Just when you think that you no longer have the capacity to be surprised by anything that happens in DI athletics, you get unpleasantly surprised.
I suppose that I have been to Evanston, Illinois 3 or 4 times. I like Evanston. Think of a larger version of Hillcrest with a major university in the middle of it. I could live in Evanston but for the property values and the taxes. Maybe I could live there under the statue of Civil War general Phil Sheridan for whom main drag Sheridan Road is named. But I couldn’t afford to buy any real estate there.
Speaking of said major university, I’ve been on campus at Northwestern on most of the occasions I have been in the Chicago area. Beautiful campus. I’ve seen the Northwestern Wildcats play there in Ryan Stadium. I saw them the year they went to the Rose Bowl of all damn things. They were led by a couple of All-Americans: running back Darnell Autrey and a local boy linebacker Pat Fitzgerald. After his playing days Fitz joined the Wildcat staff and eventually took over as head man when Randy Walker unexpectedly dropped dead from a massive coronary.
In his 16 years on the job Fitz wrung a .500 record out of a team once derisively known as the “Mildcats.” Along the way, he took them to 10 bowl games including another Rose Bowl. It was widely thought that Fitz had them playing as well as they ever could play given the fact that Northwestern ain’t that easy to get into, being an “academic school” as Wally Hall might say, or has said in regards to Vanderbilt and Rice, and that they play in the Big Ten. Or 15. Or whatever they are now with the addition of perennial Midwestern powerhouses USC and UCLA.
Well, Pat Fitzgerald got canned the other day after the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, printed a story in which former players complained of acts of hazing in the football locker room. Really grim stuff. Serial “dry-humping” of a victim in a darkened room. Nude quarterbacks being forced to take snaps from an equally disrobed center. And that’s all I can remember. Or care to.
Fitzgerald says he knew nothing about this stuff. Some of the victims said he had to know about it. Anyway as the story got worse and worse, the two week suspension originally laid down was ripened to a termination, the university’s position being it was his job to know what was going on.
Still you don’t think of this stuff going on at a world class academic institution like Northwestern. Then again, you didn’t think of little boys getting molested by a member of the coaching staff at Penn State either.
And it makes me wonder. If this kind of brutality was going on at an Ivy League level institution like Northwestern, you wonder where else it could be happening?
I guarantee you that college presidents nationwide broke out in cold sweats when this news got out. And I also guarantee you that ADs are being instructed to get the word out to their coaches reminding them that there is zero tolerance for hazing of any kind.
Because if hazing could erupt behind closed doors at Northwestern it can be, and most likely is, happening elsewhere.
And it cannot be tolerated.
But stay tuned. I bet we haven’t heard the last of this issue.
