Outside Oberlin

Time Finally Catches Up With the Militant Nihilist

Jack Scott, a renowned critic of organized athletics and former director of physical education at Oberlin College, succumbed to throat cancer on Sunday, Feb. 6, in Eugene, Ore. He was 57. During his life, he passionately advocated a series of progressive reforms that would open the world of sports to men and women regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds. He also took every opportunity to lash out against the financial exploitation of collegiate and professional athletes, arguing that sporting events should cater to the needs of participants rather than owners, advertisers and spectators. As luck would have it, Scott lived long enough to see the playing fields leveled for the athletes with whom he empathized, even if his vision of a sporting world unfettered by the meddlesome chains of commerce remained nothing more than a utopian dream.

Scott was not always an outspoken critic of sport, of course. He began his athletic career promisingly enough, leading his high school football team to the city championships and later finding his niche as a sprinter at Stanford University. But he soon harbored a growing distaste for organized sports, disillusioned by authoritarian coaches, the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs and the rampant commercialization of the games that he cherished. To make matters worse, he contended, athletic programs on the collegiate and professional levels were designed to exclude minorities and women. Thus, it came as little surprise that, after graduating from Syracuse University in 1966 and gaining his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Scott began railing against the failings of organized athletics in print. In 1970, he and his life partner, Micki McGee, founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, an organization that publicized the plights of disenchanted athletes and coaches in a series of newsletters. In 1972, he came to Oberlin.

Much to the dismay of his future colleagues in the athletic department, Scott was ushered into the Oberlin administration at that time by then-President Robert Fuller and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Daniel Reich. Fuller, who was himself an Oberlin drop-out, and Reich had earned reputations as fundamentally-radical reformers, men whose leftist politics were considered liberal even by the standards of the college. The two were convinced that Scott, a self-proclaimed "libertarian jock," would implement positive changes in their physical education program. Thus, they eagerly embraced the opportunity to hire him, a controversial decision endorsed in that department only by Frederick Shults, the most successful soccer and lacrosse coach in Oberlin history. Others were outspoken in the opposition to the hiring. "Scott was hired over the objections of almost everyone in the department of physical education," Professor Geoffrey Blodgett recalls. "He was a left-wing agent in his field who claimed that he was ahead of the pack in areas like women's athletics and race and the hiring of black coaches. The trouble with him was that he was irresponsible, overly self-interested and something of an adventurer. He alienated the people around him until Reich, his last supporter, broke with him, believing that he was not a person of integrity."

Indeed, Scott wore his progressive idealism on his sleeve during his brief stint at Oberlin and brashly attempted to modernize its athletics department by tripling funding for women's sports and hiring three black coaches - one of whom was Tommie Smith, the sprinter who shocked the nation by raising his gloved fist at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Following the radical plans outlined in his two critiques of organized sports, Athletics for Athletes and The Athletic Revolution, Scott openly sought to make his department more accessible to all students, regardless of race or gender. In the classroom, he would sometimes wear nothing more than his running shoes and gym shorts. He later defended his unusually informal dress code by explaining that "men who are supposed to be teachers act and dress like this all the time, curse their students and impose arbitrary rules about hair, clothes, social life, and no one thinks twice about it." He was referring to coaches, of course, men like the legendary Vince Lombardi who habitually dehumanized their athletes to motivate them to victory. How ironic it is, then, that Oberlin baseball experienced its own share of controversy when one student, senior Daniel Romano, was kicked off the team for violating its own arbitrary appearance policy by dyeing his hair green - just three years ago, in Spring of 1997.

Despite the fact that Scott and his coaches enjoyed success at Oberlin, the administration did not take kindly to his brazen behavior, claiming that he was causing divisions in the student body and the faculty. Thus, his contract was bought out, and Scott returned to California. During his time in Oberlin, he had taken an interest in college basketball sensation Bill Walton, who had engaged in his own brand of social activism by demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Eager to reach out to a kindred spirit, Scott took Walton into his home during the star center's early days with the Portland Trail Blazers and became his business adviser.

Scott, who never shied away from a good dose of publicity, once again found himself in the spotlight in 1975 when a Pennsylvania grand jury subpoenaed him during an investigation into the Patty Hearst case. Hearst had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army a year earlier and had subsequently joined her abductors in a number of crimes. At the time, Scott had been writing a book about the Symbionese revolutionaries, and he was privileged enough to meet with Hearst after a Los Angeles shoot-out left six of her radical cohorts dead. Ultimately, he declined the invitation to testify before the grand jury, citing governmental misconduct, but it later became clear that Scott had driven Hearst and two of her co-conspirators across the country, eluding one of the most famous manhunts in U.S. history. Even so, Scott was never charged for any crime.

In late 1975, Scott relocated to Oregon and honed his skills as a physiotherapist, a profession that would require him to use electric stimulation to heal injuries sustained by world-class athletes. During his remaining years as a therapist, he successfully treated high-profile track stars like Joan Benoit Samuelson, Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Although Scott may have been dismayed in recent years by the increasing commercialization of collegiate and professional athletics, he must have felt some degree of vindication after the passage of Title IX, which made the sporting world more accessible to women, and the implementation of free agency and the Amateur Athletic Act, which served to secure the rights of all athletes. During his lifetime, Scott had been labeled by his harshest critics as everything from a "militant nihilist" to an "enemy of sport." But Scott never viewed himself as a revolutionary, much less an irritable pest. "I'm not trying to do anything radical," he was fond of saying. "I'm just trying to be fair." But in his efforts to be fair, Scott helped to bring a permanent - and undeniably positive - change to the world of sport, and his contributions to that world must not be overlooked.

So, do you really think one person can change the world? Obviously, Jack Scott did.