PAGE 15 BOOK REVIEW
“Staggs University; The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago”; by Robin Lester, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1995; (1-800-545-4703).
In the field of college football history books, the serious student of the game’s past has to march many a mile to find any modern works that are really worthy of being called a “football history”. Fortunately for us, the University of Illinois Press has just recently released an outstanding book entitled “Stagg’s University”, by Robin Lester. This is a book that when examined from every possible angle, proves to fulfill everything that a true history of college football should strive to be.
Most of today’s college football books generally present a mind-numbing, endless litany of game highlights for season after season, the Strode series being a great example of this type of book Other notable categories of college works include: books of the personal recollections of former players or coaches, many of which are embellished and contain mistakes of fact: books of an autobiographical nature, often written to advance one’s own personal stature (ie Joe Paterno); the “football is dirty business” book, such as “Under The Tarnished Dome” and “The Hundred-Yard Lie”; and the “quicky history”, often nothing more than a coffee-table book that seeks to capitalize on a college’s just- concluded successful season, examples being the current flood of Northwestern books.
None of these fulfill what should be the basic goal of a college football history book: to tell us something factual about the big games, the great players and coaches; but also to examine some of the other pressures often brought to bear on a schools football program in areas such as player recruiting, special treatment afforded the athletes in the classroom and around campus, alumni meddling, and not to forget the faculty and administration’s exercise of politics on the program The sum of these parts is what comprises a real college football history.
Professor Lester is a prep school administrator in the Chicago area who earned his Doctorate at the University of Chicago, and while studying for his degree he was allowed to work for the university’s Archives Library on the project to organize and catalog the very extensive collection of Amos Alonzo Stagg’s personal papers which had been left to the school. Lester’s study of the collection became the basis for his Dissertation, which eventually evolved into the recently-issued book.
Everyone is familiar with the popular mythology that surrounds the reputation of Stagg, and the legendary pictures of the old coach still mowing his own lawn while in his nineties out in California. But for the first time in book form, Professor Lester discloses some of what was really going on at Chicago in relation to the football program from 1892-1939. This is NOT a book of “revisionist” history, but rather a thoroughly researched and well organized presentation of the facts, with ample footnotes on sources. It’s been just sitting there all these years in the papers of the University Archive Collection.
Amos Alonzo Stagg was hired to be the first “Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics” when the University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892 on the city’s South Side. The man who brought the young football coach to the Midway was the school’s first President, William Rainey Harper, who was acquainted with Stagg from their days at Yale. In these early days of college football, to bestow a tenured academic appointment on the school’s coach, was an unprecedented step and the author contends that this act “began the professionalism of college coaching”.
President Harper was an aggressive administrator with big dreams for the new school, and the book makes it very clear that he saw athletics, football in particular, as a means of promoting the new university, as he believed that “a great school demands a great team”. But even though Harper was PAGE 16
Stagg’s sponsor, and provided ample protection to the often brash, and sometimes disliked, football coach, A.A. nevertheless often succeeded in doing things to annoy his university President. By 1901 Harper was becoming extremely concerned over Stagg’s continued emphasis on the affairs of intercollegiate athletics, while to a great extent he ignored his duties as head of the physical education program of the university.
Throughout the book the author outlines numerous incidents which illustrate that Stagg had a monumental ego that brooked no interference, and drove him to constantly seek an expansion of his influence within the university, while insisting that the affairs and finances of the intercollegiate teams were his own personal domain. Stagg believed himself accountable to nobody, except possibly Harper, and when he complained about being asked by the university Comptroller to justify some of his expenditures, Harper capitulated and basically gave the coach a free hand. The great Stagg also was not above conniving for a salary increase, even showing Harper how to hide the expenditure from the prying trustees and accountants.
The on-going recruiting practices and policies of the University are reviewed in the book, along with ample material about the numerous cases of special treatment Stagg insisted upon for his football players; things like extremely light courses loads; reserving the newest and most luxurious of the resident halls for the athletes; and pressuring professors to go easy on the players. One of the worst of the so-called student athletes was the great Walter Eckersall. In a 10-page section devoted to the great quarterback, we learn that not only did he come nowhere near graduating, but he regularly led the team in the worst grades and most class absences. In the winter of 1904 Eckersall never attended a single class for the political science course he was enrolled in.
After reading all of the carefully researched and well described events that Stagg left in his wake through his first 30 years at Chicago, the reader begins to see the supposedly-saintly football coach as just another power-hungry hypocrite, who thought that winning football teams and large gate receipts would excuse anything he was willing to try and get away with. Stagg would be right at home in 1995 as the head coach of any of the game’s current big-time powers.
Unfortunately for Stagg, President Harper passed away after the 1905 football season, and while succeeding administrations seemed willing to humor the little coach to some extent, the path began to turn downward. As the years went on Chicago was no longer the great football power it had once been, as the large state universities of the Midwest began to expand their student populations, athletic recruiting, and money-making football stadiums. While Stagg Field was expanded to add more seating, by the early 1920’s Stagg was lobbying for the construction of a giant stadium at Chicago to rival those being built at Michigan and Illinois. It was not to be.
The author does an excellent job of describing the changing university outlook toward both studies and athletics during Stagg’s reign. As early as 1905 the University Senate had talked of banning football as part of the national outcry against the sport at that time. But when President Ernest Burton, the last of the original faculty, retired in 1928, the old coach was all alone. Right to the very end when he was forced to retire as football coach at age 70, when offered a position as a sort of Assistant A.D., Stagg was still trying to make unrealistic demands of the new administration. PAGE 17
By that time the University had undergone significant changes in its approach to academics, having adopted the so-called Chicago Plan. In 1929 the job of University President was filled by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had been Dean of the Yale Law School At long last the academics, out to get Stagg and his football program for so long, now had an instrument of destruction.
Professor Lester does a very good job of painting Hutchins’ background for us, and the events the new President pursued almost from the start in his quest to eliminate football at Chicago. In the final analysis Hutchins was like so many management people one encounters; those who are determined to make some kind of change, no matter what, for the sole purpose of showing everyone just who is in charge. In Hutchins’ case, he probably saw the elimination of the football barbarians at Chicago as solidifying his place for all-time as a great educational reformer, and the protector of a great university. Instead, today Hutchins is considered by many as a monumental phony, who had planned to eliminate the football program at Chicago from the moment he was appointed as the school’s President. It’s very ironic that, the same year this book comes out, the University of Chicago football team posted a marvelous 8-2 record while competing at the Division III level, which is where it should have been from 1930 onward without interruption.
This book will no doubt find its place someday as one of the great works in the field of college football history. There could have been a little more football detail, but this was still a spell-binding read that was difficult to put down. It is the classic example to us all of just what a football history can and should be. Works such as this are sorely needed for school’s like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Michigan, to name a few.
“Stagg’s University”, by Robin Lester, is must reading for college football historians.