Oral History Center University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Glenn Dickey

Glenn Dickey: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics

at UC Berkeley: 1960-2014

Interviews conducted by

John Cummins

in 2011-2012

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

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*********************************

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Regents of the University of California and Glenn Dickey, Jr. dated July 13, 2015.

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Glenn Dickey “Glenn Dickey: Oral Histories on the Management of

Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960-2014” conducted by John

Cummins in 2011-2012 Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library,

University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

iii

Table of Contents — Glenn Dickey

Interview 1: January 31, 2011

Audio File 1 1

Growing up with sports — Transferring from Santa Barbara to Cal — Working in

the Daily Cal as a Sports Editor — United Press and International News Service

merger — Working with the San Francisco Chronicle — Continued interest in

Cal sports — Covering the Oakland Raiders in 1967 — Replacing Ron Fimrite as

a columnist — “Free agency” for pro sports players — Covering San Francisco

Giants’ first World Series game in ‘62 — Rising college football costs and cuts to

other sports — Head football coaches’ salaries — Glenn Seaborg — End of

ASUC and ASUCLA control over Intercollegiate Athletics — Comparing Cal

and Stanford’s commitment to athletics — Impact of Free Speech Movement on

sports recruitment in 60s — Lack of diversity in sports — Earl Robinson — Al

Buch — College experience — Clark Kerr’s public censure of Pappy Waldorf —

Ron Lynn — Disputes between Mike White and David Maggard — Plummeting

graduation rates for football players — On hiring Joe Kapp — Rene Herrerias and

Bob Presley scandal — Childhood in Minnesota and moving to San Diego —

Interview with Harry Edwards after 1968 Olympics — Pete Newell on Roger

Heyns and Budd Cheit — Phil Wolpert — Texas Western College’s NCAA

Championship — Jim Padgett on recruiting black players — Mike Heyman and

affirmative action — “Tutors” for athletes — Studying journalism and political

science at Cal — Campaign to remove Ben Braun — Enacment of Title IX in

1972 — Covering women’s sports — Meeting Billie Jean King — Invitation to

Women’s Sports Foundation banquet — Donna de Varona — Lue Lilly as

women’s athletic director — Financial strains on men and women’s athletic

departments — Termination of Physical Education Department in 1997 —

Increased commercialism in college football — Experiences reporting from

AT&T Park — Differences between Ivy league teams and Pacific Coast

Conference — Development of Athletic Study Center under Heyman — Walter

Haas Jr. and family — Chancellor Tien — Smelser report and value of athletics at

Cal — Cal vs Clemenson in 1992 Citrus Bowl — Campanelli v Regents of

University of California — Jason Kidd — Chuck Muncie

Interview 2: January 31, 2012

Audio File 2 39

John Kasser — Hiring Ben Braun — Tom Homloe — What it means to be a

“good coach” — Bruce Snyder — Comparing NFL quarterbacks and computers

— Differences between high school and college football players — Harmon Gym

remodeled as Haas Pavilion — More on funding issues — Differences between

baseball and football games — PAC 12 — Andy Geiger on alumni contributions

at Ivy leagues — Hiring Steve Gladstone — Sandy Barbour and the media —

Diverting donations for baseball program to other sports — Cal baseball team

iv

winning the College World Series — Low attendance at baseball games —

Covering Stanford baseball team in 1999 College World Series — Compromising

academic standards for athletic success — Memorial Stadium before renovations

— Reporting style — More on Pappy Waldorf — Memories of Joe Kapp — More

on Mike White — Appreciation for unique sports reporter experience

[End of Interview]

1

Interview 1: January 13, 2011

Begin Audio File 1

01-00:00:00

Cummins: Okay, this is the first interview with Glenn Dickey in the series on

Intercollegiate Athletics. Today is January 13, [2011]. Why don’t you begin,

Glenn, just talking about your own background, your past, certainly where

you went to school and how you got involved in athletics, and then we’ll go

from there.

01-00:00:49

Dickey: Well, I was interested—my dad was a huge sports fan and he got me

interested. [laughing] So I followed sports, I played. When I was in high

school I played baseball, basketball, tennis—

01-00:01:03

Cummins: Which high school was that?

01-00:01:04

Dickey: Well, I went to three different high schools: Sierra High School, which is in

the foothills above Fresno; Fresno High for my junior year; and my senior

year I graduated from Sonora High. So I played these sports, but not very

well. I lettered and all, but lettering in a high school sport is not difficult, and I

didn’t play all that much. But in a way it was good, I got a chance to observe.

In my senior year I was working on the high school paper there, as sports

editor, and writing about all the sports too, so that just came natural to me.

Then I went—my dad got transferred. I actually had been accepted at Cal as a

freshman and had a place in Bowles Hall and had a job on the switchboard

and everything! And then my dad got transferred from Sonora to Santa

Barbara, so he said, “Well, you might as well go to school at Santa Barbara

the first two years, and then you can decide if you want to go to Cal or

UCLA.” I never really considered UCLA, even though we were much closer

to it at that point. So I came to Cal as a junior. I was—at Santa Barbara I

worked on the school paper and on the yearbook, both. Then when I came to

Cal I worked on the Daily Cal and worked my way up to be sports editor my

senior year.

01-00:02:41

Cummins: Which was what year?

01-00:02:44

Dickey: Well, I was assistant sports editor in the fall of 1957, and then sports editor in

the spring of 1958 and graduated that spring. So I always had this interest in

sports from this early time and played it, and then realized I couldn’t go any

further. I never tried to play college ball at all, because even at Santa Barbara,

which was pretty small at that time, I did not have the skills to play any sport

down there. So I just confined myself to writing and watching. But I had this

interest, and then of course I just continued on. People ask me sometimes,

2

when did you decide to be a writer? And I say I did not decide. The decision

was pretty much made for me. As soon as I started doing it they saw I had

natural talent for it, so why not? I could combine my love of sports with my

writing ability, and just go on.

And then I worked in—well, I worked for the summer. I couldn’t get—’58

was a bad year to get a newspaper job, because United Press and International

News Service, the Hearst wire service, had combined. So there was something

like four hundred experienced newsmen out of work on the West Coast. So

there weren’t a lot of jobs there. So I worked for the summer in Santa Barbara

at the News-Press down there, just on a vacation replacement thing. And then

I got a job in Watsonville in September, and I worked there till April of ’63,

and then I came to the [San Francisco] Chronicle and I stayed there until

2005. I kept my interest in Cal sports, of course. When I was in Watsonville I

could come up for the football games on Saturday. And then when I went to

work for the Chronicle, of course it was easy to get to the games, and then I

could go to football and basketball, so I saw a lot of games in that era.

01-00:05:08

Cummins: So a very consistent, long-term involvement over that period of time, not just

with Cal sports but really all sports.

01-00:05:17

Dickey: Right, with all sports, yeah.

01-00:05:21

Cummins: And when you started did you start with your column right away? Or did you

just cover sports or—

01-00:05:26

Dickey: Oh no, when I came to the Chronicle—at that time the way they worked it

was you would work your way up. The writers just coming in, the young

writers, had to work mostly in the office, reading out copy, writing headlines,

that type of thing, and occasionally writing—which was very frustrating.

[laughing] I didn’t get into the business to edit somebody else’s copy. But

eventually I got—in ’67 I got a beat, the Oakland Raiders, and covered them.

And then in ’71—Ron Fimrite had been writing a column and he left to go to

Sports Illustrated, so I talked to the managing editor and I said, “You know,

I’d like to write a column.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you write some

sample columns and we’ll just run them in the paper and not say anything

about it.” And they did pretty well. And then I wrote one on what Willie Mays

was really like, and that did almost too well. [laughter] It got so much

response it was—of course it was almost totally negative. But that was the

type of column I wanted to write. I wasn’t going to write with this little gloss

over everything. But they kept me on. The publisher was very tight. He didn’t

like spending money, and he didn’t want to replace me. After they’d made me

a full-time columnist they’d have to bring in another writer, and so for a

3

year—they started me on two columns a week and then three. But I was still

covering the Raiders; I was still working the desk when I wasn’t covering the

Raiders. I had one writing day a week, to write three columns.

01-00:07:26

Cummins: Amazing! [laughter]

01-00:07:31

Dickey: They got their money’s worth. But in June the next year they made me a full-

time columnist. And interestingly enough, the guy who took my spot on the

roster, was Dave Bush. You probably know Dave.

01-00:07:47

Cummins: I don’t know him.

01-00:07:48

Dickey: Oh, don’t you? Anyway, he was also a sports editor at the Daily Cal some

years after I had left. So he’d come to the—he’d gotten into the newspaper

business and came to the Chronicle. So yeah, there are a lot of Cal guys on the

Chronicle sports staff, have been over the years, which is not surprising.

01-00:08:17

Cummins: How about Stanford in that regard?

01-00:08:17

Dickey: Not many Stanford people.

01-00:08:19

Cummins: Not many.

01-00:08:23

Dickey: When I came on the paper Howard [M.] Carr was the tennis writer. He was

from Stanford. I’m trying to think if there were any—I can’t think of any

others.

01-00:08:30

Cummins: It’s interesting, because I remember a comment—and I believe this was from

Ray Colvig. You know Ray, right?

01-00:08:39

Dickey: Yeah.

01-00:08:40

Cummins: But it was some time ago, where there was a perception that the Chronicle

reporting on sports was more favorable to Stanford than Cal. [laughter] Now,

that’s not surprising. But anyway, I don’t know whether that was true for

general news? Were there more Stanford or Cal writers?

4

01-00:09:06

Dickey: You know, I don’t know. I didn’t have a lot of contact with—we had our own

little department. There were people that would come by—of course

everybody always wanted to know what was happening in sports.

01-00:09:19

Cummins: Of course, of course.

01-00:09:23

Dickey: And you’d go out and get a drink of water at the water cooler and somebody

would ask about the Giants or that type of thing. But I didn’t know too many

people on the news side. And another thing that was different—our hours

were quite different. Because for the news side, the people that were in the

office—not the writers, the writers were out doing and they’d come in to do

stories. But the desk people—their hours were basically, generally working

hours, a nine to five type of thing. Because there isn’t a lot of news, regular

news, that happens at night on the West Coast, because all the political news,

of course, is much earlier in DC and New York, the East Coast. So there

would just be three or four people manning the desk outside in the news room,

and of course the night is usually the biggest time for sports, because all the

night baseball, the night games and stuff, so our hours were quite—when I

worked the desk my basic shift was three to midnight.

01-00:10:40

Cummins: Interesting.

01-00:10:40

Dickey: Yeah, interesting is one word for it. [laughter] Delightful it’s not.

01-00:10:48

Cummins: No, delightful it’s not. Exactly. Okay, so do you want to say something about

sports in general, both when you were playing in high school and college, in

that early time once you got to the Chronicle, what it was like? It was very

different, obviously, than what it is today.

01-00:11:14

Dickey: Yeah, it was so much different, because for one thing, in the pro world you

didn’t have these big salaries. You didn’t have free agency. To me, the biggest

change that has come in pro sports is free agency, because the players

suddenly could negotiate their true value based on how many people come to

the games because of them. It’s very comparable to what happened to the

movie industry. The studios dominated the movies for so long, and then the

actors/actresses were able to break loose from that—and agents. And so now

the old studio heads are gone, and it’s the performers and agents that have the

power. So it’s the same way, really, in pro sports, that the players now have

negotiating power, and the agents, of course, make the most of it. So salaries

have gone way up, so that has required teams to market in a different way.

5

I was talking yesterday to a group about the difference with the Giants—I

saw—in ’62 I actually covered their first World Series. Even though I was in

Watsonville they sent me up to cover the games on the West Coast—not in

New York.

01-00:12:48

Dickey: At that time what you had were people who were—they were knowledgeable

about the sport. When the team did well they cheered. Well, if you watched

any of the World Series this year it was like a rock concert. There was just

constant cheering from the start, from the first pitch to the end. And because

it’s a younger crowd, it’s a crowd that comes out because it’s an event. But

you have to—you can’t just market to baseball fans anymore and make it,

because you’d have maybe a million attendance. That doesn’t cut it anymore.

So that’s the biggest change there.

College sports, what really, really disturbs me, and I just don’t know what the

solution of this is, is football costs have gotten totally out of control. And so

that’s why at Cal all these other sports are being cut, because it used to be if

you had a successful football program it spilled off money to the other sports.

That’s no longer true. It takes extra money just to subsidize the football

program.

And so these other sports—and I think it’s very worthwhile for these sports to

be there for athletes to compete, even if they are sports that there’s no

professional future. That’s—because the only ones that are really in that

category in the college sports are basketball and football. Baseball somewhat,

and there are an awful lot of baseball players that never go to college. But

college football, there may be two players in the last fifty years that didn’t go

to college, in the NFL. And basketball, some of them go directly from high

school, but a lot of them go from college too. But the other sports, they’re

certainly—especially women’s sports are worthwhile, but even if they don’t

go any further with it. But it’s hard to keep them going if—because it has

always been true, basically, that football and basketball—men’s basketball—

are the revenue sports. Now, I’m sure that Stanford does well with women’s

basketball, because they have a great program there. And there are schools—

Arizona State, I think, has done well with baseball. And again, they’ve

produced a lot of major league players over the years. So there are exceptions,

but for the most part it’s football and basketball. So you’ve got all these other

sports.

01-00:15:54

Cummins: That you’ve got to support.

01-00:15:56

Dickey: Cal had what, twenty-six sports before they cut back?

01-00:15:58

Cummins: Twenty-nine.

6

01-00:16:00

Dickey: Twenty-nine? Stanford I think has—

01-00:16:02

Cummins: Thirty-five, thirty-three, thirty-five.

01-00:16:05

Dickey: Yeah, something like that, yeah. They’ve got more than thirty. But other

schools, Notre Dame—a few years ago they cut back drastically. So I don’t

know what the solution to that is, but when Phil Knight spends $40 million to

give Oregon this high performance athletic center, everybody has to have the

same thing.

01-00:16:32

Cummins: Yes, absolutely.

01-00:16:32

Dickey: Where is the money coming from?

01-00:16:34

Cummins: Right, well—and if you know, as the Chronicle was reporting, if [Jim]

Harbaugh had stayed at Stanford that would have cost them what—$4.5

million in salary. So if you’re a Jeff Tedford, sitting at Cal making $2

[million] something, that’s the next. So it’s very—

01-00:16:53

Dickey: Yeah, right. Because it’s difficult to control.

