D. Canham, 87; Master of Selling University of Michigan Sports

Donald B. Canham, considered the father of modern college athletic directors for his ability to combine winning sports programs with uncanny marketing and fundraising skills during his 20-year tenure at the University of Michigan, died Tuesday in Ann Arbor of complications from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. He was 87.

Canham was stricken while driving near his home in Saline, Mich. His sport utility vehicle crashed and, though Canham survived a three-hour operation to repair the aneurysm, Dr. James Stanley said he died an hour later because he had lost so much blood.

“He was one of the original masters of intercollegiate athletics,” former University of Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey, who went to Canham for tips on how to sell his school’s athletic program, told The Times. “He understood marketing better than any. He had a lot of ideas and didn’t mind trying them.”

Within days of taking over as athletic director in 1968, Canham looked at the concrete gray Michigan Stadium and decided to paint it the school colors of maize and blue. A year later he hired Bo Schembechler as football coach. The Wolverines were averaging only 74,000 spectators a game in a stadium that contained nearly 101,000 seats.

“Don was a master marketer,” Schembechler told The Times. “He told me, ‘Bo, I’ll market, you win and we can do some great things here.’ ”

In 1969 Ohio State was scheduled to play the Wolverines at Michigan Stadium. “The game wasn’t close to a sellout,” Schembechler said, “even though Ohio State was coming in off ... a national championship. So Canham went and sold 25,000 seats in Columbus. The stadium was jammed. We beat them anyway and the next day I said, ‘Canham, don’t you ever do that to me again.’ But he sold out the stadium, and it made a Michigan ticket hard to get.”

Canham was born April 27, 1918, in Oak Park, Ill. A high school track star, he came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1938 hoping to earn a spot on USC’s highly regarded track and field team. When he failed, Canham enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he won an NCAA national high-jump championship.

After graduation, Canham taught high school history and coached football, basketball and track before entering the Army Air Forces during World War II. In 1948 he was hired as Michigan’s track coach, where his teams won 12 Big Ten championships.

During his 20-year tenure as the track coach, Canham also founded Champions on Film, a business devoted to selling instructional training movies featuring some of the world’s greatest track stars. That small business bloomed into a multimillion-dollar company that included a thriving catalog unit called School-Tech, which sells instructional films and recreational and instructional athletic equipment.

In 1968, Canham was hired to replace Fritz Crisler as Michigan’s athletic director. In a 1976 interview with United Press International, Canham said he decided that something different had to be done to sell Michigan’s glamour sport, football.

At the time, Michigan had the only 100,000-seat stadium in college football, and too many of those seats were empty.

“I determined we had to sell the spectacle of college football. We’re selling tailgate picnics before or after the game, spending a day on campus, the spectacle of the pom-pom girls, the band.”

Don Eaton, the husband of Canham’s daughter Clare and a general manager with School-Tech, said his father-in-law quickly transferred the lessons he had learned from selling athletic equipment.

“He did targeted mass mailings in a way that hadn’t been done in college before,” Eaton said. “He’d target high-income people; he’d tailor different brochures to different markets.

“Don decided that it paid to market to the mothers. He figured it was the mothers who decided what the family wanted to do on weekends. You didn’t have to sell the fathers on football, he said. You had to sell mom.”

Eaton also remembered how Canham hired a plane to fly a banner promoting Michigan football above Tiger Stadium in Detroit during the 1968 World Series. “Don almost got fired for that,” Eaton said. “People thought it was low-class and not the way to sell Michigan football.”

Practices that are used by almost all athletic directors today -- including putting a ticket application form at the bottom of a newspaper ad, producing big, glitzy halftime shows, using targeted mailings -- were started by Canham.

Tom Hansen, commissioner of the Pacific-10 Conference who worked as an NCAA television liaison with Canham, said he was “one of the most charismatic people I’ve met. And he was the first top-grade entrepreneur in college athletics. The story we all knew was that Don would never put an ad in anything that didn’t have a coupon on it.”

Former Big 10 commissioner Wayne Duke noted that Canham figured out how to buy the rights to the Michigan logo -- the well-recognized block M -- and then put that logo on coffee mugs, bumper stickers and anything else that could sell.

During his term as athletic director, Canham expanded Michigan’s sports complex by building a football services building, an indoor track and tennis building, an all-weather outdoor track and a women’s training facility, even though he was adamantly opposed to Title IX because he feared a negative impact on men’s sports. The Olympic-size swimming and diving natatorium is named after Canham.

The Michigan athletic budget that was $2.8 million when he took over had risen to $20 million when Canham retired in 1988. Michigan athletic teams won 72 Big Ten Championships during his time at the university. And the Wolverines have sold more than 100,000 tickets for 186 straight home football games dating to 1976.

He is survived by his second wife, Margaret; son Don Canham Jr. and daughter Clare Eaton; stepdaughters Karla Schoemer and Kirsten Roberts; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren. He also is survived by a brother, Dr. Robert Canham.

A public memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor.