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Oral History Center University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Glenn Dickey
Glenn Dickey: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics
at UC Berkeley: 1960-2014
Interviews conducted by
John Cummins
in 2011-2012
Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Oral History Center has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed
witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation.
Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews
between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
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interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and
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interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and
irreplaceable.
*********************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The
Regents of the University of California and Glenn Dickey, Jr. dated July 13, 2015.
The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights
in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft
Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from
this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long
as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The
Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of
California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online
at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Glenn Dickey “Glenn Dickey: Oral Histories on the Management of
Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960-2014” conducted by John
Cummins in 2011-2012 Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 2017.
iii
Table of Contents — Glenn Dickey
Interview 1: January 31, 2011
Audio File 1 1
Growing up with sports — Transferring from Santa Barbara to Cal — Working in
the Daily Cal as a Sports Editor — United Press and International News Service
merger — Working with the San Francisco Chronicle — Continued interest in
Cal sports — Covering the Oakland Raiders in 1967 — Replacing Ron Fimrite as
a columnist — “Free agency” for pro sports players — Covering San Francisco
Giants’ first World Series game in ‘62 — Rising college football costs and cuts to
other sports — Head football coaches’ salaries — Glenn Seaborg — End of
ASUC and ASUCLA control over Intercollegiate Athletics — Comparing Cal
and Stanford’s commitment to athletics — Impact of Free Speech Movement on
sports recruitment in 60s — Lack of diversity in sports — Earl Robinson — Al
Buch — College experience — Clark Kerr’s public censure of Pappy Waldorf —
Ron Lynn — Disputes between Mike White and David Maggard — Plummeting
graduation rates for football players — On hiring Joe Kapp — Rene Herrerias and
Bob Presley scandal — Childhood in Minnesota and moving to San Diego —
Interview with Harry Edwards after 1968 Olympics — Pete Newell on Roger
Heyns and Budd Cheit — Phil Wolpert — Texas Western College’s NCAA
Championship — Jim Padgett on recruiting black players — Mike Heyman and
affirmative action — “Tutors” for athletes — Studying journalism and political
science at Cal — Campaign to remove Ben Braun — Enacment of Title IX in
1972 — Covering women’s sports — Meeting Billie Jean King — Invitation to
Women’s Sports Foundation banquet — Donna de Varona — Lue Lilly as
women’s athletic director — Financial strains on men and women’s athletic
departments — Termination of Physical Education Department in 1997 —
Increased commercialism in college football — Experiences reporting from
AT&T Park — Differences between Ivy league teams and Pacific Coast
Conference — Development of Athletic Study Center under Heyman — Walter
Haas Jr. and family — Chancellor Tien — Smelser report and value of athletics at
Cal — Cal vs Clemenson in 1992 Citrus Bowl — Campanelli v Regents of
University of California — Jason Kidd — Chuck Muncie
Interview 2: January 31, 2012
Audio File 2 39
John Kasser — Hiring Ben Braun — Tom Homloe — What it means to be a
“good coach” — Bruce Snyder — Comparing NFL quarterbacks and computers
— Differences between high school and college football players — Harmon Gym
remodeled as Haas Pavilion — More on funding issues — Differences between
baseball and football games — PAC 12 — Andy Geiger on alumni contributions
at Ivy leagues — Hiring Steve Gladstone — Sandy Barbour and the media —
Diverting donations for baseball program to other sports — Cal baseball team
iv
winning the College World Series — Low attendance at baseball games —
Covering Stanford baseball team in 1999 College World Series — Compromising
academic standards for athletic success — Memorial Stadium before renovations
— Reporting style — More on Pappy Waldorf — Memories of Joe Kapp — More
on Mike White — Appreciation for unique sports reporter experience
[End of Interview]
1
Interview 1: January 13, 2011
Begin Audio File 1
01-00:00:00
Cummins: Okay, this is the first interview with Glenn Dickey in the series on
Intercollegiate Athletics. Today is January 13, [2011]. Why don’t you begin,
Glenn, just talking about your own background, your past, certainly where
you went to school and how you got involved in athletics, and then we’ll go
from there.
01-00:00:49
Dickey: Well, I was interested—my dad was a huge sports fan and he got me
interested. [laughing] So I followed sports, I played. When I was in high
school I played baseball, basketball, tennis—
01-00:01:03
Cummins: Which high school was that?
01-00:01:04
Dickey: Well, I went to three different high schools: Sierra High School, which is in
the foothills above Fresno; Fresno High for my junior year; and my senior
year I graduated from Sonora High. So I played these sports, but not very
well. I lettered and all, but lettering in a high school sport is not difficult, and I
didn’t play all that much. But in a way it was good, I got a chance to observe.
In my senior year I was working on the high school paper there, as sports
editor, and writing about all the sports too, so that just came natural to me.
Then I went—my dad got transferred. I actually had been accepted at Cal as a
freshman and had a place in Bowles Hall and had a job on the switchboard
and everything! And then my dad got transferred from Sonora to Santa
Barbara, so he said, “Well, you might as well go to school at Santa Barbara
the first two years, and then you can decide if you want to go to Cal or
UCLA.” I never really considered UCLA, even though we were much closer
to it at that point. So I came to Cal as a junior. I was—at Santa Barbara I
worked on the school paper and on the yearbook, both. Then when I came to
Cal I worked on the Daily Cal and worked my way up to be sports editor my
senior year.
01-00:02:41
Cummins: Which was what year?
01-00:02:44
Dickey: Well, I was assistant sports editor in the fall of 1957, and then sports editor in
the spring of 1958 and graduated that spring. So I always had this interest in
sports from this early time and played it, and then realized I couldn’t go any
further. I never tried to play college ball at all, because even at Santa Barbara,
which was pretty small at that time, I did not have the skills to play any sport
down there. So I just confined myself to writing and watching. But I had this
interest, and then of course I just continued on. People ask me sometimes,
2
when did you decide to be a writer? And I say I did not decide. The decision
was pretty much made for me. As soon as I started doing it they saw I had
natural talent for it, so why not? I could combine my love of sports with my
writing ability, and just go on.
And then I worked in—well, I worked for the summer. I couldn’t get—’58
was a bad year to get a newspaper job, because United Press and International
News Service, the Hearst wire service, had combined. So there was something
like four hundred experienced newsmen out of work on the West Coast. So
there weren’t a lot of jobs there. So I worked for the summer in Santa Barbara
at the News-Press down there, just on a vacation replacement thing. And then
I got a job in Watsonville in September, and I worked there till April of ’63,
and then I came to the [San Francisco] Chronicle and I stayed there until
2005. I kept my interest in Cal sports, of course. When I was in Watsonville I
could come up for the football games on Saturday. And then when I went to
work for the Chronicle, of course it was easy to get to the games, and then I
could go to football and basketball, so I saw a lot of games in that era.
01-00:05:08
Cummins: So a very consistent, long-term involvement over that period of time, not just
with Cal sports but really all sports.
01-00:05:17
Dickey: Right, with all sports, yeah.
01-00:05:21
Cummins: And when you started did you start with your column right away? Or did you
just cover sports or—
01-00:05:26
Dickey: Oh no, when I came to the Chronicle—at that time the way they worked it
was you would work your way up. The writers just coming in, the young
writers, had to work mostly in the office, reading out copy, writing headlines,
that type of thing, and occasionally writing—which was very frustrating.
[laughing] I didn’t get into the business to edit somebody else’s copy. But
eventually I got—in ’67 I got a beat, the Oakland Raiders, and covered them.
And then in ’71—Ron Fimrite had been writing a column and he left to go to
Sports Illustrated, so I talked to the managing editor and I said, “You know,
I’d like to write a column.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you write some
sample columns and we’ll just run them in the paper and not say anything
about it.” And they did pretty well. And then I wrote one on what Willie Mays
was really like, and that did almost too well. [laughter] It got so much
response it was—of course it was almost totally negative. But that was the
type of column I wanted to write. I wasn’t going to write with this little gloss
over everything. But they kept me on. The publisher was very tight. He didn’t
like spending money, and he didn’t want to replace me. After they’d made me
a full-time columnist they’d have to bring in another writer, and so for a
3
year—they started me on two columns a week and then three. But I was still
covering the Raiders; I was still working the desk when I wasn’t covering the
Raiders. I had one writing day a week, to write three columns.
01-00:07:26
Cummins: Amazing! [laughter]
01-00:07:31
Dickey: They got their money’s worth. But in June the next year they made me a full-
time columnist. And interestingly enough, the guy who took my spot on the
roster, was Dave Bush. You probably know Dave.
01-00:07:47
Cummins: I don’t know him.
01-00:07:48
Dickey: Oh, don’t you? Anyway, he was also a sports editor at the Daily Cal some
years after I had left. So he’d come to the—he’d gotten into the newspaper
business and came to the Chronicle. So yeah, there are a lot of Cal guys on the
Chronicle sports staff, have been over the years, which is not surprising.
01-00:08:17
Cummins: How about Stanford in that regard?
01-00:08:17
Dickey: Not many Stanford people.
01-00:08:19
Cummins: Not many.
01-00:08:23
Dickey: When I came on the paper Howard [M.] Carr was the tennis writer. He was
from Stanford. I’m trying to think if there were any—I can’t think of any
others.
01-00:08:30
Cummins: It’s interesting, because I remember a comment—and I believe this was from
Ray Colvig. You know Ray, right?
01-00:08:39
Dickey: Yeah.
01-00:08:40
Cummins: But it was some time ago, where there was a perception that the Chronicle
reporting on sports was more favorable to Stanford than Cal. [laughter] Now,
that’s not surprising. But anyway, I don’t know whether that was true for
general news? Were there more Stanford or Cal writers?
4
01-00:09:06
Dickey: You know, I don’t know. I didn’t have a lot of contact with—we had our own
little department. There were people that would come by—of course
everybody always wanted to know what was happening in sports.
01-00:09:19
Cummins: Of course, of course.
01-00:09:23
Dickey: And you’d go out and get a drink of water at the water cooler and somebody
would ask about the Giants or that type of thing. But I didn’t know too many
people on the news side. And another thing that was different—our hours
were quite different. Because for the news side, the people that were in the
office—not the writers, the writers were out doing and they’d come in to do
stories. But the desk people—their hours were basically, generally working
hours, a nine to five type of thing. Because there isn’t a lot of news, regular
news, that happens at night on the West Coast, because all the political news,
of course, is much earlier in DC and New York, the East Coast. So there
would just be three or four people manning the desk outside in the news room,
and of course the night is usually the biggest time for sports, because all the
night baseball, the night games and stuff, so our hours were quite—when I
worked the desk my basic shift was three to midnight.
01-00:10:40
Cummins: Interesting.
01-00:10:40
Dickey: Yeah, interesting is one word for it. [laughter] Delightful it’s not.
01-00:10:48
Cummins: No, delightful it’s not. Exactly. Okay, so do you want to say something about
sports in general, both when you were playing in high school and college, in
that early time once you got to the Chronicle, what it was like? It was very
different, obviously, than what it is today.
01-00:11:14
Dickey: Yeah, it was so much different, because for one thing, in the pro world you
didn’t have these big salaries. You didn’t have free agency. To me, the biggest
change that has come in pro sports is free agency, because the players
suddenly could negotiate their true value based on how many people come to
the games because of them. It’s very comparable to what happened to the
movie industry. The studios dominated the movies for so long, and then the
actors/actresses were able to break loose from that—and agents. And so now
the old studio heads are gone, and it’s the performers and agents that have the
power. So it’s the same way, really, in pro sports, that the players now have
negotiating power, and the agents, of course, make the most of it. So salaries
have gone way up, so that has required teams to market in a different way.
5
I was talking yesterday to a group about the difference with the Giants—I
saw—in ’62 I actually covered their first World Series. Even though I was in
Watsonville they sent me up to cover the games on the West Coast—not in
New York.
01-00:12:48
Dickey: At that time what you had were people who were—they were knowledgeable
about the sport. When the team did well they cheered. Well, if you watched
any of the World Series this year it was like a rock concert. There was just
constant cheering from the start, from the first pitch to the end. And because
it’s a younger crowd, it’s a crowd that comes out because it’s an event. But
you have to—you can’t just market to baseball fans anymore and make it,
because you’d have maybe a million attendance. That doesn’t cut it anymore.
So that’s the biggest change there.
College sports, what really, really disturbs me, and I just don’t know what the
solution of this is, is football costs have gotten totally out of control. And so
that’s why at Cal all these other sports are being cut, because it used to be if
you had a successful football program it spilled off money to the other sports.
That’s no longer true. It takes extra money just to subsidize the football
program.
And so these other sports—and I think it’s very worthwhile for these sports to
be there for athletes to compete, even if they are sports that there’s no
professional future. That’s—because the only ones that are really in that
category in the college sports are basketball and football. Baseball somewhat,
and there are an awful lot of baseball players that never go to college. But
college football, there may be two players in the last fifty years that didn’t go
to college, in the NFL. And basketball, some of them go directly from high
school, but a lot of them go from college too. But the other sports, they’re
certainly—especially women’s sports are worthwhile, but even if they don’t
go any further with it. But it’s hard to keep them going if—because it has
always been true, basically, that football and basketball—men’s basketball—
are the revenue sports. Now, I’m sure that Stanford does well with women’s
basketball, because they have a great program there. And there are schools—
Arizona State, I think, has done well with baseball. And again, they’ve
produced a lot of major league players over the years. So there are exceptions,
but for the most part it’s football and basketball. So you’ve got all these other
sports.
01-00:15:54
Cummins: That you’ve got to support.
01-00:15:56
Dickey: Cal had what, twenty-six sports before they cut back?
01-00:15:58
Cummins: Twenty-nine.
6
01-00:16:00
Dickey: Twenty-nine? Stanford I think has—
01-00:16:02
Cummins: Thirty-five, thirty-three, thirty-five.
01-00:16:05
Dickey: Yeah, something like that, yeah. They’ve got more than thirty. But other
schools, Notre Dame—a few years ago they cut back drastically. So I don’t
know what the solution to that is, but when Phil Knight spends $40 million to
give Oregon this high performance athletic center, everybody has to have the
same thing.
01-00:16:32
Cummins: Yes, absolutely.
01-00:16:32
Dickey: Where is the money coming from?
01-00:16:34
Cummins: Right, well—and if you know, as the Chronicle was reporting, if [Jim]
Harbaugh had stayed at Stanford that would have cost them what—$4.5
million in salary. So if you’re a Jeff Tedford, sitting at Cal making $2
[million] something, that’s the next. So it’s very—
01-00:16:53
Dickey: Yeah, right. Because it’s difficult to control.
01-00:16:53
Cummins: —very difficult, yeah, to control those costs. No question.
01-00:16:58
Dickey: Yeah, and Stanford is especially startling, because I doubt that Harbaugh got a
contract worth a million dollars when he came.
01-00:17:08
Cummins: When he came, exactly.
01-00:17:11
Dickey: Came, yeah—it was probably somewhere around $800,000-$900,000. And
they have not been willing, in the past—
01-00:17:16
Cummins: To do that.
01-00:17:17
Dickey: Yeah, Ted Leland made a point of that, saying we’re not going to get so out of
line with what professors are making.
7
01-00:17:29
Dickey: But professors aren’t bringing fifty thousand people into the stadium.
[laughing]
01-00:17:36
Cummins: Exactly. Yes, well and it’s a good point you make about the comparison
between the movie industry and athletics. And of course that did not translate
down, because the college players have no rights, basically.
01-00:17:50
Dickey: No, right.
01-00:17:53
Cummins: So they’re—and in fact there’s this lawsuit now that’s underway challenging
the NCAA on the use of images of previous college players, on video games
and things like that.
01-00:18:07
Dickey: Yeah, I hadn’t heard that one. I know there’s one challenging the BCS, for
God sakes! Oh boy.
01-00:18:17
Cummins: So if you go back—in the e-mail exchange we had you said you weren’t
covering sports, so you didn’t really know what was going on vis-à-vis the
Pacific Coast Conference in the—I’m sure you knew about it.
01-00:18:35
Dickey: Yeah, I knew about it.
01-00:18:36
Cummins: But you weren’t covering it.
01-00:18:37
Dickey: But I wasn’t involved in that. And I didn’t—I came in to Cal as a junior, and
as I say, I was on the sports staff, but that’s the only connection I had. And the
three people you were mentioning, the only time I ever saw Robert Gordon
Sproul was at the basketball games. He was sitting not too far from me. He
always had that seat on the—and I was in the press row. I never talked to
Clark Kerr at all. And I didn’t talk to Glenn Seaborg until 1987, and we were
on a—Cal played in a game in Tokyo, that old Coca-Cola Bowl, and we were
both on the team charter and we talked quite a bit. He was very interested in
football, and I was quite willing to talk football with him. I couldn’t talk about
his specialty. [laughter]
01-00:19:37
Dickey: But you know, he was a huge fan.
01-00:19:41
Cummins: Well, and at that time—it was in 1960 that Kerr finally said that the ASUC
and ASUCLA would no longer be running Intercollegiate Athletics, that it
was moving into the administration, which was a very significant change.
8
Also, in the Pacific Coast Conference the faculty really had much more
authority than the faculty do now, in the NCAA.
01-00:20:16
Dickey: I didn’t know that.
01-00:20:17
Cummins: Yeah, the faculty athletic reps really were the ones that called the shots, so
even though they were appointed by a chancellor or president, they were the
ones that really called the shots.
One of the theories I have is that over the long period of time, that Cal and the
University of California really tried to hold the line in terms of this total
commitment to football in particular. So even though in ’56 the Pacific Coast
Conference said yes, you can have athletic scholarships now, in ’62—it took
six more years for Berkeley and UCLA to actually use athletic scholarships.
Going back even further than that, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, during the huge
controversy in the early 1900s, when the NCAA was actually created, also
took a very strong stand vis-à-vis reform, which is an interesting period of
time too.
But from that period on, say when you started covering sports, it would be
interesting to get your perspective on how you saw Cal vis-à-vis Stanford and
other institutions, in terms of their commitment. There was a lot of concern,
certainly, during the Mike Heyman era, about—he’s not doing enough for
sports, et cetera.
01-00:22:01
Dickey: Oh yeah.
01-00:22:01
Cummins: So do you want to say a word about that?
01-00:22:07
Dickey: Well, do you want to jump ahead as far as Mike?
01-00:22:10
Cummins: Well, we don’t have to go that far ahead. It’s up to you. If you want to start
earlier, go right ahead.
01-00:22:16
Dickey: I didn’t get the feeling that there was less commitment—Stanford has gone
back and forth a little bit over the years. When they had the Rose Bowl teams
they were a lot more liberal on who they would let—well, the JC transfers, for
one thing, because there were a lot of JC transfers on those Rose Bowl teams.
But they’re much stricter on their entrance requirements now. I don’t know
that Cal has changed so much. I think, to me, the big difference—you
mentioned the free speech thing, and I think that hurt recruiting a lot for Cal in
the sixties, because the coaches recruited, talking to the parents, recruited
9
against Telegraph Avenue basically. “Do you want your sons being involved
in that type of thing?” I had very mixed emotions about that, because in
general I thought the free speech movement was good, because when I went to
school it was a real—well, we were not revolutionaries, put it that way.
[laughing] Revolution was cutting class, you know? We were very quiet.
There were no, certainly no protests.
And of course it was a very homogenous student body, almost all white. The
only black person I knew was Earl Robinson, who was on the basketball team
and baseball team too. Actually, I knew him as well as a baseball player
because I covered baseball when I was a junior. And I still know Earl. We’ve
talked a lot over the years because he worked at Laney [College] and he had a
home right up here in the hills for a long time. He’s moved up to Roseville
recently, but we used to see each other in the Lucky parking lot all the time. In
fact, I saw him—oh when was it, about six weeks ago maybe. He was down
visiting some friends, and for some reason he was at Lucky, and I said, “Long
time no see!” But he was a member of my class, and he spoke—we had a
class reunion right down the street here at the Claremont Country Club, and he
spoke at that. But he’s the only black—there were blacks on the football team,
but I didn’t know any of them.
I wasn’t interviewing players that much. But I did interview the basketball
bunch, for some reason—I’m trying to think what it was. But I was involved
in a campus radio show and interviewing athletes at one point, but I don’t
remember ever interviewing any football players. I did interview—I know I
remember Earl and Al Buch. I interviewed them. And I was also—my
roommate at Cal was on the basketball team. He didn’t play much. He was
mostly—he was back and forth between the varsity and the JV teams.
01-00:25:5
Cummins: Where did you live?
01-00:25:55
Dickey: We lived in a boarding house when we were—it was the same class. When
Tom and I were juniors we lived in a boarding house, and then we lived up at
Smyth, at the top of the hill there, our senior year. But so I knew a lot of the
basketball players through Tom, so I was much closer to basketball. But I
can’t recall ever seeing a black student in a class. There probably were
occasional ones.
01-00:26:30
Cummins: Oh yes, but it was a very small [number].
01-00:26:29
Dickey: And of course Latinos—no. Asians, no. And now, of course, you walk around
the campus and it looks like China West or something.
01-00:26:39
Cummins: Yes.
10
01-00:26:42
Dickey: So that, to me, is just such a huge change it’s unbelievable. But so we were a
very quiet, quiet class. And then, for just a few years later to have all this
rebellion. But I thought it was about time! We should have spoken out more.
But we were just very quiet, and so nobody protested anything. So it was a
shock to me, and of course it happened about the time I came to the
Chronicle. I think it was ’64.
01-00:27:18
Cummins: Yes, exactly. Do you remember, just to go back a couple of years, Pappy
Waldorf being censured publicly by Kerr for being part of the paying of
student athletes? Do you have any recollection?
01-00:27:33
Dickey: I don’t remember that at all, no.
01-00:27:36
Dickey: When was that?
01-00:27:37
Cummins: Well, it was 1956. It was around the time that the Pacific Coast Conference
dissolved, and that of course had to do with all of the violations related to
paying players.
01-00:27:51
Dickey: Yeah, right.
01-00:27:55
Cummins: In Pappy Waldorf’s case the amount of money, compared to say what UCLA
or USC or Washington was using, was very small. He maintained that he gave
that money only to the poor kids, the poor athletes who really needed it. But
he was directly involved, instead of using a donor/an alum basically to do that.
And so Kerr viewed that, the fact that he was directly involved, as something
that required this public letter of reprimand, which I guess was very
controversial at the time, so people were really upset that Kerr did that.
01-00:28:39
Dickey: I think that happened just before I came, because I know the break-up of the
conference was before I got to Cal, because I remember—we lived in Santa
Barbara, and I remember I used to root for SC, believe it or not, just because I
liked their football teams. And Jon Arnett was a particular hero, and he was
one that got half a season, a senior. So I remember that vividly. So that
probably—that probably was when Pappy got the thing. But I wasn’t—at that
point, frankly, I wasn’t that involved emotionally with Cal. I didn’t become—
01-00:29:18
Cummins: Yes, of course. You weren’t there.
11
01-00:29:19
Dickey: I didn’t become involved until I got here. I remember thinking that in a way,
when my dad got transferred and I went to Santa Barbara, in a way I was
happy because I could continue rooting for SC for a couple of years.
[laughter] But I was just thinking strictly in terms of the football teams, not
the quality of the—there was never any question I was going to—the thought
that I was going to go to SC—we couldn’t afford that, for God sakes.
01-00:29:52
Cummins: Anyway, I interrupted. So you were talking about FSM then, and the impact.
01-00:29:57
Dickey: Yeah, it was just—it was a real shocker to me, but I thought it was a good
thing. But I know, talking to coaches of that time, that they had a terrible time
recruiting against it, because the parents of high school kids were just appalled
by this. And so that was a real factor, I think more than anything else, more
than how committed they were or anything like that. They just had trouble
getting kids to come there.
01-00:30:36
Cummins: Exactly right.
01-00:30:36
Dickey: And then of course, when Mike White took over and Dave Maggard was
hired—White was a classmate of mine and has been a friend for a long time,
still is. He was actually hired before Dave was you know, and he never felt
that Dave had any authority over him. [laughing]
01-00:31:02
Cummins: Is that right? Who did?
01-00:31:07
Dickey: Well, yeah, and Mike is a good football coach, but he was bringing kids into
the school who just didn’t belong.
01-00:31:14
Cummins: Yes.
01-00:31:17
Dickey: The graduation rates—I’m sure you’re very familiar with that.
01-00:31:21
Cummins: Yes.
01-00:31:22
Dickey: The graduation rates—I’m sure you’re very familiar with that—the graduation
rates just plummeted, of his players. It was really funny, in a way, how all that
evolved and Dave fired him. So many writers that said, “Well, he’s a pretty
good coach. Why are you firing him?” They just didn’t understand that, but I
understood it.
12
What was really amusing at the time was the day it was announced Dave and I
had lunch. The other writers knew we were going to lunch, but it was
something that had been arranged a couple of weeks before. It had nothing to
do with that, but they thought well, he’s going to lunch and getting all the
information. [laughter] But I never—Dave has been a friend for a long time
and he’s just a real solid guy. We would have lunch a lot, but I never, ever
talked to him about a coach, whether he was going to keep a coach, whether
he was going to fire a coach. The only time we talked about a coach was when
he wanted to hire Joe Kapp and I thought that was a good idea, and both of us
were wrong. [laughing]
01-00:32:39
Cummins: Yes, yes.
01-00:32:40
Dickey: Well, this is kind of a side story. But we weren’t wrong in what the plan—the
plan was never that Joe would be a hands-on coach. It’d be that he would be
the cheerleader and he’d have assistants who would run it. That worked well
when Ron Lynn really ran the team in his first year, but then the USFL came
along and took all the good assistants away, including Lynn, and Joe thought
well, I can coach the team. Oh God. [laughing] I could have done a better job.
But anyway, that’s getting ahead of the story.
With Mike White, that’s really what happened. Mike just always felt, because
he was hired first, that he didn’t really owe any responsibility to Dave.
01-00:33:37
Cummins: Boy, that’s tough. That’s very hard.
01-00:33:39
Dickey: Yeah, and Dave just couldn’t—he was called in to clean it up. They had
that—the school was on probation because of the Isaac Curtis thing. The
assistant coach took his SAT for him.
01-00:33:56
Cummins: Go back a little bit in the sixties, still on the racial issue, Pete Newell and
Rene Herrerias and all the activity around that. Did you cover that?
01-00:34:14
Dickey: Yeah, I covered—I knew Pete pretty well. As I said, I was much closer to the
basketball scene in college than I was football. I remained close to that,
because I would come up even when I was in Watsonville. I knew a lot of the
players on the team. Some had graduated by that time, that I knew, but so I
was very close to that and to Pete. I really was pretty close to him till he died.
A wonderful guy. But he, I don’t remember—the race thing didn’t—there
were so few blacks involved. He had Earl Robinson, but Earl wasn’t on the
championship because he’d turned pro in baseball. In fact, I don’t think he
even played on the—because Pete won three straight conference titles there,
13
and I’m trying to think if—I think Earl was gone even for the first one. So he
had—I don’t know if they had any black players at all.
01-00:35:35
Cummins: Well, Newell was AD from 1960 - 1968. In 1968, Rene Herrerias was coach
and Bob Presley was a black player whose Afro did not conform to team
rules. There were other issues as well and Presley was removed from the
team. He was reinstated three days later after considerable protest but to the
consternation of some of the white players. It was a mess and Herrerias was
accused of being racist. He left in 1968 as well.
01-00:36:12
Dickey: Hmm. I don’t remember that specifically, no, no. That’s—
01-00:36:17
Cummins: Because that was also part—really a part of this. It was a very tough time for
Cal, both the FSM and everything attendant on that, plus then these racial
issues, Martin Luther King’s assassination, all the protests, on and on and on.
01-00:36:36
Dickey: I didn’t—my consciousness was raised gradually over the years. But I wasn’t
really, I had never, my background was—I was born in Minnesota, very
northern Minnesota. My dad got a job there with the Forest Service, the first
real job he’d had, and it enabled him to get married. So he and Mom moved
up there and I was born February of ’36, thirty-eight degrees below zero.
[laughing]
01-00:37:15
Cummins: Cold, yes.
01-00:37:18
Dickey: Oh God, it was awful! And we moved because the doctors told my dad that
the weather was just killing him. It was nothing specific, but it was just
beating his body down so much. So we moved to San Diego—
01-00:37:34
Cummins: Well, that was a positive change!
01-00:37:35
Dickey: —which was about as extreme a change as you make. But we drove cross
country. It took us a month. The car broke down in Nebraska, you couldn’t get
a part—you know, that type of stay. But I had never—where we lived in
Minnesota I was about as black as it got. [laughing] You had Scandinavians
and Norwegians and Finns, who are like porcelain for God sakes. So I
didn’t—I never saw a black person at all. I never saw anybody but an extreme
white person.
