Oral History Center University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Christine Dawson

Christine Dawson: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics

at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014

Interviews conducted by

John Cummins

in 2010-2011

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

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Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History

Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in

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

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The

Regents of the University of California and Christine Dawson dated December 9,

2011. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary

rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The

Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000

words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking

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Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The

Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of

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

Christine Dawson “Christine Dawson: Oral Histories on the Management of

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

Cummins in 2010-2011, Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

iii

Table of Contents—Christine Dawson

Interview 1: November 21, 2010

Audio File 1 1

Undergraduate student athlete at University of Virginia — Getting into sports

administration — Serving as sports information director at Cal — Women’s

Athletics at Cal, relationship with Men’s Athletics — Access to facilities —

Fundraising — Women’s coaches — More on sports information directorship —

More on Men’s Athletics — Harmon Gym — Recreational Sports versus

Intercollegiate Athletics — Problems with youth sports: students “get tracked

early” — Sponsorships from shoe companies — Commercialization of sports —

Women’s Athletics joining NCAA — Increased opportunities for female athletes

— Merging of Women’s Athletics, Men’s Athletics, and Rec Sports — Title IX

— Tensions after the merge — Bob Bockrath — Luella Lilly is fired, Dawson is

offered Lilly’s her position as Senior Women Administrator — Being on the Pac-

10 Council

Interview 2: December 8, 2010

Audio File 2 39

More on Title IX — Larry Scott — Women in college athletics: “how much do

you go along to get along?” — More on Lue Lilly — Opinion on the merging of

sports departments — Potential impact of more funding for Women’s Athletics —

Changes in relationships with colleagues after promotion — University Health

Services — Cindy Chang — More on responsibilities as SWA — Karen Moe —

Compliance with the NCAA — Budget deficit in the 90’s — Football coaches:

Keith Gilbertson, Tom Holmoe — Ed Arnold — Haas Pavilion — More on

budget deficit — Soccer, summer camps — Tensions over proposed sports cuts

— Fostering group spirit in the face of sports cuts

Interview 3: January 31, 2011

Audio File 3 86

More on budget issues — New Athletic Director hired in 2000, Stephen

Gladstone — Conflicts with Gladstone, getting fired — Rising coach salaries

despite rising budget deficit — Subsequent job with Pac-10 — New job

responsibilities — Pac-10 Student-Athlete Advisory Committee — More on

coach salaries — Alumni donor influence — More on SAAC — Pac-10 revenue

generation through media — Shift in sports culture: decreasing influence of

faculty athletic representatives — More on generating revenue through TV media

— Sports in the context of overall university budget — Intercollegiate athletics

seen “more as entertainment” — Role of new technologies for athletes and

coaches

1

Interview 1: November 21, 2010

Begin Audio File 1

01-00:00:01

Cummins: Okay this is an interview with Chris Dawson. This is November 21 and this is

a part of the series on Intercollegiate Athletics. Why don’t you begin just by

talking about your background, where you went to school, how you got into

athletics; briefly, so people, when they read this, will understand where you

came from.

01-00:00:31

Dawson: Okay. I grew up in Virginia, and at the time I grew up there were not really

any opportunities for girls to participate in sports, so I didn’t play sports as a

kid growing up, except with my brothers and sisters and kind of around the

neighborhood but not really in any organized way. I went to the University of

Virginia, and I was in the second class of undergraduate women at U.Va. The

reason that that’s relevant is that for my second year of college they started

having women’s sports there; I started college in 1971. So in 1972, which I

think, partly coincidentally, was the year that Title IX was initially passed, the

university, which at that time had one thousand female students out of a

student body of about eleven thousand or twelve thousand, decided to add a

field hockey team, a women’s basketball team, and a tennis team. And

notwithstanding the fact I had never played organized basketball in the past,

because I’m six five and because there were relatively few women students,

the woman who was going to be the coach literally saw me and said, “You

come and play.” So I did. I was an intercollegiate athlete but I was mostly tall.

[laughing]. The difference now is if I was six feet tall and I was thirteen years

old somebody would have me in a gym, I would have had a college

scholarship, I would have a lot of opportunities to play basketball and gotten

coaches and full support, what have you. I think I’ve always been a sports fan,

primarily probably football and to a lesser extent ice hockey because my

father was a football fan, and we, the family, would watch football games on

TV.

I majored in sociology and I wanted to be a social worker. After I worked for

social service agencies in Virginia for a couple of years, I realized that maybe

that’s not what I wanted to do. And then in conversations with some people

from the Athletic Department at UVA they encouraged me to consider a job in

athletics. And as a way to do that I ended up going to graduate school at Ohio

University, which had the first master’s program in sports administration of its

kind. Now they’ve proliferated and you can find them [at] many, many, many

institutions. So I decided to go to Ohio U. to the graduate program there and

get a master’s degree in education with emphasis in sports administration. For

me it was a way to switch fields. To finish the master’s degree you had to do

an internship of three to six months {unintelligible}.

2

And at that the time, so this would have been 1977-1978 when I was in grad

school, but at the time the Women’s Athletic Department at Cal was in its first

or second year—I think in its first year—and they had advertised several

different positions, and so in pursuit in one of those positions it turned out that

I ended up doing my internship at Cal. I had a couple of phone conversations

with Lue Lilly who was the director of Women’s Athletics and basically came

out sight unseen, had never been to California. [laughing] Lue had not met

me, but it worked out. And so I came to work at Cal in the fall of 1978 in the

Department of Women’s Athletics and then subsequently worked there for

twenty-three years.

01-00:03:55

Cummins: Okay. That’s the background; now talk about what you did when you came to

Cal, kind of a trajectory.

01-00:04:04

Dawson: Okay. Well, initially I came thinking I was going to be an administrative

assistant to Lue, the director of Women’s Athletics during the internship.

What it got turned into was a sports information director for Women’s

Athletics because they didn’t have one, and although I didn’t really have a

background in media relations or sports information, for better or for worse,

there was not a lot of interest in, from the media, in women’s sports, so it was

easy for me to learn on the job, more or less. At that time it was a victory if

you could get the local Berkeley [Daily] Gazette to run a bare score in the

paper with the result of a game. I had decent writing skills, so I turned to

writing press releases or media guides, things like that. I was able to learn on,

the job. Dick Hafner, who I’m sure you know was the former public

information officer at Cal, was really my reference there. He would take my

press releases and mark them up and send them back to me and offer me

advice when solicited, sometimes when not solicited, but that was okay. And

at the time [between] Men’s and Women’s Athletics at Cal there was—shall I

say, not a cooperative relationship between the two departments on campus,

and so I wasn’t able really to use the men’s sports information director as a

professional colleague in that way. Women’s Athletics was in Hearst Gym;

Men’s Athletics was primarily in the football stadium.

01-00:05:43

Cummins: So talk a little about that relationship. When the department got started, that

was how many years before you arrived then?

01-00:05:57

Dawson: I think two.

01-00:05:59

Cummins: Two, yeah.

01-00:06:00

Dawson: I think two, yeah.

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Cummins: Right. And Bob Kerley was the vice chancellor at that time?

01-00:06:04

Dawson: Right, right

01-00:06:05

Cummins: And a decision was made to keep men’s and women’s [athletics] separate

from the beginning?

01-00:06:11

Dawson: Right.

01-00:06:12

Cummins: There was a report I think done—oh, it was late sixties by Adrian Kragen,

maybe early seventies when they looked at this, maybe a little bit later, and for

various reasons decided to keep it separate. And that was Lue’s desire [also],

right, to keep it separate? [sound improves]

01-00:06:32

Dawson: Right, well and she came on board after the department had been organized on

the campus. But I think, I probably saw that report at some point, but I’m not

really familiar enough with it to speak to it. But I think rightfully so, they

looked at what was the national governing structure for intercollegiate

athletics for men and women, and at the time the NCAA did not sponsor

women’s sports. So the conference and national structure for participation,

and just the governmental organization, if you will, of intercollegiate athletics,

was different for men’s and women’s athletics. I think the university decided

that it would probably [be] in the best interest of developing the women’s

teams to let them have their own department and make their way through the

conference and national governing structure, and they would probably develop

the women’s sports more quickly if that was the case. And I think that was

true, and one of the things about Women’s Athletics that was clear to me from

the first time that I got there, that everybody who was there was really

interested in the success of the female student athletes. The focus was on

them, whereas in a larger department, for better or for worse, the focus is

often on football, and to a lesser extent men’s basketball, which are the

revenue-producing sports. It was a smaller department, and I think in the

time—and it was viewed as, oh lord what’s the right [term]—I’m trying to

think of the campus characterization—

01-00:08:11

Cummins: Auxiliary enterprise ?

