Oregon Athletics -- Property of Nike, Inc.

I want to write a big long blog post about Phil Knight's $100 million donation to the UO Athletic Department, but I can't. All my attempts to write get muddled and sound stupid. This is one of those things where you just have to live in Eugene and know the ins and outs to understand.

I am a life-long Ducks fan. I have three football jerseys, four or five "Oregon" sweatshirts, and more t-shirts commemorating more half-ass bowl games than I care to admit. When the Ducks win, Saturday night is a party that is capped by watching the 11:30 pm to 2:30 am replay on KEZI, which means enduring Joe Giansante and Anthony Newman calling the game, the endurance of which proves the metal of a true Duck fan. Should the Ducks lose, Saturday night takes on a more mellow tone, with Dave and Ginger quietly watching a movie. No replay watching. I don't read the Sunday sports page.

I have been faced with the fact that my beloved Ducks are not what they used to be. We used to be losers. Lovable losers. We were harmless and absolutely nobody cared. Autzen Stadium used to seat 44 thousand fans. It was hard to get tickets to see the Huskies, otherwise you could walk up to the ticket window and get tickets on game day. Reserved seats were for suckers, because with a general admission ticket you could sit just about any where. The typical crowd was about 25 thousand. For a big game, one we had an off chance of winning, there might be a crowd of 33 thousand. It rained. I swear to God it rained every game. We wore garbage bags as rain coats. I thought for the longest time that garbage bags were green in Oregon because we wore them to the game. (We couldn't wear hunting gear, because the arch-rival Beavers sport the orange and black. Wearing orange in Autzen just wouldn't go down.) Phil Knight wasn't anywhere near any of these games. He certainly wasn't anywhere near the 1983 'Toilet Bowl" where Oregon and Oregon State managed to come up with a 0-0 draw.

But those days ended, triumphantly, happily, on October 22, 1994 when Oregon beat Washington. In those days, Washington was a football powerhouse. Only Pac-10 teams had won the conference title in decades, USC, UCLA and Washington. Washington was the team we hated. They were good and they knew it. They dominated the NW schools of the Pac-10. They had won the 1991 national championship. In 1994 the Ducks were having a decent year, building off recent successes. We'd been to the Independence Bowl a couple of times and even though we'd gone 5-6 the previous year, there was reason to believe that Oregon could be a perennial middle-of-the-road team. We were 4-3 at the time, with a big win over USC, but disappointing loses to Iowa and WSU. We had little to no hope of beating the Huskies, but if we could go 6-5, then maybe another Independence Bowl!

The Ducks were playing Washington well, but were behind in the fourth quarter. Danny O'Neil drove Oregon down the field and we scored and went ahead, 24-20 with only a couple of minutes left to go. But our celebrations were guarded. Washington's QB Damon Huard led the Huskies down the field, slicing and dicing our secondary. I don't think there was a single Duck fan who didn't think that the Huskies were going to score. It was inevitable. Being a Duck fan at the time required a strong sense of fatalism. You had to have it. You had to be wary. The Ducks were the team that fumbled on the one-yard line. We missed the game winning field goal. We gave up the last minute kick-off return for a touchdown. We found a way to lose. It was who we were, what we did. So of course Washington was going to score a touchdown and break our hearts. Then this happened:

The play has come to be known as "The Pick" and is undoubtedly the greatest moment in Oregon sports history (until today that is!). I get goosebumps when I watch the video. I can recite what Jerry Allen says from memory. "A most improbable finish to the football game" indeed! We won! And we went to the Rose Bowl. And Oregon sports have never been the same sense.

I don't know if Phil Knight, Oregon's # 1 fan, was at that game. He might have been. The Huskies game always sold out. It was a big game even when we lost. If you could see better, you'd see that there was no Nike swoosh on the uniform that Kenny Wheaton was wearing. Oregon was not a Nike team then. There were many Nike teams, just not Oregon. I believe that we became a Nike team after Oregon went to the Rose Bowl. Phil Knight started coming to Oregon home games after the Rose Bowl season. He stopped coming to home games in 2000, when the University of Oregon decided to join the Worker's Rights Consortium. Phil Knight is Oregon's #1 fan, as long as the policies of the University of Oregon do not upset him.

The WRC controversy has a lot of meaning for me as a Duck fan. I guess it was my first realization that Oregon had become a "big time" college football program. After the Rose Bowl and the following Cotton Bowl year, I moved to Baltimore. I kept in touch with the Ducks by driving down to DC to sit in a Congressional staff office and listen to the Ducks' and Beavers' games on the internet with a friend. When I got back to Eugene, I realized that the Ducks were no longer in the business of being lovable losers, we were in the business of college sports.

It was decided that we needed to expand the football stadium. I am sure that for many people Autzen stadium was an eye-sore. It is made out of concrete, cleverly disguised to look like concrete. It is just a giant concrete bowl placed in the ground. The benches are made of wood that is conditioned to soak up as much rain as possible, so that unless you are sitting on something, you had a wet ass. So it was decided we needed more seats. And a new facade. Knight pledged $30 million toward the cost of the stadium. Then the UO went and did something stupid. It joined the WRC.