Then we moved to San Diego, and my best friend was a kid who had Japanese
parents. He lived just around the corner from me. And I never thought
anything of that, and my parents never said anything about that. My parents
14
never, ever criticized any other racial group. They were true Christians, as
opposed to the ones who claim to be Christians these days. But they never—
so I never had any reason to be prejudiced. When we were living in North
Fork, this little town in the hills above Fresno, there were a lot of Indians.
There was a reservation up there, and they had—not a reservation, but they
had had a mission up there that had a lot of Indians/Native Americans. I’m not
very politically correct at times. [laughing] But so I had a lot of contact with
them, but really, I didn’t have much contact, other than [with] Caucasians, for
many years. But that changed pretty rapidly, and I had—my first real shock
wave was when I had to interview Harry Edwards.
01-00:40:06
Cummins: Yes, and what was that over?
01-00:40:06
Dickey: Well, you know, this is ’68. That’s when—
01-00:40:09
Cummins: Okay, yeah, the Olympics.
01-00:40:14
Dickey: That’s right. He was speaking at a Baptist church out in San Francisco, and I
was sent out to cover him. He came in wearing the robes—you know Harry.
01-00:40:24
Cummins: Yes, a dashiki.
01-00:40:24
Dickey: And six eight—my God!
Scared me to death. But we have since gotten to know each other very well
and we have a good time. But I’ve told him about that. My son took a class
from him when he was still in high school, in the summer before he went to
college. He went to Cal too. But he was scared of him too! [laughter]
01-00:40:55
Cummins: So what was the nature of the interview?
01-00:40:56
Dickey: Well, it was just—because it was right after the Olympics, so they wanted me
to talk to him about that. And of course Harry was at his best—but that was
kind of the time I first started really—
01-00:41:14
Cummins: Paying attention.
01-00:41:16
Dickey: —understanding what was going on with all of this stuff. And so, but as I say,
I was not raised to be prejudiced in any way, and so I never have been, which
is a good thing. In dealing right now with the teams you have blacks and
15
Latins and Japanese, Chinese—practically everything. So you have to be able
to deal with that. But so it’s a sea change from when I started.
01-00:41:54
Cummins: Oh yeah, absolutely.
01-00:42:00
Dickey: But that didn’t—but I don’t remember, at that time, and it may be that I just
wasn’t paying attention.
01-00:42:08
Cummins: Well, Bruce Jenkins wrote this book, on Pete Newell. [A Good Man: The Pete
Newell Story]
01-00:42:09
Dickey: Yeah, I’ve got it.
01-00:42:10
Cummins: Newell talks about that. Apparently, it was a very hard time for him because
he viewed Roger Heyns and Budd Cheit as much less favorably inclined to
athletics than [Glenn] Seaborg. So I’m looking into that a bit too, and I’ve
interviewed Budd Cheit. I just finished that. He said there were—the one
instance I’ve remembered now had to do with playing the national anthem
before the basketball games. Pete was concerned that if they played the
national anthem it would generate protest before basketball games, and so that
became an issue. And then—Budd Cheit and his assistant, Don Hopkins—he
worked for Ron Dellums after he worked for Budd—met with Newell. That
was one issue. The other issue had to do, again, with the Presley matter and
the decision to remove him from the team. And again, there was some
intervention on the part of the administration, about “Do you really want to do
this?”
And of course—and you might say something about this too—there was such
a clash of cultures, where when you’re playing athletics at a high level the
authority of the coach is the ultimate authority.
01-00:44:08
Dickey: Right.
01-00:44:08
Cummins: And you don’t question authority, you do what the coach says. And yet, here
was this whole countercultural revolution which was an attack on authority
01-00:44:23
Dickey: Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, and also, on the racial thing, blacks were starting
to—of course Jackie Robinson had come into baseball, and football had been,
unofficially, had been broken before that in the early forties. And then
basketball was the slowest, which is kind of ironic, because now it’s almost all
black.
16
01-00:44:49
Cummins: Exactly, exactly.
01-00:44:51
Dickey: But when Bill [William F.] Russell—those great teams at USF, and Phil
Wolpert said that any time he started more than a couple blacks he got all of
these angry letters and that type of thing. I was talking to him when I was at
this USF thing yesterday, talking about—one of the guys said that Russell was
always upset, because when he was a junior they had won the NCAA title and
he was the most valuable player and all that, but the writers voted Kenny
Sears the MVP of the whole conference that year. [laughing] Well, the reason
we were talking about it is because in my experience in Watsonville I knew
Sears. He was from Watsonville. And he was a good player, but he was not
anywhere near the class of Bill Russell. But it actually had everything to do
with the color of his skin. But that was—they were starting to break through,
and Wolpert was a courageous man! He was going to play his best players and
he didn’t care what color they were. So that was the start of it.
But it didn’t—it took another—the Texas Western [College] thing, when they
won the NCAA [national title]. That was a real breakthrough, because it was
an all-black team against an all-white team. But it took until then before
people really started to accept the idea that there could be black players, and
now it’s pretty common.
01-00:46:35
Cummins: Yeah, it’s a very big change. That’s for sure.
01-00:46:37
Dickey: But it wasn’t—at Cal it wasn’t that profound a change for a while. They had
some—I remember Jackie Ridgle, Bob Presley, Ansley Truitt—they had some
very good black players under Jim Padgett—way back in about ’66,
somewhere around there. So they started—Padgett recruited some good
players but unfortunately didn’t know how to coach them.
01-00:47:10
Cummins: Yes, well that’s what he was known for, great recruiter.
01-00:47:14
Dickey: Yeah, right—how to roll the ball out. But anyway, so they did start to break
through there, and I don’t know what the student body was like at the time,
but I’m assuming that it started to get a lot more color in it too.
01-00:47:38
Cummins: I’m not—let’s see, that would have been the late sixties? I think the big moves
certainly were under Mike Heyman, because that was a top priority of his,—
really pushing affirmative action, so that’s when the biggest dramatic shift
occurred.
17
So then, in ’70-’71, Dave is appointed the AD. What’s your recollection from
that period of time?
01-00:48:15
Dickey: Right, well—it was a very tough period, because he came in with the school
on probation. And usually when a school is put on probation it’s because
they’ve brought in a lot of great athletes. But Cal wasn’t winning! So it’s kind
of like with the Holmoe situation, you’ve got the worst of all worlds. You’re
on probation and you’ve got terrible teams. So what’s the point? Jack Citrin
told me one time, he said it’s a myth that it’s the top coaches that break all of
the recruiting rules. He said it’s usually the bad coaches, because they’re
trying to get some good players. But so he had a point there, and basically he
was talking about Holmoe, of course.
01-00:49:03
Cummins: One of the interesting things about that, the Isaac Curtis situation, I guess was
that it had to do—as you said, with somebody taking the SATs, but he was
doing well academically. He wasn’t flunking out or anything like that. He
didn’t have terrible grades. I guess that in the NCAA at that time, if you had a
player like that, who the NCAA said should not be playing, if the opposing
team said they didn’t care whether he played or not, then you’d play them.
The question was then whether you would lose the game if he played, et
cetera. But so there was a rules issue at that time, which is interesting in terms
of how much power the NCAA actually had to enforce.
01-00:49:57
Dickey: Yeah, right.
01-00:49:58
Cummins: Which was different, obviously, than it is today. That’s an interesting thing.
And then the administration—Bob Kerley was the vice chancellor at that time,
and according to what Dave told me, they wanted to take this issue on, take
the NCAA to court. Do you remember anything about that?
01-00:50:20
Dickey: I remember just vaguely, yeah, that they were threatening to do that.
01-00:50:24
Cummins: So Dave comes in and says, as AD, that doesn’t make any sense. We
shouldn’t be suing them; we should start working with them.
01-00:50:33
Dickey: Yes.
01-00:50:34
Cummins: And that’s when Dave takes, as you indicated in that column I mentioned, he
really changed the institution’s approach to working with the NCAA.
18
01-00:50:46
Dickey: Yeah, right. He wanted to work within it and not oppose it. But you know, it’s
interesting. I had—a guy came to me many years after all this happened, and
he’d been a “tutor” for athletes.
01-00:51:02
Cummins: At that time?
01-00:51:03
Dickey: Over the years, yeah. And some of them had been at USF, some of them had
been at Cal, and there were guys—the funniest story was a USF guy. Byron
“Snake” Jones, who was a guard. He came in from a South Carolina JC and he
was illiterate, but he’d been passed through. He was writing papers for this
guy, and he was doing so well he was going to be an academic All-American.
The coaches flunked him in PE, so I guess it would have been so
embarrassing if it had come out. [laughter]
01-00:51:45
Cummins: I’ll say.
01-00:51:49
Dickey: He did papers for Curtis. He showed me the papers. He did papers for Bob
Presley, and he said Presley had a girlfriend who was white, five foot four—
she took tests for him.
01-00:52:04
Cummins: That’s amazing.
01-00:52:06
Dickey: Yeah, that’s pretty—yeah, “Oh Bob, how are we doing, Bob?” But she took
tests for him, and this guy wrote papers for him, and so he stayed eligible.
01-00:52:19
Cummins: Do you know Russ Ellis? He was a vice chancellor, a faculty member at
Berkeley.
01-00:52:26
Dickey: The name is familiar.
01-00:52:27
Cummins: He was a big track star at UCLA in the fifties. He said the same thing, because
Russ is a very smart guy, and his roommate was a star basketball player when
they won the NIT. And the NIT was bigger than the NCAA at that point in
time. Russ describes this situation—he said that guy never studied a lick in his
life—never. They didn’t have resident student housing at that time. They lived
in coops, basically, and they were roommates. So Russ said—and he was just
the star. I can’t remember his name. But he had come back from the
tournament, and Russ saw him at his desk and thought my God, what’s he
doing at his desk? I’ve never seen him [at his desk]. And so he went over and
he was kidding him, and basically he was cutting his photographs out of the
19
newspaper and putting them in his scrapbook.[laughter] But Russ made the
same point. He said a blue book, the test book, would appear on Russ’s desk
for somebody else, and Russ would take the test. He said it wasn’t terribly
overt, but—so this isn’t surprising, that this was occurring at a very different
time, of course.
01-00:53:55
Dickey: Yeah, it’s—I don’t know. I remember that—
01-00:54:02
Cummins: Was this tutor paid by the universities?
01-00:54:04
Dickey: No, no.
01-00:54:07
Cummins: So he was doing this on his own.
01-00:54:09
Dickey: Yeah, he was paid by the individuals. My son—Dave helped him get into Cal,
because Scott had good grades—he was in the huge pool of students who
were qualified but weren’t quite at the top level. And so Dave got him into the
Extension, UC Extension.
01-00:54:38
Cummins: Oh yeah, through that—
01-00:54:41
Dickey: Yeah, and so then—he did fine. He wound up—he’s a lawyer now, so he’s—
when he chose to apply himself he did very well. But Dave also—Scott, we’d
talked and said he wanted to, Scott wanted to stay in a dorm. For a while he
was living at home with us, but the second semester Dave said, “Well, there’s
an opening at Clark Kerr, which is, of course it’s supposed to be for the very
top students or athletes.
01-00:55:15
Cummins: A country club.
01-00:55:16
Dickey: Yeah, and Scott was neither one, but he got in on the athletes, so he was
staying in a—five in a room, they had a kind of a suite. He didn’t like it much,
and he got out after one semester and came back home. But he said the
athletes had copies of tests, and this is in the nineties, the early nineties. So it’s
still going on, I guess.
01-00:55:55
Cummins: Yeah, the tests, part of it—the fraternities, of course, keep tests. So that’s—
nothing you can do about that. If they had gotten the—now, I guess, it’s
possible, but I would imagine very hard to do, where just hacking into a
computer you can pull up whatever the professor’s—the test, or you can
20
change grades. There have been situations where people have hacked into the
computer at—I don’t know about at Berkeley, but I know other places, and
changed grades and things like that too. So yeah, it’s a constant issue.
01-00:56:32
Dickey: Yeah, it’s for real. And when I was in school I remember that there were
classes that the athletes took because they were supposed to be—
01-00:56:41
Cummins: Easier.
01-00:56:43
Dickey: —easier. But sometimes—I got in one. I didn’t take it because the athletes
were in it, I just—I majored in journalism, but I had eighteen journalism units,
and they said take eighteen journalism units and then take six other units in a
field of your interest, special interest. Well, I was always interested in political
science. I wound up with twenty-seven political science units! So anyway, and
one of them was this class in Latin American politics.
01-00:57:19
Cummins: Who taught it? Do you remember?
01-00:57:21
Dickey: I don’t remember at all, and it was supposed to be a snap course. That’s so the
athletes—a lot of athletes were in it. Well, this guy, I guess he heard that he
had this reputation, so he decided to teach everybody a lesson. But he was
giving tests that were essay questions on fairly minor points. And it was just
ridiculous, so everybody was taking books to class, and the proctors knew
what was going on. They knew that these tests were unfair. They would walk
up and down the aisles and they wouldn’t look right or left. They’d just walk
up and down the aisles, and people are thumbing through their books and what
the hell was this? Oh God, it was awful! So sometimes it didn’t work out so
well. But anyway…
01-00:58:16
Cummins: So Dave comes in, gets those changes—one of the first things he told me that
he had to do, there was a Bear boosters group that was independent of the
university.
01-00:58:29
Dickey: Right.
01-00:58:32
Cummins: He told Al Bowker that he did not think that was healthy, that we’ve got to
change this and set up our own. And that was when Bear Backers started. But
Dave tells this story about—he had cleared that with Bowker. He goes over to
the city to meet with this group, and immediately they start telling him how
Intercollegiate Athletics is going to run—and you can do this and you can do
that. [laughter] And Dave said, “I’m sorry. That’s not the way it’s going to be
anymore.” And so there was this either direct or implied threat—well, you’re
21
not going to get our money if blah, blah, blah. And Dave said, “That’s fine.
Thank you very much,” and he got up and walked out. And he said before he
got back to the campus the phones were ringing over in the chancellor’s
office—and you know, this kind of thing. So that’s also a very common issue
in intercollegiate athletics. What was your involvement? How did you deal
with that, if at all?