01-00:08:12

Dawson: Well, no, Men’s Athletics was an auxiliary enterprise; Women’s Athletics

was, I want to say Student Services but that’s not the right term. Maybe it will

come to me what the right term was. And it wasn’t exactly a student group, it

was different from that because it was an established department on campus,

but it [was] funded primarily through reg fees, at the beginning, and a limited

4

amount of donations. So I think it was a good to help the women’s sports get

its footing and begin to prosper.

01-00:08:50

Cummins: And there was a comparable association to the NCAA for women?

01-00:08:53

Dawson: Right. The AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women,

was a national governing body for women’s sports. And I would have to do

some research to tell you exactly when it started but that—. Its setup for

competition was state and regionally and then nationally based, whereas the

NCAA has always been a conference-based organization. And so in the early

days of women’s sports—I’m even thinking of back to when I played

basketball at University of Virginia—it was with small college and large

college and it wasn’t—not the divisions that we know now in the NCAA. But

it was much more geographically regionally based, so that the conferences

that Cal was in initially, the NorCal and the NorPac, that had San Jose State

and [University of the] Pacific and USF and Santa Clara, so we knew more

about competing with people that might consider them natural rivals based on

geography rather than, in the Pac-10 for example, similar academic

institutions across a much larger geographic area.

01-00:10:06

Cummins: And the philosophy was different in terms of a view about the importance of

being able to compete, as opposed to winning at all costs, would you say, or

not?

01-00:10:17

Dawson: Well, I’m not sure that it was just about participation. I think certainly in the

early days of women’s sports the opportunity to participate was the most

important thing because there weren’t a lot of them, and it wasn’t necessarily

about achieving at a high level in the way you think of Division I athletics

now. But I think it would sell the female athletes short—

01-00:10:53

Cummins: Oh, sure.

01-00:10:54

Dawson: —even at the beginning, to say that it was not about competing at a high level.

01-00:11:00

Cummins: There was certainly the desire to compete at a high level.

01-00:11:03

Dawson: Right.

01-00:11:03

Cummins: But, yeah, I think the point you make is a good one. The focus, besides that,

was to provide an opportunity for—

5

01-00:11:12

Dawson: Correct, correct. So I think when—women’s sports opportunities for female

college athletes had existed for a long time under different guises, and at Cal

previously it was the WAA, the Women’s Athletic Association, and that was a

student group that operated largely under the auspices of the Physical

Education Department. And I don’t know if—are you are going to talk to

Roberta Park?

01-00:11:41

Cummins: I did.

01-00:11:42

Dawson: Yeah, okay.

01-00:11:42

Cummins: I’ve already talked to her.

01-00:11:44

Dawson: Yeah, and Kathy Scott?

01-00:11:45

Cummins: Not yet but I will.

01-00:11:47

Dawson: So Doctor Park should have given you some very interesting perspectives on

the whole thing.

01-00:11:52

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:11:54

Dawson: So the WAA really operated through them, and then the WAA became, in the

Women’s Athletic Department, a student governing body, student council if

you will, or the equivalent of today’s SAAC, Student-Athlete Advisory

Committee.

01-00:12:09

Cummins: Yeah, interesting.

01-00:12:11

Dawson: So that transition was made but it wasn’t about play days and opportunities, I

think with the establishment of the whole department there was more of an

emphasis on higher-level performance and a desire to win.

01-00:12:31

Cummins: Yes, yes, exactly. But at a very different time obviously.

01-00:12:33

Dawson: Yes, yes.

6

01-00:12:35

Cummins: Okay, because at some point—I’m sure you’ll talk about these changes over

time. I know when the NCAA did decide to incorporate women’s sports, it

would be interesting to get your views on that as well—at least based on what

I’ve read there were differences of opinion about that, focus on philosophy, et

cetera. So at some point we can talk about that as well.

01-00:13:08

Dawson: Yeah. Initially I think that the whole budget for Women’s Athletics, and Lue

may have these facts and figures at her fingertips or you may have found

through your other research, it was just several hundred thousand dollars. And

at the time I want to say there was eleven sports and two of them were coed,

badminton and fencing were coed sports that were managed under the

auspices of Women’s Athletics. There were no scholarships initially, and I

don’t know exactly when the scholarships came in. Sometime, maybe early

eighties—I don’t want to misspeak to that.

01-00:13:48

Cummins: Yeah, sure. But now talk a little bit about the friction between—

01-00:13:59

Dawson: Between Men’s and Women’s Athletics?

01-00:14:00

Cummins: Men’s and Women’s [Athletics] and also—because what happens later is

you’ve got Lue, Dave Maggard, and then you’ve got Bill Manning dealing

with the whole Rec Sports, so what that was like and—

01-00:14:15

Dawson: [sighing and laughing] Well, looking at it from the view of an outsider, I

would say that Dave Maggard who was the director of Men’s Athletics, his

interest was in making Men’s Athletics successful. So even though Women’s

Athletics was another intercollegiate athletic department, I don’t believe he

felt that he had any kind of obligation to help them succeed. Looking at it as

in an insider, which I was, it seemed that there could have been a much more

collegial relationship between Men’s Athletics and Women’s Athletics than

there was. There just wasn’t much interaction at all. I think it was fairly

common knowledge, certainly within the department and across campus

that—adversaries is too strong of a word to describe the relationship between

Lue and Dave but—

01-00:15:12

Cummins: Friction?

01-00:15:14

Dawson: Friction. Men’s Athletics, as an established department, had facilities that it

controlled, it held a certain amount of registration fee money, it had certainly

a donor base that was established, and Women’s Athletics wanted and needed

access to the same pool. And so I think that’s where the friction came from.

Dave and the powers that be in Men’s Athletics saw Women’s Athletics

7

primarily, I think, through the lens of they want [what] we have. We now have

to share the gym, we now have to—are they going to take our reg fee money?

Are the donors going give them money instead of giving us money? And there

wasn’t any sense of athletic pride across the whole university, you know?

So—

01-00:16:07

Cummins: And a lot of this was around not just money, but facilities?

01-00:16:11

Dawson: Oh yeah, oh yeah. [laughing] Women’s Athletics was always in the position

of having to ask and negotiate and try to bargain to use everything, but had no

chips; we had nothing to trade.

01-00:16:28

Cummins: Now Roberta mentions that, and I’d have to go back and look specifically at

the date, but the Department of Physical Education was the one that the

determination about facilities up until a particular point in time—

01-00:16:43

Dawson: Yes.

01-00:16:44

Cummins: Which is very interesting.

01-00:16:46

Dawson: Yes, well, it was in particular for Harmon Gym, what was then Harmon Gym.

They controlled Harmon, so there were these scheduling groups and people

would come in, and because it was an academic building they had control of

the scheduling. There was always a fight about who was going to get in when.

But even other fields—Men’s Athletics controlled the stadium, but some of

the other buildings either belonged to, or field facilities were either controlled

by Rec Sports or they were controlled by Physical Education. So Women’s

Athletics was frequently in the position of saying—can we do this; can we do

that? There were some directives, ultimately, from the campus. I think when

Lue finally would go to Bob Kerley or Mac Laetsch and say look—this is not

right. If you’re going to have a department they have to have equal access to

facilities. There was a lot of consciousness-raising over a long period of time.

