Sport: Black Market in Football

There was, for example, the short, happy life of Tom (“Shorty”) McWilliams at Mississippi State. For one dazzling season in 1944, Freshman McWilliams, a swivel-hipped halfback, looked like the best up-&-coming player in Southeastern Conference history. No one was surprised when Shorty showed up on West Point’s unbeatable 1945 team. There were plenty more like him; they turned up three deep at both West Point and Annapolis.

By last week the tide to the service academies had turned. When their civilian schools had whistled, the big names at Annapolis had run obediently back—Bob Kelly (to Notre Dame), Skip Minisi (to Penn). But Army was tougher. When Mississippi State whistled, Shorty McWilliams couldn’t untangle himself from West Point red tape. Outraged Mississippians howled that their hero was being held a “football prisoner.” Promptly West Point’s Superintendent, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor (known as “Mr. Attack” when he commanded the famed 101st Airborne Division), sounded off.

He admitted that the Army went looking for players: “We do this deliberately . . . knowing from experience that the athlete makes the strong battle leader.” But, he added, West Point makes no concessions to its star athletes. An All-America tackle who flunked in mathematics was kicked out last June. General Taylor said that Cadet McWilliams had received a “particularly lucrative offer from a certain quarter.” Other Army stars (the brightest: Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis) have had “their summer furloughs marred by visitations and solicitations” at bull-market prices. Concluded the General: “The authorities at the Military Academy view with concern . . . the apparent decay in the amateur spirit of college athletics. . . .”

“It’s Rotten.” Most coaches played dumb, professed not to know what the General was talking about. Only one, Coach Jess Neely of Rice, conceded that “the General might be right.” The black market in footballers was so open that officials from 200 colleges who recently met in Chicago to consider and perhaps deplore it got nowhere. Down in the Southeastern Conference (Mississippi State, Georgia Tech, etc.), where so-called “grants-in-aid” to players are legal, hijacking of players from the two service academies was made not only legal but attractive. Though college football players are usually allowed only three years of varsity play, the Conference decided not to count the years any man played for Army & Navy.

Not the least of the postwar player grabbers was Navy, which found it hard to go back to old ways. Virginia Military Academy charged that five of its best players, including Lynn Chewning, 1945 all-Southern Conference fullback, had been swiped by Navy. Moaned V.M.I. Coach Allison (“Pooley”) Hubert: “It’s rotten . . . they walked off with half my team.”

Unless something was done about “amateur” football, and fast, more college presidents might say what the University of Chicago’s Robert Maynard Hutchins said about football seven years ago: “Out with it.”