01-00:59:45
Dickey: I didn’t deal with that. I remember when that happened with Dave, and I
sympathized with him because I totally agreed with his position. Most of the
real excesses in college sports come from boosters who are under no control
of the university and just acting on their own—the Sam Gilbert thing. But I
didn’t get involved at that point. I wasn’t writing about that type of thing, and
this was pretty early, because I started writing—
01-01:00:24
Cummins: Yeah, right, ’71 to the—
01-01:00:27
Dickey: Yeah, right, as I say in ’71 I was still supposedly experimental, although it
was pretty certain I was going to be, as soon as [Charles de Young] Thieriot
opened up the pocketbook a little bit. But so I was very early in my column-
writing career, and I wasn’t ready to delve into that kind of issue particularly,
so I didn’t get involved in that, but I was certainly aware of it at the time. I
knew some of these guys, and they were very angry.
01-01:01:04
Cummins: So as a reporter, and particularly over the years then, the longer you’re there,
the bigger reputation you have, et cetera, you have to be getting calls and
people talking to you at every opportunity, right? About their views—and
maybe that’s still the case, I would assume.
01-01:01:21
Dickey: Yeah, yeah right. That’s—I don’t get it as much now, because I’m not on the
Chronicle, and so not nearly as many people are reading me as did at one
point. Because the Chronicle has—well, their readership is down a lot now,
but it was, at the point I—when Hearst bought the paper the circulation was
about six hundred thousand, and it’s throughout Northern California. That’s a
lot of people!
01-01:01:55
Cummins: It is, it is.
01-01:01:57
Dickey: They figured, at that time anyway—I don’t know if the formula is still the
same, but they figured that for every subscription it meant three readers, on
the average.
01-01:02:07
Cummins: Wow, that’s a lot of people.
22
01-01:02:09
Dickey: So you’re talking about almost two million people reading the paper. And a
high percentage of those people read sports. So I had a pretty good forum, and
so I would get a lot of people. I was very closely identified with Cal; I never
made a secret of that. But now it’s—I don’t have anywhere near that kind of
readership. So I have a lot of—on my website they’re almost all Cal people, I
think. But so—I hear a lot from them, and a lot of them—it depends on how
the football team is doing. [laughing]
01-01:02:56
Cummins: And it’s all pretty much football, right?
01-01:02:57
Dickey: Oh yeah.
01-01:03:00
Cummins: Football predominates.
01-01:03:00
Dickey: Yeah, basketball is not anywhere near the issue. Now, when Ben Braun was
the coach—and at the end I was campaigning to get rid of him—that
generated a lot of mail, e-mail.
01-01:03:21
Cummins: Oh yes, pro and con, I would imagine.
01-01:03:21
Dickey: Yeah, but mostly—
01-01:03:23
Cummins: Mostly con.
01-01:03:24
Dickey: —mostly people agreeing with me.
01-01:03:24
Cummins: Oh, agreeing? Oh!
01-01:03:25
Dickey: Yeah, right. Braun was not popular. But now, what can you say? Mike
Montgomery is a great coach.
01-01:03:39
Cummins: Oh yeah, absolutely.
01-01:03:42
Dickey: I always said he was the best college coach I’d seen, on a regular basis, since
Newell. I don’t see Coach K [Mike Krzyzewski] and people like that. But he
really is a terrific coach, and they got to the NC[AA]—they won the thing last
year. I don’t know what they’ll do this year. It’s a very young team. I haven’t
23
really—I’ve just seen a little bit on TV. But there’s nowhere near the interest
in basketball.
01-01:04:15
Cummins: Yeah, exactly.
01-01:04:17
Dickey: And that’s true throughout the area. Football is so much more popular, and
baseball is number two. But it’s—even when the Giants win the World Series,
it’s a poor number two.
01-01:04:35
Cummins: So there’s that initial period where Dave Maggard deals with that. He creates
the Bear Backers. Also, Title IX passes in ’72. Did you deal with Title IX
issues?
01-01:04:53
Dickey: Yeah. I got interested in women’s sports, and I was writing a lot about
women’s sports in the seventies—practically the only columnist in the area
who was. That was due to my wife. [laughter]
01-01:05:06
Cummins: Good for her!
01-01:05:08
Dickey: Well, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot, because when we got married I
had the usual MCP attitudes. Boys and men were supposed to play sports, and
girls and women would cheer them on. Nancy played basketball when she was
in high school and she’s a good athlete—a much better athlete than I am. And
she set me straight on that issue. [laughing] So I actually became quite a
champion of women’s sports in that era. And I had met, talked to Billie Jean
King, who was another very persuasive person back in the sixties, when I was
still just a reporter. She had, as you know, a very strong point of view. And
so—yeah, I thought Title IX was fine. And I thought it was past time for—
because as I’ve written several times, if you talk, as I have talked so many
times about sports having a value, playing sports having a value, teaching you
team work, teaching you all the things that you learn—
01-01:06:26
Cummins: Discipline, yes.
01-01:06:27
Dickey: —how to deal with success and failure—well, girls should be entitled to that
as well as boys.
01-01:06:36
Cummins: Yes, yes. Exactly.
24
01-01:06:37
Dickey: So no, I was all for that. And I realized that this still—that it would put a
strain on the athletic budgets, because there’s nothing comparable to football
in women’s sports. And so there’s no—as I say, women’s basketball at
Stanford probably makes money , but it doesn’t at Cal.
01-01:06:58
Cummins: No, not at all. Right.
01-01:07:01
Dickey: And they’ve had some pretty good teams.
01-01:07:06
Cummins: Yes, yes.
01-01:07:09
Dickey: But it’s still—they deserve it, so they should have the chance. But it did—
there’s no question it has put a strain on athletic budgets. And there’s no
question that there are a lot of men who resent it. I hear—I heard from a lot of
them at that time. When I wrote about women’s sports it was probably the
most unpopular subject that I wrote about on a consistent basis. It didn’t stop
me. [laughing]
There was one time when we were invited—the Women’s Sports Foundation
had its office in San Francisco for a long time, and they had their annual
banquet in San Francisco and they invited me and Nancy. I was the only
media member that was invited. Now, there was one other member of the
media there—what’s her name—Donna de Verona. But she was invited
because she was president of the [Women’s] Sports Foundation.
01-01:08:23
Dickey: When I was down in Watsonville, maybe my second year there—let’s
see, ’58—yeah, it was ’59, yeah. I was working out at the Y regularly, and a
guy there says they had a swim meet coming up and he said, “You ought to
come to this meet. This young girl, Donna de Verona is just terrific.” And of
course she was in the Olympics the next year.
01-01:08:55
Cummins: So then in ’76 Lue Lilly gets hired as the women’s athletic director. Any
involvement?
01-01:09:05
Dickey: Yeah, I talked to Lue quite a bit. In fact, I saw her last year after the USC
game. We both left early. We were on the bus leaving, and I was talking to
her. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but I talked to her quite a few times, for a
while.
01-01:09:25
Cummins: Because there was a lot of tension between Dave and Lue and the—
25
01-01:09:27
Dickey: Yeah, well, they’re both strong people.
01-01:09:29
Cummins: Exactly. And those departments weren’t merged. They were separate. There
was also, right at the same time that Dave was appointed, the head of Rec
Sports, Bill Manning, was appointed. I don’t know if you ever had any contact
with him.
01-01:09:45
Dickey: I didn’t really, no. It was not—
01-01:09:47
Cummins: So you had these three big organizations—and they weren’t big, but they were
competing basically, I would say, with one another in terms of the resources.
And so that was tough, I think, all the way around. And that continued all the
way up until, probably, Dave left in ’92. And again, basically revolving
around facilities and budgets, because Cal doesn’t have a lot of facilities. It’s a
landlocked campus, and that makes it very difficult.
01-01:10:31
Dickey: Yeah, it is difficult. I know that Dave had a lot of battles to fight and never
had much money to work with. And people would criticize his hiring of
coaches, but I’d point out he didn’t have the funds to go out and get the best
coach in the land, or even the second best. But it was a battle. And I think, you
know, the men’s and women’s departments should have been combined from
the start. I think it’s always a mistake to have two—because you’re always
going to have a competition then. And so that just didn’t make sense, and the
Rec Sports—I never could figure out quite where that was coming in, but I
know it was a headache for Dave.
01-01:11:27
Cummins: Yeah, definitely, but it gets into the values question. And again, that’s one of
these things that has changed over time in terms of the institutional role of
providing student support services. And now, with this big emphasis on
managing your own health and the importance of exercise, and on and on, I
think that was there at an earlier stage through the Physical Education
Department—going way back, where they provided these courses. If you
wanted to learn how to play tennis or golf, or whatever, you could take classes
and do that. There was an actual Physical Education Department, which there
isn’t anymore—that was eliminated in 1997. But with this emphasis on that,
and then the question of how much money are you putting towards, say, a
recreational sports program so that students across the board get that kind of
benefit versus a lot of money devoted to a lot fewer students.
01-01:12:41
Dickey: Yeah, and I don’t know how you resolve that. I think both have value in
different ways, totally different ways. The value of the intercollegiate program
is that it’s an outlet for students and alumni, especially at the football games
26
you come together. Because you know, you go to a home game here—and I
walk around campus all the time. I love it. And you see all these groups
gathering, and you see—what’s always interesting to me about the Cal games
is that you see such a wide range of ages. Because you see people older than
me—some of them probably ten, twelve years older. And then you see kids,
little toddlers coming with their parents. But everybody’s coming together and
they’re having their tailgates—their lunches, whatever you want to call them.
And so—and it’s one of the few activities you can think of that do bring
students and alumni together, because you see a lot of students.
01-01:14:06
Cummins: No question.
01-01:14:07
Dickey: I remember I went to the UC Davis game, and I left because it wasn’t much of
a game, obviously. But there were a lot of Davis students there and alums
from Davis, because a lot of them work and live in the area, and even if they
don’t, Davis isn’t very far away. But I was walking down to that Underhill
Parking Garage where we park now, and there were just so many students
walking along and just having a good time. The Davis students were fine, and
the fact that their team was getting beat bad—they knew the team was going
to get beat. They weren’t worried about that. They’re just looking for the
parties! [laughing] But I enjoy just seeing the young people, because I always
feel—the last thing I want to be around is people my own age. That’s a
justification I always make for—maybe it’s just because I like to see the
games, but you can make that justification for it.
The recreational sports, of course it’s a totally different thing, that you need
something for the students to be able to play games themselves, work out,
whatever. And as you say, it has become—there’s become much more
emphasis on that. There was none when I was going to school.
01-01:15:46
Cummins: Well, even the origins of intercollegiate athletics were extracurricular. They
were organized by students, basically because the curriculum was so dry and
boring in the 1800s, and they were quickly commercialized. I think every one
of the issues that intercollegiate athletics faces today, whether it’s the amateur
versus professional, whether it’s the involvement of donors and alumni,
whether it’s eligibility issues, whether it’s win at all costs—all the issues that
everybody talks about. They were all there in the 1800s, every one of them.
What has changed is that it has become so big.
01-01:16:39
Dickey: Yeah, right. This has exploded. Well, I remember when I was—I guess I was
a teenager by that time, but when Hugh McElhenny went to [University of]
Washington—he had played at Compton JC. I remember reading an article
about him, and it said he found his way to Washington by following a trail of
twenty-dollar bills.
27
01-01:17:03
Cummins: Yes, exactly—I remember that. I remember that.
01-01:17:05
Dickey: That line has always stuck with me. And of course when he turned pro,
Frankie Albert said he had to take a cut in pay! So commercialism in college
football is hardly new, but it has become much more—the stakes are much
higher. The players, they get pro contracts that are $40 million if they’re the
number one draft choice. It’s just incredible. So everything has just pssht—
gone that much higher, and I don’t know where it’s all going to end. In pro
sports, as I was saying, they’ve had the same kind of explosion with the
players’ contracts, but they can raise ticket prices and they can attract more
people. They can—they’re not hurting. They’re making money, but college
sports are much more limited in how they can maximize—I’m already hearing
moans from Cal alums about the prices they’re going to have to pay to get
tickets for the football games.
01-01:18:20
Cummins: Yeah, well—and AT&T, playing over there. I heard that—it’s funny, all these
wrinkles that happen in intercollegiate athletics— football in particular. I
don’t know if this is true—I’m checking it out; I just heard it today—that
because we’re playing at AT&T Park, this ISP, which does the marketing for
Cal Athletics—I don’t know whether it was not negotiated in the contract or
whatever—I don’t even know if it’s true, but they’re not willing to cover up
their signage, all the advertising signage at AT&T. And so ISP can’t put in the
advertising that they have contracted for, okay? And so they’re saying, “Well,
we’re going to withhold a million dollars from the payment to Cal.”
01-01:19:11
Dickey: Oh boy!
01-01:19:12
Cummins: Now, it’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this, if it’s true. Again, I don’t
know if it’s true. But shouldn’t that have been put in the contract? And
somebody forgot, or whatever—I don’t know. But that’s the kind of thing
that—
01-01:19:29
Dickey: Somebody just didn’t think of it. Yeah, that’s—
01-01:19:32
Cummins: Exactly, exactly. Or you can’t—you get rainy days and the crowd is not as
good as you projected it’s going to be. Getting the handle on the—
01-01:19:44
Dickey: Oh yeah, it’s very tough while they—it’s interesting, that first game against
SC is going to be at Candlestick, where they have a lot more seats. I thought
they should have gone to Candlestick anyway, because it just eliminated the
schedule conflict and you’ve got many more seats—and AT&T is not a
football park.
28
01-01:20:13
Cummins: Yeah, it’s—I don’t know how they concluded. Have you heard anything?
01-01:20:15
Dickey: I don’t know. I know that Larry Baer can be very persuasive and he’s a Cal
alum. So I don’t know if they thought that would be more conducive. It’s
probably easier to get to, because you can come over on BART, and
Candlestick is difficult to access. But it has a lot of parking, and if you wanted
to have tailgates you could still have tailgates. Not nearly as nice as being on
campus, but—I just don’t know what the thinking was at all on that.
The only football game I’ve seen at AT&T was the Shrine Game. I covered
that a couple of times when I was still with the Chronicle. But I know that the
baseball press box is great for baseball. It’s terrible for football, because
you’re in the end zone. What I did the second game—Jack Hart and Bill
Walsh—and who else? Well, oh God—the former Cal coach that coached
the—Bruce Snyder. They were all—they were in a box upstairs. So I found
out they were up there, so I just went up with the four of them, because I
figured well, I can go down to the press box and get all the stats and write the
story there. But I was going to—and then you could see the game a lot better
from up there, sit out on the little porch of the box. But it’s just not—it’s not a
football stadium at all, and so I don’t know.
You probably saw that they had a game in Wrigley Field, an NFL game?
01-01:22:18
Cummins: Yes, yes.