That might be the best way to describe it. Both, I think, in terms of trying to

understand what Title IX required and comply with that in terms of just an

appeal to fairness at the university, and our recognition sort of, of the relative

status and an understanding that Women’s Athletics had, starting from

nothing, relied on the kindness of strangers to get ahead.

01-00:18:23

Cummins: So, I think the point you raise about the donor base is important, and Dave

Maggard had set up Cal Sports 80s right at the beginning, and Roger Heyns

and Wally Haas co-chaired that group, so that’s pretty impressive right off the

bat. What did women do with regard to fundraising in those early days?

8

01-00:18:53

Dawson: I think the first thing that was done—and are you going to talk to Joan Parker

too, I’m guessing.

01-00:18:57

Cummins: I hope so, yeah.

01-00:19:00

Dawson: Because Joan was the first person in charge of fundraising. Women’s

Athletics formed a Bear Booster Board, and it was primarily, although not

exclusively women. A lot of the women who were supportive in other areas of

the university and were supportive of Men’s Athletics. I’m trying to—if I

could think of the names of some people.

01-00:19:29

Cummins: Leta Nelson?

01-00:19:31

Dawson: Well yeah, Leta, yeah.

01-00:19:35

Cummins: I’m sure we have that in the files, so.

01-00:19:39

Dawson: There were people who—they were connected in various philanthropic efforts

within the university. Well anyway, so, that was, Women’s Athletics,

recognizing that a donor base was needed and that if the department was

going to grow that kind of support was needed, so that board was established

and various fundraising events were undertaken as well as personal appeals

and solicitations. But Cal Sports 80s I believe was partly facilities fundraising,

or maybe primarily facilities.

01-00:20:42

Cummins: Primarily, right.

01-00:20:43

Dawson: But Women’s Athletics had no facilities.

01-00:20:46

Cummins: So was the fundraising geared more towards operations?

01-00:20:49

Dawson: Operating expenses.

01-00:20:50

Cummins: Yeah, operating expenses.

01-00:20:52

Dawson: Because there was minimal, minimal—there was the level of support from the

reg fees and that was it. And so teams shared uniforms for example, or the

basketball uniforms—

9

01-00:21:10

Cummins: Went to the baseball—

01-00:21:12

Dawson: —went to the softball team.

01-00:21:13

Cummins: Softball, yes, right.

01-00:21:15

Dawson: When they were done. And people were on this rotational schedule. It was

zero-based budgeting, and it’s like in this year—every three years you’ll get to

have a set of uniforms so you better make sure you don’t lose them and they

last until then. And the original Women’s Athletics offices were in Hearst

Gym where the ROTC offices are now. That was probably—Physical

Education thought hey, we have to give up space in our building for Women’s

Athletics. And I don’t how the original conversion of the offices was funded

but it was a relatively small space at first on the west end of the building, it

was really, it was—I want to say there was three offices. Lue had her own

office—

01-00:22:08

Cummins: Was that on the first floor?

01-00:22:09

Dawson: On the first floor.

01-00:22:10

Cummins: west end yeah.

01-00:22:11

Dawson: Yeah, and so you know where there are balconies outside that faces west field,

it was kind of at that—right under where the Physical Education offices were.

And then at some point we got moved to the opposite side of the building

where ROTC is now.

01-00:22:24

Cummins: Exactly.

01-00:22:24

Dawson: There was a cage. It was called the cage, and it was probably not even as big

as this room, that had all the Women’s Athletics uniforms and equipment in it

like that. And then right next to it, cheek by jowl, were coaches’ desks.

Actually, they had this receptionist—there was one phone number for

everybody and everybody had extensions, 642-2098, why I remember that and

can’t remember Leta Nelson’s name.

But Patty would—I probably shouldn’t tell you this. Patty would, there were

three lines that came in, you know they all went—

10

01-00:23:08

Cummins: Patty?

01-00:23:09

Dawson: Patty the receptionist. She would put them on hold.

01-00:23:11

Cummins: What was her last name, do you recall? It wasn’t Patti Baba

01-00:23:16

Dawson: Oh God, no, no, no.

01-00:23:17

Cummins: Somebody else, okay.

01-00:23:18

Dawson: [both speaking at the same time] It wasn’t Patti Baba The only time that Patti

Baba worked for Athletics is after Athletics and Rec Sports merged.

01-00:23:25

Cummins: Merged, yes, okay.

01-00:23:26

Dawson: But, in any event, let’s just say it was meager and humble beginnings for the

Women’s Athletics Department. Lue worked really hard to persuade both the

reg fee committee and I think either Bob Kerley or again, Mac Laetsch, of the

need for the university to increase the support for Women’s Athletics in

various ways, whether it was more office space, whether it was to use more

operational funding to have full-time coaches or to be able to hire assistant

coaches, or to be able to retain the good coaches that were there. You see, one

of the things that I think Lue was very successful at initially was identifying

coaches who had a lot of success, Jan Brogan being a good example. She’s the

first women’s tennis coach that got hired. [Also] Karen Moe-, then Thornton,

now Humphreys, in swimming—just different people over the years under

whose guidance the sports really prospered, I think.

01-00:24:33

Cummins: So talk a little bit about that, if you remember what these coaches got paid,

were they associated with the Physical Education Department, did they teach

at all? Because there was a component right, within the Physical Education

Department where you could get a degree, obviously, that—say you were

interested in coaching, at least you could graduate with some background in

physical education.

01-00:25:10

Dawson: A decision was made at some point, and Dr. Parker, actually Joan Parker

could tell you about this, because Joan—before Women’s Athletics started she

was involved with the WAA and she coached a number of different teams.

01-00:25:24

Cummins: Joan was?

11

01-00:25:24

Dawson: Joan Parker, yeah. And she was a cheerleader when she was a student at Cal

and she has a very interesting kind of series of connections with a lot of things

at Cal. But Joan initially had a dual appointment in Physical Education and

Athletics.

01-00:25:43

Cummins: Oh she did?

01-00:25:44

Dawson: And at some point a decision was made that that was not going to be possible

anymore. And even when the coaches were initially hired, they didn’t teach

activity classes. At many institutions coaches could also teach physical

education activity classes as a way to supplement their income. It’s very

common in the CSU system, and may still be that way. The athletics coaches

at Cal didn’t have a men’s and women’s side, after, I want to say it was the

early eighties , a decision was made that it wasn’t an academic department and

there wasn’t going to be any kind of a joint appointment. And I don’t

remember that any of the women’s coaches ever taught physical education

activity classes.

01-00:26:30

Cummins: Okay.

01-00:26:32

Dawson: So most of the people who were hired were young, without a lot of experience

because they were the people you could hire for small salaries. I don’t

remember what the salaries were; I wasn’t involved. At that point I was the

sports information director and I would do miscellaneous other kinds of jobs

01-00:26:51

Cummins: And you had no responsibility for sports, yeah, okay.

01-00:26:55

Dawson: Over time I think, because the department was so small in terms of

administration, originally there was Lue, Joan, and me basically and a trainer,

an athletic trainer, and so I was able to do things really outside the box. So for

me, personally and professionally, I think it helped to have that small of a

department. And Lue recognized, perhaps that I could do some other kind of

administrative things, supervising other parts of the department or doing

reports, or what have you. But now I’ve totally lost my train of thought here.

01-00:27:35

Cummins: No, that’s okay, so now we’re right in the early eighties again. How long do

you do the public information [job] before you then move on to another

responsibility?

01-00:27:47

Dawson: Okay. I was the sports information director for Women’s Athletics for ten

years and—could it have been that long? Close to it. Lue—the funding for

12

Athletics increased. Did you ever find the program from the twenty-fifth

anniversary of—because it did have a timeline at the bottom of it. Anyway—

so at some point we added—we moved Athletics, added a position of assistant

athletic director, and Marie Tuite was hired for that job. She was the first

person who had that position. Joan was in charge of fundraising, Lue had

overall administrative responsibility. At that point we’d also hired a business

manager, Shirley Notts, was our business manager, and if you ever knew

Shirley she worked in a bunch of different parts on campus. We had an

equipment manager, and Marie basically was there to supervise everybody but

the coaches. So Lue continued to supervise the coaches and Marie had,

basically—ran the rest of the department, supervised all the rest of the staff.

