mohamedou, so it's done by video. so the panel sits one place, and we're with mohamedou in guantanamo, and he testifies, and i get to make a statement, and we have a personal representative from the military who will be assisting us. >> host: and who will sit on that panel? who are the three? >> guest: they're military people. i don't know who they are at this point. >> host: last call for theresa duncan comes from ray in waterford, connecticut. go ahead, ray. >> caller: hi, ms. duncan. my question really is i have a number of friends who are, have served in the war on terror. all of the people are not as good as mr. slahi and, obviously, you feel squirmy about that. how would you set up a system to determine in the end whether that individual that's captured is worthy of prosecution or should be released? thank you. >> guest: so i think that, ultimately, first it's the government's job to amass whatever evidence that they

think they have against a person, and then the decision whether someone should be convicted of a crime or -- so the decision should be by the u.s. government do we want to prosecute that person. if the answer's now, you need to release them. if you think they have done something that's worthy of detention, then the u.s. government needs to bring them to court and try them. >> host: theresa duncan is the counsel for mohamedou slahi, author of "guantanamo diary." thanks for your time. >> guest: thank you. >> host: and booktv's live coverage of the tucson book festival continues. now there's another author panel today. we're going to bring it to you live. it's entitled "money and influence," and we'll let the moderator introduce the panelists. after the panel, gilbert gall, who has written about sports and money, will be joining usanothe. live coverage from tucson. ..

i rate for the nation seen and we are live on. you can applaud when you hear things you like. you will also be asking questions to be ready for it. that may rent down our panel here and talk about our three authors for just a moment and then we will get into some conversation. first off, to my side we have gave mary ms. davis at 39 year veteran of the "washington post," which is pretty amazing. >> we have dave here, who is a 39 year veteran of the "washington post" which as a survival of the fittest by any

measure. dave is here to talk about his relatively new book on top of a long list of great books. for those following what has been happening in detroit a book on michigan is a big thing. next, michael hilton has been forever in other places and forever at the los angeles. micha michael wrote about the affects of silence, technology and policy and his new book is titled "big science" and it is an incredible story of how science went from being

important, valid and meaningful to very big with a lot of mown money. gilbert is last on the panel. he is long associated with a number of papers and wrote briefly for the "washington post" and new york times. brilliant work with the philadelphia inquirer. and the first work came from the cox field republican.

when america goes big it is interesting. these three gentlemen all came out at daily newspapers. and this country still has daily newspapers. and they are the place where you still maintain a newsroom. you try, not always successfully to cover a lot of stuff and you actually try to go deepgovernment tells stories that go beyond the click with the rating of the moment to go do something bigger. if ever there was ever there is the time we needed three people who knew how to cook bacon journalism, this is. we will talk about this here. first i want to talk about their books. we will start with dave. your boat -- you chose to write about detroit. you do a remarkable thing where

you take a lot of personalities and amplify them in remarkable ways. i will do this at each of you and ask you to talk about a personality in your book. i was especially struck by one figure in your book. i want to make sure i get his middle name right. the reverend clarence franklin. this is what we will find in all three of these books. reverend franklin new smokey robinson and walter reuther and martin luther king jr. admit me sad and even produced a pretty interesting daughter. tell us a little bit about clarence franklin. >> you are right. he's an intersection of my book. it's tough to write about what to trade gave america is a huge amount. not just cars that we'll think of, but the soundtrack of my generation, motown and the labor movement with walter reuther is

the heart of the labor movement and civil rights. reverend gil franklin was the most popular creature in detroit in the 50s and 60s. his new bethel baptist church field african-american part of town to people that stand outside by the hundreds to listen to sermons by the loudspeaker in during the week he would travel with nature and included his three daughters, one of whom is aretha franklin to cities around the missile penalties big arena rallies, where people would call up for his servants as though he was a rock star. he would deliver the eagles -- they knew them by heart. in 1963 when aretha was starting to rise, reverend franklin got interested in being part of the civil rights movement and he brought to detroit that june the

13th who he had known for many years because he had come out of this out himself, franklin had. 63 was the crucial year of birmingham in the summer of civil rights and united auto workers let and walter reuther had essentially been the civil rights bank for that. and they that. and they are the ones provided bail money to get king and his people out of jail in birmingham. so king comes to detroit june 23rd, 1963. he's brought there by reverend franklin, walks arm in arm with regressive police chief george edwards who brought him to run the police department after years of tension between the african-american community and police, much like what we see today around the country. sadly it's been there for a long time and hasn't improved that much. they're what down woodward avenue. 150,000 people.