01-01:22:19
Dickey: And because they’ve added some boxes or something, the field is actually
smaller, the area behind the end zone. One end zone was so limited that they
were afraid if you—
01-01:22:35
Cummins: Yeah, that they were going to crash into something.
01-01:22:37
Dickey: Yeah, right, so the offenses had to—they all played the other way, you know?
[laughter] That must have been interesting.
01-01:22:43
Cummins: I’ll say, I’ll say. So Dave, so he’s there for most of the time that Al Bowker is
the chancellor. Did you have any contact with Bowker?
01-01:22:57
Dickey: No, I never really talked to him. Heyman was the first chancellor I talked to.
01-01:22:59
Cummins: Yeah, exactly. So that’s what I thought.
29
01-01:23:02
Dickey: I talked to Heyman quite a bit.
01-01:23:03
Cummins: So talk about that a little bit.
01-01:23:04
Dickey: Well, you know—I like Mike. He occasionally still e-mails me. He’s back in
New York. My problem with Heyman was not that I disagreed with his basic
philosophy, but that I just didn’t think it worked with Cal, because basically—
of course he was from Dartmouth. He thought that that was the model, the Ivy
League model was the best. And as I say, I agree with him, but you can’t be
an Ivy League team in the Pacific Coast Conference. Unilateral disarmament
doesn’t work.
01-01:23:44
Cummins: And it has not worked.
01-01:23:47
Dickey: And that was what I felt that he just wasn’t willing to give the support to the
athletic program, and as long as you want, in a big-time program, you had to
do that. Now, if you think well, we should take Cal out of that; we should
retreat, and all that. Okay, what are your alternatives? Are you going to play
in a conference with UC Davis? I don’t think if he’d proposed that it would
have been supported by the alumni.
01-01:24:22
Cummins: Yes.
01-01:24:25
Dickey: So that was a problem I had with Heyman, and we had a lot of discussions.
They weren’t unfriendly discussions. I like the guy and I think he’s very
smart, but I think he just had a blind spot there, that he was not being realistic
about the situation.
01-01:24:50
Cummins: And I imagine Dave had to be upset about that too.
01-01:24:52
Dickey: Oh God—well, Heyman made a speech at the NCAA one time that—
01-01:24:56
Cummins: Yeah, ’87-’88.
01-01:24:59
Dickey: Oh God! And I remember Dave was just—he was so embarrassed by it, you
know. Because it just ran counter to everything he was trying to do, and he
knew it ran counter to what everybody at the convention was thinking. It was
just—again, it was the Ivy League talking, and the NCAA is not run by the
Ivy League. And the Ivy League—they do very well, but—I talked to Andy
Geiger about that one time, because he came from Penn before he came to
30
Stanford. I said, “How do they support their programs?” And he said, “Well,
they don’t. It’s all alumni support. Even though they don’t give out athletic
scholarships, they don’t have all these extra things, it still costs far too much
money to run the programs than they can generate at the gate.” But they have,
the alumni are generally able to contribute quite a bit of money, so they do
that. So there’s support, but I don’t think you could do that at Cal.
01-01:26:15
Cummins: Well, yeah, it’s hard to imagine. In the interview I did with Dave—and I’ve
done Mike [Heyman] too, and Mike lives up here now, in the hills, the
Berkeley Hills.
01-01:26:31
Dickey: Oh, he does?
01-01:26:31
Cummins: Yeah, he’s back.
01-01:26:33
Dickey: Oh, oh, I didn’t know that, because the last I heard from him he was in New
York.
01-01:26:39
Cummins: Yeah, but Dave talks about the Cal Sports 80s, his fundraising effort for
facilities. He got Wally Haas and Roger Heyns, who was no longer
chancellor, to co-chair that. He was bringing in a fair amount of money. This
was at a time when fundraising—it was on the horizon. Mike Heyman really
was the one that moved Cal into the big leagues of fundraising, and it was
critically important to do that. But they both talk about having a meeting,
Mike called Dave over and he said, “Here’s my plan. We’ve really got to up
our whole fundraising operation and put it in the big leagues. You’re raising a
lot of money at Cal,” Mike said, “probably more than any other unit, maybe
except Engineering.” He said, in so many words, “We’re going to adopt your
model. The only thing that’s going to change is that when you go to the major
donors,” who included, obviously, the Haas family and others, “you have to
come to me first, for permission.”
01-01:28:07
Dickey: Oh God!
01-01:28:08
Cummins: You know, and so—and now Dave, it’s interesting, in the—because I did a
long interview with Dave. It was probably six/seven hours. From my time,
because I was in the chancellor’s office then. I came over there in ’84 from the
Institute of Governmental Studies that Jack Citrin now runs. I remember—my
recollection is that there was a lot of—I don’t know if complaining is the right
word, from Dave, but not to Mike, but to others, about the fact that he wasn’t
getting enough support from the administration. Before I get there though, I
just want to make this connection between that Cal Sports 80s and
31
fundraising. Because those key donors, in Cal Sports 80s, were the same
people that moved into the Development Office, the major effort that we’ve
done ever since with regard to fundraising. Many of them are still the same.
So even though there’s a lot of research which indicates that there may not be
a clear connection on the fundraising level between athletics and the academic
program, it seems to me that there is a real clear connection there, at Cal,
through just what I describe.
01-01:29:33
Dickey: Yeah, right, yeah.
01-01:29:35
Cummins: So anyway, Dave is much milder in talking about, now, about that period of
time. But my recollection was that he was really frustrated.
01-01:29:48
Dickey: Yeah, he was. When I talked to him, and I talked to him quite a bit in that
period, and yeah, he often told me he was very frustrated with what Heyman
was doing. He just felt he wasn’t getting any support at all. But your
recollections are the same as mine. Dave was not ever a guy who thought that
sports was all there was to the university. There are athletic directors like that,
around the country, but he was not one of them. So he felt he was taking a
fairly balanced approach, but Heyman’s approach was different.
01-01:30:40
Cummins: And then it’s interesting, when you look at what Mike actually did, because
the Athletic Study Center really was developed under him. There was
certainly some academic help for student athletes before that time, but Jack
Citrin and Bob Price and Ken Jowitt, all professors, were the ones that really
made that function, and I think that they’ve done a very good job of doing it.
And that history is also interesting. I’ve done an interview with Jack Citrin. I
did one with Bob Price. Did you know Bob Steidel? The faculty athletic rep
for that whole period of time?
01-01:31:30
Dickey: Yeah, I knew him. Jack’s the guy that I knew best.
01-01:31:34
Cummins: That you talked to more.
01-01:31:35
Dickey: We talked a lot. But I did talk to Steidel too. Interesting—Ken Jowitt, he was
my son’s favorite professor.
01-01:31:46
Cummins: Oh, was he? A very popular professor, that’s for sure.
01-01:31:52
Dickey: He might have spoken at Scott’s graduation.
32
01-01:31:57
Cummins: He may have. That wouldn’t surprise me.
01-01:31:58
Dickey: Yeah, I think he did, yeah.
01-01:32:02
Cummins: And he was—as Jack described him, he said, “Ken—he wouldn’t even know
what a goal line was.” [laughter] Something like that. But he said he had
become this dean of undergraduate education I think it was, and he knew we
were admitting these athletes and said, “We have a responsibility to these
kids. We’ve got to give them—if you’re bringing kids in that are marginal in
terms of their ability to succeed here, we have to make sure that they will
succeed.” And so that was the motivator, and then they got faculty members
to sign up as mentors, and Mike committed the money to make that happen.
The blue-chip athletes—that was Mike too.
There was a lot of push from Dave and from the football program saying we
have to be able to admit some of these kids, and yes, we know there are
significant academic problems there. But if we don’t, we’re really hurting the
program, our ability to succeed, et cetera. So there was a lot of back and forth
about that, and then they put the program in place. Of course they couldn’t do
that without having a really good Athletic Study Center to make sure that
these kids got help, et cetera. So that was also part of what was going on.
So when you had these conversations with Mike, did you have a lot of
conversations over that time?
01-01:33:49
Dickey: No, I don’t know how many it was.
01-01:33:52
Cummins: Did he complain about your writing in your columns? Did he think you were
unfair?
01-01:34:01
Dickey: No, he didn’t complain, he just disagreed with me. And I disagreed with him.
But it was not—no, it was never a thing where he called me in to bawl me out
or anything—no, it was nothing like that. We had—I think he realized that I
wasn’t just a jock sniffer. And so he was trying to convince me. So no, we had
good conversations. I don’t remember how many we had. It wasn’t a lot—
three or four maybe. It wasn’t extensive, but when we did have a conversation
it went on for a while. It wasn’t ten minutes. But no, I enjoyed talking to him.
We just had that basic difference of opinion.
01-01:35:00
Cummins: Now, again, this is all just my recollection. But the impression was that you
had donor friends who were influencing your thinking. And so the
33
scuttlebutt—that’s what it’s called—Glenn is sitting over there and he’s got
these friends.
01-01:35:24
Dickey: [laughing] Oh, that’s funny.
01-01:35:26
Cummins: Anyway, so do you want to say something about all that?
01-01:35:28
Dickey: That’s totally untrue. No, no. I’d known some—I’d known the Haas family, of
course, for many years. Although I don’t think I met them before they bought
the [Oakland] A’s.
01-01:35:44
Cummins: Oh really? Interesting.
01-01:35:46
Dickey: I don’t think I had any contact with them—I know I didn’t have any contact
with Wally. I met Wally and Roy Eisenhardt—in fact, I didn’t even know
what they looked like. In the picture—they came into the Chronicle office,
and the picture that was in the paper that day had the caption wrong. It
reversed them—it identified Wally as Roy, and Roy as Wally. So I started to
say hello to the one I thought was Wally and it was Roy. But so that’s the first
time I’d met them. And I don’t think I’d met Walter before that. Maybe I had.
I don’t know. But my recollection was that that was the first time. But I talked
to him quite a bit. And of course I talked to—Roy was the one I talked with
the most, and he was married into the family but not a part of it. But we used
to have great conversations when he was the president of the A’s, and not
necessarily about baseball.
01-01:36:49
Cummins: A very smart guy.
01-01:36:50
Dickey: He’s an amazing person. He just has such a wide range of interests. I knew he
wouldn’t stay long with that job, because he couldn’t confine himself to that.
Now that Sandy followed him, and Sandy [Alderson] is [zooming sounds]—
there’s an objective, take that hill. But Roy is just—he’s all over the place. I’d
go and talk to him for an hour, and baseball might be ten minutes. But so I had
a lot of conversations with him, and I still do occasionally. He subscribes to
my website. And Wally—I had some conversations with him, and Walter,
who is just a great, great person. But influencing me? No. In fact, it was quite
the opposite at one point, when I was criticizing Braun, because they were
supporting him, and that was practically the only thing that was keeping him
there. But so I was going against their wishes there certainly, but even before
that—no, I never—I talked with some people, but my views are my own.
[laughing]
34
01-01:38:15
Cummins: Oh, of course. But you know what happens. You get onto this siege mentality
and that’s how it’s—
01-01:38:19
Dickey: I know. I’ve often heard that from people. Oh yeah, he’s listening to—you
know. The only guy who really influenced me was Bill Walsh, but that was
because he was the story on football, and if he said something I tended to
believe it.
01-01:38:50
Cummins: So [Bruce] Snyder comes in then, and as you said in one of the columns—I’m
going back reading your columns, and you talk about the three best coaches in
your view, and Snyder obviously was one of them. And then in this column I
was just reading yesterday you talk about the Smelser Report. And I don’t
know that you reference [Neil] Smelser, but he was the chair of this report, of
a committee report—and the committee was something that Tien put together
when he became chancellor in 1990. It came out in ’91 and it recommended
this broad-based, highly competitive program for Intercollegiate Athletics.
01-01:39:45
Dickey: I remember that, yeah.
01-01:39:48
Cummins: This committee—I was on that committee, and the committee was put
together in part I think to appease some of the donors who were complaining
so much about Mike not supporting Intercollegiate Athletics. So this was a
way—okay, let’s put this together. Jack Citrin was very involved and Smelser
was the chair, so he writes this report. That’s the number-one
recommendation, that there has always been this ambivalence or ambiguity
about the value of intercollegiate athletics at Berkeley and we’ve got to get
our act together. We’ve got to be clear about what the mission is, and the
committee recommends a broad-based, highly competitive approach, to mirror
the excellence of the academic program. That’s essentially what it says.
So Tien, as you say right in that column—here will be the test. Will they
match Snyder’s contract, or not, from Arizona State? And at that time
Snyder—I think Snyder’s salary was something like $250,000 at Cal. They
offered him double that at Arizona State. And so Tien doesn’t do it. He does
not match it, and it’s really interesting, because what he told me was that he
couldn’t do it. He said, “I just can’t.” In a way, it would not be proper to do
that. The faculty wouldn’t tolerate that, paying a football coach more than the
top professors make on the campus, et cetera. And when I interviewed Budd
Cheit recently he said that he got a call, Budd, from Walter Haas, Sr., who
was—he was the icon of the donor community really, at Cal. He said to
Budd—do you know who Budd is? You know Budd.
01-01:41:54
Dickey: Oh yes, I’ve talked to him.
35
01-01:41:58
Cummins: And so he said that he understood that Snyder was thinking about leaving. He
knew there was a salary discrepancy there. He would be happy to help—he
and other people—so that should not be an issue. But he didn’t know what
Tien’s view on this was, and would Budd call Tien? So Budd calls Tien, tells
him this, and Tien says, “Tell Walter thank you very much. I deeply
appreciate it, but we can’t do that here at Cal.” So that, I think is really
interesting on a couple of levels. One, that this very key person, donor, didn’t
feel comfortable calling Tien directly. He called Budd Cheit and asked him to
call. And secondly, despite the Smelser Report—Tien didn’t accept the offer.
01-01:42:56
Dickey: Yeah, well—a couple of things. I think, from my experience with Walter
Haas, that it was more that he wouldn’t feel—he wouldn’t want the chancellor
to feel he was pressuring him. So that’s why he would call somebody else,
because he was very—he was just a good person. He was not going to use his
influence in a negative way, what he would view as a negative way. So, but I
was also—I’d heard that. I didn’t hear that it was Walter, but I’d heard that
there were donors who were—
01-01:43:45
Cummins: People were willing, yeah.
01-01:43:44
Dickey: —willing to make up the difference, and Cal could have kept him. But I also
heard that Bockrath told [him], when they were on their way back from the—
what was it, the Gator Bowl, or whatever it was.
