Jock Out

After the Rose Bowl game of 1937, University of Pittsburgh's victorious Coach John Bain ("Jock") Sutherland asked Athletic Director W. Don Harrison for a handful of spending money so that the team, having just netted Pitt $95,000 by beating Washington, could celebrate in Hollywood. Director Harrison primly refused. Jock shelled out the money himself, fought the matter out in Pittsburgh until Harrison resigned that March. It was then that Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman turned from firing "liberal" teachers to purifying Pitt's frankly subsidized football team.

The Bowman plan not only proposed to put Pitt on a simon-pure basis, eliminating 35 annual football scholarships for freshmen and other forms of subsidy, but it restricted coaches from newspaper writing, radio appearances, endorsements of athletic goods. Jock Sutherland stood for all these things with fairly good grace, willing enough to die for a simon-pure Pitt if the opposition was to be equally simon-pure. But when new Athletic Director Jimmy Hagan set out to fill the Pitt Stadium, toward which Jock's teams had earned $600,000, by signing up Ohio State and Minnesota, Jock Sutherland snorted and made plans for his departure, convinced that he was up against "athletic envangelism gone wild."

Last week he quit while he and Pitt football were good, and his resignation was quickly accepted by Chancellor Bowman. On the campus students wore black mourning bands with JOCK printed on them in silver; the student paper, The Pitt News, printed two blistering columns blaming Jock's departure on "blundering. . . ."

Jock Sutherland then refused offers of better than $13,000 yearly from Mississippi State and the Pittsburgh Pirates, announced that he would take it easy for a year. Most mentioned as his successor at Pitt was Charles W. Bowser, Pitt center and back in 1920-22. Pitt rooters hoped that after a year of the Bowman Code, Jock Sutherland would be called back to run things the old way.

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