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Show SPORTLIGHT . Howl For Winner Hurts Football By GRANTLAND RICE ' 1 rpHE FESTIVE (after a fashion) game of football has its share of troubles today, but nothing that encroaches on education. Football is numerically too small to have any adverse effect f ""1 on a student's career. ca-reer. For example, In a midwest university univer-sity of some 14,-000 14,-000 students you'll find around 100 football players. Ton will also find that In most cases thA fnntha.ll nlav- to the importance of other sports if possible. Many cures have been suggested. John Kieran, an ex-college athlete and a keen thinker, suggests that all gate receipts be abolished as they are in some instances. That would be the complete answer. Others have suggested the abolishing abolish-ing of all post-season and all Bowl games. This would reduce part of the annual autumn hysteria. A big part of football's weakness is the pressure put upon college coaches. Such colleges as Princeton, Yale, Tennessee, Miami, Kentucky, etc., have answered this by signing sign-ing coaches for 10 years or for life. You can stop colleges from paying pay-ing for talent, but no one yet has been able to think up a device that will stop alumni from offering under un-der the table as much as $5,000 to a worthy athlete who can help win a few games. These outside funds often run from $100,000 to $150,000 a year. It costs around $250,000 to run a big-time football season. A coach's job no longer consists con-sists of simply coaching a football foot-ball team. Be must become a touring orator, taking in banquets ban-quets all over the map. "I haven't been home with my family but two days since our season sea-son closed," one leading coach told me recently. "And that was over two months ago. If I have to look at rubber steak and stale potatoes again, I think I'll pick out some tall building for a jumping takeoff." take-off." Football is still a great game one of the greatest of all competitive Grantland Rice er has to meet the same student requirements as anyone else. This isn't always al-ways true. There are colleges with low standards of admission admis-sion and low student standards later on. But these are in the minority. What isf it about football that has caused Athletic Director Dick Lar-kin Lar-kin of Ohio State to label the game a "Frankenstein Monster"? Apparently we have asked a question ques-tion that we can't answer. What has hurt football is not only the demand for a winner everywhere but also the various devices used in trying to get this winner. You don't hear a demand from students or alumni for a winning baseball team a winning win-ning crew a winning basketball team a winning track and field team a winning hockey team. . But if you have a losing football foot-ball team for over a year the howl that follows is heard arour.d the world as the losing coach is catapulted into ob- livion. , The alumni and student body or bodies take to the warpath in full war panoply, including tomahawks. As fine a game as football is, we can't see that its importance belongs be-longs above all other sports. It is difficult to call a sport amateur that takes in from $1,000,000 to $1,-500,000 $1,-500,000 at the gate in one season for one team. No other sport can draw 100,000 people for one game and often turn another 100,000 away. The Army-Notre Dame game could easily have drawn over a million people at $5 a seat if there had been room enough. This is moving pretty high up for what was originally intended in-tended as "exercise, recreation and entertainment." A river is a fine thing for a community, but it isn't so helpful when it turns into a raging flood. A cooling breeze can be useful, but a hurricane or tornado tor-nado seldom helps. Suggested Cures There is no questioning the fact that football's importance as a college col-lege sport should be brought back i into an importance it doesn't deserve. de-serve. Just how to cure this overgrowth over-growth is something beyond our limited reach. Its so-called friends are the main wreckers. The Big Smear There have been intermittent scandal uprisings in sport between the Black Sox trouble of 1919 and the basketball mess of 1951. But these are the twin peaks of shame, corruption and complete crookedness. crooked-ness. Baseball had a terrific letdown let-down around 1918, 1919 and 1920 before be-fore Judge Landis took over in 1920. Any number of games were thrown by various teams and players in those three years. More than a few people knew about it. Basketball has been under suspicion sus-picion for some years. I first heard rumors of crooked play as far back as 1945. These rumors grew stronger strong-er in 1946 and 1947. They began to pick up for.ee. Having little interest in basketball as a game to write about, or a game to watch, like many others I let these rumors slide. : I |