01-01:43:57
Cummins: Citrus Bowl.
01-01:43:58
Dickey: Citrus—anyway, that when—Snyder hadn’t interviewed with Arizona yet, but
he said that he had an offer to interview with Arizona, and Bockrath told him,
“Well, you’d better take it.” [laughing] So I don’t think he wanted—and that
might have been part of the equation. He might have said something to Tien
about—no, he’s not worth it. I don’t know. Although it’s hard for me to
believe that Tien would really listen to him at that point, but I don’t know. I
didn’t know Tien. Our only contacts were in the football press box. He came
up to me when the Bears were just thumping SC that year, and he threw his
arms around me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
01-01:44:58
Cummins: Exactly, and that’s in the column.
01-01:45:02
Dickey: Yeah, anyway, but—but my contacts with him were extremely limited. He
came by the table one time when Jack and I were having lunch at the Faculty
Club and said hello, but I never sat down and talked to him at any length. So it
was nothing—I had talked much more to Heyman than I did to Tien.
36
01-01:45:29
Cummins: Yeah, interesting. Both [John] Kasser and Dave [Maggard] thought that Mike
[Heyman] was more supportive of Intercollegiate Athletics.
01-01:45:45
Dickey: Than Tien was?
01-01:45:44
Cummins: Yeah.
01-01:45:46
Dickey: Yeah.
01-01:45:46
Cummins: But I think the problem was that the budget, when Tien was chancellor in that
early period, was just terrible. It wasn’t as bad, by any means, as it is today,
but it was in the ballpark. We had 470 or so faculty that took the voluntary
early retirement, and those faculty positions had to be made up over time. We
never got back to where we were then. So it was a very tough time financially.
And in the Smelser Report it laid out some options for how to do a financing
model for a mission of intercollegiate athletics that they describe, but nobody
ever did it. It was just never undertaken.
01-01:46:40
Dickey: Well, I didn’t—Tien was—of course he came out and endorsed that report
very strongly as I remember.
01-01:46:50
Cummins: Well, he—it’s interesting. What I can find in the records is there’s a press
release that Ray Colvig wrote, where he thanks the committee, et cetera. But
there’s never a letter that goes from Tien to Neil Smelser saying, “Thank you
very much. It was a really good report. Here’s what I’m prepared to do.” So
that was interesting. I don’t know—why that was particularly the case I don’t
know. I certainly—I think in spirit he would endorse that report. He never
talked to me or anybody else about the fact that he didn’t support it, but it’s
interesting that there isn’t that kind of follow-up.
01-01:47:41
Dickey: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s—well, the Snyder thing was unfortunate. I can see
if—now, with Walter Haas, he wouldn’t try to influence—he would donate
the money—okay, that’s it. But there are a lot of guys—and you’re setting a
precedent, and that’s where a lot of schools have gotten into trouble with that
type of thing, so I can see why they didn’t want to do it that way. It was just
unfortunate that the school—the program was at its peak at that point and
Snyder was just doing so well. And he liked it here. A lot of coaches don’t
care where they are. They are just in their little cocoon. But Bruce was not
like that, and he and his wife both—they did a lot of things in the city and they
enjoyed the area.
37
01-01:48:48
Cummins: Exactly, I think that’s right. Well, Dave talks about the Bockrath situation too,
both in terms of Snyder and [Lou] Campanelli, because there were two issues
at that point in time too.
01-01:49:06
Dickey: The Campanelli thing was terrible. It was so mishandled. Oh!
01-01:49:11
Cummins: Well, tell me what you know about that.
01-01:49:12
Dickey: Well, Lou was a guy that was really hard on his players. He would be very
critical and he would tongue-lash them. He was just kind of the old-school
coach—there are guys like that. I don’t agree with that philosophy, but that’s
the way he was and it worked for him and they had some success. But my
feeling was—the players came to Bockrath and complained about him. That’s
when he fired him, or I guess he was down in the dressing room and heard
him, whatever.
01-01:49:52
Cummins: Tearing into them, yes.
01-01:49:54
Dickey: Yeah, I mean that’s the type of thing that—this was no surprise. This is the
kind of coach Campanelli had been. If Bockrath thought that that was bad, he
should have taken him aside before the start of the season and said, “If you
don’t change, you’re going to be out of here,” and let him know that this was
not approved behavior and all that kind of thing. But he didn’t do that, and
then he makes the decision during the season, when it happened, and it blew
up. And then of course the guy who he brought in was, as I said about
Padgett—roll the ball out. He was as bad a coach as I’ve known. He was a
great recruiter, but as it turned out, one of the reasons he was a great recruiter
is the guys were getting paid. So I didn’t know about that at the time, but I did
know that he couldn’t coach a lick. But anyway, that was just a—and it was
too bad, because in one sense it was a glorious time for Cal basketball. Jason
Kidd was such a great player. Of course there’s also a question of why he
came to Cal in the first place.
01-01:51:27
Cummins: Well, say something about that.
01-01:51:29
Dickey: Well, I don’t know anything. All I know are the rumors that he was either paid
or something was done. He was not a student, ever. And he left—of course he
just stopped going to class entirely as soon as he knew he was going to leave
after his sophomore year. It was not a—I really loved Jason as a player, but
it’s not a period that I’m particularly happy about with Cal basketball because
of that, because we haven’t had too many like that. But while Chuck Muncie
was much the same way—he didn’t like going to class. [laughing] Roger
38
Theder had to babysit him to make him go to class. But Chuck is a lot smarter
individual. Jason’s a great basketball player. He’s smart on the basketball
court, but he’s not a smart individual. And Chuck has straightened his life out
pretty good, finally. He got into drugs and everything. But we should have
been able to really enjoy the team, but there was always this—kind of
wondering why, how he got there and whether it was kosher and all this kind
of stuff. So it was really—a lot of mixed emotions.
01-01:53:01
Cummins: It’s funny, because athletics is full of mixed emotions, isn’t it?
01-01:53:07
Dickey: Oh yeah, yeah, and a lot of compromises.
01-01:53:10
Cummins: A lot of compromises.
01-01:53:13
Dickey: I’m more aware of that than a lot of people.
01-01:54:33
Cummins: Okay, thank you. That’s great.
01-01:54:33
Dickey: All righty.
01-01:54:37
Cummins: Wonderful, all right. Yeah, we’re doing fine.
39
Interview 2: January 31, 2012
Begin Audio File 2
02-00:00:02
Cummins: Okay, this is January 31, 2012. This is the second interview with Glenn
Dickey. And Glenn, we were talking about the—we had finished in the last
interview right as John Kasser was coming in as the AD, so [Todd] Bozeman,
obviously there was the Bozeman problem. We had talked about that. Kasser
comes in, the programs, Men’s and Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics and
Rec Sports, were merged at that point in time. You comment on that a little bit
in the previous interview. Haas Pavilion was coming right up as an issue that
had to be addressed, et cetera. Any comments you want to make, or any
recollections you have about that period?
02-00:01:02
Dickey: Well, you know, the first time I met John Kasser I thought this guy is terrific!
He’s going to be just great. He was very outgoing, very gregarious, all those
things. What I found out after a while was that there wasn’t much behind that
front. There wasn’t much follow-through. I think he did a pretty good job with
the Haas Pavilion. He wasn’t in charge of it, but I think he did talk to a lot of
donors about that. But as far as making decisions in the Athletic Department,
he tended to make quick ones without much research. I particularly noticed it
in football, because when Keith Gilbertson was fired—well, they hired Steve
Mariucci, and Mariucci was just there for one year, and then he also had to
hire a basketball coach in that period. He hired Ben Braun, who I thought, at
the start, would be pretty good—and he was pretty good for a while. And of
course, he was running a clean program, which Bozeman definitely was not.
Bozeman was—he brought in some great players, but we found out later how
he brought them in, and that’s what got the school and him put on probation.
But anyway, so he’d hired Ben Braun and then he had to hire another football
coach after Mariucci left abruptly. I thought Artie Gigantino would be a good
choice, but Kasser did not want him and he didn’t want any momentum
building up. Artie had a lot of friends among the alums, and so he quickly
made [Tom] Holmoe the head coach. Well, it was a terrible choice! He had
not been a good defensive coordinator. They had the second-worst defense in
the NCAA among the Division I schools. So it wasn’t that he was being
promoted because he’d done such a great job. Bill Walsh called me and he
said, “I’d like to put in a good word for Tom Holmoe. I said, “I hate to tell
you this, Bill, but I just sent in a column saying he’d be a disaster.” And of
course he was. I tried to—I softened my view a little bit. I talked a lot to
Tom—he’s a great guy, a very personable guy. I read the other day that he
still has good feelings about Cal. He’s just that type of person. But the trouble
with Tom was he’s very malleable. Bill Walsh was a very strong personality,
and what Tom wanted to do all along was to get into football administration—
where he is now.
40
02-00:03:59
Cummins: Exactly, at BYU.
02-00:04:00
Dickey: He’s very good in that position, because people like him and respond to him
and that type of thing. But he never really wanted to be a football coach, but
because Bill persuaded him, he got him on his staff first with the 49ers and
with Stanford, and then he pushed him to be head coach here—well, to be the
coordinator first and then the head coach. So he just kind of followed along
with what Bill wanted, and it was not the best thing for him and it certainly
wasn’t the best thing for Cal. But that’s the kind of decision that Kasser often
made. He would just make a quick decision. Don’t think about it and don’t let
anybody else come in and try to tell you what to do. And so ultimately I
thought he hurt the program, and of course he kept—he not only hired
Holmoe, he rehired him. He extended his contract. Boy! I mean, how many
games did you have to watch to realize this guy was not a good head coach?
02-00:05:09
Cummins: Interesting. In the previous interview you also make comments about coaches,
and it would be interesting to hear your view of what you think a good coach
is, because you’ve observed so many over so many years.
02-00:05:24
Dickey: Well, you know there are a lot of elements that go into it. The primary one is
that you have to have the kind of persona that players want to play for you and
want to do their best, and that you’re a leader, in other words. And there are a
lot of different types. Bill Walsh was one type. Bill Belichick is not at all like
Walsh in personality, but he is in that kind of leadership—players really
follow him. It helps if you have the kind of mind, again, that Walsh and
Belichick have, who—they’re very good at programming things, at designing
offenses and defenses and that type of thing. You also have to, I think, have to
have the ability to know what you can’t do and delegate. Like Walsh knew he
couldn’t do the defense, so he always had—he got George Seifert in there who
is probably as good or better than any defensive coordinator I’ve ever known.
And he was as imaginative on the defensive side as Walsh was on the
offensive.
Jim Harbaugh, if you look at Harbaugh, what he’s doing with the 49ers now,
he brought in a very good defensive coach and he brought in a very good
special teams coach and he’s got a lot of his staff from Stanford he just
brought over, but they all have specific responsibilities. He doesn’t try to do
the whole thing. So I think that’s—those are really the main ingredients. You
can—not all coaches are great planners. Some are just inspirational coaches
and some do well in some circumstances and not in others. But the really good
ones have both, and that’s really what it takes.
Now Bruce Snyder, I thought Bruce was a very good coach here. It took him a
while to get established. He didn’t have good players when he came in. He
41
had to recruit them and get them and put them in position, and you have to
know—that’s the other thing. You have to really identify your key players,
especially the quarterback. You can’t win with a bad quarterback. And you
can’t have a guy out there who isn’t doing the job of quarterback—I think
you’ve seen it with Cal teams lately. When the quarterback position drops, so
do they. When Aaron Rodgers was here they had a terrific team. When he
wasn’t here, then it leveled off a lot. So they’re still trying to fight through
that and get back to that level. So you have to be able to identify talent.
02-00:08:21
Cummins: Now, there is so much detail, I think, that—again, I’m no expert. I’ve never
sat with a team and watched them review film after a game, et cetera. But
there’s a whole lot now—
02-00:08:36
Dickey: You wouldn’t want to! [laughter]
02-00:08:36
Cummins: Have you done that?
02-00:08:38
Dickey: No, I haven’t actually done that. I have—when Mariucci was coaching the
49ers, he would let me see the videos of the previous game. Not the one that
was coming up but the previous game, mostly to show me how tough it was to
play quarterback in the NFL. Because they were shot from behind the
quarterback, and when you see shots like that and see where the player—guys
coming at him from all directions, the things that he has to recognize so
quickly—it’s not even a thinking process. I’ve always said it’s like a
computer. A computer doesn’t think, but it reacts—it does things so quickly.
Well, a quarterback has to be like that and has to—if he sees a defensive
player over here, he has to see—and he sees a receiver here, he has to know
instantly whether he can throw the pass there, whether he can complete the
pass.
I got an e-mail the other day from a guy who’s—he’s been watching the 49ers
for fifty years probably. And he said he thinks that Alex Smith doesn’t have
good peripheral vision, because he says you can see a secondary receiver
running free on the sideline, and Alex doesn’t see him and he goes to the
primary one. Well, what this guy doesn’t realize is Alex Smith knows the
other team’s defense, and very often you’ll see a guy that looks open, but if
the pass goes there, the safety comes over and—pssht. In fact, the 49ers
themselves won a lot of games that way this year, with the safety coming over
and intercepting a ball when the receiver looked open for a while. So that’s
the type of thing a quarterback has to know, so I’ve seen that.
I’ve seen films that they’ve had when they’ve had recruits—like tomorrow is
letter-of-intent day, and now they’ll probably show some films of guys in their
42
high school games. [laughing] But those are amusing for two reasons. One is
that they’re very poorly lit.
02-00:10:52
Cummins: And it’s hard to see.
02-00:10:51
Dickey: It’s hard to see who’s doing what. The other is that you often have a case of
men against boys, because some of these guys mature. I remember a few years
ago—and I don’t remember the guy’s name. There was an offensive lineman
that Cal had recruited, and he was just pancaking guys. But he was well over
three hundred pounds and he had nearly a hundred-pound advantage on the
guys he was blocking—of course he was pancaking them! But so I think—I
don’t know how these guys evaluate high school talent, because there’s
such—with the pros evaluating college talent, they also have to factor in the
quality of competition and all that type of thing, but there’s not anywhere near
the difference between top college play and the pros that there is between high
schools and college.
02-00:11:49
Cummins: Right. Okay, so go ahead then about Kasser, other recollections about that
period of time? The Haas Pavilion was very controversial because of the
funding issues.
02-00:12:04
Dickey: Right, yeah.
02-00:12:05
Cummins: Did you hear anything about that?
