Pacific Simon-Purity

In any language, 2,000,000 words are a mouthful. In California, they are the approximate number of words required by a diligent ex-G-Man named Edwin Newton Atherton, after $40,000 worth of gumshoeing over two years, to round up the athletic abuses, mainly in football, prevalent in the ten universities* making up the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

Atherton's survey was ordered by the Conference two years ago, when faculty delegates, after years of non-intervention while Pacific teams paid off the mortgages on some of the most glamorous football hippodromes in the U. S., decided to take a hand to keep commercialism from running hog-wild. Atherton, a stocky, black-maned, 43-year-old lawyer, onetime consular official and G-Man, now head of a Los Angeles investigating firm, started by questioning some 500 letter & numeral men on 1937 Conference teams. He got cooperation by promising: 1) no punishments, 2) no publication of details. He wound up last fall with case histories of 250 variously subsidized athletes, findings that filled a dozen black-bound, legal-sized volumes, some of them five inches thick.

True to his promise, Investigator Atherton refused to make his findings public, but presented them this year to the annual fence-mending meeting of Conference delegates. His imposing document contained nothing really new to anyone within whiffing distance of any football-minded campus in the land. But along the Pacific, the cumulative effect of this 2,000,000-word arraignment was electric. Because of it, contrite Pacific Conference turned over the most simon-pure set of new leaves in the picaresque annals of U. S. football.

It promised to swear off: 1) recruiting of prep and high-school athletes (sometimes carried on in California with brass bands); 2) athletic scholarships; 3) phantom or sinecure campus jobs; 4) alumni or student organization handouts; 5) scalping of football tickets by squadsmen; 6) other "bad practices." To administer these bans, the Conference engaged wordy Mr. Atherton for three more years as its "commissioner," a post promptly dubbed "Tsar of West Coast Football."

Living up to a set of rules like these would make the Pacific Conference the nonpareil purity league of U. S. football. Unless its 1940 intentions turn out, after all, to be just New Year's resolutions, the Conference, in its repentant zeal, might become a circuit of universities like Chicago, which last season purified its football team out of existence. One man who sincerely hopes that may not happen is 47-year-old Clark D. Shaughnessy, coach of great Tulane teams for a dozen years, Chicago's coach (succeeding great Amos Alonzo Stagg) for the last seven. Last week Clark Shaughnessy was appointed coach of Stanford, replacing Claude ("Tiny") Thornhill, whom Stanford dropped after its disastrous last-place 1939 Pacific Conference season.

*Washington State, Oregon State, Stanford, University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles, Universities of California, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho.

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