01-00:16:53

Cummins: —very difficult, yeah, to control those costs. No question.

01-00:16:58

Dickey: Yeah, and Stanford is especially startling, because I doubt that Harbaugh got a

contract worth a million dollars when he came.

01-00:17:08

Cummins: When he came, exactly.

01-00:17:11

Dickey: Came, yeah—it was probably somewhere around $800,000-$900,000. And

they have not been willing, in the past—

01-00:17:16

Cummins: To do that.

01-00:17:17

Dickey: Yeah, Ted Leland made a point of that, saying we’re not going to get so out of

line with what professors are making.

7

01-00:17:29

Dickey: But professors aren’t bringing fifty thousand people into the stadium.

[laughing]

01-00:17:36

Cummins: Exactly. Yes, well and it’s a good point you make about the comparison

between the movie industry and athletics. And of course that did not translate

down, because the college players have no rights, basically.

01-00:17:50

Dickey: No, right.

01-00:17:53

Cummins: So they’re—and in fact there’s this lawsuit now that’s underway challenging

the NCAA on the use of images of previous college players, on video games

and things like that.

01-00:18:07

Dickey: Yeah, I hadn’t heard that one. I know there’s one challenging the BCS, for

God sakes! Oh boy.

01-00:18:17

Cummins: So if you go back—in the e-mail exchange we had you said you weren’t

covering sports, so you didn’t really know what was going on vis-à-vis the

Pacific Coast Conference in the—I’m sure you knew about it.

01-00:18:35

Dickey: Yeah, I knew about it.

01-00:18:36

Cummins: But you weren’t covering it.

01-00:18:37

Dickey: But I wasn’t involved in that. And I didn’t—I came in to Cal as a junior, and

as I say, I was on the sports staff, but that’s the only connection I had. And the

three people you were mentioning, the only time I ever saw Robert Gordon

Sproul was at the basketball games. He was sitting not too far from me. He

always had that seat on the—and I was in the press row. I never talked to

Clark Kerr at all. And I didn’t talk to Glenn Seaborg until 1987, and we were

on a—Cal played in a game in Tokyo, that old Coca-Cola Bowl, and we were

both on the team charter and we talked quite a bit. He was very interested in

football, and I was quite willing to talk football with him. I couldn’t talk about

his specialty. [laughter]

01-00:19:37

Dickey: But you know, he was a huge fan.

01-00:19:41

Cummins: Well, and at that time—it was in 1960 that Kerr finally said that the ASUC

and ASUCLA would no longer be running Intercollegiate Athletics, that it

was moving into the administration, which was a very significant change.

8

Also, in the Pacific Coast Conference the faculty really had much more

authority than the faculty do now, in the NCAA.

01-00:20:16

Dickey: I didn’t know that.

01-00:20:17

Cummins: Yeah, the faculty athletic reps really were the ones that called the shots, so

even though they were appointed by a chancellor or president, they were the

ones that really called the shots.

One of the theories I have is that over the long period of time, that Cal and the

University of California really tried to hold the line in terms of this total

commitment to football in particular. So even though in ’56 the Pacific Coast

Conference said yes, you can have athletic scholarships now, in ’62—it took

six more years for Berkeley and UCLA to actually use athletic scholarships.

Going back even further than that, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, during the huge

controversy in the early 1900s, when the NCAA was actually created, also

took a very strong stand vis-à-vis reform, which is an interesting period of

time too.

But from that period on, say when you started covering sports, it would be

interesting to get your perspective on how you saw Cal vis-à-vis Stanford and

other institutions, in terms of their commitment. There was a lot of concern,

certainly, during the Mike Heyman era, about—he’s not doing enough for

sports, et cetera.

01-00:22:01

Dickey: Oh yeah.

01-00:22:01

Cummins: So do you want to say a word about that?

01-00:22:07

Dickey: Well, do you want to jump ahead as far as Mike?

01-00:22:10

Cummins: Well, we don’t have to go that far ahead. It’s up to you. If you want to start

earlier, go right ahead.

01-00:22:16

Dickey: I didn’t get the feeling that there was less commitment—Stanford has gone

back and forth a little bit over the years. When they had the Rose Bowl teams

they were a lot more liberal on who they would let—well, the JC transfers, for

one thing, because there were a lot of JC transfers on those Rose Bowl teams.

But they’re much stricter on their entrance requirements now. I don’t know

that Cal has changed so much. I think, to me, the big difference—you

mentioned the free speech thing, and I think that hurt recruiting a lot for Cal in

the sixties, because the coaches recruited, talking to the parents, recruited

9

against Telegraph Avenue basically. “Do you want your sons being involved

in that type of thing?” I had very mixed emotions about that, because in

general I thought the free speech movement was good, because when I went to

school it was a real—well, we were not revolutionaries, put it that way.

[laughing] Revolution was cutting class, you know? We were very quiet.

There were no, certainly no protests.

And of course it was a very homogenous student body, almost all white. The

only black person I knew was Earl Robinson, who was on the basketball team

and baseball team too. Actually, I knew him as well as a baseball player

because I covered baseball when I was a junior. And I still know Earl. We’ve

talked a lot over the years because he worked at Laney [College] and he had a

home right up here in the hills for a long time. He’s moved up to Roseville

recently, but we used to see each other in the Lucky parking lot all the time. In

fact, I saw him—oh when was it, about six weeks ago maybe. He was down

visiting some friends, and for some reason he was at Lucky, and I said, “Long

time no see!” But he was a member of my class, and he spoke—we had a

class reunion right down the street here at the Claremont Country Club, and he

spoke at that. But he’s the only black—there were blacks on the football team,

but I didn’t know any of them.

I wasn’t interviewing players that much. But I did interview the basketball

bunch, for some reason—I’m trying to think what it was. But I was involved

in a campus radio show and interviewing athletes at one point, but I don’t

remember ever interviewing any football players. I did interview—I know I

remember Earl and Al Buch. I interviewed them. And I was also—my

roommate at Cal was on the basketball team. He didn’t play much. He was

mostly—he was back and forth between the varsity and the JV teams.

01-00:25:5

Cummins: Where did you live?

01-00:25:55

Dickey: We lived in a boarding house when we were—it was the same class. When

Tom and I were juniors we lived in a boarding house, and then we lived up at

Smyth, at the top of the hill there, our senior year. But so I knew a lot of the

basketball players through Tom, so I was much closer to basketball. But I

can’t recall ever seeing a black student in a class. There probably were

occasional ones.

01-00:26:30

Cummins: Oh yes, but it was a very small [number].

01-00:26:29

Dickey: And of course Latinos—no. Asians, no. And now, of course, you walk around

the campus and it looks like China West or something.

01-00:26:39

Cummins: Yes.

10

01-00:26:42

Dickey: So that, to me, is just such a huge change it’s unbelievable. But so we were a

very quiet, quiet class. And then, for just a few years later to have all this

rebellion. But I thought it was about time! We should have spoken out more.

But we were just very quiet, and so nobody protested anything. So it was a

shock to me, and of course it happened about the time I came to the

Chronicle. I think it was ’64.

01-00:27:18

Cummins: Yes, exactly. Do you remember, just to go back a couple of years, Pappy

Waldorf being censured publicly by Kerr for being part of the paying of

student athletes? Do you have any recollection?

01-00:27:33

Dickey: I don’t remember that at all, no.

01-00:27:36

Dickey: When was that?

01-00:27:37

Cummins: Well, it was 1956. It was around the time that the Pacific Coast Conference

dissolved, and that of course had to do with all of the violations related to

paying players.

01-00:27:51

Dickey: Yeah, right.

01-00:27:55

Cummins: In Pappy Waldorf’s case the amount of money, compared to say what UCLA

or USC or Washington was using, was very small. He maintained that he gave

that money only to the poor kids, the poor athletes who really needed it. But

he was directly involved, instead of using a donor/an alum basically to do that.

And so Kerr viewed that, the fact that he was directly involved, as something

that required this public letter of reprimand, which I guess was very

controversial at the time, so people were really upset that Kerr did that.

01-00:28:39

Dickey: I think that happened just before I came, because I know the break-up of the

conference was before I got to Cal, because I remember—we lived in Santa

Barbara, and I remember I used to root for SC, believe it or not, just because I

liked their football teams. And Jon Arnett was a particular hero, and he was

one that got half a season, a senior. So I remember that vividly. So that

probably—that probably was when Pappy got the thing. But I wasn’t—at that

point, frankly, I wasn’t that involved emotionally with Cal. I didn’t become—

01-00:29:18

Cummins: Yes, of course. You weren’t there.

11

01-00:29:19

Dickey: I didn’t become involved until I got here. I remember thinking that in a way,

when my dad got transferred and I went to Santa Barbara, in a way I was

happy because I could continue rooting for SC for a couple of years.

[laughter] But I was just thinking strictly in terms of the football teams, not

the quality of the—there was never any question I was going to—the thought

that I was going to go to SC—we couldn’t afford that, for God sakes.

01-00:29:52

Cummins: Anyway, I interrupted. So you were talking about FSM then, and the impact.

01-00:29:57

Dickey: Yeah, it was just—it was a real shocker to me, but I thought it was a good

thing. But I know, talking to coaches of that time, that they had a terrible time

recruiting against it, because the parents of high school kids were just appalled

by this. And so that was a real factor, I think more than anything else, more

than how committed they were or anything like that. They just had trouble

getting kids to come there.

01-00:30:36

Cummins: Exactly right.

01-00:30:36

Dickey: And then of course, when Mike White took over and Dave Maggard was

hired—White was a classmate of mine and has been a friend for a long time,

still is. He was actually hired before Dave was you know, and he never felt

that Dave had any authority over him. [laughing]

01-00:31:02

Cummins: Is that right? Who did?

01-00:31:07

Dickey: Well, yeah, and Mike is a good football coach, but he was bringing kids into

the school who just didn’t belong.

01-00:31:14

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:31:17

Dickey: The graduation rates—I’m sure you’re very familiar with that.

01-00:31:21

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:31:22

Dickey: The graduation rates—I’m sure you’re very familiar with that—the graduation

rates just plummeted, of his players. It was really funny, in a way, how all that

evolved and Dave fired him. So many writers that said, “Well, he’s a pretty

good coach. Why are you firing him?” They just didn’t understand that, but I

understood it.

12

What was really amusing at the time was the day it was announced Dave and I

had lunch. The other writers knew we were going to lunch, but it was

something that had been arranged a couple of weeks before. It had nothing to

do with that, but they thought well, he’s going to lunch and getting all the

information. [laughter] But I never—Dave has been a friend for a long time

and he’s just a real solid guy. We would have lunch a lot, but I never, ever

talked to him about a coach, whether he was going to keep a coach, whether

he was going to fire a coach. The only time we talked about a coach was when

he wanted to hire Joe Kapp and I thought that was a good idea, and both of us

were wrong. [laughing]

01-00:32:39

Cummins: Yes, yes.

01-00:32:40

Dickey: Well, this is kind of a side story. But we weren’t wrong in what the plan—the

plan was never that Joe would be a hands-on coach. It’d be that he would be

the cheerleader and he’d have assistants who would run it. That worked well

when Ron Lynn really ran the team in his first year, but then the USFL came

along and took all the good assistants away, including Lynn, and Joe thought

well, I can coach the team. Oh God. [laughing] I could have done a better job.

But anyway, that’s getting ahead of the story.

With Mike White, that’s really what happened. Mike just always felt, because

he was hired first, that he didn’t really owe any responsibility to Dave.

01-00:33:37

Cummins: Boy, that’s tough. That’s very hard.

01-00:33:39

Dickey: Yeah, and Dave just couldn’t—he was called in to clean it up. They had

that—the school was on probation because of the Isaac Curtis thing. The

assistant coach took his SAT for him.

01-00:33:56

Cummins: Go back a little bit in the sixties, still on the racial issue, Pete Newell and

Rene Herrerias and all the activity around that. Did you cover that?

01-00:34:14

Dickey: Yeah, I covered—I knew Pete pretty well. As I said, I was much closer to the

basketball scene in college than I was football. I remained close to that,

because I would come up even when I was in Watsonville. I knew a lot of the

players on the team. Some had graduated by that time, that I knew, but so I

was very close to that and to Pete. I really was pretty close to him till he died.

A wonderful guy. But he, I don’t remember—the race thing didn’t—there

were so few blacks involved. He had Earl Robinson, but Earl wasn’t on the

championship because he’d turned pro in baseball. In fact, I don’t think he

even played on the—because Pete won three straight conference titles there,

13

and I’m trying to think if—I think Earl was gone even for the first one. So he

had—I don’t know if they had any black players at all.

01-00:35:35

Cummins: Well, Newell was AD from 1960 - 1968. In 1968, Rene Herrerias was coach

and Bob Presley was a black player whose Afro did not conform to team

rules. There were other issues as well and Presley was removed from the

team. He was reinstated three days later after considerable protest but to the

consternation of some of the white players. It was a mess and Herrerias was

accused of being racist. He left in 1968 as well.

01-00:36:12

Dickey: Hmm. I don’t remember that specifically, no, no. That’s—

01-00:36:17

Cummins: Because that was also part—really a part of this. It was a very tough time for

Cal, both the FSM and everything attendant on that, plus then these racial

issues, Martin Luther King’s assassination, all the protests, on and on and on.

01-00:36:36

Dickey: I didn’t—my consciousness was raised gradually over the years. But I wasn’t

really, I had never, my background was—I was born in Minnesota, very

northern Minnesota. My dad got a job there with the Forest Service, the first

real job he’d had, and it enabled him to get married. So he and Mom moved

up there and I was born February of ’36, thirty-eight degrees below zero.

[laughing]

01-00:37:15

Cummins: Cold, yes.

01-00:37:18

Dickey: Oh God, it was awful! And we moved because the doctors told my dad that

the weather was just killing him. It was nothing specific, but it was just

beating his body down so much. So we moved to San Diego—

01-00:37:34

Cummins: Well, that was a positive change!

01-00:37:35

Dickey: —which was about as extreme a change as you make. But we drove cross

country. It took us a month. The car broke down in Nebraska, you couldn’t get

a part—you know, that type of stay. But I had never—where we lived in

Minnesota I was about as black as it got. [laughing] You had Scandinavians

and Norwegians and Finns, who are like porcelain for God sakes. So I

didn’t—I never saw a black person at all. I never saw anybody but an extreme

white person.