Marie was there for maybe three years.

01-00:29:16

Cummins: And so, where are we now, mid-eighties, or later? Because if you had done it

for ten years—

01-00:29:24

Dawson: I was going to say mid—so I couldn’t have done it for ten years because that

would have taken from ’78 to ‘88—I’m just trying to picture this, because the

athletic departments merged in ’91, ’92, in the ’91-’92 school year, and my

first job in the merged departments was as the events manager for all of the

twenty-four sports that Cal had. And I had been doing that in Women’s

Athletics. I took Marie’s job as the assistant AD, and there was events

management responsibility there.

01-00:29:59

Cummins: But no coaches, no actual teams that you had responsibility for?

01-00:30:05

Dawson: Correct.

01-00:30:05

Cummins: Yes, okay, so we’re up to ’92, okay, fine.

01-00:30:10

Dawson: So, and I want to say I had the events job for three years because I certainly—

01-00:30:14

Cummins: And how did that go? Say a little bit about what was involved in all of those

things.

01-00:30:19

Dawson: Well, I still want to make one other point about Marie, and this just relates to

the friction, if you will, between Men’s and Women’s Athletics. Marie, I think

tried to develop a relationship with some of the folks up on the hill, you know,

up at the stadium. Mike Moss being, I wouldn’t say the best example, but she

tried to establish a more cooperative relationship for things like—and these

are the kinds of things that are just idiotic, that when you were living it you

thought you’ve got to be kidding me. When Women’s Athletics, women’s

13

coaches had recruits and wanted to go a football game, we had to buy tickets

for recruits to go to the football game. And you’ve heard the story about

wanting to sell the Bear Booster pass, the student pass to—for ten dollars I

think it was, so it was a student pass to all Women’s Athletics events. We

tried to sell it at the stadium when they were selling the student AP cards for

football and basically were kicked out of the stadium. They said you may not

be here and capitalize on our audience at the same time. So some of that stuff

is just so inane—

01-00:31:40

Cummins: And when was that?

01-00:31:43

Dawson: I believe middle eighties

01-00:31:44

Cummins: Middle eighties.

01-00:31:45

Dawson: Yeah, middle eighties. But it was clear—again it was, not having heard it

directly, but you had to think it was Dave [Maggard] saying you know they

don’t belong here. And maybe it was broader than that and nobody else is up

here when we’re doing our sales. But there was not a spirit of cooperation, and

there was not anybody above the Athletic Directors that I’m aware of—

neither of the vice chancellors told Lue and Dave try to get along better, or

maybe they did.

01-00:32:20

Cummins: Right.

01-00:32:21

Dawson: Lue and Dave could probably tell you that{.

01-00:32:24

Cummins: Yes, right.

01-00:32:25

Dawson: Because Bob Kerley’s not here to tell you anymore. But anyway—

01-00:32:29

Cummins: Or Mac Laetsch; I’ve interviewed him and he says yes. [both speaking at the

same time]

01-00:32:38

Dawson: That he told them to make nice and adapt and it didn’t work.

01-00:32:38

Cummins: Kind of, yes, so and then Bill Manning—when Dave was hired, which would

have been around ’72, that’s when the Department of Rec Sports was created

and Bill Manning was the director. He says that he was friends with Dave

before that, they would play various sports and things like that, handball

14

basically I think was the sport, and so he was really excited. Here you had

these two young guys taking over what could be big departments, and Bill had

this vision about a new building for Rec Sports and really putting Cal on the

map. And so he says he went to see Dave, and Bill laid this out and said, “I’m

really looking forward to cooperating,” et cetera. He says that Dave’s

response was, “Well, I have no interest in cooperating with you. I have what

my job is, I report directly to the vice chancellor, you report to Jim Brown,” I

think was one of first under Norvel Smith or, essentially, “I don’t need you

and in fact I wouldn’t support a building for you.” So it was a very

antagonistic situation, and in Bill’s view, in the long run, he won. He was able

to—

01-00:34:17

Dawson: He got his building done.

01-00:34:18

Cummins: Yeah, exactly, so. Anyway—do you think, based on what you know and

having lived it that that’s typical or atypical of universities dealing with these

issues?

01-00:34:38

Dawson: I’m trying to think of other—it was far more common by, certainly by the

mid-eighties for, certainly by the time the NCAA began to sponsor women’s

sports. When the wholesale shift was made to Men’s and Women’s Athletics

being in the same department. It’s less common for Rec Sports to be included

under the umbrella of Athletics, but it’s not that unusual, it’s not an anomaly.

But it’s more common for Athletics to be its own separate enterprise. I think

it’s because there’s a difference in their mission. The mission of Rec Sports is

to provide recreational opportunities for the campus at large, and Division I

Athletics is much more specialized.

01-00:35:38

Cummins: Yeah, very.

01-00:35:39

Dawson: Achieving at a high level, giving people an opportunity to perform and

develop their skills that are at the highest level of athletics that’s possible. You

know, I would say that it’s probably, it’s atypical that there was a level of

antagonism.

01-00:35:58

Cummins: The level of it.

01-00:36:00

Dawson: Yeah, that there was, but I think it’s unfortunately common for people to have,

regardless of Athletics or what area, they have their little fiefdoms.

01-00:36:15

Cummins: Fiefdom, yes.

15

01-00:36:16

Dawson: And as I said at the beginning, the charitable view of the situation is that they

thought okay, I have my job to do, it’s not to help Women’s Athletics. And

absent some firm directive from the campus that you must cooperate in any

way that you can, he chose not to do that.

01-00:36:40

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:36:41

Dawson: And unfortunately I think there was more professional courtesy shown to

people from other athletic departments than there was between Men’s and

Women’s Athletics [very loud static interference, several unintelligible words

here]. I think Marie really did help try to smooth over that relationship. And

some of the staff farther down the food chain, because they had to cooperate

on things like the scheduling issues, and Harmon Gym being the center of that

circle because there were still physical education classes in there. There was

volleyball, there was men’s and women’s basketball, and there was a lot of

angling for time and space there.

01-00:37:30

Cummins: I think even as late as 1976there was a memo that I’ve seen that Jean

Dobrzensky wrote on the organizational changes in the sports programs. She

worked for Bob Kerley.

01-00:37:46 01-00:37:49

Cummins: The memo saidthat Physical Education would receive preference in the

assignment of space and use of facilities because academic programs have

priority.

01-00:38:03

Dawson: Yeah.

01-00:38:05

Cummins: So anyway, it’s interesting

01-00:38:07

Dawson: I can’t remember at what point—and Athletics had an interest in Physical

Education being in charge of Harmon Gym because that meant that they paid

for, the campus, they paid for general upkeep and utilities. So when it was

redone under John Kasser, when it was turned into Haas Pavilion there was a

lot of discussion about was Physical Education going to keep their lines on the

floor? What was their space allocation going to be, and what was the

percentage that the campus was going to pay, and for the upkeep of the

building and all that. Now they are completely out of the building, and it’s all

Athletics but in any event—

01-00:38:56

Cummins: So on this issue—

16

Dawson: Can we stop for a minute? [interruption in recording]

01-00:39:03

Cummins: I was going to ask you a question then about this differentiation between the

high-performance athletes and regular Rec Sports for students. Obviously, at

least in my view, this has become totally disproportionate now in terms of—

from a values point of view, a philosophical point of view, if you want to

provide the opportunity for students as a whole to compete for health reasons

and other reasons, and it’s very difficult to do that. I wasn’t even aware of this

until I was working with this project, the documentary film that Fred

Wiseman is doing. We happened to be over at Rec Sports and I noticed that

people were camping out, overnight, to be there first thing in the morning to

sign up for certain teams because they wanted to play on a team—

01-00:40:15

Dawson: Their club sports teams?

