Saved By the Bell: Ivy Athletics Deserve a Better Fate

Times were rough, what with the Second Gulf War having just entered its eighteenth depressing year, and I thought it would be a nice idea for me to take my son on a trip out of town for the weekend. I managed to leave New York and the i-banking job I never thought I’d find myself sucked into (what the hell happened to me?!), and took ten-year-old Marty Jr. on the early Amtrak to Boston.

Somehow, the ride still takes over four hours, so we ended up having to run from the Harvard Square T stop to get to Harvard Stadium in time for kickoff. Luckily, there were plenty of seats still available. Just like always, Harvard-Columbia wasn’t exactly breaking box office records, only it was worse now. There were about 1,000 other people in the stadium. Just like always, there were about as many stodgy alums in the seats as there were students. Only this time, I was one of the stodgy alums. It felt creepy, and I decided to reconnect with my youth in the easiest way possible.

I pointed to the championship banners across the stadium and singled out “2001” in the row, fifth from the last.

“You see that one over there?” I said. “I was a reporter for the paper here when they won that championship. It was pretty big. They went the whole year without losing a single game.”

“That’s great, Dad,” Marty said. He was caught up in the game and didn’t seem to care much. Harvard had just fumbled the ball on Columbia’s one-yard line, and the Lions had taken over. Rush, rush, rush. Punt. Now it was Harvard’s ball again. Incomplete pass. Up the middle for a gain of three. Incomplete pass. The punting unit came back on…

“Dad, did the games suck this much back when you were here?”

I grinned. Marty was a lot more perceptive than I’d been as a ten-year-old or even as a twenty-year-old, because I didn’t see this coming.

“Well, son, the Ivy League pretty much abandoned its commitment to athletics shortly after I graduated,” I explained. “The presidents of all the schools decided that sports were bad in ways that intense public service commitments and working in the theater and all the other things students here spend 35 hours a week doing are not. So there’s practically no more recruiting, and the recruiting spots that do exist are taken up by people who don’t mind playing for a program in which sports are little more than a hobby. There are sharp limits on how many hours a week you can practice, as well.”

Marty frowned. “Well, if somebody like Tyrone Willingham were coaching here, it wouldn’t matter, right? Good coaches still find ways to win games.”

“That’s a good point, except nobody wants to coach here anymore,” I said. “Tyrone Willingham’s won three national championships. He wouldn’t want to coach in a place where there’s no recruiting.”

I paused for a second. Marty Jr. was a pretty smart kid, and I wonder how he’d react to some heavier thoughts along these lines. What the hell, I said to myself.

“In fact, you’ll notice if you go to a lot of events around here that there aren’t a lot of coaches who look like Tyrone Willingham,” I said. “Or you or me.”

“Why aren’t there many black coaches?” he asked as Columbia fumbled away another one.

“Well, Harvard—and the League—have historically had a lot of trouble hiring minority coaches,” I explained. “There’s been something of an old boys’ network in place for decades and decades. It’s like any job—people become interested in jobs because of who they know, and get interviews because of who they know. It’s like they’ve been talking about with the NFL. There was a point when it looked like this might change—schools made more of an effort to give qualified black candidates a chance. Back in 2002, for example, Yale’s men’s basketball team and both soccer teams had black coaches at the helm, and they were all terrific. The basketball team won its first Ivy League championship in decades under James Jones. Came outta nowhere.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, a lot of schools do care about diversity in the coaching ranks, and at any given point there’s a pretty small applicant pool of minority candidates for Division I positions,” I told him. “If you’re a black coach, there’s not a lot of appeal to the not-so-famous, non-scholarship Ivy League to begin with. When you add in the fact that the league doesn’t care about sports any more, well, why would I want to coach at Dartmouth when schools that will give you the tools to work with are out there?”

Marty furrowed his youthful brow in thought.

“So in a roundabout way,” I continued. “The league hurt its commitment to diversity within Ivy League sports when it cut back on them entirely.”

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Marty said, parroting his favorite line from Austin Powers 20.

“Exactly,” I said. “Just one of a number of things the league’s presidents failed to think about when the cutbacks started. Let alone that a lot of the most interesting people here back in my day played sports and went on to do all kinds of things. Run companies, pass laws, teach, even play professional sports.”

Marty was aghast at this last point. I told him about Ben Crockett ’02 and Carl Morris ’03, guys I’d covered as an undergrad making their mark in baseball and football, respectively. He hadn’t heard of either one, but that’s mostly because the only sports he watches seriously are wrestling, motocross and Slamball. Who knew Slamball would be such a big hit with the kids?

But Marty knew enough about football to wince when Columbia fumbled for the fifth time in the first half, and a smallish but determined-looking linebacker took the ball back eighty yards for a score.

“I don’t know, Dad,” Marty said. “Maybe the whole league is bad now, but Columbia is really, really, really bad.”

Some things never change. I smiled. We hugged. 28-7, Harvard.

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu.