Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization by Winton U. Solberg (review)

Concerns about the outsized role of athletes and athletics in college life, the number of sporting contests and the ever-expanding season, and the roughness and brutality of football. Questions regarding eligibility, under-the-table payments, alumni interference, and recruiting violations. Differential benefits to athletes. Money, commercialization, corruption, and quasi professionalism. Welcome to the world of intercollegiate sports in America—a century ago. However contemporary such descriptions sound—as I write, my own university, just off of probation, announced that thirteen football players have been suspended for selling team-issued sneakers for as much as $2,500 a pair—they capture, more or less accurately, much about college sports in America even in its earliest days. This point is made emphatically—again and again—in Winton U. Solberg's informative new book, Creating the Big Ten.

In this tightly focused study, Solberg traces the history of the "Western Conference"—that is, the Big Ten—over its first fifty years, from 1896 through 1945. Along with a group of prominent eastern schools—most of which later coalesced into the so-called Ivy League—the Big Ten played a key role in developing the early policy framework for American intercollegiate athletics. This framework was adopted at least in a titular sense by most other conferences as time passed. The fact that the Big Ten's founding predated by over a decade that of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), the forerunner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is suggestive of the vanguard role the Big Ten's early leaders played in laying down the basic protocols and standards that, for better or worse, are still with us today.

Athletes and organized athletics began to insinuate themselves into American higher education in the decades after the Civil War, and problems of one type or another—generally relating to sports' disproportionate and distortive role—arose almost from the start. Complaints from administrators and faculty members typically followed suit, and various and sundry efforts soon emerged to rein in campus athletics. In the case of the Big Ten, such efforts from the get-go consistently emphasized commitments to two principles: amateurism and faculty control. Both were viewed as sine qua nons for member schools during the fifty-year period covered in Solberg's book. Unfortunately, one of the principal takeaways from Creating the Big Ten is the disconcerting fact that these principles were often honored in the breach, increasingly so, as time passed.

Solberg's relatively brief study (241 pages of text) is divided into fourteen chapters along with a prologue and epilogue. The approach is basically internalist, and the emphasis throughout is on the administrative and institutional history of the conference. The author painstakingly mined both the official records of the conference and those of numerous conference schools. These efforts allow him to reconstruct, in great detail, complicated narratives regarding policy issues, organizational politics, and controversies involving individual schools and players. This approach gives readers a firm sense of the importance, within the Big Ten's early history, of the conference's first commissioner, John L. Griffith, who served from 1922 until 1945. The same is true regarding the book's treatment of luminaries such as Amos Alonzo Stagg, Fielding Yost, Red Grange, and Knute Rockne. (Notre Dame was a persistent, albeit unsuccessful suitor of the Big Ten's first fifty years.)

Because of the author's research strategy, some topics are covered more fully than others, and some important issues—African American athletes and the role of race more generally in the Big Ten, for example—are overlooked. Similarly, the author's internalist approach, for all its merits, often pays short shrift to broader developments in American social and cultural life, developments that shed useful light on the history of the Big Ten. For example, the dynamics of the Midwest's agro-industrial economy were central to the rise and subsequent trajectory...