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"How Much Respect?" Inevitably, the soul-searching led straight back to the whole question of big-time collegiate sport. Demanded Sports Columnist Joe Williams in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: "How much respect do you think a football player really has for a school which has outbid six or seven other schools for his services? Damned little, I'd imagine. Contempt, more likely."
Harold Stassen, president of the University of Pennsylvania, called for "a re-examination."* Said he: "The athletic scandals should cause our entire educational system to take a careful look in the mirror and take stock not only of its athletic programs, but also of its moral and ethical teaching of the youth of the nation." Stassen had the athletic-program problem right in his own backyard: Penn's big-time football team pays for 85% of Penn's $617,000 budget for intercollegiate and intramural athletics.
"We Love You." Is L.I.U.'s return to intramuralism the answer? It did not satisfy L.I.U. students. By week's end, more than 2,000 of them had signed a petition which read, in effect: "We want big-time sports." At a campus rally, they spotted Coach Clair Bee and hustled him to a desk top for a speech. Smiling wanly, Bee told them: "I admire your spirit. I'm awfully proud of you. We're coming back strong. We're not through." L.I.U. students waved a sign addressed to the arrested stars: "Sherm, LeRoy, Al—We Still Love You!" C.C.N.Y. loved its crooked heroes, too. Petitions, with faculty and student signatures, demanded that the boys be allowed to come back and get their college degrees some day.
Hardly anybody seemed to love Gambler Salvatore Sollazzo, the man charged with corrupting so many poor basketball players. The U.S. Government, after a prowl through his books, slapped a $1,128,493 lien on him, for evasion of income taxes.
This week Manhattan District Attorney Hogan was still on the trail, piecing together clues to more fixes, fixers and crooked college boys. Some of the clues go back five years. Some of them might lead to still more indictments. But at this point, there was no sign that the colleges were piecing anything together, or earnestly searching their souls about the commercial nature of college sports. There was no sign that they even knew that they, too, had been indicted. Yet puzzled, slow-spoken LeRoy Smith had given the clue to them in nine short words: "It seems more of a business than a sport."
-* C.C.N.Y. did, fielding a makeshift five in the half-empty Garden to beat Lafayette, 67-48. *For opinion by Pennsylvania's Stassen on another question, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.