02-00:12:07
Dickey: Well, I didn’t hear anything—I mean, I heard people saying, “Boy, this cost a
lot of money.” Of course the Haas family was putting in most of it anyway. It
was something that obviously needed to be done. I forget when—it was the
thirties that it was—
02-00:12:26
Cummins: Harmon [Gym] was built.
02-00:12:26
Dickey: Yeah, right.
02-00:12:27
Cummins: Oh yeah, long, long ago.
02-00:12:28
Dickey: It was a great little place, and I have very fond memories from my college
days of the games there. But they really needed to expand, and I think they did
a great job, because you still have the same feeling when you’re in the new
pavilion that you had in the old one.
43
02-00:12:55
Dickey: And it’s really about twice as big, I think, the overall capacity now. But I
haven’t been to many games there lately, but I went to quite a few for a while.
The funny thing is that the press table is in exactly the same location as the old
one was, in comparison to the floor. It’s just that there are many more seats
behind it. [laughing]
02-00:13:23
Cummins: The budget—I don’t know if you heard about any issues related to the budget
escalating during that period.
02-00:13:38
Dickey: What I heard consistently, since Title IX first came in, I’ve heard consistently
from coaches of men’s sports—I shouldn’t say consistently. I’ve never heard
[Jeff] Tedford complain about that. But a lot of coaches have complained to
me and they’ve complained to others about the women’s sports, and they’re
taking so much money and we’re having to do this and do that and juggle,
blah, blah, blah. And of course they were complaining even as recently as last
year when it appeared that baseball was going to be cut, dropped, and blah,
blah, blah—all this kind of stuff. So there’s no doubt that it has created
financial pressure.
But I have been very much for Title IX from the very start. In the seventies I
was writing a lot of columns about [how] it was important for girls and
women to be competing. If these sports are so good, why shouldn’t they have
a chance to—and I think what I’ve said been borne out. It has been, I think, a
boon to a lot of girls and women, and they’ve gotten a lot more confidence
from playing sports. I think that’s great! When I go over to a men’s basketball
meeting, but I’m walking through the halls—they’ve got a lot of pictures of
women athletes there too. They’re all damn good looking, I must say!
[laughing] You get, especially if you get the volleyball players—they’re just
really attractive women as well as great athletes. So I’ve been very much for
that, even though it has created problems.
But I think what has really, really created problems for the programs in
general has been the escalation of football salaries, good football coaches’ salaries and the addition of coaches. The football program used to pay for
other programs. Now it can barely pay for itself, and you’ve got—we just got
this new [Simpson Student-Athlete] High Performance Center in, which I’ll
see tomorrow, because they’re going to have the
02-00:16:02
Dickey: the letter-of-intent day there, the program that they have. I said you know,
Tedford absolutely needs that, because every other school has it. It’s like the
arms race. But that’s something that’s fairly recent. Phil Knight probably
created that, because he did all that stuff at Oregon.
44
02-00:16:28
Dickey: And all of a sudden everybody’s got to have the same stuff. So that’s—then, I
say don’t blame the women, for God sakes—look at the increase in the
football programs. Look at what they cost. I think Woody Hayes’s top salary
was something like $85,000 for God sakes. I know that’s a long time ago, and
the cost of—the whole thing has gone up in all areas quite a bit. But if you say
ten times—$850,000—you couldn’t begin to get a coach for that now.
02-00:17:08
Cummins: Well, Bruce Snyder was paid $250,000 and Tedford is making $2.5 million.
02-00:17:12
Dickey: Yeah, right, and a lot of it being paid by Phil Knight, by the way. Did you
know that?
02-00:17:19
Cummins: Who?
02-00:17:20
Dickey: Phil Knight, the guy at Oregon—you know the Nike guy?
02-00:17:21
Cummins: Yes, sure.
02-00:17:24
Dickey: Because he—Tedford was up there and he really likes Tedford, so he’s
underwriting a lot of that. I’m not sure how much, but it’s a considerable
portion. It might be like a third of it. [laughing]
02-00:17:35
Cummins: Interesting. But they have a—the Athletic Department has a contract with
Nike too.
02-00:17:42
Dickey: Yeah.
02-00:17:44
Cummins: One of the typical contracts.
02-00:17:46
Dickey: Yeah, right so you know, it’s all hand in glove there. And of course Nike—
they’re wearing these weird uniforms, and tradition means nothing anymore.
It just kills me.
02-00:18:00
Cummins: Right, right.
02-00:18:00
Dickey: But it would bother me even more if I were a Stanford alum. Jesus, they’re
wearing black uniforms—Jesus. Traditional black—yeah, right.
45
02-00:18:12
Cummins: Ah traditional black, yes. Well, and then the most recent case here, just in the
last couple of weeks with Tosh Lupoi and Eric Kiesau going to Washington at
$500,000 and $700,000. It’s almost incomprehensible, but there it is. That was
one of my questions. Where do you see this going?
02-00:18:36
Dickey: It’s just so out of control, I don’t know. It may be that a lot of schools have to
drop football. I’m beginning to think Robert [Maynard] Hutchins was onto
something! [laughter] You know, Jesus. He got a lot of heat for that, but
Chicago’s very highly respected academic school. My daughter-in-law
graduated there.
02-00:19:04
Cummins: Yeah, well, and they’re still playing football. They belong to this—I guess
that would be Division III.
02-00:19:12
Dickey: Whatever it is, yeah. But it’s not a—
02-00:19:12
Cummins: Yeah, whatever division. But they still play and it’s obviously very small
time, not Division I.
02-00:19:21
Dickey: Yeah, right. Well, I remember when I was covering the Raiders, and this is
probably ’69, they used to take these trips—they’d stay two weeks in the East.
They’d play in New York, Boston—I think it was Boston then, the Patriots
and the Buffalo Bills. We were staying in Boston that time, and Blaine
Newnham and I, we went up, we took a drive up to see the leaves changing
and all that. It was very nice. But we also—one of the things we did was to go
to a Harvard football game on Saturday, the day before the Raiders game. It
was an interesting experience, because the first thing Blaine and I said—these
guys are really slow. [laughter] You could see that the pace of the game and
everything about it was just nowhere near a major college.
02-00:20:21
Cummins: Yeah, like when we played. [laughter]
02-00:20:21
Dickey: Yeah, right.
02-00:20:22
Cummins: Hilarious. A huge change.
02-00:20:26
Dickey: You know, and I don’t—if you can get—the thing about football, as opposed
to baseball, if you watch a baseball game at a low level—I covered high
school baseball at the start of my career, and it was painful, believe me,
because they just don’t play the game very well and there are a lot of walks,
46
errors, a lot of these things. But you have to see baseball at a fairly high level
to appreciate it. College baseball, in the Pac—what’s now the Pac-12, used to
be the Pac-10, is generally very good. Of course Cal won the national title just
last year. But if you watch a football game, the main thing about the football
game is whether it’s competitive. Again, I was covering high school football,
and the high school football games were a lot more interesting and exciting
than the baseball games, because they were fairly evenly matched teams, and
the skill level—it’s all relative. You don’t have—the quarterback isn’t as
good, well, and the defensive backs aren’t as good. That’s why people love
college football, and it’s certainly not as good as the NFL, even the best
teams. But if you’ve got fairly evenly matched teams, it can be good. So if
you had more teams playing at a lower level, it wouldn’t bother me at all if
Cal were playing at a lower level if they had other teams to play against on
that level. That’s a problem that—
02-00:22:19
Cummins: It is, it’s yeah, where do you go? You make that point in the first interview,
talking about Davis, for example.
02-00:22:30
Dickey: Yeah, right. Because Davis has had some good teams, but they’re nowhere
near what Cal is, as we saw last year in the opener here. But if you had a lot of
teams like that—but who would do that? You couldn’t have the same kind of
conference set up, because you’ve got, and especially now with this wonderful
Pac-12 we have, you’ve got Utah and Colorado. You’ve got long trips to get
to them and to the Arizona schools. When you had the original Pac-8,
everybody was along the coast, and so it wasn’t quite so difficult. But even
that, if you are on a lower level, you can’t be traveling up to Seattle to play a
game if you’re playing Division II or whatever they call it now. So you’d have
to play within your region.
That’s the thing about the Ivy League, of course. It’s very compact, the
schools all have basically the same academic level. Harvard is the best, but
not that much better than the others. And so they’re playing on a level playing
field and they’re close. Even then—I talked to Andy Geiger about that when
he was at Stanford, because he had been at Penn. He said that the only way
they can keep the programs going is if they have large contributions from the
alumni to subsidize it. So but I don’t know. I really don’t know what the
answer is. I sure don’t like the direction it’s going now. But it just keeps going
up and up and up and up.
02-00:24:26
Cummins: So then following the Kasser period, then Steve Gladstone comes in. Tedford
is hired, and that is a major shift vis-à-vis Cal. So what are your recollections
about that?
47
02-00:24:43
Dickey: Right. Well, I really like Gladstone, and I was skeptical when they first named
him, because I thought—the crew coach? But when I talked to him and saw
the quality of people that he was hiring—one of them was Bob Rose he hired
to do PR, and I had known Bob since he was at Stanford like in ’83-’84. He
always impressed me, he was just—he’d bounced around a lot to different
places. He’s with the A’s now. But he just is a first-rate PR guy and very
professional, and he was a very definite step-up. So that was good. He was
hiring good people, and I just thought he did an excellent job and really did
his research on Tedford. I didn’t even think of Tedford as a candidate
originally. I forget who I was thinking about. Then somebody said to me,
“Well, what do you think of Jeff Tedford?” And I looked—well, he was doing
a great job at Oregon, [as] coordinator, and so he got in the mix. But he’s
certainly done a very good job. So he’s the best coach that Cal has had since
I’ve—since I came here in ’56, the fall of ’56. That was Pappy Waldorf’s last
year, which was not a good one. [laughing]
02-00:26:25
Cummins: Right, right.
02-00:26:29
Dickey: But I just thought Gladstone was very professional in the way he handled
things and ran the department. He apparently—I didn’t know much about the
financial part of it, but Mark Stephens was in charge of the finances there, and
I was told that—I guess the chancellor told me—that they were finally getting
things on a businesslike status. Before, Kasser would just—had no business
sense at all, apparently. But under Gladstone things got straightened up pretty
good. So I thought he did a very good job.
I think Sandy [Barbour] is doing a good job. She is just not very outgoing with
the media. Of course I don’t have, obviously, the same status I had when I was
with the Chronicle. But it isn’t just me. She just doesn’t open up to people.
She makes—she’s friendly, she gets around to things. She used to show up
periodically at the media luncheons for football, but when you talk to her
she’s just—she doesn’t give you anything. [laughing] If you read her public
pronouncements, they’re just like a PR person is writing them, designed to
give as little information as possible. But I think she’s done a good job.
Everybody isn’t media-friendly.
02-00:28:32
Cummins: So that brings us up then to the last couple of years, and the cutting of sports,
the big brouhaha over that. What were your thoughts on that?
02-00:28:47
Dickey: Well, I thought that number one, they played games with it, to some extent,
because there were a lot of people that wanted to keep the baseball program.
A lot of people made contributions thinking they were going to keep the
baseball program, and then it was announced—well, the contributions have
48
gone to save other sports but baseball was being dropped. So then they had
another campaign, just organized to get people to contribute to baseball, and
got enough to keep it going. I think that Sandy and [Chancellor Robert]
Birgeneau knew this all along, that they were diverting money to the other
sports. Because they thought if people were contributing specifically to sports,
so many would contribute to baseball and they wouldn’t contribute to the
other sports. They wanted to keep all of them and they thought this way they
could do it. But that’s what I mean, that they’re not very forthcoming. They
certainly never said that and never even hinted at it, but I think it’s pretty
obvious from their actions that that was their plan all along. They just scared
the shit out of the people who love baseball. [laughing]
02-00:30:06
Cummins: Did you hear from alums about the cuts?
02-00:30:10
Dickey: I heard from a lot of baseball people, alums who wanted to keep the baseball
program. And I said, “Well, I do too.” I covered baseball when I was a junior,
in the Daily Cal. That was the year that they won the College World Series
too. I didn’t see it because I was working in the summer and they were
playing it when I was working. Earl Robinson was on that team, and then he
signed the big contract with the Dodgers. But at the same time, I hadn’t seen a
Cal baseball game in some time. It probably could be ten years since I’ve seen
a game, and most of the people that were angry about the sport being dropped
hadn’t been to games either. But that’s, in large part, because they’re often
played at inconvenient times. If you’re working for a living, and they’re
playing a game on Thursday afternoon—
02-00:31:16
Cummins: Not possible.
02-00:31:19
Dickey: You’re going to be in the office, you’re not going to be out there at the
[Evans] Diamond. So I think that’s a big factor in that, but also I think there’s
a factor that you’ve got two professional baseball teams in the area, and
people who are really baseball fans go to one or the other—more often the
Giants now.
02-00:31:40
Cummins: Does Stanford do any better? I just don’t know, in terms of attendance at their
[games]?
02-00:31:48
Dickey: They do a little better, but they don’t—they’re not overwhelming. But the
Stanford baseball program has really been very good. I covered them in the
World Series in 1999. They didn’t win it, but they were back there. That
was—that’s a great experience! The College World Series is maybe the best,
the most fun of any sports event I’ve ever been to, because you get back there
in Omaha and absolutely nothing is happening there. So everywhere you go
49
you’ve got all these signs up and the papers are full of the stories, it’s all over
TV. It’s all people are talking about! You go to a World Series or Super Bowl,
it’s a big event, but there are a lot of things going on in that city. So it was
really a lot of fun. And it was fun—the Stanford kids were so much fun. They
were just so thrilled to be interviewed! That’s not an experience I have a lot.
But they’ve got a great program going down there, and they’ve—Stanford is a
much closer-knit family, in a sense, because it’s smaller, much smaller. And
so the people who are around the university, who are alums, tend to support
the events there a little more. Now, they don’t have enough of them for
football—they did sell some games out last year finally, because they got
more casual fans in because they had such a good team. But they don’t have
anywhere near the group of fans that Cal has for football and things like that.
But for the smaller things they can do well.
02-00:33:51
Cummins: Interesting. So in conclusion, looking back over all those years that you’ve
watched this program, what are your general thoughts? Do any particular
people stand out? The general direction vis-à-vis the way things are going
now, et cetera—any comments you want to make?