Then we moved to San Diego, and my best friend was a kid who had Japanese

parents. He lived just around the corner from me. And I never thought

anything of that, and my parents never said anything about that. My parents

14

never, ever criticized any other racial group. They were true Christians, as

opposed to the ones who claim to be Christians these days. But they never—

so I never had any reason to be prejudiced. When we were living in North

Fork, this little town in the hills above Fresno, there were a lot of Indians.

There was a reservation up there, and they had—not a reservation, but they

had had a mission up there that had a lot of Indians/Native Americans. I’m not

very politically correct at times. [laughing] But so I had a lot of contact with

them, but really, I didn’t have much contact, other than [with] Caucasians, for

many years. But that changed pretty rapidly, and I had—my first real shock

wave was when I had to interview Harry Edwards.

01-00:40:06

Cummins: Yes, and what was that over?

01-00:40:06

Dickey: Well, you know, this is ’68. That’s when—

01-00:40:09

Cummins: Okay, yeah, the Olympics.

01-00:40:14

Dickey: That’s right. He was speaking at a Baptist church out in San Francisco, and I

was sent out to cover him. He came in wearing the robes—you know Harry.

01-00:40:24

Cummins: Yes, a dashiki.

01-00:40:24

Dickey: And six eight—my God!

Scared me to death. But we have since gotten to know each other very well

and we have a good time. But I’ve told him about that. My son took a class

from him when he was still in high school, in the summer before he went to

college. He went to Cal too. But he was scared of him too! [laughter]

01-00:40:55

Cummins: So what was the nature of the interview?

01-00:40:56

Dickey: Well, it was just—because it was right after the Olympics, so they wanted me

to talk to him about that. And of course Harry was at his best—but that was

kind of the time I first started really—

01-00:41:14

Cummins: Paying attention.

01-00:41:16

Dickey: —understanding what was going on with all of this stuff. And so, but as I say,

I was not raised to be prejudiced in any way, and so I never have been, which

is a good thing. In dealing right now with the teams you have blacks and

15

Latins and Japanese, Chinese—practically everything. So you have to be able

to deal with that. But so it’s a sea change from when I started.

01-00:41:54

Cummins: Oh yeah, absolutely.

01-00:42:00

Dickey: But that didn’t—but I don’t remember, at that time, and it may be that I just

wasn’t paying attention.

01-00:42:08

Cummins: Well, Bruce Jenkins wrote this book, on Pete Newell. [A Good Man: The Pete

Newell Story]

01-00:42:09

Dickey: Yeah, I’ve got it.

01-00:42:10

Cummins: Newell talks about that. Apparently, it was a very hard time for him because

he viewed Roger Heyns and Budd Cheit as much less favorably inclined to

athletics than [Glenn] Seaborg. So I’m looking into that a bit too, and I’ve

interviewed Budd Cheit. I just finished that. He said there were—the one

instance I’ve remembered now had to do with playing the national anthem

before the basketball games. Pete was concerned that if they played the

national anthem it would generate protest before basketball games, and so that

became an issue. And then—Budd Cheit and his assistant, Don Hopkins—he

worked for Ron Dellums after he worked for Budd—met with Newell. That

was one issue. The other issue had to do, again, with the Presley matter and

the decision to remove him from the team. And again, there was some

intervention on the part of the administration, about “Do you really want to do

this?”

And of course—and you might say something about this too—there was such

a clash of cultures, where when you’re playing athletics at a high level the

authority of the coach is the ultimate authority.

01-00:44:08

Dickey: Right.

01-00:44:08

Cummins: And you don’t question authority, you do what the coach says. And yet, here

was this whole countercultural revolution which was an attack on authority

01-00:44:23

Dickey: Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, and also, on the racial thing, blacks were starting

to—of course Jackie Robinson had come into baseball, and football had been,

unofficially, had been broken before that in the early forties. And then

basketball was the slowest, which is kind of ironic, because now it’s almost all

black.

16

01-00:44:49

Cummins: Exactly, exactly.

01-00:44:51

Dickey: But when Bill [William F.] Russell—those great teams at USF, and Phil

Wolpert said that any time he started more than a couple blacks he got all of

these angry letters and that type of thing. I was talking to him when I was at

this USF thing yesterday, talking about—one of the guys said that Russell was

always upset, because when he was a junior they had won the NCAA title and

he was the most valuable player and all that, but the writers voted Kenny

Sears the MVP of the whole conference that year. [laughing] Well, the reason

we were talking about it is because in my experience in Watsonville I knew

Sears. He was from Watsonville. And he was a good player, but he was not

anywhere near the class of Bill Russell. But it actually had everything to do

with the color of his skin. But that was—they were starting to break through,

and Wolpert was a courageous man! He was going to play his best players and

he didn’t care what color they were. So that was the start of it.

But it didn’t—it took another—the Texas Western [College] thing, when they

won the NCAA [national title]. That was a real breakthrough, because it was

an all-black team against an all-white team. But it took until then before

people really started to accept the idea that there could be black players, and

now it’s pretty common.

01-00:46:35

Cummins: Yeah, it’s a very big change. That’s for sure.

01-00:46:37

Dickey: But it wasn’t—at Cal it wasn’t that profound a change for a while. They had

some—I remember Jackie Ridgle, Bob Presley, Ansley Truitt—they had some

very good black players under Jim Padgett—way back in about ’66,

somewhere around there. So they started—Padgett recruited some good

players but unfortunately didn’t know how to coach them.

01-00:47:10

Cummins: Yes, well that’s what he was known for, great recruiter.

01-00:47:14

Dickey: Yeah, right—how to roll the ball out. But anyway, so they did start to break

through there, and I don’t know what the student body was like at the time,

but I’m assuming that it started to get a lot more color in it too.

01-00:47:38

Cummins: I’m not—let’s see, that would have been the late sixties? I think the big moves

certainly were under Mike Heyman, because that was a top priority of his,—

really pushing affirmative action, so that’s when the biggest dramatic shift

occurred.

17

So then, in ’70-’71, Dave is appointed the AD. What’s your recollection from

that period of time?

01-00:48:15

Dickey: Right, well—it was a very tough period, because he came in with the school

on probation. And usually when a school is put on probation it’s because

they’ve brought in a lot of great athletes. But Cal wasn’t winning! So it’s kind

of like with the Holmoe situation, you’ve got the worst of all worlds. You’re

on probation and you’ve got terrible teams. So what’s the point? Jack Citrin

told me one time, he said it’s a myth that it’s the top coaches that break all of

the recruiting rules. He said it’s usually the bad coaches, because they’re

trying to get some good players. But so he had a point there, and basically he

was talking about Holmoe, of course.

01-00:49:03

Cummins: One of the interesting things about that, the Isaac Curtis situation, I guess was

that it had to do—as you said, with somebody taking the SATs, but he was

doing well academically. He wasn’t flunking out or anything like that. He

didn’t have terrible grades. I guess that in the NCAA at that time, if you had a

player like that, who the NCAA said should not be playing, if the opposing

team said they didn’t care whether he played or not, then you’d play them.

The question was then whether you would lose the game if he played, et

cetera. But so there was a rules issue at that time, which is interesting in terms

of how much power the NCAA actually had to enforce.

01-00:49:57

Dickey: Yeah, right.

01-00:49:58

Cummins: Which was different, obviously, than it is today. That’s an interesting thing.

And then the administration—Bob Kerley was the vice chancellor at that time,

and according to what Dave told me, they wanted to take this issue on, take

the NCAA to court. Do you remember anything about that?

01-00:50:20

Dickey: I remember just vaguely, yeah, that they were threatening to do that.

01-00:50:24

Cummins: So Dave comes in and says, as AD, that doesn’t make any sense. We

shouldn’t be suing them; we should start working with them.

01-00:50:33

Dickey: Yes.

01-00:50:34

Cummins: And that’s when Dave takes, as you indicated in that column I mentioned, he

really changed the institution’s approach to working with the NCAA.

18

01-00:50:46

Dickey: Yeah, right. He wanted to work within it and not oppose it. But you know, it’s

interesting. I had—a guy came to me many years after all this happened, and

he’d been a “tutor” for athletes.

01-00:51:02

Cummins: At that time?

01-00:51:03

Dickey: Over the years, yeah. And some of them had been at USF, some of them had

been at Cal, and there were guys—the funniest story was a USF guy. Byron

“Snake” Jones, who was a guard. He came in from a South Carolina JC and he

was illiterate, but he’d been passed through. He was writing papers for this

guy, and he was doing so well he was going to be an academic All-American.

The coaches flunked him in PE, so I guess it would have been so

embarrassing if it had come out. [laughter]

01-00:51:45

Cummins: I’ll say.

01-00:51:49

Dickey: He did papers for Curtis. He showed me the papers. He did papers for Bob

Presley, and he said Presley had a girlfriend who was white, five foot four—

she took tests for him.

01-00:52:04

Cummins: That’s amazing.

01-00:52:06

Dickey: Yeah, that’s pretty—yeah, “Oh Bob, how are we doing, Bob?” But she took

tests for him, and this guy wrote papers for him, and so he stayed eligible.

01-00:52:19

Cummins: Do you know Russ Ellis? He was a vice chancellor, a faculty member at

Berkeley.

01-00:52:26

Dickey: The name is familiar.

01-00:52:27

Cummins: He was a big track star at UCLA in the fifties. He said the same thing, because

Russ is a very smart guy, and his roommate was a star basketball player when

they won the NIT. And the NIT was bigger than the NCAA at that point in

time. Russ describes this situation—he said that guy never studied a lick in his

life—never. They didn’t have resident student housing at that time. They lived

in coops, basically, and they were roommates. So Russ said—and he was just

the star. I can’t remember his name. But he had come back from the

tournament, and Russ saw him at his desk and thought my God, what’s he

doing at his desk? I’ve never seen him [at his desk]. And so he went over and

he was kidding him, and basically he was cutting his photographs out of the

19

newspaper and putting them in his scrapbook.[laughter] But Russ made the

same point. He said a blue book, the test book, would appear on Russ’s desk

for somebody else, and Russ would take the test. He said it wasn’t terribly

overt, but—so this isn’t surprising, that this was occurring at a very different

time, of course.

01-00:53:55

Dickey: Yeah, it’s—I don’t know. I remember that—

01-00:54:02

Cummins: Was this tutor paid by the universities?

01-00:54:04

Dickey: No, no.

01-00:54:07

Cummins: So he was doing this on his own.

01-00:54:09

Dickey: Yeah, he was paid by the individuals. My son—Dave helped him get into Cal,

because Scott had good grades—he was in the huge pool of students who

were qualified but weren’t quite at the top level. And so Dave got him into the

Extension, UC Extension.

01-00:54:38

Cummins: Oh yeah, through that—

01-00:54:41

Dickey: Yeah, and so then—he did fine. He wound up—he’s a lawyer now, so he’s—

when he chose to apply himself he did very well. But Dave also—Scott, we’d

talked and said he wanted to, Scott wanted to stay in a dorm. For a while he

was living at home with us, but the second semester Dave said, “Well, there’s

an opening at Clark Kerr, which is, of course it’s supposed to be for the very

top students or athletes.

01-00:55:15

Cummins: A country club.

01-00:55:16

Dickey: Yeah, and Scott was neither one, but he got in on the athletes, so he was

staying in a—five in a room, they had a kind of a suite. He didn’t like it much,

and he got out after one semester and came back home. But he said the

athletes had copies of tests, and this is in the nineties, the early nineties. So it’s

still going on, I guess.

01-00:55:55

Cummins: Yeah, the tests, part of it—the fraternities, of course, keep tests. So that’s—

nothing you can do about that. If they had gotten the—now, I guess, it’s

possible, but I would imagine very hard to do, where just hacking into a

computer you can pull up whatever the professor’s—the test, or you can

20

change grades. There have been situations where people have hacked into the

computer at—I don’t know about at Berkeley, but I know other places, and

changed grades and things like that too. So yeah, it’s a constant issue.

01-00:56:32

Dickey: Yeah, it’s for real. And when I was in school I remember that there were

classes that the athletes took because they were supposed to be—

01-00:56:41

Cummins: Easier.

01-00:56:43

Dickey: —easier. But sometimes—I got in one. I didn’t take it because the athletes

were in it, I just—I majored in journalism, but I had eighteen journalism units,

and they said take eighteen journalism units and then take six other units in a

field of your interest, special interest. Well, I was always interested in political

science. I wound up with twenty-seven political science units! So anyway, and

one of them was this class in Latin American politics.

01-00:57:19

Cummins: Who taught it? Do you remember?

01-00:57:21

Dickey: I don’t remember at all, and it was supposed to be a snap course. That’s so the

athletes—a lot of athletes were in it. Well, this guy, I guess he heard that he

had this reputation, so he decided to teach everybody a lesson. But he was

giving tests that were essay questions on fairly minor points. And it was just

ridiculous, so everybody was taking books to class, and the proctors knew

what was going on. They knew that these tests were unfair. They would walk

up and down the aisles and they wouldn’t look right or left. They’d just walk

up and down the aisles, and people are thumbing through their books and what

the hell was this? Oh God, it was awful! So sometimes it didn’t work out so

well. But anyway…

01-00:58:16

Cummins: So Dave comes in, gets those changes—one of the first things he told me that

he had to do, there was a Bear boosters group that was independent of the

university.

01-00:58:29

Dickey: Right.

01-00:58:32

Cummins: He told Al Bowker that he did not think that was healthy, that we’ve got to

change this and set up our own. And that was when Bear Backers started. But

Dave tells this story about—he had cleared that with Bowker. He goes over to

the city to meet with this group, and immediately they start telling him how

Intercollegiate Athletics is going to run—and you can do this and you can do

that. [laughter] And Dave said, “I’m sorry. That’s not the way it’s going to be

anymore.” And so there was this either direct or implied threat—well, you’re

21

not going to get our money if blah, blah, blah. And Dave said, “That’s fine.

Thank you very much,” and he got up and walked out. And he said before he

got back to the campus the phones were ringing over in the chancellor’s

office—and you know, this kind of thing. So that’s also a very common issue

in intercollegiate athletics. What was your involvement? How did you deal

with that, if at all?

01-00:59:45

Dickey: I didn’t deal with that. I remember when that happened with Dave, and I

sympathized with him because I totally agreed with his position. Most of the

real excesses in college sports come from boosters who are under no control

of the university and just acting on their own—the Sam Gilbert thing. But I

didn’t get involved at that point. I wasn’t writing about that type of thing, and

this was pretty early, because I started writing—

01-01:00:24

Cummins: Yeah, right, ’71 to the—

01-01:00:27

Dickey: Yeah, right, as I say in ’71 I was still supposedly experimental, although it

was pretty certain I was going to be, as soon as [Charles de Young] Thieriot

opened up the pocketbook a little bit. But so I was very early in my column-

writing career, and I wasn’t ready to delve into that kind of issue particularly,

so I didn’t get involved in that, but I was certainly aware of it at the time. I

knew some of these guys, and they were very angry.

