When he was a 17-year-old freshman at Ohio State University in 1946, Fred Jacoby completed a class project in which he indicated that his life ambition was to be a football coach and athletics director at a small college and earn $5,000 a year.

His professor appreciated Jacoby's exuberance about a career in athletics, but he cautioned that Jacoby's salary hopes were extravagant in post-World War II America.

After 53 years of service in full-time coaching at the high-school and collegiate levels and in athletics administration, Jacoby has far and away surpassed those antiquated compensation hopes. More importantly, he has helped shape the direction of college sports through his service.

But what makes him unique in the college athletics world is that he is one of the world's longest surviving recipients of a heart transplant.

Jacoby, who at age 77 remains actively engaged in athletics administration as the commissioner of the Division II Lone Star Conference and Division III American Southwest Conference, has worked as an assistant football coach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1958-66), and has been the commissioner of the Wisconsin State University Conference (1966-71), the Mid-American Conference (1971-82) and the now-defunct Southwest Conference (1982-93). He also has served on a multitude of NCAA committees throughout his career.

Not even a heart transplant 15 years ago has stopped Jacoby from his lifelong work.

"I guess you could say I'm the luckiest guy around,'' Jacoby said. "I've worked at my hobby my entire life.''

Restless heart

With this attitude it's no wonder that Jacoby came out of retirement less than a year after leaving his post with the SWC to oversee two conferences out of the same office in the Dallas suburb of Richardson.

A more leisurely existence doesn't agree with his work ethic.

"The man's view of retirement is to work 10-hour days instead of 12,'' said Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice-president for membership services and a member of Jacoby's SWC staff in the late 1980s. "He's still going helping those schools and staying on top of everything. I have the utmost respect for Fred.''

Jacoby has mentored other people besides Lennon who are in influential positions throughout the collegiate community. MAC Commissioner Rick Chryst; Conference USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky; Dutch Baughman, executive director of the Division I-A Athletics Directors Association; Pacific-10 Conference Associate Commissioner Duane Lindberg; MAC Associate Commissioner Bob Gennarelli; and John Leavens, vice-president of membership at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, are just a few who have benefited from Jacoby's tutelage.

"Fred has forgotten more about college athletics than most of us will ever know,'' said Jim Johnson, an associate athletics director at Central Missouri State University. "He just loves it. He loves coming to work every day. He likes being involved in making things happen and change. He built the Lone Star from an eight-team league to a 15-team league. It's one of the best in America. I don't know what he would do if he retired.''

If the "R'' word did become a reality, Jacoby doesn't have much of a plan on how to tackle the free time.

A typical day for him is to report to work between 8:30 and 9 a.m. and leave the office at 5 p.m. All the while he's directing a three-person office staff and making sure all the schools in the Lone Star and the 16-team American Southwest Conference are operating efficiently.

"If I retired, I guess would go to my athletic club three or four times a week and read the Wall Street Journal until noon," Jacoby said. "Then what would I do? I would be bored.

"I don't fear coming to work. I welcome it. The people have been so receptive and cooperative to work with. If they would tell me at the meeting this year that they need someone younger, I wouldn't hesitate to step away. But they always seem to keep coming back.''

Making Division II better

A large part of Jacoby's desire in continuing to improve college athletics stems from the heart transplant he received September 29, 1989. His doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School believe a virus settled in his heart sometime during his life, which caused an irregular heartbeat.

The malady led to fluid filling up his lungs, which made it difficult for him to breathe. His only chance for survival was to find a donor for a transplant.

He was told that one-third of the patients on the waiting list die before a matching organ can be found. He was in the hospital for 32 days before a heart became available.

"One of my cardiologists came into my room when I was waiting,'' Jacoby said. "I told him I'm OK, but I have a problem. I told him for me to have good fortune somebody else has to have bad fortune. I told him I was having a real problem with that. He pointed out the window and said, 'Fred you can't control anything that happens outside of this room. So don't worry about what's happening outside. Once you get a heart, you can lead a productive life.' I tried to remember that.''

Jacoby speaks regularly to patients who are in need of organs to help counsel them through the process. He also has developed community-service projects for the two conferences he oversees. League institutions often set aside one football or basketball game during which they distribute organ-donor cards.

"I tell my coaches before I pass the cards out that either he or she, a family member or a close friend is going to need some type of a transplant in the next 10 years,'' Jacoby said. "It could be heart, kidney, lungs or whatever. The medical technology has improved so dramatically that people shouldn't fear it, but welcome it.''

While his health prevents him from a heavy travel load, Jacoby's impact is still far-reaching, according to those who have contact with him in their conferences. He mediates many of the meetings, whether it's for coaches of individual sports or administrators from around the league.

"You don't find people who have that kind of commitment and loyalty to organizations,'' said Jill Willson, the athletics director at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a Lone Star member institution. "He does everything he can every day to try to make the Lone Star Conference a better place. His commitment at being a good conference commissioner and trying to make Division II a better place is admirable.''

'Mad race for money'

Through the years, Jacoby has witnessed the tremendous growth of intercollegiate athletics. He cites television contracts and the exposure received from media broadcasts as the spark to the increased revenues.

While it is a benefit to the major Division
I-A conferences, the rest of the NCAA institutions suffer, according to Jacoby.

"If you can see games all day on Saturday and do your weekend chores, then why would you get in your car and drive 180 miles from Dallas to Abilene (for a Division II game)?'' Jacoby said. "They may do that for homecoming, but I doubt that they will do that for three or four games a year.

"I think television has created a mad race for money, and it's also created an elite group. In Division I, no matter how much money they have, there is an insatiable appetite for more.''

The intercollegiate athletics community is well aware of Jacoby's contributions. The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics presented Jacoby with its NIT/
Athletics Director Award in 2002 for his extensive contributions at the institutional, conference and national levels of sports.

One of the proudest moments of service for Jacoby came in his work on the National Letter of Intent (NLI) program. He worked on the program for 22 years.

"He essentially invented it,'' Johnson said. "It started out with six rules, then every year something would come up and they would add to it.''

Jacoby believes the NLI is the single-most important instrument in intercollegiate athletics to control recruiting, time, pressure and costs. The movement for the NLI began in 1964 due to fierce recruiting battles between SWC and Big Eight Conference schools.

Before it was sanctioned throughout the NCAA, Jacoby accepted the task of creating rules for the document in 1973.

"My first year, I got threatened by more lawsuits than anything,'' Jacoby said.

But sensing the importance of the program, he stayed the course. Today, the NLI is such a common aspect of intercollegiate athletics that it's hard to imagine that the days preceding it even existed.

Jacoby also was a president of the Collegiate Commissioners Association and chair of the NCAA Committees on Membership Structure, Postgraduate Scholarship, Research and Championship Standards.

He served on the Length of Season, Officiating and Junior College Relations Committees and was an officer in the College Football Association. Jacoby still serves on the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association Team Selection Committee.

"You start to understand that people from other sections of the country don't think the way that you do about different issues,'' Jacoby said. "I found that to be very interesting. NCAA committee service is important because it gives you a broader view of how people are thinking around the country.''

Listening to other perspectives is one of the biggest reasons for Jacoby's success in collegiate athletics.

"The only way to describe Fred is that he's a legend in the NCAA,'' Lennon said. "Anybody who knows Fred has a story, and it's always a good one about a good person. He's one of the few guys who worked his way through the entire business and doesn't have any enemies.''