02-00:34:17
Dickey: Well, I think with the Cal athletic program you always have to be realistic that
this is not LSU. The school’s academic standards are much higher than a lot
of the real football players. They are higher than anybody, except Vanderbilt,
in the SEC. And Vanderbilt, of course, never goes anywhere. [laughing] You
don’t see Vanderbilt playing in the BCS title game. So I think you have to be
realistic about success in football. Now, I find that the older alums, like me,
tend to have that kind of approach, because they understand more of what’s
going on. They’re proud of the school, and an occasional success is fine.
Some of the younger ones think that—well, Cal should be a top-ten football
team every year. There’s no way that’s going to happen, and I would be
worried if it did! Because the only way it would happen is if academic
standards were compromised, and I don’t believe that should happen.
Athletics are not the most important thing about the University of California,
and I’ve been writing about them all my life. But I have a little better
perspective on that.
So in that sense—now, in the ones, the sports that don’t grab the attention,
that really don’t have a professional counterpart—swimming, water polo, that
type of thing, Cal has been pretty successful in those sports, and I think can
continue to be because there you don’t have the big money component. You
don’t have alums demanding success in that, and it’s not representative of the
school’s athletics, in that sense. But it’s very important. It gives a lot of good
athletes in those sports a chance to shine, and that’s very important. So I think
keeping a broad-based program is important. Whether Cal can continue to do
50
that is a real question, because the football program is just sucking up so much
money.
And now they’re putting all these millions, hundreds of millions, into
restructuring the stadium, which had to be done. There’s no way you could
continue playing—we’re all fortunate that it didn’t fall down around our heads
during a game sometime. When I think of that, all the—
02-00:37:17
Cummins: Right, all the games.
02-00:37:19
Dickey: —all the games I’ve been to, just sitting right on the fault there. Holy Christ!
So that absolutely had to be done, and of course the stadium was just—it was
in bad shape. A beautiful setting, but if you had to go to the restroom—not too
pretty.
02-00:37:44
Cummins: Oh! Exactly.
02-00:37:47
Dickey: The facilities were very outdated.
02-00:37:50
Cummins: Of course you were up in that press box, where it could have fallen down too.
02-00:37:53
Dickey: Yeah, right. The temporary press box—temporary. Temporary—I think it was
put in twelve years ago. It’s funny how those things [go]. Well, it’s funny, but
I kind of enjoyed that press box, because I didn’t write there. Now, the guys
who had to write there, it was a real problem, because they’d have their
machines there—now, they had another room where you could go after the
game. But if you’re writing during the game, or trying to keep notes or
something, and it started raining or something, it’s really a mess. But I
enjoyed it because the stands are there. People would stand up and they’d
walk by and talk to me, and it was fun. I enjoyed that. So I don’t think it’ll be
the same with the new press box. It’ll be removed. It’ll be a much nicer press
box, obviously.
02-00:38:55
Cummins: I think we should get on tape here how you reported. Because I remember
when we had our first meeting setting up your interview with Chancellor
Berdahl, you didn’t take any notes. And then when we had the interview with
Bob Berdahl in the chancellor’s office you also didn’t take any notes—and so
we commented on that immediately after you left. And yet the article said
verbatim, closed quotes around that column. How in God’s name did you do
that? So you should say something about that. [laughter]
51
02-00:39:26
Dickey: Well, you know, when I started out nobody was even using tape recorders.
Now everybody uses tape recorders. So you had to take notes. Unless you take
shorthand, like John Crumpacker, who covers Bear sports, he learned how to
take—
02-00:39:47
Cummins: Write shorthand? Oh.
02-00:39:48
Dickey: —shorthand, so he scribbles along, and it’s good. Because Mike Montgomery,
while I was at a basketball meeting last year, Mike challenged him on it and
he says, “Well, tell me what I just said.” And John just read it back to him.
But I didn’t take shorthand, and my handwriting was—well, it was a lot better
then than it is now, but it’s still—if you’re trying to scribble down things… Plus, I felt that you missed things too. So I trained myself to listen and catch
the—guys have pet phrases that they use. Art Agnos asked me about this one
time, because we had a lot of meetings on the ball park and he’d give me
some pretty complicated stuff, and I wasn’t taking notes and it came out fine.
He said, “How do you do that?” And I said, “Well, it’s kind of like when
you’re reading something and you highlight the important things. When I’m
listening to a conversation I’m having with somebody, it’s like I highlight in
my mind. I can’t give you the whole thing verbatim, but I can give you the
important things verbatim.” So that’s the way I do it, but I’ve always done it
that way. It’s also a way of keeping my mind sharp, because it’s a challenge.
02-00:41:16
Cummins: Focused, absolutely. That’s hard to do.
02-00:41:25
Dickey: But a lot of people—one time when Garry St. Jean was an assistant coach for
Don Nelson, he had a bet with Don Nelson that I have a tape recorder hidden.
Because he’d be there when I was talking to Nelson, and he knew that what I
was writing in the column was what Nelson said—he says, “He can’t
remember all that.”
02-00:41:43
Cummins: Oh, that’s hilarious, that’s hilarious. It’s a little unnerving, especially the first
time. So anyway, it’s a good technique, I’ll tell you, if you can do it.
02-00:41:55
Dickey: That only time it failed me—it didn’t fail me, but when I was down in Santa
Barbara—I went two years down in Santa Barbara before I came up to Cal,
because my dad was in the Forest Service. He was transferred down there. I
don’t know if I ever told you this. But we were up in Sonora, and I was
accepted at Cal as a freshman and I had a place reserved in Bowles Hall. I
even had a job on the telephone—
02-00:42:24
Cummins: The switchboard?
52
02-00:42:26
Dickey: The switchboard, to help pay the expenses. But then Dad got transferred to
Santa Barbara that summer, so he said well, you might as well go here for a
couple of years, which was fine with me. You take the same courses the first
two years, wherever you are, so we went down there. Well, the basketball
coach there, if I was just talking to him, he thought that I wasn’t going to write
anything about it—I wasn’t going to record all his pretty little words. So I had
to pretend that I was taking notes with him. [laughter]
02-00:43:03
Cummins: Amazing.
02-00:43:03
Dickey: I never did, but so long as I was scribbling something down he thought okay,
he’s going to write about me. But that’s the only time—but there have been a
lot of times that people have been surprised when they see it in print. But I
don’t—I’ve never tried to embarrass people with that. If somebody said
something to me—well, in our conversation. I thought at the start that Berdahl
was going to be off the record, so I asked him how much of this—and he said
any of it. So okay. Good. Because it was great, and as I remember I had to
write—it was twice as long as my normal column. But he was—because he
was very forthcoming. I was very happy with that.
02-00:44:14
Cummins: Interesting. Good. Any other general comments? When you get the transcript
back, of course, we can revisit this and if there are other things you want to
say we can do it in that format.
02-00:44:30
Dickey: Yeah. I’m just trying to think what—because I’ve known so many people over
the years here. I never really knew Pappy Waldorf, and as I say, he was in his
last year. So many of the alums who were here earlier or who happened to
grow up in Berkeley, the guys that came to Cal and that grew up in Berkeley
and they saw games when they were at Berkeley High and that type of thing,
just revered Pappy. But by the time I got here his luck, or whatever—he had
such a strange career, that he was so successful early, but then after ’51 I think
it was, he never had a winning season again. So I think part of it was the fact
that SC was not—SC was in a down period in the late forties. And so the
competition was not as stiff in the conference maybe. I don’t know what it
was. But since I didn’t really see his teams, the good teams, I can’t—I saw
one game in ’54 when I was a senior in high school—well, it was ’53, fall
of ’53, when I was up for—I forget whether it was a journalism day or music
day. I was a soloist in the choir in high school. But it was one of those. I was
up a couple of times during that year. They used to always play San Jose
State, and that was the game they always had one of these big high school
things, because they had a lot of empty seats that they had for us. So I saw that
game, which I don’t remember at all. And then I saw some games in the last
season and that was it. And none of them—I didn’t see the Big Game, because
53
it was Thanksgiving weekend, so I had gone home to my family in Santa
Barbara. Joe Kapp’s coming out. [laughter] But I knew—of course I had
known Joe and I had talked to him earlier, and he’s always been such a
flamboyant character—still is.
02-00:47:13
Cummins: You saw that You Tube video with him? [laughter]
02-00:47:17
Dickey: Oh yeah, I love that!
02-00:47:17
Cummins: He’s just not changed at all.
02-00:47:19
Dickey: Of course the other guy started it.
02-00:47:20
Cummins: True, true.
02-00:47:22
Dickey: But Joe didn’t back down a bit.
02-00:47:23
Cummins: No way, no way!
02-00:47:25
Dickey: Well, Joe is probably the most colorful character I’ve known in Cal sports
ever. We had an experience one time—they used to have these celebrity
luncheons in San Francisco and some in Oakland too, but mostly in San
Francisco, raising money for the high school programs. Then the way—and I
participated and in fact I got in at the start of it, because Don Barksdale had
come to me with this idea and we talked about it. Don had so many contacts,
he got all the people—I didn’t believe he’d be able to pull it off, but they’d
have us waiting on tables and then afterwards we’d have lunch, just the guys
participating. And so I was sitting at the table, I’m next to Kapp, and Larry
Baer is sitting at one end of the table. Joe got into one of his monologues,
telling Larry what was wrong with baseball and what they should do, blah,
blah, blah. Larry’s just sitting there—he’s just kind of shell-shocked by this
onslaught, and Joe turned to me and kind of winked and he said, “He hasn’t
seen anything, has he?” [laughter]
But yeah, he’s really quite a guy. But he’s among—and of course Mike White.
You know Mike was a classmate of mine at Cal. We weren’t friends at that
time, but we knew each other, because I was, of course, on the Daily Cal,
sports editor, and he was playing sports. And then we got reacquainted when
he was at Stanford and then when he came over and became head coach at
Cal. We were pretty close, but I knew—I was also close to Dave Maggard,
and talking to Dave I knew this couldn’t last. Mike was actually hired before
Dave was.
54
02-00:49:37
Cummins: I thought Dave hired him.
02-00:49:39
Dickey: No, Dave did not hire him. He had been hired and then Dave was—I think
because of that Mike felt that he was impervious or he didn’t have to worry.
But he was bringing in a lot of kids that really didn’t belong, junior college
transfers that just—the graduation rate of football players went way down
when he was here, and I knew that situation was not going to last. But then he
was fired, in ’72 I think it was.
02-00:50:19
Cummins: Seventy-seven.
02-00:50:20
Dickey: Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He was hired in—
02-00:50:22
Cummins: Yeah, I think he was hired in ’72 and fired in ’77.
02-00:50:24
Dickey: Yeah, it was something like that. Anyway, the day that he was fired Maggard
came in, made the announcement to the media, and then he and I went out to
lunch. Well, all my colleagues thought he was going to tell me—
02-00:50:44
Cummins: You were getting the scoop.
02-00:50:42
Dickey: —give me the real lowdown. Well, it was a lunch we had scheduled ten days
before or something, and we didn’t even talk about that! Because I knew why
he was fired. That was no mystery to me, ever, why he was fired. And the
other guys were looking at the football results and he was doing fine. But they
couldn’t—because Dave had been hired specifically because the school had
been put on probation, and he was told to—
02-00:51:20
Cummins: Right, after the Isaac Curtis thing.
02-00:51:21
Dickey: —clean it up.
02-00:51:25
Cummins: Exactly. Did you, say with the other ADs, have the kind of relationship you
had with Dave?
02-00:51:31
Dickey: I was very close with Andy Geiger when he was at Stanford.
55
02-00:51:38
Cummins: Do you think something happened that was more than just personalities,
whereas intercollegiate athletics got bigger and bigger there was more concern
about being more open about what was going on in programs and things like
that, over time?
02-00:51:56
Dickey: I don’t—I think basically it has been a matter of the individuals. And right
now, as we say, Sandy Barbour isn’t open at all. Dave was much more open
about it. Kasser seemed to be open. [laughing] A lot of time he was just
bullshitting. But Steve Gladstone was pretty good about that. He was pretty
straightforward. If you asked him a question he’d answer it. Of course I
always have to qualify this by saying, as Steve said to me, very frankly, he
said, “You’re in a special position. You’re an alumnus of the school but
you’re also a major columnist.” And so it wasn’t just that they were open—
sometimes they were open with me, would tell me things off the record,
especially true with Dave, because we were very close. But it just—so it’s
hard for me to judge in that sense, because I wasn’t just another columnist. I
was a columnist for by far the largest paper in Northern California and
certainly the most read. So—
02-00:53:40
Cummins: And you had those relationships, as you say, going back to when you were
writing for the Daily Cal.
02-00:53:42
Dickey: Yeah, right.
02-00:53:43
Cummins: And the history, yeah, so that’s true.
02-00:53:46
Dickey: So I was—Gladstone he also said, “And of course you’re an alumnus too.”
02-00:53:56
Cummins: Reminding you.
02-00:53:57
Dickey: Yeah, right. [laughter] But all these things were true, and so I was in a unique
position there. But I’m not—I’m not in the same position now because my
professional status is nowhere near what it was at the Chronicle. And you
know I don’t—I’m seventy-five for Christ’s sake, at least for a couple of
weeks. My birthday is the sixteenth. I don’t have the same drive, goals,
whatever, that I had earlier. This is just something I’m doing—I enjoy the
writing and can continue with it and do it at my own pace pretty much. But so
it’s not that I want to be what I was ten years ago. So it has changed in that
sense.
56
02-00:55:09
Cummins: Okay, well that may be a good place to end. That was—I really appreciate
your doing this.
02-00:55:16
Dickey: Well, I’m enjoying it too, and it’s—yeah, I enjoyed watching the sports and
being part of it for so long, and it’s not many people who are able to do that in
the way I’ve done it, to stay close to the program and be almost a part of the
program, in a sense. And so it just—it has just been a lot of fun. And being in
the same area—I know a lot of guys that—like Mark Purdy is a good friend of
mine, the San Jose Mercury [News] columnist, sports editor I guess he is. He
went to school at Northwestern. And so he seldom gets a chance to see them
play or be on the campus or anything, and I’m sure he would enjoy that a lot.
But he enjoys being out here a lot more too, and a lot of guys are like that.
They just—to be able to be in the same area where you graduated college and
to have a lot of friends who are alums and contacts and stuff—it’s really quite
pleasant. [laughing]
02-00:56:38
Cummins: Okay. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
02-00:56:45
Dickey: Okay. Good luck with your project.
02-00:56:46
Cummins: Now I’ll make sure I—yes.
02-00:56:47
Dickey: I hope it gets written one of these days.
02-00:56:51
Cummins: Well, I’m working on it, that’s for sure.
[End of Interview]