Wait what? This was the 1959 team?
I found Meggyesy's book in paperback in a bookstore about 15 years ago and decided to buy it, I'd just read Maury Youman's book on the 1959 season "'59" and decided I should read Meggyesy's book as well for a different perspective, even though as an SU fan I had an image of Meggysey as a "bad guy". He's certainly a bitter guy and to some extent he was projecting his inner conflicts upon the people encountered. But he gives a lot of detail and it became hard to dismiss what he said. I took it, as I did with the revelations that led to our two basketball probations more as a cross-sectional view of what it takes to run a top football or basketball program rather than a specific indictment of SU as an outlier. Dave would have met similar people doing and saying similar things no matter where he went in big-time college football. He was disappointed because he'd been assured that these things didn't happen here. We were different. But we weren't.
Here is what I wrote at the time:
What Meggyesy Said
A poster linked us to an article about Dave Meggyesy, who played for SU in the early 1960’s and then played for several years in the NFL before becoming disenchanted with football and publishing the landmark book “Out of Their League” (1971). In it he revealed a lot of questionable practices at all levels of the sport, including a 60+ page segment on his time at SU. I decided to re-read that portion of the book as some posters wanted to know what Meggyesy said and because his experiences date from the same era as the recent book “’59”, which I reviewed earlier on this site. Many of the same people discussed in that book are discussed by Meggyesy, who was on the freshman team that year, but in a very different light. Here is a summary of what Dave had to say in his book:
- Meggyesy describes himself as a “kamikaze” type player who was always trying to impress the coaches with his hustle. But he also seems to have been a sensitive guy who was hurt when he wasn’t treated well or when people didn’t seem to like him. Veteran players didn’t like his growing reputation and resented him. The coach’s praise seemed to isolate him. Coach Bill Bell who recruited him, was very solicitous while he was being recruited but treated him rudely when he finally showed up at Syracuse. Meggyesy didn’t rebel against authority- at least not immediately, although he does express contempt for West Point and say that anyone would be “crazy” to go there considering how the plebes were treated. Actually, he seems to have rebelled against himself, not liking the person he was and wanting to change. In changing, he rejected the world he had been a part of. He tells about how he started to “hang out” with students from the School of Fine Arts who looked down on athletics and had a world of different ideas. Ben Schwartzwalder warned him “if you hanged around with those beatniks, you’re going to destroy yourself”. The “beatniks” were similarly lacking in tolerance and understanding of those who were different from them: “They would get drunk and go to the games and laugh at the fans and mock the coach”. Nonetheless they opened Meggyesy’s mind to different points of view.
- Injuries and the way they were treated were a big part of Meggyesy’s disenchantment. He says they were always told how sports would “Strengthen the body” while the schooling would strengthen the mind. But, he says, football destroys the body. As a freshman he broke a tooth in a game and “when I pulled out my mouthpiece out most of tooth came with it, leaving the nerve exposed, hanging and smarting.” Nonetheless Coach Dick Beyer told him “it’s only a tooth. Put your mouthpiece back on. You’re the only center we’ve got”. He later spent hours in the dentist’s chair getting it fixed. A teammate, Mark Weber, who was trying to recover from “a succession of knee injuries”, was sent in to return a punt against Army. He got hit in the knee and tore it up. He never played football again. Meggyesy later hurt a knee and an ankle against Miami and was brought to the locker room where “Doc” Barney wrenched the knee back into place and everyone left Dave there, saying an ambulance was on the way. They went back out to watch the game. Later Meggyesy tore a two inch gash in his elbow during practice. Barney stitched it up with no anesthetic and equipment that may not have been fully sterilized . An infection developed that doubled the size of his elbow and actually popped the stitches Barney had put in. He almost had to have his arm amputated. He also had three concussions in his time at SU, two shoulder separations, (one on each shoulder) and tore up his ankle so badly it broke the arch of his foot. He complains that the emphasis of the team doctors and trainers was to get him back onto the field. He says that a common practice in football, (he does not specifically say this happened at SU but he doesn’t it didn’t, either), was to “shoot up” a player before a game so that he could play, even though that actually increased the possibility of a worse injury because of the lack of feeling in the stricken area.
- There was a “remedial” academic program, “ostensibly designed to help freshmen entering with academic deficiencies” but which the football players were steered to because “it lasted through the whole year and consisted mainly of ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses requiring little work”. Joe Szombathy was the head of the academic tutoring program. “He would simply take the freshmen football players’ class cards and simply fill out the courses he wanted them to take.” The main criterion for the courses was that they didn’t interfere with football practice and they would enable players to remain eligible with minimal effort. Meggyesy filled out his own course card and Szombathy was furious with him, saying “We want you to take these other courses so you’re sure to be eligible. You can always take the other courses next year.” Varsity players stopped going to class during the football season. Meggyesy says “Eric Faigle, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, was an avid supporter of the football program and the rumor was that no professor was about to incur his wrath and rule a player ineligible simply because he wasn’t attending classes or taking exams. Even though most of the players hadn’t seen a classroom for some time, no one was declared ineligible and the team went on to win the National Championship and defeat Texas in the Cotton Bowl.” Tutors would meet with players before midterms and give them “important information, saying that if they wrote it down, they would do well on the exams. The “important information” was the answers to key questions on the exams. Dave’s younger brother, Dennis, flunked his freshman year. He went home to Ohio and worked as a construction worker during the summer. When he got back to schools he’d been credited with getting A’s in summer school and was eligible to play again. Of 26 players who came in with Meggyesy’s class, three of them- Dave his roommate, Gene Stancin and John Mackey graduated. Dave says “The minute (an athlete’s) eligibility ends, the Athletic Department’s concern for his welfare evaporates.”
