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Scholarly Athletics
The launch of a $100 million renovation of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium has refocused attention on the role of athletics at institution whose emphasis is on mind over muscle.
February 1996
by Bruce Fellman
One of the most riveting sporting events of this summer’s Olympic Games in Atlanta will be—as it is in every Olympics—the sight of gymnasts performing their gravity-defying routines. A classic (and one at which such former gold medalists as Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton excelled) is the vault. Charging down a runway at breakneck speed, the athlete leaps onto a springboard, and then, twisting and turning, hurtles over a “horse” before, if everything goes right, “sticking” a triumphant landing.
Although the performance is over in a heartbeat, years of training are required to do it right. For Yale gymnasts, a successful vault requires something more.
Anna Mitescu ’96, last year’s Ivy League champion gymnast, explains that to do a vault properly requires 75 feet of runway and 25 feet of landing area. But the eighth-floor gymnastics room at the venerable Payne Whitney Gymnasium, where Mitescu (who is majoring in both geology and internationalstudies) and her teammates practice, is more than several feet short. To compensate, the vaulters have to start their runs across the hall—in the coach’s office.
When Payne Whitney—Yale’s “cathedral of sweat”—opened its doors 65 years ago, it was considered one of the wonders of the physical fitness universe. However, time and deferred maintenance have not been kind to the massive structure, and although architect James Russell Pope attempted to build for the ages, the changing requirements of athletes, to say nothing of the fact that in the 1970s women began to share the facility with men, have over the years made Payne Whitney something of an athletic anachronism. The gym’s inadequacies were considered by some to be so serious that in recent years at least a few people at Yale were suggesting that the building be demolished and replaced with an entirely new one.
But after weighing the findings of a study conducted by the Minneapolis-based architectural firm of Ellerbe Becket, administrators last year decided against the wrecking ball. And this spring, not long after the frost is out of the ground, a small army of builders will take up positions at the gym and begin the first phase of what will eventually be a top-to-bottom renovation.
To remain true to Pope’s neo-Gothic aesthetic while crafting a state-of-the-art facility, University planners, working with Ellerbe Becket and with Cesar Pelli and Associates (Pelli is the former dean of the School of Architecture), have developed a multiphase project that will take at least ten years and cost an estimated $100 million. The first phase will include renovation of several of the existing squash courts to meet the new dimensions required for international play, as well as completion of work begun last year on the amphitheater, and major improvements to the women’s locker rooms and upgrades of the fire- and life-safety systems. Also on tap is the construction of a 35,000-square-foot addition that will house new basketball and volleyball courts.
The budget for the first phase is $35 million, at least $25 million of which will come from the nearly completed Campaign for Yale. Phase Two, for which neither a cost estimate nor a timetable has been set, will concentrate on improvements to the swimming pools (including enlarging the main pool to meet the standards for national and international competition). Phase Three will address the nine-story tower section of the building.
This massive commitment to the restoration of Yale’s primary athletic facility is especially good news to those alumni who see Yale sports as an integral part of the educational experience at the College, and have been increasingly dismayed by the performance of recent years. Their feelings were made known at the Association of Yale Alumni’s Assembly XLVII—“Mens Sana in Corpore Sano: Athletics at Yale”—held on campus from October 26 to 28. Chaired by Maureen O. Doran ’71MSN, the event surprised many observers by revealing a deep level of concern. “I know that as a certified egghead I’m not supposed to care about sports,” said one attendee. “But I have to admit that I feel better about my Sunday when I know that Yale won the day before.”
It is a feeling President Levin, himself an enthusiastic sports fan, can relate to. Although statistics undercut the conventional wisdom that winning teams stimulate alumni giving, nobody likes losing. “We ought to have winning teams, and everyone’s committed to achieving them,” said Levin at the Assembly. “But we have to do it within the rules of the Ivy League philosophy.”
And therein, grumbled a number of AYA delegates, lies the problem: a fundamental disagreement over Yale’s interpretation of that philosophy.
