The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- November 8, 1999

The NCAA Century Series -- Part I: 1900-39

Thoughts of the Day

Sportsmanship

"Without a doubt, it will be a great thing for this country when all the boys and young men are filled with a love for personal participation in pure athletics and play sports knowing that it is better to lose fairly than to win unfairly.

"If we can encourage the great mass of youth of this land to take part in manly games in a rational and gentlemanly manner, we will have done much for their moral and physical well-being. Since over 50 percent of the successful men are college graduates, what a wonderful field this is in which to work for the national welfare!

"If we succeed in eradicating the 'win-at-any-cost' spirit on college athletic fields, the civic life of this country undoubtedly will be wonderfully benefited."

-- NCAA President Palmer E. Pierce, 1910

Academics, amateurism and recruiting

"Under existing conditions, promising young athletes in high schools and academies are rounded up by alumni scouts or other agencies, they receive inducements of one sort and another, in many cases legitimate and in many other cases such as to prostitute all moral integrity. But whether right or wrong, the athlete is zealously sought after, and that because he is an athlete.

"If possible, he is placed under obligations before reaching college, he is even steered to the proper fitting school of the particular college. He thus enters college with the wrong idea of the relative importance of sport and study. Once in college, he lives in an athletic atmosphere that is commercialized and professionalized."

-- C.W. Savage, professor, Otterbein College, 1914

Trust

"When I say that we must trust each other, I am not recommending the naivete of the ostrich. Blind belief is folly.

"But blind unbelief is sure to err. We cannot establish trust in ourselves without trusting others. Moreover, heretical though it may seem, there are many worse things than being cheated now and then. And if we are always expecting to be cheated, we are not merely unhappy, we are cheated quite as often. When we know that a man or a college is untrustworthy, let us not deal with him or it, but let us be slow in knowing. Let us not distrust until we have to -- and we may never have to."

-- LeBaron R. Briggs, Harvard University, 1915

Presidential control

"We, the heads of colleges, have been subjected to a great deal of pressure to allow our colleges to enter a competition that becomes not a competition in football, but a competition in scouting where money counts. At least, we are asked to turn a blind eye to practices that we know in our hearts are ignoble. I won't do it, and there are many college presidents who will not do it, and I believe the alumni of our colleges are going to stand by us on that proposition....

"I do not agree with Mr. (Walter) Camp that you cannot control athletics. You can control them. Anything that this organization decides to control in athletics you can control."

-- C.A. Richmond, president, Union College, 1921

Gambling

"Students have no business betting on games. Usually they are not betting their own money and, if they lose, they find themselves having to 'explain to Dad' or having to go without things they should have. Neither is apt to be a very pleasant experience, and it is only human nature that they try to blame someone else for their own hard luck. Before they know it, they are finding all kinds of fault with the team, the coaches and everything from the water boy to the president. And all this because they lost a few dollars which they had no business betting."

-- Fielding H. Yost, director of athletics and football coach, University of Michigan, 1922