01-00:40:16

Cummins: Club sports, and they just didn’t have the resources, so if you didn’t get

there—that kind of thing. So do you have any thoughts on that? This is

obviously a question, not just for Cal but for intercollegiate athletics

generally. Anything you want to say about that?

01-00:40:36

Dawson: Yeah, I think it goes back to the question of what’s the mission of athletics

versus what’s the mission of a recreational sports program, and I think

recreational sports is about health and wellness.

01-00:40:48

Cummins: Yeah, right.

01-00:40:49

Dawson: And if you—you can carry that down now to elementary school and high

school level where health and wellness programs, physical education

programs for students are among the many things that are viewed as

extracurricular, which are being cut. And yet how has that contributed to the

childhood obesity problem that we currently have? The kids who have the

opportunity to do creative things like art and music are the ones whose parents

can afford to give them private lessons or send them off to camps, or what

have you. And so I think in some ways the university—I’m going to

contradict myself in a minute, but it’s the same sort of thing. What’s their

obligation to provide health and wellness programs for the students, a

recreational outlet, a way for the general student body to stay physically fit?

And how does that figure into the budget priorities of the campus?

Intercollegiate Athletics—I think the reason it’s becoming more difficult to

justify some of the campus spending is that people don’t view it as much as

part of the educational enterprise, in the same way that you provide

17

opportunities for students in any discipline to develop, learn, improve, and

achieve at the highest level regardless of what the discipline is. I think that

should be the philosophy associated with Intercollegiate Athletics as well. But

as it takes on more and more of the hallmarks of big business and tries to

compete for the entertainment dollar, if you will, and views the need to have

ever more specialized and fancy training opportunities—

01-00:42:47

Cummins: Amenities.

01-00:42:49

Dawson: Amenities. And they’re not amenities in the sense that some of them are

necessary to keep up with the Joneses, and we talked about this a little bit the

first time we talked. What’s the cost of keeping up with the Joneses, what’s

the benefit of it, and then what’s your detriment if you don’t? Some of it I

personally do view as excessive, and I’ll use the University of Oregon as an

example in terms of the luxurious appointment in their football locker rooms,

football meeting rooms. But now that sets the standard, and so people think

this is what you need to attract eighteen-year-olds who are making a decision

maybe on the basis of the look of the place, especially if you’re a football

player who, rightly or wrongly, believes that he has the opportunity to play in

the pros. So where am I going to go that gives me the best opportunity to

advance to a career in professional football?

01-00:43:58

Cummins: Or basketball.

01-00:43:59

Dawson: Or basketball, and baseball to a lesser extent.

01-00:44:05

Cummins: And this I think is tied into the commercialization of sports as we were

discussing earlier, this book by George Dohrmann, Play Their Hearts Out,

where you’re going down to the fifth, sixth, seventh , and eighth grades,

because even at that level these very young kids are being treated in a very

special way, flown around on jets to play in different cities, the parents are

sometimes given money to cover their rent so that the kid will play at the

seventh-grade level at a particular school. A lot of things—well, the entire

sports media, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, et cetera that makes heroes out of

these kids. And then this privileged kind of notion that then carries through all

the way, so the university, when you go to a university or college you expect

to be treated the same way.

01-00:45:14

Dawson: Yeah, I was going to say—two thoughts. One, about—and this is not unique

to football, but the other thing that I think is horrible about the current model

in youth sports is that kids—they get tracked early. If they’re playing soccer

they can’t play, a kid who’s in elementary school can’t play soccer and

18

baseball because the club soccer coach, the travel team coach says, if you

want to play for me you must play soccer year round.

01-00:45:43

Cummins: Year round.

01-00:45:43

Dawson: You may not go play basketball; you may not do the other things. I think kids

get much too narrowly focused and sometimes they burn out on that. And they

don’t develop maybe some of the all-around skills that even would make them

a better soccer player because they’re spending too much time playing soccer.

01-00:46:02

Cummins: Right, or if they don’t make that traveling team, or whatever, then they lose

interest. They stop playing basically.

01-00:46:11

Dawson: And it’s painted as this is your path to the college scholarship.

01-00:46:15

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:46:15

Dawson: And if you play on this best team, then I have a connection to the coaches at

Cal. I’m the pipeline. Whether it’s softball, basketball, you name it; I have a

connection. If you want to go play at Cal for coach X, you want to play in the

Pac-10—be on my team. And so the parents pay all these—it would be

interesting for them to track how much money they spend on the youth

activities, compared to what the value of the college scholarship is ultimately.

I think in some cases there would not be a good balance. And the other thing it

does for some kids though is it gets them into the college of their choice.

01-00:46:58

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:47:00

Dawson: For example, students here are given, here, UCLA, a lot of the more selective

universities, there are, as we know, tens of thousands of people who meet the

minimum UC requirements and there are this many of them [making a hand

sign to indicate a small amount] who are ultimately admitted. But if you’re an

athlete within certain parameters and meet the minimum requirements you’re

in. I just want to say—and in the early days of Women’s Athletics one of the

things that I think helped the women’s teams at Cal be so successful early was

the opportunity to get those kids into Cal. The ability to tag student athletes

for admission, because it’s not competitive the way it is now, but twenty,

thirty years ago it was still very competitive for admissions here. So the kind

of—the demographic maybe of a family who had kids who had been playing

sports and competing their whole life—they wanted their kids to go to Cal.

And so this was a way to help them get in, even if there was no scholarship

money available. The fees at the time were at the low end, too. But I think that

19

part of the reason the Women’s Athletic Program here was initially successful,

and that helped build the traditions where—that’s continuing today in terms of

the successful performance of the teams was the quality of the university and

its ability to attract those students.

01-00:48:34

Cummins: And on the whole the students in the Olympic sports do very well, and

women’s sports, in terms of graduation rates. Academically they have always

done really pretty well, so that’s interesting too. This issue of the values I

think is important because it’s where the rhetoric starts to diverge from the

reality of what’s going on, which is, at least in the major sports—I mean

football and basketball, maybe women’s basketball to some degree now—but

what is happening at the youth level, that is being repeated now in other

sports, so it’s not just in basketball, which gets a lot of attention, but lacrosse

and field hockey and all these other—so people see an opportunity to make

money at a very young age, when you’re dealing with kids at a very young

age.

01-00:49:45

Dawson: Right, either it’s through the club systems, primarily through the club systems

where—pick just any sport.

01-00:49:54

Cummins: And certainly the shoe companies. The shoe companies are so directly related.

When Sonny Vaccaro, [as] I mentioned, gave this talk on Friday, he said that

he approached Nike in 1977. He had run what’s called the Round Ball Classic,

which was the first attempt to provide a tournament at the high school level,

and that was in Pittsburgh, my hometown. That turned out to be successful.

They had—about ten thousand people would show up for this game. And so

he then came up with this concept—Nike was at that time only doing track

shoes and they wanted to expand into other sports. And so he had a meeting

with Phil Knight and they said, “So how do we do this?” And Vaccaro said,

“Basically you pay coaches.” And he said, “What are you talking about?” And

he said, “Yeah. You write a check to coaches and you give the colleges and

universities shoes, so they all wear your shoes. That’s basically what I think

should be done.” So they said, “Okay, go ahead, do this.” Their worth he says,

at that point in time, is $25 million. They signed up fourteen schools in the

first year at the college level; the second year, eighty-nine, very interesting.

By 1980 Nike was worth a $1 billion, okay?

Astounding, and nothing—when you think about it in retrospect, there’s

nothing very complicated about that. In the speech Vaccaro gave he said of

course if college presidents say that they’re not running a commercial

enterprise, it’s ridiculous. They began right then, and if they wanted to they

could have stopped it. They could have said no, we’re not going to accept a

check from Nike or then Adidas or Reebok or whatever, so, very interesting.

And then to take that whole model down to the AAU traveling teams and then

down to the grade school is pretty amazing.

20

But, there seems to be this almost unlimited appetite for sports in this country,

so that now you’ve got—major conferences have their own television

network, obviously ESPN. I don’t know how many channels they now have,

two or three.

