Slipping in Slush

The college coaching profession is not noted as a haven of security, but if anybody seemed safe in his job it was Pete Elliott, the University of Illinois' football coach since 1960. Blond, still boyish at 41, a graduate of the University of Michigan where he was the only twelve-letter man in the school's history, Elliott survived his share of losing seasons, took his team to the Rose Bowl in 1964, was so highly thought of as an administrator that both Illinois and Northwestern offered him the post of athletic director.

Now the idyl has ended. Scandalized by the disclosure that needy Illinois athletes had received "walking-around money" from an alumni-financed slush fund, the Big Ten's athletic directors voted last month to expel Illinois from the conference--unless the university fired Elliott as well as Basketball Coach Harry Combes and his assistant Howard Braun. Last week Illinois appealed the decision to the Big Ten board of faculty representatives, and got turned down cold.

Dribs & Drabs. The sentence was surprising--both in its severity and in its source. Although conference rules forbid any financial assistance to athletes beyond board, room, tuition and fees, slush funds are nothing new in the Big Ten: at least one of the athletic directors who sat in judgment on Illinois--Michigan State's Clarence ("Biggie") Munn--was implicated in a similar scandal himself, in 1953. For punishment, Michigan State was placed on probation for one year. All told, fully half of the Big Ten have been caught breaking the rules at one time or another; yet no coaches have ever been fired before. Besides, neither Elliott nor Combes nor Braun had anything personally to do with the creation of the Illinois slush fund; it was started in 1961 by the school's athletic director, Douglas Mills, who has since retired.

The $21,000 involved was dispensed mainly in dribs and drabs: $9.18 to pay for a recruited athlete's motel room, $2.11 for another to make an emergency phone call. Some of the money was budgeted for Illinois scouts' traveling expenses. One football player received a total of $300 to cover his wife's medical expenses. Most got nothing at all, and the rest averaged less than $15 per month, which is a permissible amount under N.C.A.A. rules but not under the Big Ten's. Ironically, meticulous records were kept of all disbursements, so that Elliott, Combes and Braun helped convict themselves. And it was Illinois' own president, David Henry, who presented the Big Ten with the evidence, fully expecting that the university then would be permitted to discipline itself by putting the coaches on probation and suspending the athletes involved.

"Not Here!" Word of the sentence provoked a storm of protest at Illinois. "It's incredible," said one athlete. "I just can't believe it could happen here." President Henry called the dismissal order "too harsh," and Illinois Governor Otto Kerner asked for "justice and mercy." A group of alumni in Champaign, Ill. began circulating a statewide petition, demanding that Illinois go ahead and withdraw from the Big Ten rather than fire the coaches. But at week's end such a decision seemed unlikely. The three coaches will probably be fired, Illinois will probably stay in the Big Ten, and the other nine schools will surely check their own houses to see just how glassy they are.

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