From red ink to roses

"On January 1, 1994, the University of Wisconsin football team scaled heights it had only dreamed of before, winning the school's first Rose Bowl ever. The 1993-94 men's basketball team was experiencing newfound success as well, qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament for the first time in forty-seven years. These twin accomplishments brought Wisconsin into the forefront of big-time college sports and capped off a difficult and turbulent transformation that began only a few short years before." "In 1991, renowned sportswriter Rick Telander, author of Heaven Is a Playground, the classic study of urban teenagers and their beloved games, was given unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Wisconsin athletic department. The school's sports were in the throes of a major crisis, thanks to huge deficits that resulted from a combination of lousy football, declining attendance, and some ill-advised construction projects.^ University Chancellor Donna Shalala, a veteran of the New York City financial crisis of the 1970s, knew that serious measures were called for, and hired athletic director Pat Richter and administrative officer Al Fish to take the necessary steps, which ultimately meant the elimination of five sports - including baseball - and cutting positions wherever possible." "Even as they tightened belts, though, everyone recognized that without a winning football team there was no way to make the books balance. For all the fiscal sanity imposed by the administration, no decision was more important than the decision to hire Barry Alvarez as head coach and to give him what he needed to build a winner on the field of Camp Randall Stadium. Alvarez delivered the victories, and the cash has followed." "But every decision made on a balance sheet affects dozens of young lives.^ Telander skillfully balances the bottom-line perspective of the administrators with the insights of Rick Aberman, a psychologist paid by the university to be available to any student-athletes who might need someone to talk to. Through Aberman, we watch the kids try to cope with all the pressures the adult world is placing on them - and not always in the healthiest ways. Aberman's sessions run the gamut of teenage problems, from a dethroned starting quarterback's loss of status to women athletes' concerns about the dysfunctional eating patterns of some of their compatriots.^ Aberman represents the caring, humanistic side of a university's role, just as Richter and Fish stand for the practical necessity of keeping the business running." "Telander weaves a broad tapestry here, with portraits from the lives of literally dozens of young men and women: Barry Baum, an aggressive aspiring sportswriter who's looking for love in mostly the wrong places; Amy Bauer, the point guard on the women's basketball team, who leaves the team surrounded by a cloud of rumors and innuendo; Jim Frueh, a fencer who is nearly killed when his lung is punctured during a match just two weeks before his sport is killed by Fish's budget axe. These people and the many classmates who also appear here serve as an important reminder of whom this whole extravagant enterprise is intended to benefit in the first place." "The year Telander spent in Madison proved to be a watershed for Wisconsin athletics.^ With his ample reportorial and writerly skills, Telander sheds new light on all the issues that underlie college sports and brings into focus an eventful, critical period in the life of a university - and the lives of the kids caught up in a game beyond their control."--BOOK JACKET.