In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 2 Go Blue It doesn’t take long for newcomers to the University of Michigan campus to discover the centrality of intercollegiate athletics in the life of the institution. The local newspapers and television broadcasts are saturated with news about Michigan teams, coaches, and players. Michigan insignia are plastered on sweatshirts and T-shirts, caps and scarves, coffee cups and car bumpers, billboards and street signs. Anything and everything is a potential advertisement for Michigan athletics—and a source of licensing income for the athletic department. It is very hard to avoid Michigan athletics if you work at the university or live in Ann Arbor, since both communities come largely to a standstill—rather, a gridlock—during major sporting events. Of course, intercollegiate athletics has also been a long-standing tradition at the university. Michigan has been both fortunate and envied for its unusual ability to combine world-class academic programs with nationally competitive programs in college sports. Beyond that, Michigan has always played a leadership role in intercollegiate athletics through the success and integrity of its programs and its influence within the Big Ten Athletic Conference and the NCAA. Therefore it seems both appropriate and instructive to begin a discussion of intercollegiate athletics by selecting the University of Michigan as a case study. By focusing on a single institution, we can better understand the nature of college sports, its organization and financing, its culture, and its relationship to the university and the rest of society. This chapter has been constructed primarily as a series of vignettes, impressions of college sports at a major university , as seen from the perspective of the president. These are intended to illustrate both the character and complexity of college 16 sports and to lay the foundation for a more thorough analysis of the many issues swirling about them. First, Some History Far more histories have been written about Michigan athletics than have been written about the university itself. The names of Michigan ’s sports heroes—Yost, Crisler, Harmon—are better known than any members of Michigan’s distinguished faculty or its presidents. Tellingly, most of these histories have been written by sportswriters , former athletic directors, coaches, or fans. Hence it seems both appropriate and amusing to provide a brief historical corrective from the perspective of a longtime faculty member (me). Go Blue • 17 The Michigan Wolverines take the field. (UM Photo Services.) Although the legends of the good old days of Michigan athletics make enjoyable reading, my purpose is better served by beginning somewhat later, in the mid-1960s, when Michigan athletics, and college sports more generally, began their mad dash toward the cliff of commercialization.1 During today’s heady times of national championships and lucrative television and licensing contracts, Michigan fans sometimes forget that the university’s athletics programs have not always been dominant. During the 1960s, the Michigan football program had fallen on hard times, with typical stadium attendance averaging sixty to seventy thousand per game (about two-thirds the capacity of Michigan Stadium ). Michigan State University, just up the road, drew most of the attention with its powerful football teams—actually, this was part of its president’s strategy to transform what had once been Michigan Agricultural College into a major university. Furthermore , student interest on activist campuses such as Michigan’s had shifted during the 1960s from athletics to political activism, with great causes such as racial discrimination and an unpopular war in Vietnam to protest. There were, nevertheless, a few bright spots in Michigan’s athletic fortunes. Michigan’s basketball team had enjoyed considerable success in the mid-1960s, with Cazzie Russell leading the team to the NCAA championship game, only to lose to an upstart UCLA team (which would then dominate the sport for the next decade). Largely as a consequence of this success, the university used student-fee-financed bonds2 to build a new basketball arena, Crisler Arena, named after former football coach and athletic director Fritz Crisler.3 This facility was known to many as “the house that Cazzie built.” Some of the other athletics programs were also successful. The ice hockey team won the national championship in 1964. Swimming began what was to become a three-decade-long domination of the Big Ten Conference. There were considerable accomplishments in other sports such as wrestling, track, and gymnastics. But at Michigan, football was king, and when the football fortunes were down, students and fans were apathetic about Michigan athletics . 18 • INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS AND THE...

Share