- One of Meggyesy’s teammates, John Charette, had been a professional boxer, (which I assume should have made him ineligible under the rules of the day). He told Meggyesy that he had refused to take a “pay cut” when he came to Syracuse and was getting $60/mth, (About $360.00 in today’s money) and also had a charge account with Wells and Coverly, the leading men’s store in town. Dave says that Charette eventually lost interest in football but retained his scholarship and his financial deal by threatening to turn his Wells and Coverly receipts over to the NCAA. Meggyesy said that even after Charette had left the team, he saw him leaving Schwartzwalder’s office with a brown manila envelope on a regular basis. Latter, Mark Webber, concerned about his knee problems, asked Schwartzwalder for a similar deal and was “flatly refused”. According to Meggyesy, Rocky Pirro used to shake hands with the players as they boarded the team bus. They would then find $20 bills in their hands. Once Dave found he couldn’t put his foot in his shoe because some paper was wadded up in the toe. He pulled it out and found another $20 bill there. Meggyesy says that he had been concerned he would go to a school where under the table payments like these were made and that Coach Bell had said that that did not happen at Syracuse. Bell had even advised him against going to LSU because they paid players there. Dave indicates he was very upset to find he had been lied to. Later, when he needed money, Szombathy offered to “put him on the payroll” but Meggyesy declined because “I felt it would buy them even more control over my life than they already had”. Eventually, however, he gave in. He was told to go down to the Syracuse Herald Journal, where “one of the editors was an avid football fan”. He would pay Meggyesy the money.
- Meggyesy says that athletes at Syracuse were expected to behave like “animals who were half domesticated”, getting drunk and playing pranks like setting a fire in their Resident Advisor’s waste basket. “At Syracuse the prevailing opinion was that it was somehow healthy and manly to go out and get drunk, pick up some girl, lay her and maybe even rough her up a bit. To the coaches, this was ‘normal’ behavior; but they got upset if you began to develop a genuine relationship with a woman.” Dave at the time was living with his eventual wife, Stacy, and the coaches considered this “sinful”. He says the University spent as much effort trying to keep its players out of jail as they did keeping them eligible. One player was famed as the greatest barroom brawler in Syracuse. This guy heard there was party in an apartment house. Drunk, he decided to crash it and went to the wrong apartment. He kept pounding on the door and finally broke it down to be confronted with a local doctor who also happened to be a champion fencer. Despite being cut several times the player got to the doctor and broke both his hands. The incident was shut up and the player never served any jail time. For his part, Dave had $800.00 worth of parking tickets fixed.
- Dave has a less than worshipful attitude toward the stars of the 1959 team, who he said blew any chance of a second national title in 1960 with their complacency. He describes Fred Mautino getting the team bus to stop before the Pittsburgh game in 1960 so Mautino could scalp his compliment of tickets. Then he describes Mautino getting pancaked on nearly every play by the Panther’s Mike Ditka, his rival for All-American honors that year.
- He says that the SU players did not want to play in the Liberty Bowl in 1961 because after along, difficult, frustrating season, (including the infamous Notre Dame game), they longed for “a return to normal life”. When the Athletic Department announced SU was going to the Liberty Bowl to play Miami, “my first reaction was that the coaches and administrators should play the game since they had accepted the invitation.” He describes it as a profitable venture for the athletic department that only meant a couple more weeks of practice for the players. Dave says the players wanted to know what they would get out of the game. They were told that players on other bowl teams got watches or luggage. Ben told them they weren’t going to get anything. The seniors threatened to boycott the game until AD Lou Andreas agreed they would get watches prior to the game.
- Having no agent, when it came time to negotiate with the NFL teams, Dave went to Schwartwalder for help and got the brush-off. He said “Szombathy knows about the pros- maybe he’ll help you.” Szombathy just advised him to “be pliable.”
Back to 2023: I pull the Meggyesy book out of my bookcase for the first time since I wrote that and re-read the section, (pages 80-82) that describes the confrontation between the football player and the fencer. Dave does not identify the player by name but instead gives him an alias, "Randy Peters". He does not say when this happened. Dave was on the freshman team in 1959, then played varsity from 1960-62, so I suspect it was someone who played in those seasons. I looked over the "lettermen' section of the SU media guide and could find no one with a similar name from that period.
2022 Football Media Guide (PDF) - Syracuse University Athletics (p138-148)