01-00:52:40

Dawson: They’re starting a channel for women’s sports. It’ll be interesting to see how

that goes.

01-00:52:42

Cummins: Yes, and maybe that will help. I don’t—that’s the reality in a capitalist

society. That’s what you can do; it’s not that there’s anything wrong with it.

But I’m just interested in your view on—because you’re right in the middle.

01-00:53:01

Dawson: Yeah, and I think the shift in focus at the Pac -10 to the heavy emphasis on

marketing the conference, monetizing its value in anticipation of negotiating

the TV contracts. That money will all trickle down to the institutions and so

there is a reason to take the approach that you’re taking. But sometimes it’s

hard when you think about intercollegiate athletics, the idea of monetizing it

goes against the grain if the value of it is personal development of the student

athletes. So you get back to the values question you were talking about.

I think athletics has benefit for the individual student athlete. I think the

ancient ideal of healthy mind/healthy body is true, and I think that the

competitive lessons learned in athletics benefit not only those individual

students, but many of them who go on to be leaders in a large variety of areas.

And then from the standpoint of the campus I think it does provide the front

porch, that’s a favorite expression that people have, you know that athletics

can be the front porch of the university and a way to tie donors, whether you

like it or not, or agree or disagree, that that’s the way to get them to return to

the campus. You should have more pride in Cal’s whatever number of Nobel

Prize winners, but that’s much more abstract to the average alum than the

football team going to the Rose Bowl, the men’s basketball team, or even to a

lesser extent the women’s basketball team, or the swimmers winning the

national championship and that sort of thing.

And I think as colleges and universities, not just in California but everywhere,

have faced such tremendous financial challenges and they’re withdrawing

support—I think Cal is an aberration in some degrees in terms of the amount

of money that’s been provided to Athletics. There’s more of an emphasis on

paying your own way, and so when people try to figure out: How do we pay

our own way? We get Nike to give us all of our uniforms and equipment. We

get what are—that serve only to reinforce the commercialization of the

enterprise.

21

And this is a small thing, I hate the introductions at the basketball games

where they dim the lights and bring out the spotlight and do all this—I just

think it’s way over the top. We’re not the NBA. But because—

01-00:56:28

Cummins: They did that at the high school level.

01-00:56:30

Dawson: Yeah, see, and I think it’s a reflection of the availability of those images

through the media, so think of before the advent of ESPN or multiple sports

channels where you didn’t see what was done in a pro league or a pro arena.

You didn’t see that, so you didn’t know this was the standard, this was the

norm. But now people think that’s the entertainment value and you have to

have that if you want people to come watch your games, and maybe that’s

true. [telephone ringing]

01-00:57:08

Cummins: Okay, good. So, anyway it’s a very big question, the commercialization,

where it’s going, et cetera. And there doesn’t seem to be any obvious solution

to it either. If you look at the March Madness, the TV contract there which

just keeps escalating. Now it’s like $10 or $11 billion. There’s always the

hope that somehow you’re going to find enough money, say at the college or

university level, so that at least you break even, but a lot of places don’t.

01-00:57:47

Dawson: Right, most places don’t.

01-00:57:49

Cummins: And now, I don’t know what your view is about the Pac-10 going into this TV

contract now with the two additional schools. Yes, that’ll help. I think it’ll

generate another source of revenue. But whether it really in the long run will

lead to anything different, I don’t know. Do you have any view on that?

01-00:58:13

Dawson: I don’t think it’ll lead to anything different.

01-00:58:19

Cummins: So ten years from now there’ll still be struggle for money?

01-00:58:22

Dawson: Yeah, I think so.

01-00:58:24

Cummins: —and resources. It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t.

01-00:58:28

Dawson: For example, one of the things that will probably happen in the new TV

contract in men’s basketball is that instead of playing—right now they play

Thursday-Saturday or Friday-Sunday. They’re going to start playing every

night of the week, and in order to do that, allegedly, people are going to start

22

chartering,—which in many other conferences they already take charter planes

to their games and they go the night before and then they fly home right after

the games, so they not only miss less school but obviously it’s far more

expensive to charter twenty-five people somewhere, thirty people somewhere,

than it is to take a commercial flight, a scheduled commercial flight. So the

value of the contract not only is intended to provide more revenue back to the

institutions for them to support their existing programs, but incrementally it

has to be that much greater to pay the additional expenses that are going to go

with it.

Building a studio—I was in the Big Ten office on Friday for a meeting and

compared to the Pac10, in the area of video services, the Pac 10 is way, way

behind the times. And they have a command center, they call it, for football.

They’ve got a big room and it has got maybe six video screens, and so they

get feeds from every football game that they have. Their coordinator of

officiating and frequently the commissioner—they can go to the Big Ten

office on Saturday and they sit there and watch all the games, to monitor the

broadcasts and things happen, and then they have all the video right there if

there’s some play or something that they have to deal with administratively.

We have none of that. So, to set up—I was even thinking setting up that room

and that kind of delivery of service and the editing—the equipment alone

would be half a million dollars at least. Not to mention the staff to run it and

monitor it and all those things. So, those are the other kinds of incremental

expenses when we change the image and approach that we have. There are

going to be other costs that come with it.

So the threshold question may be—could the conference continue to compete

at the same level, have the same level of success across all of its sports

programs without this change in emphasis? Because we’ve been pretty good

for a long time, in a lot of different sports, in the Pac-10. Apparently the

presidents have decided no, they can’t. We need more money from our

conference and this is how we’re going to get it. And that’s why they hired the

person they hired and have approved that approach. And he’s, Larry Scott—

have you met Larry?

01-01:01:53

Cummins: Not yet, no.

01-01:01:53

Dawson: His thinking is much more corporate. He thinks of the CEOs as a board, and

gets the board to approve the direction and approve the general budget and

then he just kind of goes with it. It’s just a different way of thinking about

what we’re doing. And I will say that the presidents have been much more

engaged over the last year, because it’s been a pretty fundamental shift in the

direction. It’s good to that extent, that they’re paying attention, but I think the

attention that’s being paid is we need a way to support our athletic programs.

23

01-01:02:41

Cummins: Yeah, so it’s a financial solution. And I’m not so sure how much the

presidents actually know about this entire system that we’ve been talking

about. When you go way back to the Pacific Coast Conference, the faculty

athletic reps ran it. Now from what I understand, this decision, the faculty had

no involvement whatsoever. It was the presidents deciding, okay, yes we’re

going to move in this direction. And of course if you, I would think, I’m sure

that the ADs and maybe the vice chancellor in some cases—if the AD reports

to a vice chancellor, like at Berkeley—they’re involved. But of course, I mean

there are principles, certainly at Berkeley with all of the big issues

surrounding the budget, this is going to look like a way out. I don’t know if

you saw it—I could actually show them to you, but Chuck [Charles E.]

Young—did you see his communication to the chancellors and presidents and

to Larry Scott? I don’t know if you ever saw them?

01-01:03:55

Dawson: No.

01-01:03:55

Cummins: I’ll get them for you. It’s very interesting, because of all the chancellors that I

knew over all the years he was the most involved with intercollegiate athletics

at every level—NCAA, Pac 10, the whole thing. For years! And he totally

opposed this new approach and said, you know—you have no idea what

you’re getting into. And so—

01-01:04:21

Dawson: Interesting.

01-01:04:22

Cummins: That is interesting, it really is. It’s such a shift but again it’s money-driven.

It’s no surprise to say that, but everything else kind of gets pushed to the

background.

01-01:04:43 01-01:04:45

Cummins: What I’m trying to do in the long run, besides doing all these oral histories, is

to write something, if I live long enough, that would summarize this. That

would take a look at what is happening to athletics, in the big picture, and say

here’s what happened at Berkeley. It kind of mirrors it in terms of the

decisions, the amounts of money involved over time, et cetera, and trying to

hold the line and not being very successful. So, anyway that’s the idea. You’re

now up to about 1988 or so. You’re now the assistant director, you’ve taken

on more responsibilities, but you don’t have any sports yet.

01-01:06:58

Dawson: Right, no. Lue kept all the sports reporting to her.