The idea that “winning is everything” is alive and well at both the professional level and at universities whose sports programs serve primarily as a kind of minor league for the pros. But the creation of a “gladiator class” was precisely the sort of thing that the 1954 agreement that led to the formation of the Ivy League sought to avoid. In striving to make sports conform to the liberal educational model set forth nearly 150 years ago in Cardinal Newman’s influential book, The Idea of a University, the League banned athletic scholarships and declared that the members of varsity teams were expected to be as competent in the classroom as they were on the field, in the water, or on the court.
The ideal, said former President A. Bartlett Giamatti at an AYA Assembly 15 years ago, meant that “we no more encourage a professionalism of spirit in athletics in our undergraduates than we encourage a professional view of the purpose of an undergraduate education.” Winning was important, but striving was equally so, insisted Giamatti, adding that in its proper place within Newman’s liberal universe, “athletics is essential, but not primary. It contributes to the point, but it is not the point itself.”
Not surprisingly, the late President, who eventually became commissioner of baseball, was a fan of the Boston Red Sox, a team that, despite mighty efforts, has not quite pulled off the ultimate victory since the early part of this century (a time when Yale and national prominence in sports were synonymous). Also not surprising is that despite Giamatti’s declaration that “we must be first-rate in all things,” the speech is often cited by some alumni as the beginning of what they see as Yale’s acceptance of varsity athletics as a distinctly back-seat partner to academics.
But is that assessment fair? Calvin Hill ’69, who was a stellar halfback for the University and the Dallas Cowboys, thinks so, and he’s clearly not alone. At the AYA Assembly, the man who jokingly refers to himself as “Grant Hill’s father” (Grant Hill was a basketball star at Duke and now plays professionally) joined with another Yale football great, Tone N. Grant ’66, in suggesting that if the University is going to return to what they and others at the meeting saw as the glory days, much more than a Payne Whitney upgrade will be necessary.
Both men are recent recipients of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Silver Anniversary Award—Grant in 1991, Hill in 1994—an honor given to only six former varsity athletes each year for what the NCAA terms “significant contributions to society in the 25 years since their graduations,” and both were on campus to participate in an Assembly panel discussion called “Athletics as Preparation for a Life of Distinction.” Before either spoke, they and their audience in a packed Levinson Auditorium at the Law School watched films that showcased the athleticism of quarterback Grant, runner and pass-catcher (and occasional thrower) Hill, and another Yale great, Brian Dowling ’69. “I’m always intrigued to see the highlights of my playing days,” Hill told the crowd. “That was when football was where it should be.”
Hill, who has worked as an executive with the Baltimore Orioles and now travels the country as a motivational speaker, went on to tell a story whose point was that there was more to sport than win-loss records. It was 1965, he said, and this self-described “center of everything” quarterback who had never lost a football game in high school, suddenly found himself relegated to an unaccustomed role: running and catching passes. During the first couple of weeks of practice as a freshman, Hill candidly admitted that he was doing neither job well. On the day of his first game, he missed the bus to the Bowl, and, he recalled, he wasn’t all that sorry. “I was thinking, ’Maybe I wouldn’t even play,’” he said.
But, as Hill recalled the episode, Yale’s legendary swimming coach Bob Kiphuth spotted him “moseying between Morse and Stiles” and offered him a ride. Kiphuth also offered him some advice. “We talked about never giving up hope, and that’s ultimately what I learned from sports,” said Hill, who explained that the pep talk “translated into better performances both on the field—I scored my first touchdown—and in the classroom.”
There was another powerful lesson as well, he continued. “At the time, Yale was undergoing a tremendous social upheaval. There was the war in Vietnam, and there was civil rights, urban unrest, and the question of whether to admit women. And yet, no matter where you were on these issues, everyone could set them aside for a while and rally around the football team.”
There are those who are genuinely uninterested in athletics, and there are others who feel that hanging one’s identity on the achievements of a team is, at best, silly. But a number of students, even those who described themselves as jaded, reported experiencing a soul-stirring feeling as the Yale football team pulled off its delicious upset last fall of previously unbeaten Princeton. And while the atmosphere before The Game was not akin to, say, the hoopla preceding a Big Ten contest or the “Huskymania” that swept this state last year when the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team powered its way to an undefeated season, the fact that people had something in common to discuss was significant. (Even though Yale lost, the contest was one of the most exciting in years.)