01-01:01:04

Cummins: So as a reporter, and particularly over the years then, the longer you’re there,

the bigger reputation you have, et cetera, you have to be getting calls and

people talking to you at every opportunity, right? About their views—and

maybe that’s still the case, I would assume.

01-01:01:21

Dickey: Yeah, yeah right. That’s—I don’t get it as much now, because I’m not on the

Chronicle, and so not nearly as many people are reading me as did at one

point. Because the Chronicle has—well, their readership is down a lot now,

but it was, at the point I—when Hearst bought the paper the circulation was

about six hundred thousand, and it’s throughout Northern California. That’s a

lot of people!

01-01:01:55

Cummins: It is, it is.

01-01:01:57

Dickey: They figured, at that time anyway—I don’t know if the formula is still the

same, but they figured that for every subscription it meant three readers, on

the average.

01-01:02:07

Cummins: Wow, that’s a lot of people.

22

01-01:02:09

Dickey: So you’re talking about almost two million people reading the paper. And a

high percentage of those people read sports. So I had a pretty good forum, and

so I would get a lot of people. I was very closely identified with Cal; I never

made a secret of that. But now it’s—I don’t have anywhere near that kind of

readership. So I have a lot of—on my website they’re almost all Cal people, I

think. But so—I hear a lot from them, and a lot of them—it depends on how

the football team is doing. [laughing]

01-01:02:56

Cummins: And it’s all pretty much football, right?

01-01:02:57

Dickey: Oh yeah.

01-01:03:00

Cummins: Football predominates.

01-01:03:00

Dickey: Yeah, basketball is not anywhere near the issue. Now, when Ben Braun was

the coach—and at the end I was campaigning to get rid of him—that

generated a lot of mail, e-mail.

01-01:03:21

Cummins: Oh yes, pro and con, I would imagine.

01-01:03:21

Dickey: Yeah, but mostly—

01-01:03:23

Cummins: Mostly con.

01-01:03:24

Dickey: —mostly people agreeing with me.

01-01:03:24

Cummins: Oh, agreeing? Oh!

01-01:03:25

Dickey: Yeah, right. Braun was not popular. But now, what can you say? Mike

Montgomery is a great coach.

01-01:03:39

Cummins: Oh yeah, absolutely.

01-01:03:42

Dickey: I always said he was the best college coach I’d seen, on a regular basis, since

Newell. I don’t see Coach K [Mike Krzyzewski] and people like that. But he

really is a terrific coach, and they got to the NC[AA]—they won the thing last

year. I don’t know what they’ll do this year. It’s a very young team. I haven’t

23

really—I’ve just seen a little bit on TV. But there’s nowhere near the interest

in basketball.

01-01:04:15

Cummins: Yeah, exactly.

01-01:04:17

Dickey: And that’s true throughout the area. Football is so much more popular, and

baseball is number two. But it’s—even when the Giants win the World Series,

it’s a poor number two.

01-01:04:35

Cummins: So there’s that initial period where Dave Maggard deals with that. He creates

the Bear Backers. Also, Title IX passes in ’72. Did you deal with Title IX

issues?

01-01:04:53

Dickey: Yeah. I got interested in women’s sports, and I was writing a lot about

women’s sports in the seventies—practically the only columnist in the area

who was. That was due to my wife. [laughter]

01-01:05:06

Cummins: Good for her!

01-01:05:08

Dickey: Well, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot, because when we got married I

had the usual MCP attitudes. Boys and men were supposed to play sports, and

girls and women would cheer them on. Nancy played basketball when she was

in high school and she’s a good athlete—a much better athlete than I am. And

she set me straight on that issue. [laughing] So I actually became quite a

champion of women’s sports in that era. And I had met, talked to Billie Jean

King, who was another very persuasive person back in the sixties, when I was

still just a reporter. She had, as you know, a very strong point of view. And

so—yeah, I thought Title IX was fine. And I thought it was past time for—

because as I’ve written several times, if you talk, as I have talked so many

times about sports having a value, playing sports having a value, teaching you

team work, teaching you all the things that you learn—

01-01:06:26

Cummins: Discipline, yes.

01-01:06:27

Dickey: —how to deal with success and failure—well, girls should be entitled to that

as well as boys.

01-01:06:36

Cummins: Yes, yes. Exactly.

24

01-01:06:37

Dickey: So no, I was all for that. And I realized that this still—that it would put a

strain on the athletic budgets, because there’s nothing comparable to football

in women’s sports. And so there’s no—as I say, women’s basketball at

Stanford probably makes money , but it doesn’t at Cal.

01-01:06:58

Cummins: No, not at all. Right.

01-01:07:01

Dickey: And they’ve had some pretty good teams.

01-01:07:06

Cummins: Yes, yes.

01-01:07:09

Dickey: But it’s still—they deserve it, so they should have the chance. But it did—

there’s no question it has put a strain on athletic budgets. And there’s no

question that there are a lot of men who resent it. I hear—I heard from a lot of

them at that time. When I wrote about women’s sports it was probably the

most unpopular subject that I wrote about on a consistent basis. It didn’t stop

me. [laughing]

There was one time when we were invited—the Women’s Sports Foundation

had its office in San Francisco for a long time, and they had their annual

banquet in San Francisco and they invited me and Nancy. I was the only

media member that was invited. Now, there was one other member of the

media there—what’s her name—Donna de Verona. But she was invited

because she was president of the [Women’s] Sports Foundation.

01-01:08:23

Dickey: When I was down in Watsonville, maybe my second year there—let’s

see, ’58—yeah, it was ’59, yeah. I was working out at the Y regularly, and a

guy there says they had a swim meet coming up and he said, “You ought to

come to this meet. This young girl, Donna de Verona is just terrific.” And of

course she was in the Olympics the next year.

01-01:08:55

Cummins: So then in ’76 Lue Lilly gets hired as the women’s athletic director. Any

involvement?

01-01:09:05

Dickey: Yeah, I talked to Lue quite a bit. In fact, I saw her last year after the USC

game. We both left early. We were on the bus leaving, and I was talking to

her. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but I talked to her quite a few times, for a

while.

01-01:09:25

Cummins: Because there was a lot of tension between Dave and Lue and the—

25

01-01:09:27

Dickey: Yeah, well, they’re both strong people.

01-01:09:29

Cummins: Exactly. And those departments weren’t merged. They were separate. There

was also, right at the same time that Dave was appointed, the head of Rec

Sports, Bill Manning, was appointed. I don’t know if you ever had any contact

with him.

01-01:09:45

Dickey: I didn’t really, no. It was not—

01-01:09:47

Cummins: So you had these three big organizations—and they weren’t big, but they were

competing basically, I would say, with one another in terms of the resources.

And so that was tough, I think, all the way around. And that continued all the

way up until, probably, Dave left in ’92. And again, basically revolving

around facilities and budgets, because Cal doesn’t have a lot of facilities. It’s a

landlocked campus, and that makes it very difficult.

01-01:10:31

Dickey: Yeah, it is difficult. I know that Dave had a lot of battles to fight and never

had much money to work with. And people would criticize his hiring of

coaches, but I’d point out he didn’t have the funds to go out and get the best

coach in the land, or even the second best. But it was a battle. And I think, you

know, the men’s and women’s departments should have been combined from

the start. I think it’s always a mistake to have two—because you’re always

going to have a competition then. And so that just didn’t make sense, and the

Rec Sports—I never could figure out quite where that was coming in, but I

know it was a headache for Dave.

01-01:11:27

Cummins: Yeah, definitely, but it gets into the values question. And again, that’s one of

these things that has changed over time in terms of the institutional role of

providing student support services. And now, with this big emphasis on

managing your own health and the importance of exercise, and on and on, I

think that was there at an earlier stage through the Physical Education

Department—going way back, where they provided these courses. If you

wanted to learn how to play tennis or golf, or whatever, you could take classes

and do that. There was an actual Physical Education Department, which there

isn’t anymore—that was eliminated in 1997. But with this emphasis on that,

and then the question of how much money are you putting towards, say, a

recreational sports program so that students across the board get that kind of

benefit versus a lot of money devoted to a lot fewer students.

01-01:12:41

Dickey: Yeah, and I don’t know how you resolve that. I think both have value in

different ways, totally different ways. The value of the intercollegiate program

is that it’s an outlet for students and alumni, especially at the football games

26

you come together. Because you know, you go to a home game here—and I

walk around campus all the time. I love it. And you see all these groups

gathering, and you see—what’s always interesting to me about the Cal games

is that you see such a wide range of ages. Because you see people older than

me—some of them probably ten, twelve years older. And then you see kids,

little toddlers coming with their parents. But everybody’s coming together and

they’re having their tailgates—their lunches, whatever you want to call them.

And so—and it’s one of the few activities you can think of that do bring

students and alumni together, because you see a lot of students.

01-01:14:06

Cummins: No question.

01-01:14:07

Dickey: I remember I went to the UC Davis game, and I left because it wasn’t much of

a game, obviously. But there were a lot of Davis students there and alums

from Davis, because a lot of them work and live in the area, and even if they

don’t, Davis isn’t very far away. But I was walking down to that Underhill

Parking Garage where we park now, and there were just so many students

walking along and just having a good time. The Davis students were fine, and

the fact that their team was getting beat bad—they knew the team was going

to get beat. They weren’t worried about that. They’re just looking for the

parties! [laughing] But I enjoy just seeing the young people, because I always

feel—the last thing I want to be around is people my own age. That’s a

justification I always make for—maybe it’s just because I like to see the

games, but you can make that justification for it.

The recreational sports, of course it’s a totally different thing, that you need

something for the students to be able to play games themselves, work out,

whatever. And as you say, it has become—there’s become much more

emphasis on that. There was none when I was going to school.

01-01:15:46

Cummins: Well, even the origins of intercollegiate athletics were extracurricular. They

were organized by students, basically because the curriculum was so dry and

boring in the 1800s, and they were quickly commercialized. I think every one

of the issues that intercollegiate athletics faces today, whether it’s the amateur

versus professional, whether it’s the involvement of donors and alumni,

whether it’s eligibility issues, whether it’s win at all costs—all the issues that

everybody talks about. They were all there in the 1800s, every one of them.

What has changed is that it has become so big.

01-01:16:39

Dickey: Yeah, right. This has exploded. Well, I remember when I was—I guess I was

a teenager by that time, but when Hugh McElhenny went to [University of]

Washington—he had played at Compton JC. I remember reading an article

about him, and it said he found his way to Washington by following a trail of

twenty-dollar bills.

27

01-01:17:03

Cummins: Yes, exactly—I remember that. I remember that.

01-01:17:05

Dickey: That line has always stuck with me. And of course when he turned pro,

Frankie Albert said he had to take a cut in pay! So commercialism in college

football is hardly new, but it has become much more—the stakes are much

higher. The players, they get pro contracts that are $40 million if they’re the

number one draft choice. It’s just incredible. So everything has just pssht—

gone that much higher, and I don’t know where it’s all going to end. In pro

sports, as I was saying, they’ve had the same kind of explosion with the

players’ contracts, but they can raise ticket prices and they can attract more

people. They can—they’re not hurting. They’re making money, but college

sports are much more limited in how they can maximize—I’m already hearing

moans from Cal alums about the prices they’re going to have to pay to get

tickets for the football games.

01-01:18:20

Cummins: Yeah, well—and AT&T, playing over there. I heard that—it’s funny, all these

wrinkles that happen in intercollegiate athletics— football in particular. I

don’t know if this is true—I’m checking it out; I just heard it today—that

because we’re playing at AT&T Park, this ISP, which does the marketing for

Cal Athletics—I don’t know whether it was not negotiated in the contract or

whatever—I don’t even know if it’s true, but they’re not willing to cover up

their signage, all the advertising signage at AT&T. And so ISP can’t put in the

advertising that they have contracted for, okay? And so they’re saying, “Well,

we’re going to withhold a million dollars from the payment to Cal.”

01-01:19:11

Dickey: Oh boy!

01-01:19:12

Cummins: Now, it’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this, if it’s true. Again, I don’t

know if it’s true. But shouldn’t that have been put in the contract? And

somebody forgot, or whatever—I don’t know. But that’s the kind of thing

that—

01-01:19:29

Dickey: Somebody just didn’t think of it. Yeah, that’s—

01-01:19:32

Cummins: Exactly, exactly. Or you can’t—you get rainy days and the crowd is not as

good as you projected it’s going to be. Getting the handle on the—

01-01:19:44

Dickey: Oh yeah, it’s very tough while they—it’s interesting, that first game against

SC is going to be at Candlestick, where they have a lot more seats. I thought

they should have gone to Candlestick anyway, because it just eliminated the

schedule conflict and you’ve got many more seats—and AT&T is not a

football park.

28

01-01:20:13

Cummins: Yeah, it’s—I don’t know how they concluded. Have you heard anything?

01-01:20:15

Dickey: I don’t know. I know that Larry Baer can be very persuasive and he’s a Cal

alum. So I don’t know if they thought that would be more conducive. It’s

probably easier to get to, because you can come over on BART, and

Candlestick is difficult to access. But it has a lot of parking, and if you wanted

to have tailgates you could still have tailgates. Not nearly as nice as being on

campus, but—I just don’t know what the thinking was at all on that.

The only football game I’ve seen at AT&T was the Shrine Game. I covered

that a couple of times when I was still with the Chronicle. But I know that the

baseball press box is great for baseball. It’s terrible for football, because

you’re in the end zone. What I did the second game—Jack Hart and Bill

Walsh—and who else? Well, oh God—the former Cal coach that coached

the—Bruce Snyder. They were all—they were in a box upstairs. So I found

out they were up there, so I just went up with the four of them, because I

figured well, I can go down to the press box and get all the stats and write the

story there. But I was going to—and then you could see the game a lot better

from up there, sit out on the little porch of the box. But it’s just not—it’s not a

football stadium at all, and so I don’t know.

You probably saw that they had a game in Wrigley Field, an NFL game?

01-01:22:18

Cummins: Yes, yes.

01-01:22:19

Dickey: And because they’ve added some boxes or something, the field is actually

smaller, the area behind the end zone. One end zone was so limited that they

were afraid if you—

01-01:22:35

Cummins: Yeah, that they were going to crash into something.