01-01:07:00

Cummins: Yeah, so then what happened?

24

01-01:07:03

Dawson: So then a study was done about the advisability, viability of combining Men’s

and Women’s Athletics and Rec Sports into one big department.

01-01:07:15

Cummins: And that was—that led to the recommendation from the Smelser Committee

in ’91 to combine everything?

01-01:07:22

Dawson: Right, right.

01-01:07:22

Cummins: Right, okay.

01-01:07:24

Dawson: So, 1981-1982 is when the NCAA first began to sponsor women’s

championships, and Cal had its feet in both camps.

01-01:07:36

Cummins: Now, can you, since you were there, can you say what was the driver for the

NCAA to do that as opposed to staying with the AIAW? I’ve read different

things. I’ve read that, for example, the AIAW just didn’t have the resources to

provide the kind of tournaments and insurance the NCAA provides. Is that the

biggest driver?

01-01:08:06

Dawson: I think it was one of the biggest drivers, for sure. The NCAA, for example,

pays the expenses for teams to participate in its championships, and the

AIAW did not.

01-01:08:19

Cummins: Could not do that.

01-01:08:20

Dawson: I don’t think there was ever any thought that the AIAW was going to be in a

financial position ever to do that. I think that as the women’s sports became

more established and they started to compete against the same conference

teams, people questioned why the difference in the conferences, and we had a

relationship with the other schools in the Pac-10 for men’s sports. Why wasn’t

it organized in the same way in women’s sports? And so some of it I think

was a public perception issue. In a sense, the NCAA would be able to provide

more opportunities for female student athletes to advance.

01-01:09:08

Cummins: And what were the arguments against it?

01-01:09:11

Dawson: I think the arguments against it, even then, included apprehension about—

01-01:09:20

Cummins: Being subsumed?

25

01-01:09:22

Dawson: Well, no, not that. Apprehension about the ways in which values were

compromised in sports like football and men’s basketball—so more of a

pure—well, and I don’t want to paint the picture of the women being purists

by any—. I think because the kind of money and media attention and focus

had never existed for women’s sports in the same way that it has for years in

football and men’s basketball, you can look at some of the recruiting dirty

tricks and some of the cesspool that’s always been men’s basketball

recruiting. The shoe companies—what you described before is, like what’s the

timeline for when that started? So these things were all kind of happening at

the same time.

And if you think about also the women’s movement that was also along about

the same time and changing some people’s ideas about what women should do

in any of a variety of [areas], whether it was educational opportunities or

athletic opportunities, job opportunities, what have you. So all these things

were going along on parallel tracks, but I think then there were some people

who had apprehension that adopting the NCAA model would lead to those

kinds of excesses in women’s sports, and they didn’t want that. The larger

concern probably was that women’s sports would just be sucked into this

larger organization that was dominated by football and men’s basketball. And

now it was football, men’s basketball, and other sports—and now you have

women’s sports, right? And the tension and competition between the haves

and the have-nots just grew, because now the pool of have-nots fighting for

their slice of the pie was bigger because now you had x number of women’s

teams come in.

I think there was definitely a concern that women as coaches and

administrators would lose opportunities in the NCAA, which was an

organization run by men for men, that despite the women’s movement there

wasn’t a lot of enlightenment going on. [laughing] And that the AIAW existed

to create opportunities for female student athletes in a way that wouldn’t exist

in the NCAA, and the decisions would be made by people who weren’t in

touch with what it was like to be a female student athlete or understand the

climate that existed around women’s sports and the opportunities for girls to

compete.

01-01:12:39

Cummins: In retrospect, how do you think it’s worked?

01-01:13:01

Dawson: Well, I think there were growing pains, but ultimately I think it made sense for

there to be one athletic department and there to be one national governing

body for college sports, because to the extent that—. Well, if the NCAA is

viewed as the mainstream of college sport, to the extent that women are

always outside and another organization diminishes what they do, and so the

idea that they have equal footing, or equal access to the main college sports

26

governing body, the one that’s acknowledged to be that, that’s a good thing,

that’s a good thing.

The sense that, or the understanding maybe more than the sense, that athletes

are athletes regardless of their gender, and their efforts, their challenges, their

successes are the same regardless if you’re talking about field hockey or

football. And that’s a purely philosophical approach, because I think the

rewards in football can be quite different than the rewards from field hockey

financially, but personally, personally I don’t think they are. Philosophically I

don’t think they are in terms of people learning to train and test themselves

and improve and all those sorts of things. So, ghettoize is too strong of a term,

I’m trying to find the right phrase. And I don’t know that I can come up with

it but separate is most often not equal.

But yet one of the concerns that I think women had with—and I saw it in

women’s athletics, a comment that I made at the beginning about the people

who were there were really interested in having the women’s teams succeed.

And so you lose that focus if you’re going from a group of three hundred

student athletes in women’s athletics to seven or eight hundred, you lose the

sense of family communication that existed within the smaller group. But the

counterbalance theoretically would be greater opportunities, more financial

support, and all those sorts of things.

01-01:15:51

Cummins: And has that happened?

01-01:15:53

Dawson: On a global scale or at Cal?

01-01:15:55

Cummins: No, nationally. There have, as a result of merging—yes, I would guess there

are greater opportunities, but what about the quality issue? In other words—I

don’t know the answer, but do women in the NCAA have as strong a role as

they deserve, or think they should have? In other words there aren’t very

many women ADs.

01-01:16:18

Dawson: Correct.

01-01:16:20

Cummins: What’s the role that women play within the NCAA?

01-01:16:24

Dawson: Well, I think the role that women play within the NCAA structure is

satisfactory, for lack of a better term. In part, when women’s sports joined the

NCAA, this issue of the senior woman administrator and identifying an

administrator, the highest ranking female administrator to be a person who got

all the information from the NCAA, was included in the decision-making, all

those sorts of things. That was purposefully done to answer some of the

27

concerns about women’s sports coming in. And so ever since then, for almost

every NCAA committee that’s composed of the membership, there are gender

requirements, like all these NCAA cabinets and stuff they have, positional

requirements, ADs, FARs, senior women administrators, they have ethnicity

requirements.

So, now if you think about the NCAA staff, right now I think there is one

woman who’s in the senior management group there, a woman named Joni

Comstock who works in championships, so you might question—there has

never been a female president of the NCAA. There have been women who

were, when they had a different structure of committees, Judy [Judith M.]

Sweet—I don’t know if you know Judy or have heard of her, who was the

director of women’s athletics at UC San Diego—was the president of the

NCAA when the president was from the internal board, not the executive

directors, sort of a switch in terminology now with Mark Emmert being the

president of the NCAA. I think over this long period of time—

01-01:18:44

Cummins: There’s continuing progress, is that—

01-01:18:46

Dawson: Yeah, I think there is continuing progress. I think that girls now in school have

far more opportunities to participate in a variety of sports from a young age.

And it’s viewed as normal for them, they are not the tomboys, they’re not

outliers in the way that people who are my age, if you participated in sports it

was—

01-01:19:13

Cummins: Odd.

01-01:19:14

Dawson: Yeah, the people who were definitely outside the mainstream. And I think part

of that’s just a shift in the culture. I don’t know at what point—this is

probably eighties and nineties, there was this big force of dads who had

daughters—now all of a sudden they’re thinking, hey, now there’s chance for

my daughter to have a college scholarship. There’s a chance for my daughter

to play in school. And so there was much made of how the shift in their

attitude, which I think was partly a cultural shift in general, not just in

athletics per se, but people who had daughters—and you have a twenty-three-

year-old daughter—it was like what kind of possibilities were available for

her? And what did you think, how narrow or wide was your view of what she

could do, academically or athletically? Is her path to go to college, get

married, raise children? Or was it to do something different from that? Or to

include all those steps but still have other kinds of opportunities? So I think

some of it’s hard to separate out.

