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The Newest Sound in Music City 3/24/2004
The Newest Sound in Music City Six months after Vanderbilt said goodbye to its athletic department, the university said goodbye to its basketball team yesterday in Nashville. Past the magnolia trees, the on-campus pub and the Chi Omega sorority house, students and administrators stood outside Memorial Gym — an arena originally built for opera — to send the Commodores into the Round of 16 against Connecticut tomorrow in Phoenix. Memorial Gym is famous for having a raised court, benches on the baselines and acoustics better than the Grand Ole Opry. The unusual arena is a fitting symbol for a sports program that does not fit the mold. In the middle of last year’s Southeastern Conference football season, a sacred time in Tennessee, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Gordon Gee, disbanded the university’s athletic department, putting it under the division of student life and university affairs. The college community reacted as if Vanderbilt had taken the Sugar Bowl hostage. “I was concerned,” Kevin Stallings, the men’s basketball coach, said in a telephone interview. “When you read intramurals in the same sentence as varsity athletics, it caused a lot of concern for a lot of people.” After all, Vanderbilt never seemed to get the bounces. This was the university that had Bear Bryant as the football team’s defensive line coach in the early 1940’s but could not keep him. Bill Parcells was defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt in the mid-70’s, but he was never hired as a head coach. Mike Krzyzewski was considered for head coach for the men’s basketball team when he was at Army in 1979, but the job went to Richard Schmidt, who was fired two years later. Still, the only private university in the conference — and the smallest member of the S.E.C., with fewer than 6,000 undergraduates — insisted on playing by its ideals. Vanderbilt had the first African-American basketball player in the S.E.C., routinely led the nation in graduation rates and rejected one of the best high school players in Nashville history, Ron Mercer, because his grades were not good enough. After the outcry subsided, Mercer went to Kentucky and left early for the N.B.A. “Vanderbilt teams have always drawn on the energy and the juices of the underdog role,” said Perry Wallace, who became the first African-American basketball player in S.E.C. history in 1967-68. “I appreciate that they are always taking the lead on reforms. They have a constant desire to move things forward because they understand who they are, how the odds are stacked against them, and they let those odds be inspiring.” Around the corner from Music Row and up the street from the honky-tonks lining Broadway, Vanderbilt has fit right in with a town that sings about struggle and glorifies the little guy. In a league that prizes football over all else, the Commodores’ greatest gridiron accomplishments came before the forward pass. The men’s basketball team has historically been competitive, but only last season it lost by 62 points at Kentucky, dropped nine games in a row and was pressured to fire Stallings. Even this year, when Vanderbilt entered the N.C.A.A. tournament having beaten opponents seeded No. 1 and No. 2 — Kentucky and Mississippi State — the Commodores were listed as underdogs in the first round against 11th-seeded Western Michigan. Bob Ryan, a sports columnist for The Boston Globe, proclaimed on the radio that Vanderbilt could not win a game in the tournament because it had “too many white guys.” The ensuing back-and-forth between Ryan and offended Vanderbilt fans could have filled the Commodores’ bulletin board. With three African-American starters and no athletic director, Vanderbilt blew out Western Michigan and came back from a double-digit deficit in the final three minutes to upset North Carolina State last Sunday. When the team arrived back on campus, nearly 1,000 people were waiting with the temperature in the 30’s to greet them. “This entire campus erupted,” said Richard McCarty, dean of the College of Arts and Science, who was among the faculty members in the cold. “I could hear people yelling and screaming out of their dorms. With all the bad news in college sports, this is a shining example of how you can have athletics and academics in a proper way. We’re very proud of it.” Once known as the center for the Southern literary movement in the 1920’s, Vanderbilt is currently recognized for straddling the narrowest lines in college sports. It patterns itself not after Duke and Stanford, or Alabama and Auburn, but attempts to adopt elements of each. In the past year, Vanderbilt has been ranked among the top 25 universities in the country by U.S. News & World Report (No. 20), was No. 24 in Playboy’s “Top 25 Party Schools” and has both its men’s and women’s basketball teams in the Round of 16. No colleges are rushing to deconstruct their athletic departments and pattern themselves after Vanderbilt, but given recent scandals involving universities like Colorado and Georgia, and recent developments for the Commodores’ basketball team, Vanderbilt’s strategy is at least gaining some credibility. “We did this because we had started seeing athletic departments around the country as silos separate from the university,” said David Williams II, vice chancellor for student life and university affairs and the man who now oversees athletics. Williams said that Vanderbilt encouraged athletes to run for student government, write for the student newspaper and become officers in their dorms. “No matter what they say in mission statements, athletic departments were not integrated into the mission of the university and were drifting further away,” Williams said. “We noticed symptoms of that here. We wanted to make athletics truly part of the university and say to our student-athletes, `We value you as more than just athletes.’ We are not doing away with athletics at all. We’re putting more into it.” |