01-01:22:37

Dickey: Yeah, right, so the offenses had to—they all played the other way, you know?

[laughter] That must have been interesting.

01-01:22:43

Cummins: I’ll say, I’ll say. So Dave, so he’s there for most of the time that Al Bowker is

the chancellor. Did you have any contact with Bowker?

01-01:22:57

Dickey: No, I never really talked to him. Heyman was the first chancellor I talked to.

01-01:22:59

Cummins: Yeah, exactly. So that’s what I thought.

29

01-01:23:02

Dickey: I talked to Heyman quite a bit.

01-01:23:03

Cummins: So talk about that a little bit.

01-01:23:04

Dickey: Well, you know—I like Mike. He occasionally still e-mails me. He’s back in

New York. My problem with Heyman was not that I disagreed with his basic

philosophy, but that I just didn’t think it worked with Cal, because basically—

of course he was from Dartmouth. He thought that that was the model, the Ivy

League model was the best. And as I say, I agree with him, but you can’t be

an Ivy League team in the Pacific Coast Conference. Unilateral disarmament

doesn’t work.

01-01:23:44

Cummins: And it has not worked.

01-01:23:47

Dickey: And that was what I felt that he just wasn’t willing to give the support to the

athletic program, and as long as you want, in a big-time program, you had to

do that. Now, if you think well, we should take Cal out of that; we should

retreat, and all that. Okay, what are your alternatives? Are you going to play

in a conference with UC Davis? I don’t think if he’d proposed that it would

have been supported by the alumni.

01-01:24:22

Cummins: Yes.

01-01:24:25

Dickey: So that was a problem I had with Heyman, and we had a lot of discussions.

They weren’t unfriendly discussions. I like the guy and I think he’s very

smart, but I think he just had a blind spot there, that he was not being realistic

about the situation.

01-01:24:50

Cummins: And I imagine Dave had to be upset about that too.

01-01:24:52

Dickey: Oh God—well, Heyman made a speech at the NCAA one time that—

01-01:24:56

Cummins: Yeah, ’87-’88.

01-01:24:59

Dickey: Oh God! And I remember Dave was just—he was so embarrassed by it, you

know. Because it just ran counter to everything he was trying to do, and he

knew it ran counter to what everybody at the convention was thinking. It was

just—again, it was the Ivy League talking, and the NCAA is not run by the

Ivy League. And the Ivy League—they do very well, but—I talked to Andy

Geiger about that one time, because he came from Penn before he came to

30

Stanford. I said, “How do they support their programs?” And he said, “Well,

they don’t. It’s all alumni support. Even though they don’t give out athletic

scholarships, they don’t have all these extra things, it still costs far too much

money to run the programs than they can generate at the gate.” But they have,

the alumni are generally able to contribute quite a bit of money, so they do

that. So there’s support, but I don’t think you could do that at Cal.

01-01:26:15

Cummins: Well, yeah, it’s hard to imagine. In the interview I did with Dave—and I’ve

done Mike [Heyman] too, and Mike lives up here now, in the hills, the

Berkeley Hills.

01-01:26:31

Dickey: Oh, he does?

01-01:26:31

Cummins: Yeah, he’s back.

01-01:26:33

Dickey: Oh, oh, I didn’t know that, because the last I heard from him he was in New

York.

01-01:26:39

Cummins: Yeah, but Dave talks about the Cal Sports 80s, his fundraising effort for

facilities. He got Wally Haas and Roger Heyns, who was no longer

chancellor, to co-chair that. He was bringing in a fair amount of money. This

was at a time when fundraising—it was on the horizon. Mike Heyman really

was the one that moved Cal into the big leagues of fundraising, and it was

critically important to do that. But they both talk about having a meeting,

Mike called Dave over and he said, “Here’s my plan. We’ve really got to up

our whole fundraising operation and put it in the big leagues. You’re raising a

lot of money at Cal,” Mike said, “probably more than any other unit, maybe

except Engineering.” He said, in so many words, “We’re going to adopt your

model. The only thing that’s going to change is that when you go to the major

donors,” who included, obviously, the Haas family and others, “you have to

come to me first, for permission.”

01-01:28:07

Dickey: Oh God!

01-01:28:08

Cummins: You know, and so—and now Dave, it’s interesting, in the—because I did a

long interview with Dave. It was probably six/seven hours. From my time,

because I was in the chancellor’s office then. I came over there in ’84 from the

Institute of Governmental Studies that Jack Citrin now runs. I remember—my

recollection is that there was a lot of—I don’t know if complaining is the right

word, from Dave, but not to Mike, but to others, about the fact that he wasn’t

getting enough support from the administration. Before I get there though, I

just want to make this connection between that Cal Sports 80s and

31

fundraising. Because those key donors, in Cal Sports 80s, were the same

people that moved into the Development Office, the major effort that we’ve

done ever since with regard to fundraising. Many of them are still the same.

So even though there’s a lot of research which indicates that there may not be

a clear connection on the fundraising level between athletics and the academic

program, it seems to me that there is a real clear connection there, at Cal,

through just what I describe.

01-01:29:33

Dickey: Yeah, right, yeah.

01-01:29:35

Cummins: So anyway, Dave is much milder in talking about, now, about that period of

time. But my recollection was that he was really frustrated.

01-01:29:48

Dickey: Yeah, he was. When I talked to him, and I talked to him quite a bit in that

period, and yeah, he often told me he was very frustrated with what Heyman

was doing. He just felt he wasn’t getting any support at all. But your

recollections are the same as mine. Dave was not ever a guy who thought that

sports was all there was to the university. There are athletic directors like that,

around the country, but he was not one of them. So he felt he was taking a

fairly balanced approach, but Heyman’s approach was different.

01-01:30:40

Cummins: And then it’s interesting, when you look at what Mike actually did, because

the Athletic Study Center really was developed under him. There was

certainly some academic help for student athletes before that time, but Jack

Citrin and Bob Price and Ken Jowitt, all professors, were the ones that really

made that function, and I think that they’ve done a very good job of doing it.

And that history is also interesting. I’ve done an interview with Jack Citrin. I

did one with Bob Price. Did you know Bob Steidel? The faculty athletic rep

for that whole period of time?

01-01:31:30

Dickey: Yeah, I knew him. Jack’s the guy that I knew best.

01-01:31:34

Cummins: That you talked to more.

01-01:31:35

Dickey: We talked a lot. But I did talk to Steidel too. Interesting—Ken Jowitt, he was

my son’s favorite professor.

01-01:31:46

Cummins: Oh, was he? A very popular professor, that’s for sure.

01-01:31:52

Dickey: He might have spoken at Scott’s graduation.

32

01-01:31:57

Cummins: He may have. That wouldn’t surprise me.

01-01:31:58

Dickey: Yeah, I think he did, yeah.

01-01:32:02

Cummins: And he was—as Jack described him, he said, “Ken—he wouldn’t even know

what a goal line was.” [laughter] Something like that. But he said he had

become this dean of undergraduate education I think it was, and he knew we

were admitting these athletes and said, “We have a responsibility to these

kids. We’ve got to give them—if you’re bringing kids in that are marginal in

terms of their ability to succeed here, we have to make sure that they will

succeed.” And so that was the motivator, and then they got faculty members

to sign up as mentors, and Mike committed the money to make that happen.

The blue-chip athletes—that was Mike too.

There was a lot of push from Dave and from the football program saying we

have to be able to admit some of these kids, and yes, we know there are

significant academic problems there. But if we don’t, we’re really hurting the

program, our ability to succeed, et cetera. So there was a lot of back and forth

about that, and then they put the program in place. Of course they couldn’t do

that without having a really good Athletic Study Center to make sure that

these kids got help, et cetera. So that was also part of what was going on.

So when you had these conversations with Mike, did you have a lot of

conversations over that time?

01-01:33:49

Dickey: No, I don’t know how many it was.

01-01:33:52

Cummins: Did he complain about your writing in your columns? Did he think you were

unfair?

01-01:34:01

Dickey: No, he didn’t complain, he just disagreed with me. And I disagreed with him.

But it was not—no, it was never a thing where he called me in to bawl me out

or anything—no, it was nothing like that. We had—I think he realized that I

wasn’t just a jock sniffer. And so he was trying to convince me. So no, we had

good conversations. I don’t remember how many we had. It wasn’t a lot—

three or four maybe. It wasn’t extensive, but when we did have a conversation

it went on for a while. It wasn’t ten minutes. But no, I enjoyed talking to him.

We just had that basic difference of opinion.

01-01:35:00

Cummins: Now, again, this is all just my recollection. But the impression was that you

had donor friends who were influencing your thinking. And so the

33

scuttlebutt—that’s what it’s called—Glenn is sitting over there and he’s got

these friends.

01-01:35:24

Dickey: [laughing] Oh, that’s funny.

01-01:35:26

Cummins: Anyway, so do you want to say something about all that?

01-01:35:28

Dickey: That’s totally untrue. No, no. I’d known some—I’d known the Haas family, of

course, for many years. Although I don’t think I met them before they bought

the [Oakland] A’s.

01-01:35:44

Cummins: Oh really? Interesting.

01-01:35:46

Dickey: I don’t think I had any contact with them—I know I didn’t have any contact

with Wally. I met Wally and Roy Eisenhardt—in fact, I didn’t even know

what they looked like. In the picture—they came into the Chronicle office,

and the picture that was in the paper that day had the caption wrong. It

reversed them—it identified Wally as Roy, and Roy as Wally. So I started to

say hello to the one I thought was Wally and it was Roy. But so that’s the first

time I’d met them. And I don’t think I’d met Walter before that. Maybe I had.

I don’t know. But my recollection was that that was the first time. But I talked

to him quite a bit. And of course I talked to—Roy was the one I talked with

the most, and he was married into the family but not a part of it. But we used

to have great conversations when he was the president of the A’s, and not

necessarily about baseball.

01-01:36:49

Cummins: A very smart guy.

01-01:36:50

Dickey: He’s an amazing person. He just has such a wide range of interests. I knew he

wouldn’t stay long with that job, because he couldn’t confine himself to that.

Now that Sandy followed him, and Sandy [Alderson] is [zooming sounds]—

there’s an objective, take that hill. But Roy is just—he’s all over the place. I’d

go and talk to him for an hour, and baseball might be ten minutes. But so I had

a lot of conversations with him, and I still do occasionally. He subscribes to

my website. And Wally—I had some conversations with him, and Walter,

who is just a great, great person. But influencing me? No. In fact, it was quite

the opposite at one point, when I was criticizing Braun, because they were

supporting him, and that was practically the only thing that was keeping him

there. But so I was going against their wishes there certainly, but even before

that—no, I never—I talked with some people, but my views are my own.

[laughing]

34

01-01:38:15

Cummins: Oh, of course. But you know what happens. You get onto this siege mentality

and that’s how it’s—

01-01:38:19

Dickey: I know. I’ve often heard that from people. Oh yeah, he’s listening to—you

know. The only guy who really influenced me was Bill Walsh, but that was

because he was the story on football, and if he said something I tended to

believe it.

01-01:38:50

Cummins: So [Bruce] Snyder comes in then, and as you said in one of the columns—I’m

going back reading your columns, and you talk about the three best coaches in

your view, and Snyder obviously was one of them. And then in this column I

was just reading yesterday you talk about the Smelser Report. And I don’t

know that you reference [Neil] Smelser, but he was the chair of this report, of

a committee report—and the committee was something that Tien put together

when he became chancellor in 1990. It came out in ’91 and it recommended

this broad-based, highly competitive program for Intercollegiate Athletics.

01-01:39:45

Dickey: I remember that, yeah.

01-01:39:48

Cummins: This committee—I was on that committee, and the committee was put

together in part I think to appease some of the donors who were complaining

so much about Mike not supporting Intercollegiate Athletics. So this was a

way—okay, let’s put this together. Jack Citrin was very involved and Smelser

was the chair, so he writes this report. That’s the number-one

recommendation, that there has always been this ambivalence or ambiguity

about the value of intercollegiate athletics at Berkeley and we’ve got to get

our act together. We’ve got to be clear about what the mission is, and the

committee recommends a broad-based, highly competitive approach, to mirror

the excellence of the academic program. That’s essentially what it says.

So Tien, as you say right in that column—here will be the test. Will they

match Snyder’s contract, or not, from Arizona State? And at that time

Snyder—I think Snyder’s salary was something like $250,000 at Cal. They

offered him double that at Arizona State. And so Tien doesn’t do it. He does

not match it, and it’s really interesting, because what he told me was that he

couldn’t do it. He said, “I just can’t.” In a way, it would not be proper to do

that. The faculty wouldn’t tolerate that, paying a football coach more than the

top professors make on the campus, et cetera. And when I interviewed Budd

Cheit recently he said that he got a call, Budd, from Walter Haas, Sr., who

was—he was the icon of the donor community really, at Cal. He said to

Budd—do you know who Budd is? You know Budd.

01-01:41:54

Dickey: Oh yes, I’ve talked to him.

35

01-01:41:58

Cummins: And so he said that he understood that Snyder was thinking about leaving. He

knew there was a salary discrepancy there. He would be happy to help—he

and other people—so that should not be an issue. But he didn’t know what

Tien’s view on this was, and would Budd call Tien? So Budd calls Tien, tells

him this, and Tien says, “Tell Walter thank you very much. I deeply

appreciate it, but we can’t do that here at Cal.” So that, I think is really

interesting on a couple of levels. One, that this very key person, donor, didn’t

feel comfortable calling Tien directly. He called Budd Cheit and asked him to

call. And secondly, despite the Smelser Report—Tien didn’t accept the offer.

01-01:42:56

Dickey: Yeah, well—a couple of things. I think, from my experience with Walter

Haas, that it was more that he wouldn’t feel—he wouldn’t want the chancellor

to feel he was pressuring him. So that’s why he would call somebody else,

because he was very—he was just a good person. He was not going to use his

influence in a negative way, what he would view as a negative way. So, but I

was also—I’d heard that. I didn’t hear that it was Walter, but I’d heard that

there were donors who were—

01-01:43:45

Cummins: People were willing, yeah.

01-01:43:44

Dickey: —willing to make up the difference, and Cal could have kept him. But I also

heard that Bockrath told [him], when they were on their way back from the—

what was it, the Gator Bowl, or whatever it was.

01-01:43:57

Cummins: Citrus Bowl.

