Student Bodies, Right?

I am in receipt of a clipping from a Florida paper quoting a former University of Miami football player as admitting he took money while he was playing in college in 1986.

Alonzo Highsmith is unapologetic. “You tell me how a kid is supposed to survive on $20 a week?” he demands to know. “We were supposed to eat and go to the movies on that?”

He adds: “In my junior year, I’m saying to myself that we play on national TV, we do this and do that, and all I get out of the deal is just a chance to play for the national title and college education? What you leave on the field is worth five times more than a degree.”

An interesting way to look at it. Fuel for the argument that college football players should cut into the revenues the teams bring in, an argument that is winning more devotees by the day.

But I wonder if it would surprise fullback Highsmith--who, by the way, cashed in on his athletic ability developed in college by playing for pay, big pay, with the Houston Oilers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Dallas Cowboys--to know that, not so long ago, in this country, athletes played for no rewards at all, not even movie money, for their colleges or universities.

Well, on second thought, they did get something out of it. They got a letter. A big block Y or H or ND, which their moms could sew onto sweaters.

It was the most prized possession of their lives. To be a letterman was honor enough. You bled, blocked and tackled for dear old alma mater, not good old money. In some cases, you didn’t even get free tuition.

You did, however, get an education

Well, you may say, that was in the Dark Ages. That was when the game was played on campus before an audience consisting only of the student body, who got in free, and the game wasn’t big business.

Uh-uh. The game was played in the Yale Bowl. And 75,000 people showed up, just as they do today. And radio paid to broadcast it. And the ticket cost was high. In fact, for the Yale-Army game, you couldn’t get one.

And students played it. They weren’t complicated mercenaries. They weren’t on scholarship. The scholarships of those days were for scholars.

They didn’t go on to the NFL. What passed for pro football was a kind of pass-the-hat game played by teams that weren’t made up of former All-Americans but of former--or current--railroad workers.

I don’t know when football coaches first began to smuggle athletes into the student body and the system. But as soon as one coach did it, others had to follow suit. They used to call it “cheating” because you were humbugging the academic system.

A new phrase was coined to describe some of these play-for-hire boys. They called them tramp athletes because they often went from campus to campus like a hobo with a bindle, hiring out to the highest bidder. They played under assumed names if necessary. The immortal George Gipp was a tramp athlete. So, I have to think, was Knute Rockne himself. I had a pal, the late sportswriter, Vincent X. Flaherty, who was a tramp athlete. They used to call guys like that ringers. The game is all ringers today.

It quite got out of hand. Most things in America do.

There’s nothing bad about colleges offering kids free education in return for football prowess. There’s nothing bad about colleges being farm systems for the pros. (And if you don’t think they are, name me one player in the pros who didn’t play in college first.)

What is at issue here, it seems to me, is, why do colleges have to, certifiably, have the best athletes on the planet on the field? Why do you need coaching staffs of a dozen people?

The game was just as marketable the old way. Didn’t 120,000 people show up to see Notre Dame and USC play back in the prehistoric days--1927--at Soldier Field in Chicago?

The attitude of the college athlete today is, “You need us.” But do they? It’s pretty hard to improve on 120,000 people.

The pros need them. They sell their game and their teams as the best money can buy. But why does Stanford have to do it? Or even Miami? Harvard was once captained and quarterbacked by a guy who became a brain surgeon. And the games were sellouts. Presidents Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower played varsity football.

It has been a long time since “the old college try” or “do or die for alma mater dear” went into the language. Today it’s all, “We’re No. 1!” The institution is incidental. The team is the focus.

Yale and Harvard don’t even play Division I-A football anymore. But the republic survives, and the old grads still show up on game day to sing, “Boola Boola,” and wear the old school ties.

Students have been disenfranchised. The football team is off-limits to them. Frank Merriwell is dead.

If they start paying the football players, it will further distance the team from the university at large. I suppose we shouldn’t care. They don’t play for alma mater anymore, they play for the coalition poll.

I don’t suppose it will change. But even though ABC didn’t have it nationally, I have to think Yale-Harvard can be every bit as exciting as Florida State-Nebraska. If I want to see a pro game, I can go to the Meadowlands.

And as for leaving on the field something “worth five times more than a college degree,” I hope Alonzo Highsmith doesn’t believe that. Going to a university for four years to learn how to play football is like enrolling at MIT to learn how to change a light bulb. A terrible waste of opportunity.