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Cy says that apparently we prefer to lop off the head of the chicken
rather than to de~louse it. Certainly I do not believe in lopping off
the head of such a fine sport as football. I merely pointed out to these
high school and college players that these coaches and the so-called
friends of football are the ones who are killing it, and the yelp that
the coaches emit shows that they lave been struck by missiles which
hit the mark.

When a gardener trims excessive branches from a grapevine he does it
to improve the fruit. Certainly you will not deny this, will you,
Brownie? By lepping off many of the football barnacles, football
could be saved. And so could basketball, for that matter. But the
wey it is going at the present ime causes people to wonder whether

the mon’who make money out of football will permit it to be saved.

May 7 make another observation? The, future crop of coaches in both
football and basketball will of necessity come from a group of men
who are outstanding inthe sport from the angle of technical skill.
This is their laboratory work to show that they are experts. These
men, by and large, are now athletes who awe receiving either their
board, room tuition, books, and so forth, or a large part of it, and
some are men who positively leave school with a larger bank account
than they entered with. How in the world can these great builders

of character challenge a boy to enroll in the university — by the
same and only method they know - that is the pay check.

These major spectacular sports are nothing but a rachet, or a business
racket tied to the tail of the university or college. The boy is maite

to feel that that is the most important thing in his existence, when

all of us know that it is not by any manner of means the most important.

it is important because it is an incentive which should drive him on to
the durable things of life, and that is the thing that he gets in the
classroom and in the contact with his fellows. But when he know that he is
nothing more than a paid professional, keeping from the general public

the truth of his status, then you and I both know that it is a racket.

I certainly have no quarrel with you when you say, “Football represents
so much of a spirit of a game where mental, physical, and emotional
expressions have e wholesome outlet that youth will demand, and have,
in one way or another." Again I say, let's have it in the right way,
and not in the way it is being ccnducted in the "big time". Again I
want to say that I do net wee. te kill football, but I want to point
to the boy who is p&sying it the danger of following wandering fires
lost in the quagmire.

Brownie, I have never worried much about ostracism. I find that I

make a few friends and lose a few, but when I characterize a group

of coaches as “beagle hounds out sniffing the bushes for athletes to

be given salaries for doing no work", I state correctly what I know

and what you know, Of course, some big time schools have someone

else to do their beagle-hounding for them, and they sit back as re-
spectable individuals while the dirty work is done by the less important
beagle hounds. Had I not talked to so many professors who tell me the
pressure they feel from the advance agent for so many of these flunking
athletes, then I might say that some of them might resent it. But I
‘know this game from all the intricacies as you do. And these professors
do not resent this snap course idea|because they know hew many of the
wise boys hunt for them,

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