01-01:43:58

Dickey: Citrus—anyway, that when—Snyder hadn’t interviewed with Arizona yet, but

he said that he had an offer to interview with Arizona, and Bockrath told him,

“Well, you’d better take it.” [laughing] So I don’t think he wanted—and that

might have been part of the equation. He might have said something to Tien

about—no, he’s not worth it. I don’t know. Although it’s hard for me to

believe that Tien would really listen to him at that point, but I don’t know. I

didn’t know Tien. Our only contacts were in the football press box. He came

up to me when the Bears were just thumping SC that year, and he threw his

arms around me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful?”

01-01:44:58

Cummins: Exactly, and that’s in the column.

01-01:45:02

Dickey: Yeah, anyway, but—but my contacts with him were extremely limited. He

came by the table one time when Jack and I were having lunch at the Faculty

Club and said hello, but I never sat down and talked to him at any length. So it

was nothing—I had talked much more to Heyman than I did to Tien.

36

01-01:45:29

Cummins: Yeah, interesting. Both [John] Kasser and Dave [Maggard] thought that Mike

[Heyman] was more supportive of Intercollegiate Athletics.

01-01:45:45

Dickey: Than Tien was?

01-01:45:44

Cummins: Yeah.

01-01:45:46

Dickey: Yeah.

01-01:45:46

Cummins: But I think the problem was that the budget, when Tien was chancellor in that

early period, was just terrible. It wasn’t as bad, by any means, as it is today,

but it was in the ballpark. We had 470 or so faculty that took the voluntary

early retirement, and those faculty positions had to be made up over time. We

never got back to where we were then. So it was a very tough time financially.

And in the Smelser Report it laid out some options for how to do a financing

model for a mission of intercollegiate athletics that they describe, but nobody

ever did it. It was just never undertaken.

01-01:46:40

Dickey: Well, I didn’t—Tien was—of course he came out and endorsed that report

very strongly as I remember.

01-01:46:50

Cummins: Well, he—it’s interesting. What I can find in the records is there’s a press

release that Ray Colvig wrote, where he thanks the committee, et cetera. But

there’s never a letter that goes from Tien to Neil Smelser saying, “Thank you

very much. It was a really good report. Here’s what I’m prepared to do.” So

that was interesting. I don’t know—why that was particularly the case I don’t

know. I certainly—I think in spirit he would endorse that report. He never

talked to me or anybody else about the fact that he didn’t support it, but it’s

interesting that there isn’t that kind of follow-up.

01-01:47:41

Dickey: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s—well, the Snyder thing was unfortunate. I can see

if—now, with Walter Haas, he wouldn’t try to influence—he would donate

the money—okay, that’s it. But there are a lot of guys—and you’re setting a

precedent, and that’s where a lot of schools have gotten into trouble with that

type of thing, so I can see why they didn’t want to do it that way. It was just

unfortunate that the school—the program was at its peak at that point and

Snyder was just doing so well. And he liked it here. A lot of coaches don’t

care where they are. They are just in their little cocoon. But Bruce was not

like that, and he and his wife both—they did a lot of things in the city and they

enjoyed the area.

37

01-01:48:48

Cummins: Exactly, I think that’s right. Well, Dave talks about the Bockrath situation too,

both in terms of Snyder and [Lou] Campanelli, because there were two issues

at that point in time too.

01-01:49:06

Dickey: The Campanelli thing was terrible. It was so mishandled. Oh!

01-01:49:11

Cummins: Well, tell me what you know about that.

01-01:49:12

Dickey: Well, Lou was a guy that was really hard on his players. He would be very

critical and he would tongue-lash them. He was just kind of the old-school

coach—there are guys like that. I don’t agree with that philosophy, but that’s

the way he was and it worked for him and they had some success. But my

feeling was—the players came to Bockrath and complained about him. That’s

when he fired him, or I guess he was down in the dressing room and heard

him, whatever.

01-01:49:52

Cummins: Tearing into them, yes.

01-01:49:54

Dickey: Yeah, I mean that’s the type of thing that—this was no surprise. This is the

kind of coach Campanelli had been. If Bockrath thought that that was bad, he

should have taken him aside before the start of the season and said, “If you

don’t change, you’re going to be out of here,” and let him know that this was

not approved behavior and all that kind of thing. But he didn’t do that, and

then he makes the decision during the season, when it happened, and it blew

up. And then of course the guy who he brought in was, as I said about

Padgett—roll the ball out. He was as bad a coach as I’ve known. He was a

great recruiter, but as it turned out, one of the reasons he was a great recruiter

is the guys were getting paid. So I didn’t know about that at the time, but I did

know that he couldn’t coach a lick. But anyway, that was just a—and it was

too bad, because in one sense it was a glorious time for Cal basketball. Jason

Kidd was such a great player. Of course there’s also a question of why he

came to Cal in the first place.

01-01:51:27

Cummins: Well, say something about that.

01-01:51:29

Dickey: Well, I don’t know anything. All I know are the rumors that he was either paid

or something was done. He was not a student, ever. And he left—of course he

just stopped going to class entirely as soon as he knew he was going to leave

after his sophomore year. It was not a—I really loved Jason as a player, but

it’s not a period that I’m particularly happy about with Cal basketball because

of that, because we haven’t had too many like that. But while Chuck Muncie

was much the same way—he didn’t like going to class. [laughing] Roger

38

Theder had to babysit him to make him go to class. But Chuck is a lot smarter

individual. Jason’s a great basketball player. He’s smart on the basketball

court, but he’s not a smart individual. And Chuck has straightened his life out

pretty good, finally. He got into drugs and everything. But we should have

been able to really enjoy the team, but there was always this—kind of

wondering why, how he got there and whether it was kosher and all this kind

of stuff. So it was really—a lot of mixed emotions.

01-01:53:01

Cummins: It’s funny, because athletics is full of mixed emotions, isn’t it?

01-01:53:07

Dickey: Oh yeah, yeah, and a lot of compromises.

01-01:53:10

Cummins: A lot of compromises.

01-01:53:13

Dickey: I’m more aware of that than a lot of people.

01-01:54:33

Cummins: Okay, thank you. That’s great.

01-01:54:33

Dickey: All righty.

01-01:54:37

Cummins: Wonderful, all right. Yeah, we’re doing fine.

39

Interview 2: January 31, 2012

Begin Audio File 2

02-00:00:02

Cummins: Okay, this is January 31, 2012. This is the second interview with Glenn

Dickey. And Glenn, we were talking about the—we had finished in the last

interview right as John Kasser was coming in as the AD, so [Todd] Bozeman,

obviously there was the Bozeman problem. We had talked about that. Kasser

comes in, the programs, Men’s and Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics and

Rec Sports, were merged at that point in time. You comment on that a little bit

in the previous interview. Haas Pavilion was coming right up as an issue that

had to be addressed, et cetera. Any comments you want to make, or any

recollections you have about that period?

02-00:01:02

Dickey: Well, you know, the first time I met John Kasser I thought this guy is terrific!

He’s going to be just great. He was very outgoing, very gregarious, all those

things. What I found out after a while was that there wasn’t much behind that

front. There wasn’t much follow-through. I think he did a pretty good job with

the Haas Pavilion. He wasn’t in charge of it, but I think he did talk to a lot of

donors about that. But as far as making decisions in the Athletic Department,

he tended to make quick ones without much research. I particularly noticed it

in football, because when Keith Gilbertson was fired—well, they hired Steve

Mariucci, and Mariucci was just there for one year, and then he also had to

hire a basketball coach in that period. He hired Ben Braun, who I thought, at

the start, would be pretty good—and he was pretty good for a while. And of

course, he was running a clean program, which Bozeman definitely was not.

Bozeman was—he brought in some great players, but we found out later how

he brought them in, and that’s what got the school and him put on probation.

But anyway, so he’d hired Ben Braun and then he had to hire another football

coach after Mariucci left abruptly. I thought Artie Gigantino would be a good

choice, but Kasser did not want him and he didn’t want any momentum

building up. Artie had a lot of friends among the alums, and so he quickly

made [Tom] Holmoe the head coach. Well, it was a terrible choice! He had

not been a good defensive coordinator. They had the second-worst defense in

the NCAA among the Division I schools. So it wasn’t that he was being

promoted because he’d done such a great job. Bill Walsh called me and he

said, “I’d like to put in a good word for Tom Holmoe. I said, “I hate to tell

you this, Bill, but I just sent in a column saying he’d be a disaster.” And of

course he was. I tried to—I softened my view a little bit. I talked a lot to

Tom—he’s a great guy, a very personable guy. I read the other day that he

still has good feelings about Cal. He’s just that type of person. But the trouble

with Tom was he’s very malleable. Bill Walsh was a very strong personality,

and what Tom wanted to do all along was to get into football administration—

where he is now.

40

02-00:03:59

Cummins: Exactly, at BYU.

02-00:04:00

Dickey: He’s very good in that position, because people like him and respond to him

and that type of thing. But he never really wanted to be a football coach, but

because Bill persuaded him, he got him on his staff first with the 49ers and

with Stanford, and then he pushed him to be head coach here—well, to be the

coordinator first and then the head coach. So he just kind of followed along

with what Bill wanted, and it was not the best thing for him and it certainly

wasn’t the best thing for Cal. But that’s the kind of decision that Kasser often

made. He would just make a quick decision. Don’t think about it and don’t let

anybody else come in and try to tell you what to do. And so ultimately I

thought he hurt the program, and of course he kept—he not only hired

Holmoe, he rehired him. He extended his contract. Boy! I mean, how many

games did you have to watch to realize this guy was not a good head coach?

02-00:05:09

Cummins: Interesting. In the previous interview you also make comments about coaches,

and it would be interesting to hear your view of what you think a good coach

is, because you’ve observed so many over so many years.

02-00:05:24

Dickey: Well, you know there are a lot of elements that go into it. The primary one is

that you have to have the kind of persona that players want to play for you and

want to do their best, and that you’re a leader, in other words. And there are a

lot of different types. Bill Walsh was one type. Bill Belichick is not at all like

Walsh in personality, but he is in that kind of leadership—players really

follow him. It helps if you have the kind of mind, again, that Walsh and

Belichick have, who—they’re very good at programming things, at designing

offenses and defenses and that type of thing. You also have to, I think, have to

have the ability to know what you can’t do and delegate. Like Walsh knew he

couldn’t do the defense, so he always had—he got George Seifert in there who

is probably as good or better than any defensive coordinator I’ve ever known.

And he was as imaginative on the defensive side as Walsh was on the

offensive.

Jim Harbaugh, if you look at Harbaugh, what he’s doing with the 49ers now,

he brought in a very good defensive coach and he brought in a very good

special teams coach and he’s got a lot of his staff from Stanford he just

brought over, but they all have specific responsibilities. He doesn’t try to do

the whole thing. So I think that’s—those are really the main ingredients. You

can—not all coaches are great planners. Some are just inspirational coaches

and some do well in some circumstances and not in others. But the really good

ones have both, and that’s really what it takes.

Now Bruce Snyder, I thought Bruce was a very good coach here. It took him a

while to get established. He didn’t have good players when he came in. He

41

had to recruit them and get them and put them in position, and you have to

know—that’s the other thing. You have to really identify your key players,

especially the quarterback. You can’t win with a bad quarterback. And you

can’t have a guy out there who isn’t doing the job of quarterback—I think

you’ve seen it with Cal teams lately. When the quarterback position drops, so

do they. When Aaron Rodgers was here they had a terrific team. When he

wasn’t here, then it leveled off a lot. So they’re still trying to fight through

that and get back to that level. So you have to be able to identify talent.

02-00:08:21

Cummins: Now, there is so much detail, I think, that—again, I’m no expert. I’ve never

sat with a team and watched them review film after a game, et cetera. But

there’s a whole lot now—

02-00:08:36

Dickey: You wouldn’t want to! [laughter]

02-00:08:36

Cummins: Have you done that?

02-00:08:38

Dickey: No, I haven’t actually done that. I have—when Mariucci was coaching the

49ers, he would let me see the videos of the previous game. Not the one that

was coming up but the previous game, mostly to show me how tough it was to

play quarterback in the NFL. Because they were shot from behind the

quarterback, and when you see shots like that and see where the player—guys

coming at him from all directions, the things that he has to recognize so

quickly—it’s not even a thinking process. I’ve always said it’s like a

computer. A computer doesn’t think, but it reacts—it does things so quickly.

Well, a quarterback has to be like that and has to—if he sees a defensive

player over here, he has to see—and he sees a receiver here, he has to know

instantly whether he can throw the pass there, whether he can complete the

pass.

I got an e-mail the other day from a guy who’s—he’s been watching the 49ers

for fifty years probably. And he said he thinks that Alex Smith doesn’t have

good peripheral vision, because he says you can see a secondary receiver

running free on the sideline, and Alex doesn’t see him and he goes to the

primary one. Well, what this guy doesn’t realize is Alex Smith knows the

other team’s defense, and very often you’ll see a guy that looks open, but if

the pass goes there, the safety comes over and—pssht. In fact, the 49ers

themselves won a lot of games that way this year, with the safety coming over

and intercepting a ball when the receiver looked open for a while. So that’s

the type of thing a quarterback has to know, so I’ve seen that.

I’ve seen films that they’ve had when they’ve had recruits—like tomorrow is

letter-of-intent day, and now they’ll probably show some films of guys in their

42

high school games. [laughing] But those are amusing for two reasons. One is

that they’re very poorly lit.

02-00:10:52

Cummins: And it’s hard to see.

02-00:10:51

Dickey: It’s hard to see who’s doing what. The other is that you often have a case of

men against boys, because some of these guys mature. I remember a few years

ago—and I don’t remember the guy’s name. There was an offensive lineman

that Cal had recruited, and he was just pancaking guys. But he was well over

three hundred pounds and he had nearly a hundred-pound advantage on the

guys he was blocking—of course he was pancaking them! But so I think—I

don’t know how these guys evaluate high school talent, because there’s

such—with the pros evaluating college talent, they also have to factor in the

quality of competition and all that type of thing, but there’s not anywhere near

the difference between top college play and the pros that there is between high

schools and college.

02-00:11:49

Cummins: Right. Okay, so go ahead then about Kasser, other recollections about that

period of time? The Haas Pavilion was very controversial because of the

funding issues.

02-00:12:04

Dickey: Right, yeah.

02-00:12:05

Cummins: Did you hear anything about that?

