September 22, 1944.

Mr. Sam Smith, |
United Press Association,

- 600 City Bank Building,

Kansas City, Moe
Dear Sams

I have had little time to dictate some of the things that have been in
my mind for a long time, and I won't have much time now, but here's one
statement that can preceed all the rest. Here it goess

No longer are the so-called amateur athletics taken seriously by John
Qe Public. The administrators of the National Collegiate Athletic Assoc-
iation and the boys that run the Amateur Athletic Union of the United
States should invite the highly efficient national professional baseball
and football executives into their fold to teach the amateurs how to run
their professional athletics.

This is all the outgrowth of the failure of the American Association of
University and College Presidents to do anything about athletics from a
postwar angle except to acknowledge that athletics have gone professional,
and now the scramble is to get big mame coaches to man the guns and to fill
the stadium to dripping capacity. Sure, it will be a “golden age era" of
sports. There won't be enough silver to hire the big boyse It will take
golde

The public doesn't care what the boys are paid so long as they perform
but the educators of the country are in a different position, or should bee
They are running educational institutions. And if educational institutions
are efficient they should set up some machinery that will protect them
from some scandal akin to the Black Sox scandal of 1925. There is more
money being bet on football and basketball games in America today thanis
bet on all the horse races of the country.

Judge Landis will not have a racing man connected with his organized
baseball because racing is so crooked and everybody knows ite It is the

money angle,-the betting angle, that has made it so. Judge Landis is

fighting betting on professional baseball in his vigorous mamner, but the
colleges are doing nothing about it, and as sure as you live the thing is

going to crack wide open sometime when they lay bare a scandal,awhere some —
oup of college boys have thrown a game for a tidy sun(that. att rock the>

er
It has already happened in New York in Madison Square Garden,