Columbia’s Athletic Director Bows Out
Al Paul cleaned out his desk Friday afternoon and left Columbia University after 17 1/2 years as athletic director.
Given the football team’s record of 20-140-3 under his tenure, one might have expected his departure to come a lot sooner. But then, Columbia is different.
“I hope this doesn’t just focus on football,” he said Thursday in the final interview before his retirement. “I leave here feeling good, but I’m not naive enough to think the football doesn’t stand out.”
There was the football team’s Division I-record 44-game losing streak and four coaching changes, two of them controversial. There were four winless seasons and eight one-win seasons. And there was an Ivy League decision that allowed Columbia a variance to admit football recruits whom otherwise would have been rejected.
“I leave here feeling good,” said Paul, who will turn 65 in September. “I say this with all sincerity, it’s been satisfying to be here as athletic director despite all the disappointments in football.”
Basketball hasn’t been the disaster of football, but it also failed to win a title during Paul’s tenure, going 167-266. However, the sports that don’t get attention generally have done well.
Soccer won eight Ivy League titles, went 166-76-26 and lost the 1983 NCAA final to Indiana in double overtime. Fencing won seven Ivy titles, three NCAA championships and went 157-50. Wrestling won four Ivy titles and the tennis team finished first four times.
“It happens to be in the two visible sports areas we’ve had less success than he wanted or we wanted,” said Columbia provost Jonathan Cole, the man in charge of the committee searching for a successor.
Paul, a graduate of Western Maryland who spent 32 years at Columbia and 42 in college sports, would have been forced out long ago at big-time schools. But at Columbia, with its Ivy League ideals and a university president uninterested in athletics, he never was pressured.
“I never even felt any second- or third-hand pressure from the university,” Paul said. “I never felt it from the alumni group.”
Paul got wide-eyed when he thought back to Jan. 1, 1974, his first day on the job. He calls it his most memorable, too.
“Here I was, an assistant football coach -- I was also an associate athletic director -- coming from a little school in Maryland, becoming an athletic director at a prestigious insititution like Columbia in the Ivy League,” he said.
During his tenure, he oversaw the opening of Levien Gymnasium and the planning and construction of new football and soccer stadiums at Baker Field. The low point of his tenure came on Feb. 24, 1976, when lightweight rower Stephen Abbey drowned during a workout on the Harlem River.
“You can’t even put that in the same category with losing games,” Paul said.
A high came on Oct. 8, 1988, when Columbia beat Princeton 16-13 and ended the losing streak.
“The happiness that me and my wife felt, the tears in our eyes seeing goalposts sticking out of fraternity windows on 114th Street,” Paul said.
The stress of all those losing Saturdays will never been known. Paul had a heart attack while playing racquetball in Levien Gym in the summer of 1981 and he said he can’t guess whether football was a factor.
“My disappointments on Saturday afternoons were not for Al Paul, but for the players who went through tremendous time and sacrifice and never being able to reap the awards on Saturday,” he said.
He plans to be at the games on future Saturdays, but he won’t have to worry. Columbia’s losses will be someone else’s problem. For now, he really doesn’t know what he want to do next.
“Maybe I’ll wind up watching soap operas and the Phil Donahue show,” he joked.
No matter; Paul already considers his life a success. In 1963, he was on a recruiting trip to Syracuse, N.Y., trying to convince a high school quarterback named Marty Domres to go to Columbia. To save money, Paul stayed with an alumnus named Hubie Schultz. That night, Paul met Schultz’s sister-in-law, Anita, and later they were married.
Just like the movies, he got the player and the girl.