Campus controversy to career catalyst

So, with the sun and the moon threatening to crash into the water tower in downtown Oxford during the fall of 1976, the Miami University Redskins (sorry, but that’s what they were called back then) were sprinting to their first losing football season in 34 years.

That was bad.

This was worse: I had the audacity to write a satirical column for The Miami Student on the absurdity of it all.

Well, I should say that the satirical column was “worse” than the Redskins’ 0-6 start, but only for those who hadn’t a clue around campus what a satirical column was meant to be.

OK, OK. I’m talking about more than a few Student readers in general, and Miami head coach Dick Crum in particular.

Let’s start with some background.

The same Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who broke the Watergate Scandal during the early 1970s for The Washington Post had a book published during the spring of 1976 on the closing days of the Richard Nixon administration called “The Final Days.” With that in mind, I wrote a column called “Dick Crum and The Final Daze” for The Student that October 1976 during the Redskins’ losing streak.

Woodward and Bernstein wrote that Nixon spent his last moments in the White House wandering the halls in a drunken state while talking to the portraits on the walls of his Oval Office predecessors.

In contrast, I had Crum spending the aftermath of the Redskins’ loss by two touchdowns at Ohio University for that 0-6 start guzzling Gatorade while talking to photos of Cradle of Coaches members in the Miami Athletics Hall of Fame at Millett Hall.

Even though I was just a sportswriter at the time as a junior on campus, The Student editor-in-chief Sue MacDonald ran my column on the front of the entire paper. It was well-read, especially by Crum, his assistant coaches and players.

They fumed with every syllable.

My roommate tracked me down at King Library the night the column ran to tell me somebody kept calling our 203 Hepburn Hall phone and hanging up. He suspected it was a Miami player.

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One of the Redskins stars was a good friend of mine, so I went to his Hepburn Hall room to see if the calls were coming from one of his teammates. He said they weren’t pleased with the column, but he added, “No. Not us with the calls. It’s from one of the coaches.”

He said he and others were summoned to the athletics department in Millett after the column was printed, and that “The Football Powers That Be” wanted him and a group of his teammates to harass me for whatever it was I was trying to do with “that (ahem) crappy article.”

I called Dave Young that night to tell him what was happening. He was the good-guy sports information director for Miami. Later, after he closed and locked the door to his office, he said Crum “went bananas” after reading my column. He said he didn’t understand the piece was satirical (you know, whatever that means) and took what I said literally.

“He talked about filing a lawsuit,” Young said.

You can imagine Crum’s likely reaction when papers around the state – ranging from the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Dayton Daily News to the Columbus Dispatch and the Toledo Blade – ran either all or parts of my column in their publications during the next 24 hours.

Along my way after that to becoming The Student Sports section editor a few months later, I was labeled “the rabblerouser,” as it said in the cutline underneath my photo in the 1978 Recensio, of The Student.

All I know is that “The Final Daze” factored heavily into me (1) receiving an internship from the Cincinnati Enquirer after my junior year at Miami, (2) getting hired full-time by the Enquirer a week after I graduated from Miami in May of 1978 and (3) working nearly 50 years after that as a professional sports journalist.

Thanks, Coach Crum.

Terence Moore graduated from Miami University in 1978 with a degree in economics. He served as the first Black editor at The Miami Student, and went on to have a successful sports reporting career at ESPN and CNN.