For the current student athletes, the ones that I have felt our conversation was

about, I’m getting to be old enough almost now, not to be their grandmother,

28

but when I started working at Cal I was not that much older than the students

athletes. That changed over time, but it’s good that they have an expectation

that they’re going to have equal access to facilities and medical treatment, and

all those things. It’s like this is just part of the day-to-day life, but there’s also

I think a lack of appreciation for the changes that have happened and the

people who fought hard to make those things happen, you know Lue being an

example of somebody who I think fought hard to help make change for

opportunities for the students.

01-01:21:20

Cummins: Okay, so then ’92. I want to watch time here just, we have a half hour I think.

The departments are merged, the Smelser Report comes out, that in the

merger, at least at that point in time, just as a reference, the deficit that

Intercollegiate Athletics as a whole is running basically came from Women’s

Intercollegiate Athletics, and it was maybe $270,000, something not very

significant. The Smelser Report recommends that it wouldn’t be unreasonable

for the chancellor to make a million dollars a year available from discretionary

funds to help the program over a six-year period, to build their fundraising

efforts, et cetera, so that’s that period in time. Now let’s see—Bob, let’s see

Maggard leaves right about that period in time. Do you want to say anything

about his departure?

01-01:22:33

Dawson: Well, I think that when the decision was finally made to merge Men’s and

Women’s Athletics and Rec Sports, I think Dave, knowing it was coming,

probably—and I never had a conversation with him about this, but he

probably assumed he was going to be the director of the group, of the whole

unit. I think when he found that he was not he decided he was leaving, and he

would go seek other opportunities, because he didn’t want to be a second

banana to somebody else. I think Lue never had the expectation that she was

going to be the big boss. And I don’t know if Manning ever did or not, but it

was my understanding that all three of them were told at the same time:

“You’re not going to be the boss. We need to have this new enterprise.” I

think it’s true that there had to be a different way of thinking about what was

going on, and putting any of the three of them in charge of the merged

department would not have had a good outcome.

Just in terms of really trying to fully integrate the groups, there was debate

certainly about whether or not it made sense to include Rec Sports. I think

members of the committee saw that as a way to deal with the facility problem

and to, if you thought about athletics and recreation as this continuum, go onto

it at this end just from the student exercise to blah, blah, blah athletics at the

far end, then okay, let’s take this big holistic view and put them all together

and see how that worked out.

01-01:24:26

Cummins: Yeah, , but in reading the report there’s very little mention of Rec Sports . It

just says yes, these departments should be merged, but the entire focus of the

29

report is on Men’s and Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics. It’s interesting.

Anyway, so in ’92 then, does your role change? Well and I should say Bob

[Bockrath] about then is appointed as the new AD coming in with this

mandate to make this merger work.

01-01:25:07

Dawson: Right.

01-01:25:08

Cummins: Okay, so any comments about that period?

01-01:25:10

Dawson: Yeah, so Bob comes in and, you know, I’m {included with these role changes.

I think he doesn’t know what to do with Lue. What Lue wanted to have

happen was I think to still to continue to have all of Women’s Athletics report

to her. And she just wanted a structure where she now had a different boss

essentially, but there would be greater cooperation. That, to me, would have

made the female student athletes ill-served frankly, because I think if you

really were going to change the culture you needed to try to really integrate all

the services—the training room, the sports supervision, whatever it was. I

don’t know if it was because of Lue’s perspective on what she wanted to have

done, on what the job would be or—

01-01:26:00

Cummins: I can ask.

01-01:26:01

Dawson: —where she wanted to go, what Bob Bockrath might have heard about her or

her approach. He made her—there wasn’t really a full-time compliance officer

in Men’s and Women’s Athletics, so her job nominally when the departments

first moved was to be in charge of compliance. And I’m trying to remember if

she still had sports reporting to her or not, and honestly I don’t—I would

assume yes, but I don’t specifically remember. My job was events manager

for all the sports, so the only one that was really very different was football. I

had been buying football tickets for years, and going and sitting in the stands,

Section TT, Row 41 where I sit yet today! But now I got them for free

because I was part of the Athletic Department, and so that was different. I

think that there were those from Men’s Athletics who viewed me, as a person

from Women’s Athletics, as not knowing anything about what was going on

with football, and how dare you come in and try to tell me this is what we

should do on football game day.

01-01:27:17

Cummins: And that was as Bruce Snyder was leaving and I guess [Keith] Gilbertson was

coming in. Is that right? In other words Snyder’s there from ’87 to ’92.

30

01-01:27:35

Dawson: You know what, this is pretty funny, honestly I don’t remember. It was less

important who the football coach was because my job really was just to deal

with the police and the tickets and with all these various aspects of it.

01-01:27:49

Cummins: But somebody was playing a role from Men’s Intercollegiate Athletics?

01-01:27:52

Dawson: Oh sure, I mean there were a lot of people who—from Men’s Athletics, Mike

Moss.

01-01:27:56

Cummins: Mike Moss.

01-01:27:56

Dawson: Yeah, and certainly I relied on those people who had done all those jobs

previously, just to make this all work, and it was something new for me to do

that. But, like the basketball games at Harmon were—the difference was only

in the number of people in the stands really, so how many more ticket takers

did you need . But I think there was a clash of cultures, and some viewed,

particularly for the revenue-producing sports, that those who had worked in

Men’s Athletics knew better. And people just had ways of doing things, they

had established relationships, and so there was a lot of—

01-01:28:46

Cummins: And so if you wanted to change something you would have some difficulty?

01-01:28:49

Dawson: Yeah, there would be some negotiation involved, and I think there was also a

lot of anxiety about what was going to happen.

01-01:28:55

Cummins: Yes.

01-01:28:57

Dawson: You know, Bill Coysh might be an interesting person for you to talk to—you

know Bill?

1-01:29:02

Cummins: Yeah.

01-01:29:02

Dawson: Just because he was certainly there through the merger, and I think a lot of

people, more so on the men’s side because he had a role in dealing with them,

but they saw him as a—I don’t know if he was a personal therapist to a large

number of people who were there or not, but anyway he might have some

interesting perspective about the whole merger and the personalities and

trying to merge the groups.

31

I really do believe that when you merged the departments, you did need to

have people who were formerly men’s athletic trainers, just as an example,

deal with the women’s teams. You had to have equal access to the stadium

training room for men’s and women’s, and the weight rooms, and those sorts

of things, and that’s where a lot of the resistance—like how can we possibly

do this?

01-01:29:54

Cummins: Well, and the other thing I think that’s important there is the Supreme Court

case right in ’92 that says women have standing to sue their institutions. So, I

mean is that true? In other words, that had to get everybody’s attention.

01-01:30:10

Dawson: Well, I think one of the things about the merger, and Lue was fond of saying

this, I think as a way to discourage it—as long as Men’s and Women’s

Athletics were separate, I don’t think that the university was—I’m going to

say as concerned, but maybe that’s not the right expression. The disparity

between the kinds of support services and the support in general for the

female student athletes compared with the men as a whole was not as

apparent. But when you put them all together it became more apparent. Part of

the idea, for example, disparities in operating budgets between teams and

coaching salaries and things like that. In the two or three years, I think, after

the merger there was an increase in the amount of financial aid for female

student athletes, because relative to what had been going on in the amount

provided in Men’s Athletics it was—

01-01:31:23

Cummins: And this was scholarships?

01-01:31:24

Dawson: Scholarship money, yeah.

01-01:31:26

Cummins: Do you remember, did that money come from Central Campus in order to

address this?

01-01:31:32

Dawson: You know, I want to say yes.

01-01:31:34

Cummins: I think that’s right, because [Chancellor] Tien I know provided—I think Bud

Travers was doing the budgets then and he went to Dan Boggan who then

went to Tien and said, “You know, first of all we have to address this—”

tuition was rising because it was a downturn in the economy, a serious

downturn, and so Tien said, “Yes, I’ll put in,” $420,000 a year for at least a

couple of years. But there was also the addition of the women’s sports that I

want you to talk about too, but I don’t want to push you ahead, so go ahead.

32

01-01:32:12

Dawson: Well, there were a lot of things that were disparate that when they weren’t