02-00:12:07

Dickey: Well, I didn’t hear anything—I mean, I heard people saying, “Boy, this cost a

lot of money.” Of course the Haas family was putting in most of it anyway. It

was something that obviously needed to be done. I forget when—it was the

thirties that it was—

02-00:12:26

Cummins: Harmon [Gym] was built.

02-00:12:26

Dickey: Yeah, right.

02-00:12:27

Cummins: Oh yeah, long, long ago.

02-00:12:28

Dickey: It was a great little place, and I have very fond memories from my college

days of the games there. But they really needed to expand, and I think they did

a great job, because you still have the same feeling when you’re in the new

pavilion that you had in the old one.

43

02-00:12:55

Dickey: And it’s really about twice as big, I think, the overall capacity now. But I

haven’t been to many games there lately, but I went to quite a few for a while.

The funny thing is that the press table is in exactly the same location as the old

one was, in comparison to the floor. It’s just that there are many more seats

behind it. [laughing]

02-00:13:23

Cummins: The budget—I don’t know if you heard about any issues related to the budget

escalating during that period.

02-00:13:38

Dickey: What I heard consistently, since Title IX first came in, I’ve heard consistently

from coaches of men’s sports—I shouldn’t say consistently. I’ve never heard

[Jeff] Tedford complain about that. But a lot of coaches have complained to

me and they’ve complained to others about the women’s sports, and they’re

taking so much money and we’re having to do this and do that and juggle,

blah, blah, blah. And of course they were complaining even as recently as last

year when it appeared that baseball was going to be cut, dropped, and blah,

blah, blah—all this kind of stuff. So there’s no doubt that it has created

financial pressure.

But I have been very much for Title IX from the very start. In the seventies I

was writing a lot of columns about [how] it was important for girls and

women to be competing. If these sports are so good, why shouldn’t they have

a chance to—and I think what I’ve said been borne out. It has been, I think, a

boon to a lot of girls and women, and they’ve gotten a lot more confidence

from playing sports. I think that’s great! When I go over to a men’s basketball

meeting, but I’m walking through the halls—they’ve got a lot of pictures of

women athletes there too. They’re all damn good looking, I must say!

[laughing] You get, especially if you get the volleyball players—they’re just

really attractive women as well as great athletes. So I’ve been very much for

that, even though it has created problems.

But I think what has really, really created problems for the programs in

general has been the escalation of football salaries, good football coaches’ salaries and the addition of coaches. The football program used to pay for

other programs. Now it can barely pay for itself, and you’ve got—we just got

this new [Simpson Student-Athlete] High Performance Center in, which I’ll

see tomorrow, because they’re going to have the

02-00:16:02

Dickey: the letter-of-intent day there, the program that they have. I said you know,

Tedford absolutely needs that, because every other school has it. It’s like the

arms race. But that’s something that’s fairly recent. Phil Knight probably

created that, because he did all that stuff at Oregon.

44

02-00:16:28

Dickey: And all of a sudden everybody’s got to have the same stuff. So that’s—then, I

say don’t blame the women, for God sakes—look at the increase in the

football programs. Look at what they cost. I think Woody Hayes’s top salary

was something like $85,000 for God sakes. I know that’s a long time ago, and

the cost of—the whole thing has gone up in all areas quite a bit. But if you say

ten times—$850,000—you couldn’t begin to get a coach for that now.

02-00:17:08

Cummins: Well, Bruce Snyder was paid $250,000 and Tedford is making $2.5 million.

02-00:17:12

Dickey: Yeah, right, and a lot of it being paid by Phil Knight, by the way. Did you

know that?

02-00:17:19

Cummins: Who?

02-00:17:20

Dickey: Phil Knight, the guy at Oregon—you know the Nike guy?

02-00:17:21

Cummins: Yes, sure.

02-00:17:24

Dickey: Because he—Tedford was up there and he really likes Tedford, so he’s

underwriting a lot of that. I’m not sure how much, but it’s a considerable

portion. It might be like a third of it. [laughing]

02-00:17:35

Cummins: Interesting. But they have a—the Athletic Department has a contract with

Nike too.

02-00:17:42

Dickey: Yeah.

02-00:17:44

Cummins: One of the typical contracts.

02-00:17:46

Dickey: Yeah, right so you know, it’s all hand in glove there. And of course Nike—

they’re wearing these weird uniforms, and tradition means nothing anymore.

It just kills me.

02-00:18:00

Cummins: Right, right.

02-00:18:00

Dickey: But it would bother me even more if I were a Stanford alum. Jesus, they’re

wearing black uniforms—Jesus. Traditional black—yeah, right.

45

02-00:18:12

Cummins: Ah traditional black, yes. Well, and then the most recent case here, just in the

last couple of weeks with Tosh Lupoi and Eric Kiesau going to Washington at

$500,000 and $700,000. It’s almost incomprehensible, but there it is. That was

one of my questions. Where do you see this going?

02-00:18:36

Dickey: It’s just so out of control, I don’t know. It may be that a lot of schools have to

drop football. I’m beginning to think Robert [Maynard] Hutchins was onto

something! [laughter] You know, Jesus. He got a lot of heat for that, but

Chicago’s very highly respected academic school. My daughter-in-law

graduated there.

02-00:19:04

Cummins: Yeah, well, and they’re still playing football. They belong to this—I guess

that would be Division III.

02-00:19:12

Dickey: Whatever it is, yeah. But it’s not a—

02-00:19:12

Cummins: Yeah, whatever division. But they still play and it’s obviously very small

time, not Division I.

02-00:19:21

Dickey: Yeah, right. Well, I remember when I was covering the Raiders, and this is

probably ’69, they used to take these trips—they’d stay two weeks in the East.

They’d play in New York, Boston—I think it was Boston then, the Patriots

and the Buffalo Bills. We were staying in Boston that time, and Blaine

Newnham and I, we went up, we took a drive up to see the leaves changing

and all that. It was very nice. But we also—one of the things we did was to go

to a Harvard football game on Saturday, the day before the Raiders game. It

was an interesting experience, because the first thing Blaine and I said—these

guys are really slow. [laughter] You could see that the pace of the game and

everything about it was just nowhere near a major college.

02-00:20:21

Cummins: Yeah, like when we played. [laughter]

02-00:20:21

Dickey: Yeah, right.

02-00:20:22

Cummins: Hilarious. A huge change.

02-00:20:26

Dickey: You know, and I don’t—if you can get—the thing about football, as opposed

to baseball, if you watch a baseball game at a low level—I covered high

school baseball at the start of my career, and it was painful, believe me,

because they just don’t play the game very well and there are a lot of walks,

46

errors, a lot of these things. But you have to see baseball at a fairly high level

to appreciate it. College baseball, in the Pac—what’s now the Pac-12, used to

be the Pac-10, is generally very good. Of course Cal won the national title just

last year. But if you watch a football game, the main thing about the football

game is whether it’s competitive. Again, I was covering high school football,

and the high school football games were a lot more interesting and exciting

than the baseball games, because they were fairly evenly matched teams, and

the skill level—it’s all relative. You don’t have—the quarterback isn’t as

good, well, and the defensive backs aren’t as good. That’s why people love

college football, and it’s certainly not as good as the NFL, even the best

teams. But if you’ve got fairly evenly matched teams, it can be good. So if

you had more teams playing at a lower level, it wouldn’t bother me at all if

Cal were playing at a lower level if they had other teams to play against on

that level. That’s a problem that—

02-00:22:19

Cummins: It is, it’s yeah, where do you go? You make that point in the first interview,

talking about Davis, for example.

02-00:22:30

Dickey: Yeah, right. Because Davis has had some good teams, but they’re nowhere

near what Cal is, as we saw last year in the opener here. But if you had a lot of

teams like that—but who would do that? You couldn’t have the same kind of

conference set up, because you’ve got, and especially now with this wonderful

Pac-12 we have, you’ve got Utah and Colorado. You’ve got long trips to get

to them and to the Arizona schools. When you had the original Pac-8,

everybody was along the coast, and so it wasn’t quite so difficult. But even

that, if you are on a lower level, you can’t be traveling up to Seattle to play a

game if you’re playing Division II or whatever they call it now. So you’d have

to play within your region.

That’s the thing about the Ivy League, of course. It’s very compact, the

schools all have basically the same academic level. Harvard is the best, but

not that much better than the others. And so they’re playing on a level playing

field and they’re close. Even then—I talked to Andy Geiger about that when

he was at Stanford, because he had been at Penn. He said that the only way

they can keep the programs going is if they have large contributions from the

alumni to subsidize it. So but I don’t know. I really don’t know what the

answer is. I sure don’t like the direction it’s going now. But it just keeps going

up and up and up and up.

02-00:24:26

Cummins: So then following the Kasser period, then Steve Gladstone comes in. Tedford

is hired, and that is a major shift vis-à-vis Cal. So what are your recollections

about that?

47

02-00:24:43

Dickey: Right. Well, I really like Gladstone, and I was skeptical when they first named

him, because I thought—the crew coach? But when I talked to him and saw

the quality of people that he was hiring—one of them was Bob Rose he hired

to do PR, and I had known Bob since he was at Stanford like in ’83-’84. He

always impressed me, he was just—he’d bounced around a lot to different

places. He’s with the A’s now. But he just is a first-rate PR guy and very

professional, and he was a very definite step-up. So that was good. He was

hiring good people, and I just thought he did an excellent job and really did

his research on Tedford. I didn’t even think of Tedford as a candidate

originally. I forget who I was thinking about. Then somebody said to me,

“Well, what do you think of Jeff Tedford?” And I looked—well, he was doing

a great job at Oregon, [as] coordinator, and so he got in the mix. But he’s

certainly done a very good job. So he’s the best coach that Cal has had since

I’ve—since I came here in ’56, the fall of ’56. That was Pappy Waldorf’s last

year, which was not a good one. [laughing]

02-00:26:25

Cummins: Right, right.

02-00:26:29

Dickey: But I just thought Gladstone was very professional in the way he handled

things and ran the department. He apparently—I didn’t know much about the

financial part of it, but Mark Stephens was in charge of the finances there, and

I was told that—I guess the chancellor told me—that they were finally getting

things on a businesslike status. Before, Kasser would just—had no business

sense at all, apparently. But under Gladstone things got straightened up pretty

good. So I thought he did a very good job.

I think Sandy [Barbour] is doing a good job. She is just not very outgoing with

the media. Of course I don’t have, obviously, the same status I had when I was

with the Chronicle. But it isn’t just me. She just doesn’t open up to people.

She makes—she’s friendly, she gets around to things. She used to show up

periodically at the media luncheons for football, but when you talk to her

she’s just—she doesn’t give you anything. [laughing] If you read her public

pronouncements, they’re just like a PR person is writing them, designed to

give as little information as possible. But I think she’s done a good job.

Everybody isn’t media-friendly.

02-00:28:32

Cummins: So that brings us up then to the last couple of years, and the cutting of sports,

the big brouhaha over that. What were your thoughts on that?

02-00:28:47

Dickey: Well, I thought that number one, they played games with it, to some extent,

because there were a lot of people that wanted to keep the baseball program.

A lot of people made contributions thinking they were going to keep the

baseball program, and then it was announced—well, the contributions have

48

gone to save other sports but baseball was being dropped. So then they had

another campaign, just organized to get people to contribute to baseball, and

got enough to keep it going. I think that Sandy and [Chancellor Robert]

Birgeneau knew this all along, that they were diverting money to the other

sports. Because they thought if people were contributing specifically to sports,

so many would contribute to baseball and they wouldn’t contribute to the

other sports. They wanted to keep all of them and they thought this way they

could do it. But that’s what I mean, that they’re not very forthcoming. They

certainly never said that and never even hinted at it, but I think it’s pretty

obvious from their actions that that was their plan all along. They just scared

the shit out of the people who love baseball. [laughing]

02-00:30:06

Cummins: Did you hear from alums about the cuts?

02-00:30:10

Dickey: I heard from a lot of baseball people, alums who wanted to keep the baseball

program. And I said, “Well, I do too.” I covered baseball when I was a junior,

in the Daily Cal. That was the year that they won the College World Series

too. I didn’t see it because I was working in the summer and they were

playing it when I was working. Earl Robinson was on that team, and then he

signed the big contract with the Dodgers. But at the same time, I hadn’t seen a

Cal baseball game in some time. It probably could be ten years since I’ve seen

a game, and most of the people that were angry about the sport being dropped

hadn’t been to games either. But that’s, in large part, because they’re often

played at inconvenient times. If you’re working for a living, and they’re

playing a game on Thursday afternoon—

02-00:31:16

Cummins: Not possible.

02-00:31:19

Dickey: You’re going to be in the office, you’re not going to be out there at the

[Evans] Diamond. So I think that’s a big factor in that, but also I think there’s

a factor that you’ve got two professional baseball teams in the area, and

people who are really baseball fans go to one or the other—more often the

Giants now.

02-00:31:40

Cummins: Does Stanford do any better? I just don’t know, in terms of attendance at their

[games]?

02-00:31:48

Dickey: They do a little better, but they don’t—they’re not overwhelming. But the

Stanford baseball program has really been very good. I covered them in the

World Series in 1999. They didn’t win it, but they were back there. That

was—that’s a great experience! The College World Series is maybe the best,

the most fun of any sports event I’ve ever been to, because you get back there

in Omaha and absolutely nothing is happening there. So everywhere you go

49

you’ve got all these signs up and the papers are full of the stories, it’s all over

TV. It’s all people are talking about! You go to a World Series or Super Bowl,

it’s a big event, but there are a lot of things going on in that city. So it was

really a lot of fun. And it was fun—the Stanford kids were so much fun. They

were just so thrilled to be interviewed! That’s not an experience I have a lot.

But they’ve got a great program going down there, and they’ve—Stanford is a

much closer-knit family, in a sense, because it’s smaller, much smaller. And

so the people who are around the university, who are alums, tend to support

the events there a little more. Now, they don’t have enough of them for

football—they did sell some games out last year finally, because they got

more casual fans in because they had such a good team. But they don’t have

anywhere near the group of fans that Cal has for football and things like that.

But for the smaller things they can do well.

02-00:33:51

Cummins: Interesting. So in conclusion, looking back over all those years that you’ve

watched this program, what are your general thoughts? Do any particular

people stand out? The general direction vis-à-vis the way things are going

now, et cetera—any comments you want to make?