“Sports can help build a sense of community,” says Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology, master of Silliman College, and a former Purdue pitcher. This bonding, of course, may be temporary—the time it takes to participate in, or merely witness, a game—but because athletes and sports fans generally cherish talking about events long before and after the games are over, and because being part of a team can create lifelong ties, the community that results can be surprisingly strong and lasting.
Nor are the benefits reserved for those on the varsity, says Brownell. While some 20 percent of Yale undergraduates participate in varsity sports (an unusually high percentage compared to universities that offer athletic scholarships), an estimated 53 percent are active in Yale’s intramural program, which offers competition between each of the residential colleges in sports as disparate as touch football, bowling, water polo, and ultimate frisbee. “Intramurals are one of Yale’s great selling points,” says economics major Sam Wilderman ’96, who plays soccer and basketball for Silliman. “It’s nice to have an opportunity to compete, and the rivalry that develops does wonders for forming a bond with your residential college.”
These contests—more than 3,000 of them each year—are, says Edward Mockus, who directs intramural sports and recreation at Payne Whitney, not for the faint-hearted. “The students come out with incredible intensity,” he says.
The same can be said of the 18 percent of undergraduates who take part in club sports, explains Tom Migdalski, the assistant athletics director who oversees these student-directed activities which include everything from capoeira (a South American martial art) and ballroom dancing to polo and rugby. “We don’t duplicate anything offered by varsity sports,” says Migdalski, whose father helped to pioneer the club sports concept at Yale more than 40 years ago. “Instead, we provide additional opportunities for students to compete at a less structured level.”
Because both club and intramural athletes share most of the same facilities as those of the varsity, all groups will benefit from the eventual restoration of Payne Whitney, a building through whose oaken doors passed, during a study conducted last spring, some 2,900 people per day.
“We figure that more than 90 percent of Yale College students are involved in some level of athletics,” says Tom Beckett, who became Yale’s director of athletics in 1994. He adds that a high number of graduate students, faculty, and staff members use the gym and other sports facilities in pursuit of the corpore sano. “There are very few couch potatoes here.”
The degree of participation is, to be sure, laudable, but to many, there’s a hunger for something that goes beyond the “college try.” They desperately and passionately want Yale teams—football, in particular—to win.
A poor season often obscures better ones—of which there have been many in recent years—but it also concentrates the attention on how to improve. Some critics of Yale’s recent performance attribute a measure of blame to Title IX, the 1973 federal mandate that brought gender equity to intercollegiate sports. Having to put money into women’s teams (there are 17 varsity women’s squads; the men have 16) has, argue some, diluted the program for everyone.
Barbara Chesler, associate director of athletics, bristles at the charge. “There’s absolutely no truth to it,” says Chesler, explaining that her department’s budget, now $12.5 million, has grown to meet the needs of new women’s teams. “None of this [growth] has come at the expense of men—if we didn’t have women’s programs, those funds simply wouldn’t be there.”
Another alleged roadblock, others say, is Yale’s alleged failure to pursue student-athletes with the same kind of fervor that is said to exist at Yale’s Ivy rivals. Then, there is the complex issue of the Academic Index, or AI, a formula adopted by the League in 1985 that sets minimum admissions standards for players in football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey. By design, Yale’s index is higher than that of, for example, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, and this, say critics, means that those schools may be picking up talent whose credentials are more athletic than scholarly. And, of course, there’s the lack of athletics scholarships, an issue that always puts Ivy League schools at a disadvantage in comparison to Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, and other institutions with both strong academics and a commitment to big-time athletics.
Advocates of a change in the present Ivy League ban on athletic scholarships say the way to get around it is to consider them “merit” scholarships and use them to attract any kind of desired talent, be it a trombonist or a tackle. At the recent Assembly, President Levin rejected this idea, which he said would, by abandoning Yale’s current system of need-based aid, put the University on a “slippery slope” toward having a dramatically different kind of student body than is presently here: a “modest fraction” who were getting a free ride, with the rest paying full fare.
