For the Love of the Game

The great illusion about U.S. sport--that its heroes play the game for the fun of it--is still as lively as Santa Claus. Yet anyone who thumbed through the sport section of his local newspaper last week found, it full of stories of commercialism that belonged on the business page, or stories of corruption that belonged up front with the other crime news. Examples:

P: The New York World-Telegram said last week: "The threat of a basketball fix has local colleges so concerned that players are closeted in a hotel room on game days and denied the use of the telephone . . . to keep their players free of association, or even casual contact, with gamblers.. . .

P: In tennis, Davis Cup Hero Ted Schroeder, previously unranked for 1946, was awarded the valuable No. 2 amateur rating, ahead of Frank Parker. The balloting involved as many proxies as a U.S. Steel board meeting. Final count: 20,825 to 19,075.

P: In pro football, headlines still went to Alvin Paris, a tinhorn gambler who entertained players with partying chorus girls, and tried to fix the National League's championship game between the Bears and the Giants (TIME, Dec. 23). He was due to be sentenced next week.

P:Golf Pro Dick Metz slugged Tournament Manager Fred Corcoran in an argument over what the tournament divvy should be.

P: In baseball, the Yankee ball club announced that it would play 42 pre-season exhibition games, including a money-making tour of the Caribbean in February. The tour would come even before the boys limbered up their rusty arms & legs in spring training.

But the big news of the week was the high financing of Georgia's high-stepping Halfback Charlie Trippi. He showed up in Manhattan last week with the modern athlete's helper: a business manager. Trippi wanted to play both baseball and football. He began trading. The Boston Red Sox, who offered him a mere $30,000 to sign a baseball contract, were out of the running from the start. Then Trippi played off the New York Yankees (who own both football and baseball units) against Chicago's football Cardinals.

The Yankees, a little too sure of themselves, offered only $75,000 for five years of football, a $10,000 bonus for signing, another $20,000 for two seasons of baseball. After two days of well-publicized thinking-it-over, Trippi called at Yankee headquarters and said: "I'm sorry . . . that's not enough." Charles Bidwell's Cardinals got him for an even $100,000 (for four years) and he was still free to peddle his baseball talents. A voice from football's faded past, that of Illinois' ex-Galloping Ghost Red Grange, spoke up: "Why, that $100,000 contract with the Chicago Cardinals is peanuts--absolutely peanuts. ... I got $50,000 for playing one game."

The men who manage college football had met in Manhattan earlier in the month. Like statesmen arguing for disarmament, each of them was all for amateurism, in football, but didn't want to be the first: to try it. One who could discuss the matter with authority was Notre Dame's president, Father John J. Cavanaugh. Said he last week: "I suspect the reformers protest too much. . . . We at Notre Dame make no apologies about wanting winners."

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