02-00:34:17

Dickey: Well, I think with the Cal athletic program you always have to be realistic that

this is not LSU. The school’s academic standards are much higher than a lot

of the real football players. They are higher than anybody, except Vanderbilt,

in the SEC. And Vanderbilt, of course, never goes anywhere. [laughing] You

don’t see Vanderbilt playing in the BCS title game. So I think you have to be

realistic about success in football. Now, I find that the older alums, like me,

tend to have that kind of approach, because they understand more of what’s

going on. They’re proud of the school, and an occasional success is fine.

Some of the younger ones think that—well, Cal should be a top-ten football

team every year. There’s no way that’s going to happen, and I would be

worried if it did! Because the only way it would happen is if academic

standards were compromised, and I don’t believe that should happen.

Athletics are not the most important thing about the University of California,

and I’ve been writing about them all my life. But I have a little better

perspective on that.

So in that sense—now, in the ones, the sports that don’t grab the attention,

that really don’t have a professional counterpart—swimming, water polo, that

type of thing, Cal has been pretty successful in those sports, and I think can

continue to be because there you don’t have the big money component. You

don’t have alums demanding success in that, and it’s not representative of the

school’s athletics, in that sense. But it’s very important. It gives a lot of good

athletes in those sports a chance to shine, and that’s very important. So I think

keeping a broad-based program is important. Whether Cal can continue to do

50

that is a real question, because the football program is just sucking up so much

money.

And now they’re putting all these millions, hundreds of millions, into

restructuring the stadium, which had to be done. There’s no way you could

continue playing—we’re all fortunate that it didn’t fall down around our heads

during a game sometime. When I think of that, all the—

02-00:37:17

Cummins: Right, all the games.

02-00:37:19

Dickey: —all the games I’ve been to, just sitting right on the fault there. Holy Christ!

So that absolutely had to be done, and of course the stadium was just—it was

in bad shape. A beautiful setting, but if you had to go to the restroom—not too

pretty.

02-00:37:44

Cummins: Oh! Exactly.

02-00:37:47

Dickey: The facilities were very outdated.

02-00:37:50

Cummins: Of course you were up in that press box, where it could have fallen down too.

02-00:37:53

Dickey: Yeah, right. The temporary press box—temporary. Temporary—I think it was

put in twelve years ago. It’s funny how those things [go]. Well, it’s funny, but

I kind of enjoyed that press box, because I didn’t write there. Now, the guys

who had to write there, it was a real problem, because they’d have their

machines there—now, they had another room where you could go after the

game. But if you’re writing during the game, or trying to keep notes or

something, and it started raining or something, it’s really a mess. But I

enjoyed it because the stands are there. People would stand up and they’d

walk by and talk to me, and it was fun. I enjoyed that. So I don’t think it’ll be

the same with the new press box. It’ll be removed. It’ll be a much nicer press

box, obviously.

02-00:38:55

Cummins: I think we should get on tape here how you reported. Because I remember

when we had our first meeting setting up your interview with Chancellor

Berdahl, you didn’t take any notes. And then when we had the interview with

Bob Berdahl in the chancellor’s office you also didn’t take any notes—and so

we commented on that immediately after you left. And yet the article said

verbatim, closed quotes around that column. How in God’s name did you do

that? So you should say something about that. [laughter]

51

02-00:39:26

Dickey: Well, you know, when I started out nobody was even using tape recorders.

Now everybody uses tape recorders. So you had to take notes. Unless you take

shorthand, like John Crumpacker, who covers Bear sports, he learned how to

take—

02-00:39:47

Cummins: Write shorthand? Oh.

02-00:39:48

Dickey: —shorthand, so he scribbles along, and it’s good. Because Mike Montgomery,

while I was at a basketball meeting last year, Mike challenged him on it and

he says, “Well, tell me what I just said.” And John just read it back to him.

But I didn’t take shorthand, and my handwriting was—well, it was a lot better

then than it is now, but it’s still—if you’re trying to scribble down things… Plus, I felt that you missed things too. So I trained myself to listen and catch

the—guys have pet phrases that they use. Art Agnos asked me about this one

time, because we had a lot of meetings on the ball park and he’d give me

some pretty complicated stuff, and I wasn’t taking notes and it came out fine.

He said, “How do you do that?” And I said, “Well, it’s kind of like when

you’re reading something and you highlight the important things. When I’m

listening to a conversation I’m having with somebody, it’s like I highlight in

my mind. I can’t give you the whole thing verbatim, but I can give you the

important things verbatim.” So that’s the way I do it, but I’ve always done it

that way. It’s also a way of keeping my mind sharp, because it’s a challenge.

02-00:41:16

Cummins: Focused, absolutely. That’s hard to do.

02-00:41:25

Dickey: But a lot of people—one time when Garry St. Jean was an assistant coach for

Don Nelson, he had a bet with Don Nelson that I have a tape recorder hidden.

Because he’d be there when I was talking to Nelson, and he knew that what I

was writing in the column was what Nelson said—he says, “He can’t

remember all that.”

02-00:41:43

Cummins: Oh, that’s hilarious, that’s hilarious. It’s a little unnerving, especially the first

time. So anyway, it’s a good technique, I’ll tell you, if you can do it.

02-00:41:55

Dickey: That only time it failed me—it didn’t fail me, but when I was down in Santa

Barbara—I went two years down in Santa Barbara before I came up to Cal,

because my dad was in the Forest Service. He was transferred down there. I

don’t know if I ever told you this. But we were up in Sonora, and I was

accepted at Cal as a freshman and I had a place reserved in Bowles Hall. I

even had a job on the telephone—

02-00:42:24

Cummins: The switchboard?

52

02-00:42:26

Dickey: The switchboard, to help pay the expenses. But then Dad got transferred to

Santa Barbara that summer, so he said well, you might as well go here for a

couple of years, which was fine with me. You take the same courses the first

two years, wherever you are, so we went down there. Well, the basketball

coach there, if I was just talking to him, he thought that I wasn’t going to write

anything about it—I wasn’t going to record all his pretty little words. So I had

to pretend that I was taking notes with him. [laughter]

02-00:43:03

Cummins: Amazing.

02-00:43:03

Dickey: I never did, but so long as I was scribbling something down he thought okay,

he’s going to write about me. But that’s the only time—but there have been a

lot of times that people have been surprised when they see it in print. But I

don’t—I’ve never tried to embarrass people with that. If somebody said

something to me—well, in our conversation. I thought at the start that Berdahl

was going to be off the record, so I asked him how much of this—and he said

any of it. So okay. Good. Because it was great, and as I remember I had to

write—it was twice as long as my normal column. But he was—because he

was very forthcoming. I was very happy with that.

02-00:44:14

Cummins: Interesting. Good. Any other general comments? When you get the transcript

back, of course, we can revisit this and if there are other things you want to

say we can do it in that format.

02-00:44:30

Dickey: Yeah. I’m just trying to think what—because I’ve known so many people over

the years here. I never really knew Pappy Waldorf, and as I say, he was in his

last year. So many of the alums who were here earlier or who happened to

grow up in Berkeley, the guys that came to Cal and that grew up in Berkeley

and they saw games when they were at Berkeley High and that type of thing,

just revered Pappy. But by the time I got here his luck, or whatever—he had

such a strange career, that he was so successful early, but then after ’51 I think

it was, he never had a winning season again. So I think part of it was the fact

that SC was not—SC was in a down period in the late forties. And so the

competition was not as stiff in the conference maybe. I don’t know what it

was. But since I didn’t really see his teams, the good teams, I can’t—I saw

one game in ’54 when I was a senior in high school—well, it was ’53, fall

of ’53, when I was up for—I forget whether it was a journalism day or music

day. I was a soloist in the choir in high school. But it was one of those. I was

up a couple of times during that year. They used to always play San Jose

State, and that was the game they always had one of these big high school

things, because they had a lot of empty seats that they had for us. So I saw that

game, which I don’t remember at all. And then I saw some games in the last

season and that was it. And none of them—I didn’t see the Big Game, because

53

it was Thanksgiving weekend, so I had gone home to my family in Santa

Barbara. Joe Kapp’s coming out. [laughter] But I knew—of course I had

known Joe and I had talked to him earlier, and he’s always been such a

flamboyant character—still is.

02-00:47:13

Cummins: You saw that You Tube video with him? [laughter]

02-00:47:17

Dickey: Oh yeah, I love that!

02-00:47:17

Cummins: He’s just not changed at all.

02-00:47:19

Dickey: Of course the other guy started it.

02-00:47:20

Cummins: True, true.

02-00:47:22

Dickey: But Joe didn’t back down a bit.

02-00:47:23

Cummins: No way, no way!

02-00:47:25

Dickey: Well, Joe is probably the most colorful character I’ve known in Cal sports

ever. We had an experience one time—they used to have these celebrity

luncheons in San Francisco and some in Oakland too, but mostly in San

Francisco, raising money for the high school programs. Then the way—and I

participated and in fact I got in at the start of it, because Don Barksdale had

come to me with this idea and we talked about it. Don had so many contacts,

he got all the people—I didn’t believe he’d be able to pull it off, but they’d

have us waiting on tables and then afterwards we’d have lunch, just the guys

participating. And so I was sitting at the table, I’m next to Kapp, and Larry

Baer is sitting at one end of the table. Joe got into one of his monologues,

telling Larry what was wrong with baseball and what they should do, blah,

blah, blah. Larry’s just sitting there—he’s just kind of shell-shocked by this

onslaught, and Joe turned to me and kind of winked and he said, “He hasn’t

seen anything, has he?” [laughter]

But yeah, he’s really quite a guy. But he’s among—and of course Mike White.

You know Mike was a classmate of mine at Cal. We weren’t friends at that

time, but we knew each other, because I was, of course, on the Daily Cal,

sports editor, and he was playing sports. And then we got reacquainted when

he was at Stanford and then when he came over and became head coach at

Cal. We were pretty close, but I knew—I was also close to Dave Maggard,

and talking to Dave I knew this couldn’t last. Mike was actually hired before

Dave was.

54

02-00:49:37

Cummins: I thought Dave hired him.

02-00:49:39

Dickey: No, Dave did not hire him. He had been hired and then Dave was—I think

because of that Mike felt that he was impervious or he didn’t have to worry.

But he was bringing in a lot of kids that really didn’t belong, junior college

transfers that just—the graduation rate of football players went way down

when he was here, and I knew that situation was not going to last. But then he

was fired, in ’72 I think it was.

02-00:50:19

Cummins: Seventy-seven.

02-00:50:20

Dickey: Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He was hired in—

02-00:50:22

Cummins: Yeah, I think he was hired in ’72 and fired in ’77.

02-00:50:24

Dickey: Yeah, it was something like that. Anyway, the day that he was fired Maggard

came in, made the announcement to the media, and then he and I went out to

lunch. Well, all my colleagues thought he was going to tell me—

02-00:50:44

Cummins: You were getting the scoop.

02-00:50:42

Dickey: —give me the real lowdown. Well, it was a lunch we had scheduled ten days

before or something, and we didn’t even talk about that! Because I knew why

he was fired. That was no mystery to me, ever, why he was fired. And the

other guys were looking at the football results and he was doing fine. But they

couldn’t—because Dave had been hired specifically because the school had

been put on probation, and he was told to—

02-00:51:20

Cummins: Right, after the Isaac Curtis thing.

02-00:51:21

Dickey: —clean it up.

02-00:51:25

Cummins: Exactly. Did you, say with the other ADs, have the kind of relationship you

had with Dave?

02-00:51:31

Dickey: I was very close with Andy Geiger when he was at Stanford.

55

02-00:51:38

Cummins: Do you think something happened that was more than just personalities,

whereas intercollegiate athletics got bigger and bigger there was more concern

about being more open about what was going on in programs and things like

that, over time?

02-00:51:56

Dickey: I don’t—I think basically it has been a matter of the individuals. And right

now, as we say, Sandy Barbour isn’t open at all. Dave was much more open

about it. Kasser seemed to be open. [laughing] A lot of time he was just

bullshitting. But Steve Gladstone was pretty good about that. He was pretty

straightforward. If you asked him a question he’d answer it. Of course I

always have to qualify this by saying, as Steve said to me, very frankly, he

said, “You’re in a special position. You’re an alumnus of the school but

you’re also a major columnist.” And so it wasn’t just that they were open—

sometimes they were open with me, would tell me things off the record,

especially true with Dave, because we were very close. But it just—so it’s

hard for me to judge in that sense, because I wasn’t just another columnist. I

was a columnist for by far the largest paper in Northern California and

certainly the most read. So—

02-00:53:40

Cummins: And you had those relationships, as you say, going back to when you were

writing for the Daily Cal.

02-00:53:42

Dickey: Yeah, right.

02-00:53:43

Cummins: And the history, yeah, so that’s true.

02-00:53:46

Dickey: So I was—Gladstone he also said, “And of course you’re an alumnus too.”

02-00:53:56

Cummins: Reminding you.

02-00:53:57

Dickey: Yeah, right. [laughter] But all these things were true, and so I was in a unique

position there. But I’m not—I’m not in the same position now because my

professional status is nowhere near what it was at the Chronicle. And you

know I don’t—I’m seventy-five for Christ’s sake, at least for a couple of

weeks. My birthday is the sixteenth. I don’t have the same drive, goals,

whatever, that I had earlier. This is just something I’m doing—I enjoy the

writing and can continue with it and do it at my own pace pretty much. But so

it’s not that I want to be what I was ten years ago. So it has changed in that

sense.

56

02-00:55:09

Cummins: Okay, well that may be a good place to end. That was—I really appreciate

your doing this.

02-00:55:16

Dickey: Well, I’m enjoying it too, and it’s—yeah, I enjoyed watching the sports and

being part of it for so long, and it’s not many people who are able to do that in

the way I’ve done it, to stay close to the program and be almost a part of the

program, in a sense. And so it just—it has just been a lot of fun. And being in

the same area—I know a lot of guys that—like Mark Purdy is a good friend of

mine, the San Jose Mercury [News] columnist, sports editor I guess he is. He

went to school at Northwestern. And so he seldom gets a chance to see them

play or be on the campus or anything, and I’m sure he would enjoy that a lot.

But he enjoys being out here a lot more too, and a lot of guys are like that.

They just—to be able to be in the same area where you graduated college and

to have a lot of friends who are alums and contacts and stuff—it’s really quite

pleasant. [laughing]

02-00:56:38

Cummins: Okay. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

02-00:56:45

Dickey: Okay. Good luck with your project.

02-00:56:46

Cummins: Now I’ll make sure I—yes.

02-00:56:47

Dickey: I hope it gets written one of these days.

02-00:56:51

Cummins: Well, I’m working on it, that’s for sure.

[End of Interview]