Answering charges that the University had created recruiting roadblocks, Levin explained that the decision last year to increase the number of letters informing prospective athletes about their likelihood of admittance had already made a difference in the number deciding to attend Yale. Indeed, Beckett called the Class of 1999 the best he has seen in terms of athletic prowess.
Nor does Levin regard the AI as an “insurmountable handicap to success.” The fact that the University’s two primary competitors, each of which has an AI in Yale’s neighborhood, have enjoyed recent winning campaigns in such sports as men’s hockey (Harvard) and football (Princeton) supports the President’s contention. But Tone Grant is unconvinced. “There are structural impediments to success in sports here that are not present in academics,” Grant asserts. “The door should be wide open to pursue your passions in all fields, including athletics. In life—and sport—you’re supposed to compete,” he said. “You don’t survive otherwise. Maybe we should just get out of the Ivy League.”
Of course, the big time sports schools all rely on athletic scholarships, and even if Yale were to entertain withdrawing from its league—something that administrators from President Levin and Athletics Director Beckett on down insist is not under consideration—the cost of going the sports scholarship route (a figure that, assuming the varsity program remains the same size, could, said one official, reach $100 million per year) would certainly rule it out in these cash-strapped times. And economics aside, the “pay for play” approach still seems to be fundamentally at odds with the liberal spirit that has long been at the heart of the Yale experience. “I looked at Stanford when I was considering colleges, but there was no way I could have run there competitively,” says Lucy Chester ’96, noting that the varsity slots were reserved for those standout athletes on full scholarship. “I chose Yale because this place is about participation.”
To be sure, results are important as well, but the valuable lessons in sports come to both the victors and the also-rans. That point was made strongly at the Assembly by Kwaku Ohene-Frempong ’70, ’75MD, a champion hurdler and soccer player who received the NCAA’s Silver Anniversary Award in 1995 (joining Hill, Grant, and Olympic gold-medal–winning swimmer Don Schollander ’68; Kurt Schmoke ’71 won an unprecedented fifth award for Yale this past November). Ohene-Frempong, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania who directs sickle-cell disease research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, brought a distinctly Giamatti-esque viewpoint to the debate. “You can’t judge an athlete by a win-loss record,” he said. “I remember less the winning than what I went through mentally trying to understand why I didn’t do so well.”
For Ohene-Frempong, like Hill, the true rewards of athletics are to be found in the trust and fellowship that develop among teammates—and in learning not to quit. “I’ve watched people who are done in by small setbacks,” he says, noting that the kind of perseverance required of all athletes, especially those on the losing side, may be the most important benefit of participating in a sport. “I just hope that those of us on the outside don’t make our athletes who aren’t winning feel like failures.”
Ironically, much of the handwringing expressed at the Assembly came from “outsiders.” After a stirring speech at the traditional Friday night dinner by Francis T. “Faye” Vincent ’63LLB in which the former commissioner of baseball pronounced Yale athletics “in pretty good shape” and urged the University to “stay the course” with respect to the goals of the Ivy agreement, master of ceremonies John C. Kane Jr. ’6’ asked those in the 500-member audience in Commons who were former varsity athletes to stand and take a bow. Perhaps a dozen rose. In other words, the greatest share of the Assembly criticism was coming not from one-time members of any team, but from fans.
In a perfect world, athletes will have the best imaginable facilities, recruiters will bring in the most talented athletes, and Yale teams will never lose. In the real world, of course, things aren’t quite so simple. “We’ve had our share of disappointments—we’ve had a couple of years of drought,” admits Barbara Chesler. “We can do things better around here, but there’s no lack of commitment on the part of coaches and administrators, and there’s no lack of work ethic among our student-athletes.”
The renovation of the gym will certainly give those vigorous scholar-athletes like Anna Mitescu a more supportive setting in which to compete. Can a return to winning ways be far behind? “We’re working on it,” says Tom Beckett. “Hard.”  |
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