Michael Oriard

The other day I heard the author on NPR and, as it’s that time of the year, I wanted to read his newest book about the development of college football as it transitioned into the questionable Bowl Championship System (BCS) currently in place. I was overwhelmed with shock and excitement when my local library’s database listed two copies as “available.” Then, of course, the typical disappointment set in when the book was nowhere to be found (I say typical since I’ve come to realize that if you can’t rely on the nation’s third largest library to never have the book you’re looking for, then what library can you rely on?). As Oriard has only written seven books, it was surprising that the library actually had one of them, so I quickly snatched it up.

Admittedly, the subtitle inclusion of such terms as “Spectacle…Golden Age…Newsreels…Daily Press…” concerned me quite a bit. However this is a terrific historical text that is in no way some nostalgic-trip-down-memory-lane picture book as the subtitle sort-of implies. If anything, it borders on being too academically rigorous like Harold Seymour’s baseball book that I just couldn’t get through. Oriard’s narrative is much more engaging as it stays away from insane, Seymourian statistics. Instead of stating something like, “There were 2,194 registered baseball players between the ages of 9 and 12 in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood during the 1923 season yielding a mean allotment of one municipal team for every 17.26 players…et cetera.,” Oriard might go with a more effective, “Football was popular that year amongst school-aged children.”

The other factor that made this quite palatable – though I was initially unsure – is Oriard’s reliance upon the aforementioned media resources as a vehicle with which to trace how the sport evolved to increasingly dominate the attention and participation of US citizenry. As I have an innate tendency to distrust most journalism from even the likes of The New York Times, Oriard’s use of resources from Some Town in Texas Gazette, goofy stories from Colliers, and, gulp, Hearst newsreels didn’t initially seem like the basis for solid scholarship. But this is indeed a solid narrative, dealing with seemingly all the relevant issues surrounding the game as it transitioned from an elite pursuit of helmetless Yalies to an increasingly padded anyone-from-anywhere population segment over a fifty-year period (well, anyman – not woman, though he deals with that as well). These issues include the Americanization of different ethnic groups, the incremental acceptance of black players during and after Jim Crow, the ongoing debates about the “professionalism” of the college game (including the coverage of various Socialist Dailies), the emergence of the NFL – definitely not a fait accompli circa 1920 – and the role of football as the ultimate expression of “masculinity” in the US (especially during interwar periods) to the logical exclusion of “sissies” and “females” (hilariously, J. C. Leyendecker’s oft-commissioned, early-century cover art that came to represent the ideal, football dude archetype were really paintings of his gay lover!).

The use of sundry media sources – as questionable as they might be individually – seems necessary to deal with these myriad social and cultural issues. All of this is poised against such external backdrops as Freudian theory, State Department visa restrictions, the “science” of Eugenics, the Civil Rights movement, World Wars, The Great Depression, fledgling Feminism, and, of course, the insatiable thirst for entertainment in this country. However, unlike many scholarly texts, say, within the discipline of architecture, Oriard doesn’t smother/disfigure the main topic under the weight of too much theoretical/socioeconomic/critical baggage. There’s a thankful exclusion of Heidiggerian quotes (or perhaps more relevantly, Nietzschean “Supermen”) that seem to sneak their way into every proper treatment of bathroom renovation essays within my chosen profession. It’s a well-balanced history that seems comprehensive while also necessarily incomplete. Here, many doors of further inquiry are opened, but for those not really interested in more football books (unless his latest offering miraculously appears on one of my library’s shelves), this is a fulfilling account of a pivotal period of the sport’s history.… (más)

The latest in a lengthy line of Michael Oriard football books, Bowled Over covers the transformations that, since ca. 1960, have exacerbated the already ambiguous position of collegiate football since it’s founding days; that of awkwardly inhabiting a territory between academic amateurism and commercialized professionalism. It’s a compelling story concerning the innumerable contradictions within the sport. He articulates, for instance, how “pampering” and “exploitation” of the athlete-student could/should be seen as the same thing. The fact that coaches are now bestowed CEOesque salaries and the programs bring in many millions from commercialized realms while the (recruited) players only gain (mostly) free admittance to the university, with increasingly less opportunity to actually utilize the university as an educational venue is just one of many disparities.

Another primary issue involves whether the role of a football is a mere adjunct to or main attribute of a given university and its national reputation. Some programs seem to have blossomed because of their football prowess (the author’s alma mater in Indiana, the University of Miami) and others have withered on the vine without Big Football (any number of still-provincial programs). Some schools are mostly unaffected with a deemphasized program (Tulane, the Ivies) or by eliminating the sport altogether (Chicago, hopefully the school at which I teach) and some were on a solid path regardless of the team’s success (the oft-mentioned “Flutie Factor” turns out to be statistically dubious at BC). It’s a complex issue and when he turns to much needed reforms – or clarifications about the sport as profession or just college component – there are apparently no agreeable solutions even amongst seemingly innocuous suggestions, much less dramatic proposals. Oriard covers much ground (I would say “like Reggie Bush” but I’m not that lame…) with a very balanced, scholarly production.

In structure, the book is necessarily broken up into two parts: one focusing mostly on the final years of racial integration, the other articulating the sundry ramifications of the 1972-73 acts inaugurating the one-year scholarship and freshman eligibility. I say necessarily because the paucity of hard financial data outlining how Big Time college ball evolved into something like a quasi-NFL didn’t really exist until the last couple of decades and, presumably, there haven’t been any explicitly segregated programs since “Ole Miss,” LSU, and Georgia entered the twentieth century in 1972.

My only issue is that the portion about student unrest and team integration doesn’t really, if you will, integrate seamlessly with the second part. Yes, the discussions about player exploitation mostly revolves around black athletes, many from the lower echelons of US economic and educational society (they’re the latest equivalent of the sons of immigrant coal miners and factory laborers of decades past, though the author convincingly argues that the earlier group weren’t subjected to the same academic alienation that the current system promotes). Yes the data in Part Two covers graduation rates amongst black athletes as part of many other numerical and revenue-related factors. What I felt, however, is that the two parts read differently – as if they might better yield two separate books. Not that I think Oriard should have produced yet another book that would be all but ignored by the online reader community, but despite the excellent writing, I didn’t think Part One formed a solid basis for or reciprocal pairing with Part Two. They’re like different species within the same genus if I understood anything Steven Jay Gould ever wrote. Regardless, it’s a great book overall that any college football enthusiast or anti-college football professor should enjoy.… (más)