I won't go into the details of the WRC controversy, but joining was the result of a vote of the faculty Senate, a vote to the student government and month-long campout on the lawn of the administration building to force the UO administration to follow university policy. When the UO finally did announce that the UO was joining the WRC, Knight was not pleased. He withdrew his $30 million pledge and announced that he would never donate again. I don't remember a lot of the details, but I do know that Knight skipped coming to a home football game. To punish us or something. I remember that Register Guard, our paper of record, columnist Ron Bellamy wrote a column that bemoaned this fact. I remember him specifically mentioning that listening for Knight's helicopter to arrive was a game-day tradition at Oregon. I remember wondering about this. I thought sitting in the rain with a garbage bag over you was an Oregon tradition. Walking across the footbridge, blowing late leads, these were Oregon traditions.

it turns out I was wrong. In the years I was gone, the Oregon football fan went from being a blue-collar guy from Springfield to a chablis man from Portland. And we hated liberals. Liberals were not people we football fans respected. UO athletics and their fans became dominated by Republicans. Moderate Rockefeller Republicans, but Republicans none the less. And the last thing we wanted was anyone telling us that Phil Knight wasn't the greatest guy in the world.

I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but at some point UO President Dave Frohnmayer withdrew the UO from the WRC and we joined the FLA, which was the Nike-sponsored watch-dog group. Phil eventually pledged his money again and returned to his air-conditioned box at Autzen Stadium. I remember that at one game the athletic department passed out t-shirts that read "Thank you, Phil." I think this was when he was still "protesting" by not coming to games. He was supposed to see all the students pledging their undying loyalty to him and be touched enough to give us money. I snagged a shirt and wore it for awhile. It drove my union brothers and sisters crazy. I tried to explain that I was wearing it ironically, because I was thanking Phil for reminding us all who it was that set university policy, Phil Knight. Hard to wear a t-shirt "ironically." Fortunately, the Oregon University System solved the sweatshop/labor monitoring issue for us by barring all state universities and college from making purchasing decisions based on "politics." Because there is nothing so non-political as not taking human rights into consideration.

I remember having a discussion/argument about the Nike issue with my then advisor. I remember tentatively advancing the idea that there was something morally wrong that Oregon's football success was being purchased with money made off of the backs of low wage workers in repressive countries. He disagreed. His belief was that Nike money was being made the way all money was being made, by exploiting the cheapest resources possible and the UO could benefit from the largess. He argued that it was better that it go to an institution whose motive was educating people; in a way we were spinning sin into gold. I didn't really buy that argument then. I was startled that a nineteenth-century historian could miss the obvious parallel to the slavery argument and advance a modern-day "slavery profits can be used for good" argument. But then, I grew up post-civil rights movement and he grew up pre-civil rights movement.

So while I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the issue of where the money comes from, my unease has been compounded by the more recent "the athletics department must be seen as a business" arguments that have been advanced by the UO. So much of what is said in regards to any conflict between acadmeics and athletics is becoming increasingly problematic and bizarre. The UO administration would have us believe that the athletics department should be seen as completely separate from the university. (Unless $100 million donations come into the athletics department, then it is a donation for the "University of Oregon.") There have been too many mini-scandals recently to go into, but the athletics department has certainly been acting as if it is business, not a part of a public institution. And that business is owned by Phil Knight.

In the last couple of years we have seen the departure of the athletic director and the track coach. Why? They pissed Knight off. From the R-G:

He [Knight]clearly had a falling out with former AD Bill Moos, and issues that couldn't be resolved until Oregon bought out Moos' contract, hired Kilkenny at a token salary, and brought [Associate AD and Knight friend] Bartko back from less than a year at California. Bartko and Kilkenny have the credibility with Knight that Moos once had and lost, and those relationships provided the groundwork for Saturday's commitment.

As a side comment, I want to note that columnist Ron Bellamy says these things approvingly. It is the stance of the only paper in Eugene/Springfield that when the UO's largest donor wants public employees fired, they should be fired. The R-G also fully supports the idea that the most important qualification for being an athletic director in the state of Oregon is being friends with the largest donor.

Here's my current favorite story. On Thursday, the R-G reported the Ducks would be hold a "secret" practice in Beaverton at the Nike campus on Saturday. Now, this scrimmage may or may not have been in violation of NCAA rules, but that doesn't seem to matter. When I first read about this, I naively thought that Bellotti was holding a closed practice away from campus for some sort of team building exercise. I now realize, of course, that this private scrimmage was a little reward for the $100 million man. Donate $100 million and we'll haul the football team across the state for a little private afternoon practice for you. Don't know if it'd be more or less to get the new competitive cheerleading squad for an hour or so. And I am saddened that writing that is way less plausible than it should be.

I'd also like to note that the R-G did not make the connection between the scrimmage and the donation in their two stories today. Possibly because there is no connection, possibly because it looks pretty bad. This also may explain why the story being sold in the R-G is that none of the administrators at the UO had any idea this announcement was coming. Pete the Barber tells me "everyone" on campus had been buzzing about this announcement all of last week.

So, here I sit, a committed Duck fan finding that my excitement about the upcoming season is tainted by the fact that I know that my beloved Ducks have been sold. Sold to the highest bidder, the guy who was able to exploit the most Asians and raise the most cash. Every time the Ducks win, it will have less to do with a plucky devil-may-care spirit and more to do with better practice facilities, better locker rooms, better grass and women at the recruiting parties. We will win because we spent more money than the other guys. This is what the athletic department and Register Guard tell me. You can't win unless you spend money; the guy who spends the money calls the shots. These are not my Oregon Ducks, they are Phil Knight's Oregon Ducks.

This depresses me. Can even Kenny Wheaton make me feel better? Let me find out.