect does Bogan realize how lucky he was to avoid a school where football came first. “If I had to pick a way that college athletics should be run in this country, I would use the Ivy League as a prototype because there academics clearly come first.”

About the NCAA’s Proposition 42, a plan that would raise the academic eligibility standards for athletic scholarships, Bogan says there are many “sociological questions” that come into play when debating this issue. Yet he still believes that “even those students without the proper educational background can make it with the proper motivation and nurturing. And you don’t like to close that opportunity off by keeping them out of college.”

With his Dartmouth scholarship based solely on need, Bogan recalls feeling “comforted” to know he could remain there whether or not he played football. As it happened, a back injury dogged him his sophomore and junior years, during which he played only “so-so.”

“There were times when I even thought about giving it up,” he admits.

Also creating difficulty was Bogan’s consciousness of the fact that he was one of the handful of blacks in an all-white, upper-class school where private school educations were the rule. “It did make me stop and ask myself if I could compete. What saved me was that I had all the work habits necessary to weather the storm. I was the guy who stayed in my room on weekends studying harder than anybody else.”

Teammate Murry Bowden, now a Houston real estate investor, believes Bogan had “a secret agenda: to prove that he was there not only because he was a great athlete but also because he had a great mind.”

Sporting a full Afro, wearing dashikis and enrolling in black history courses at Dartmouth, Bogan came to understand himself as a black person, he says. And though he acknowledged feeling some “tension” as a minority there, “I think ultimately we were pragmatic. We understood that wearing that Dartmouth label was going to be helpful in the long run.”

During college summers he worked for a Michigan treatment program for juveniles in trouble plus a term as a Dartmouth Tucker Intern teaching poor young blacks in Clarksdale, Miss.

By the end of his senior year, Bogan not only had made Dean’s List every term and finished with a 4.71 out of a possible 5.00 grade point average, he also was senior safety on the undefeated 1970 Dartmouth football squad that went on to beat out Penn State for the Lambert Trophy, given to the school with the best record in the East.

“It was the kind of year that you don’t understand until 20 years later because everything went perfectly,” Bogan says with wonderment.

Scouts for the Dallas Cowboys and the Baltimore Colts made notes as he played in the post-season North-South Shrine and the American Bowl games. “I think there’s no question he had the potential to really be a fine pro player,” says his coach Bob Blackman, now retired and living in Hilton Head, S.C.

Drafted for Football

The Baltimore Colts drafted him in the eighth round, but Bogan went to Oxford instead in 1971 as one of 32 American Rhodes scholars. “Quite frankly, one of the things you have to understand about me is that although I’m quiet in a lot of ways, my ambitions aren’t,” Bogan acknowledges. “And when I had it in my mind to look for the next accomplishment, I viewed the Rhodes as the next thing to go after.”

At Oxford, Bogan mostly worried about what to do with his life. “I mean, the education thing was great, but I was beginning to think that, at some point, I had to be something.”

So Bogan decided to be a lawyer “almost by default. It wasn’t that I had any burning desire to be one. It just seemed to be something that I thought I might be able to do well.”

After the snow in Dartmouth and the rain at Oxford, Bogan opted for the sunshine at Stanford for law school where he met Carmen, the Stanford undergraduate whom he married in 1976. “Just by comparing him to the other men on campus, I could tell he stuck out as being very serious and very directed,” says the 35-year-old communications management consultant.

In 1976, at age 27, Bogan finally went to work full time as an associate with the L.A. law firm of Tuttle and Taylor. By 1981, in an effort to combine his career with his love of athletics, Bogan had became a sports lawyer with the Westwood firm of Fine Perzick & Friedman, which represents Jerry Buss management of the L.A. Lakers.

Joined a New Firm

Two years later, Bogan was invited by partner Alex Steinberg to join him in setting up a new Manhattan Beach law firm. “When I had received his resume at the other law firm, I felt that this was person we were going to hire sight unseen,” Steinberg recounts. “So when I had an opportunity to start my practice, Willie was just a wonderful person whom I wanted to practice with.”

In his new situation, Bogan tried to be a sports lawyer representing players in negotiations with management. But he soon discovered that the business was “unpalatable. I didn’t have the temperament or the money to stay with it because so many of these players dangle the prospect of signing and expected to be courted monetarily and unfortunately nothing comes out of it.”

Today, he practices civil litigation, general business and real estate law in relative obscurity, but with the same intensity that he used to devote to writing “A” papers and learning football playbooks.

When not working, Bogan can be found running near his office, or playing with his two young daughters--5-year-old Erin and 16-month-old Natalie--or helping Watts/Willowbrook raise funds for a new building. “They just need so much,” Bogan says, surveying the dilapidated roof and worn-out flooring of the present clubhouse. “But, really, our primary function becomes keeping the doors open, and that’s not easy. We are not a board made up of celebrities, and it helps to have that kind of people to raise money. So it’s been a struggle for us.”

But while he knows this Hall of Fame award will not supply the stardom he needs for that fund-raising effort, he says it has awakened him out of his everyday reverie and forced him to dream a bigger dream again.

“I read recently, and it just sent chills through my body, that Rhodes scholars are ‘people with great futures behind them.’ And I don’t want that to be me,” he says earnestly.

“It seems trite to say it, but you cannot rest on your laurels.”