Scorecard

SHAME, SHAME FOR OLD NOTRE DAME

As John Underwood recently observed (SI, Jan. 10), Notre Dame is a cut above most other college sports powers in insisting on high admission standards for its athletes and in making sure that they're bona fide students once they're on campus. As Underwood further noted, the school's approach to intercollegiate athletics is also characterized by a fierce bottom-line mentality. Unfortunately, this approach sometimes imparts the idea that dollars and cents aren't just important, which they certainly are, but are the be-all-and-end-all of college sports. That was very much the impression conveyed by Notre Dame's announcement last week that, effective next season, it was downgrading its hockey program from NCAA Division I to club status because of financial losses and lack of fan support.

Notre Dame's abandonment of top-level hockey can be traced to the university's athletic schizophrenia, a condition that afflicts many other big-name sports schools. Those institutions are deeply committed to football and basketball, not because these are necessarily more beneficial to the students playing them than other sports, but because they're popular spectacles that make money. Swimming, gymnastics and other "minor" sports are allowed to languish—or are even made to languish. In Notre Dame's case, the school all but melted the ice under hockey Coach Lefty Smith and defied him to skate on. As recently as three or four years ago, the Fighting Irish had winning teams and played before average home crowds of more than 3,000. But then the administration began undercutting the program. It reduced the number of hockey scholarships, first from 20 to 18, then to 16, and it shifted the team from the big-time Western Collegiate Hockey Association to a "bus league" in which it didn't have to fly to away games. These measures were blamed on rising costs and the expense of beefing up women's sports to comply with Title IX. Of course, the football program wasn't subjected to similar scholarship and scheduling restrictions.

The administration's economy moves threw Irish athletics even farther out of whack than they already were and probably hastened the hockey program's demise. The actions damaged the program's credibility and adversely affected recruiting, which no doubt helps explain the 8-15-1 record this season's team had as of last weekend. Meanwhile, the administration actually seemed surprised that students accustomed to seeing their football team beat Michigan and Pittsburgh didn't turn out in droves to watch their hockey team lose to Lake Superior State and Ferris State. Home attendance this season has averaged just 1,500 a game, and students accounted for less than half that number.

In subscribing to the notion that the sports that make the most money are the ones most worth fostering, Notre Dame is following a dubious course. The university's anthropology department, the newest and one of the smallest academic disciplines on campus, has only 31 students majoring in that area, yet school administrators willingly operate the department at a substantial "loss." This isn't to say that hockey is as important as anthropology but merely to wonder exactly what purpose beyond profit the Notre Dame hierarchy thinks that sports really serve. Ideally, sports should probably be their own reward, and to judge by the sense of betrayal that Irish players, losing record and all, expressed at last week's bitter news—one team member skated at practice with the words "Shame, Shame for Old Notre Dame" written on his jersey—Notre Dame's hockey program was indeed rewarding.

The program also was compatible with the school's devotion to academics. This is indicated by the following astonishing fact: Since the sport was given varsity status at Notre Dame in 1968, there have been 112 scholarship hockey players, present squad excluded, and all 112 of those athletes have graduated. Only two of them needed more than four years to get their diplomas. Seen in this light, the hockey program that Notre Dame scuttled last week may well have been the most successful college sports program in the country.

NO STRIKE, BUT A PROTEST

There has been a great deal of criticism of the American Bowling Congress lately for refusing to validate some 300 games, including the three that Glenn Allison bowled for his historic 900 series (SI, Nov. 15, 1982). The ABC contends that improper lane conditions can work to keep balls in the pocket and lead to perfect games that in the ABC's view aren't worthy of official recognition.

In Jacksonville, where several high-score games were disallowed by the ABC last year, a professional bowler named Fred Asensio staged a novel protest a few weeks ago. Asensio, who has had five 300 games—the last of which was disallowed—bowled 11 straight strikes in league competition at Bowlarama and then stopped his game to go to the public address system. He announced that in protest of ABC rulings against local bowlers, he would aim to hit only a single pin with his last ball instead of trying to roll a 12th strike for a perfecto. He returned to the lane and deftly picked off the 10-pin, winding up with a score of 291.

It wasn't a perfect game, but it certainly was a rare one. The only possible way to make a 291 is to roll 11 consecutive strikes and then get one pin with the last ball. It was just the seventh ABC-sanctioned 291 game in history—as opposed to more than 46,000 perfect games—and the first since 1973.