the largest civil rights rally to that in american history. a radical valhall. franklin brings king to do list and it is fair with franklin introducing handpicking delivered the first major version of the i have a dream speech. it happened in detroit first and reverend franklin with the traditional baptist preachers encountered my because he wore flamboyant clothes and without it might with the different clubs in town and he was sort of history feature of the time. franklin is the one that made that happen at a very critical time in american history. >> at the close of your boat, the last pages, it is this incredible -- i wish i had the book here. i would hold it up for the c-span audience. it is a group of circles with prominent figures in it and though the errors of intersection.

>> it is sort of a pseudo-friend diagram. i chirrup myself. >> it wasn't that well drawn. >> much better in the book than the book that was on my desk. i will tell you that. it was a way for me to figure connections between these threads. the speech that martin luther king gave not only did walter reuther walk arm in arm with him but berry gordy junior who founded motown record of the speech. it was the first talking word speech recorded. so all the threads of the book come together and that is that the diagram shows. >> mitt romney's dad keeps floating in a straight guy. >> since i consider the american dilemma and it certainly wasn't detroit at the heart of every problem detroit had going back to 1943 and a horrible race riot during world war ii between

whites who came up to work in the plants from appalachia, african-americans who are coming up. but george romney, mitt's dad was very progressive on race and huge issue was open housing. there were these vigilante squads in many detroit neighborhoods trying to prevent african-americans from the big men george romney supported during that period. in that sense he was more progressive i would say then his son. >> pretty good guy. we will talk about some intersections between his books as regard to money and power and what it does to some places and what it does to some entities like science in sports. i give you each a taste of these books. the last thing i want to offer here in regards to dave's book is the closing of your book and i have read, full disclosure, we

come from the same newspaper in madison, wisconsin. dave is a higher achievers so he's not associated anymore. i still am. it's a wonderful paper. you read his stuff in madison is familial. if some of the best stuff you've written. a beautiful section on going to see a motown band at the very close to that. while there's so much we talk about what the decayed challenges of detroit come you have a beautiful closing where you write -- >> i interview martha reeves but that the issue to 72 when i talk to her. one of the thrills of our parting, i have on tape with bill clinton and barack obama and mohammed ali and many people. in the interview she described for me as a 16-year-old in detroit talk classical music training by her music teacher

she said renate torreon. when i was interviewing her, she broke into song. she hit a high note at age 72. so the first motor town review that detroit in 1962 and october when the cuban missile crisis was breaking out. their first stop was the howard theatre in washington d.c. 50 some years later, my wife and some friends and i went to the howard theatre, martha reeves age 72 is up on stage dancing in the street. so i say a lot of things are ephemeral. they come and go. cities rise and fall. this decomposition and composition, but motown is forever. [applause] >> michael. your book looks at how science

went big and you do the most dangerous thing, do you actually pulled it off in this one, where you go and look around and find the guy who is sort of the vehicle by which science went big in this earnest orlando boys who we associate with the site at sean in nuclear physics. but you make him an incredibly nuanced figure and that he seems to be sitting in eisenhower's office around and over with all these people. tell us about ernest lawrence. >> as you alluded, it would be fair to think of ernest lawrence says the reverend cl franklin, starting in the 1930s. lawrence during his life was the most famous american-born scientist in the country. cover story on "time" magazine

in 1938 back in the prehistoric era that we think of as the era of print. he would be interviewed on any scientific development at the age enough in social and economic and political issues as well. if professor lawrence has sent in, you could take it to the bank. he was the real scientific oracle at this time. to a degree that we don't have anymore. i don't think we can point to anyone in science today who had his level of authority in his level of respect. it arrived the first of his invention of the cyclotron in 1929, 30, 31 estimates affect event efficient added smasher ever invented at a time when the physics really needed new equipment to delve into the mysteries of the natural world and the atomic nucleus. the era of small science, ernest

rutherford, marie curie who had gone as far as they could with the tools that nature gave them. the natural emissions from radium and polonium. they knew that the next step has to be something that derived from human ingenuity at a conference and said i would like to see somebody come up and inventive apparatus that can give us a house in electron polls and sit in a comfortably sized room. ernest lawrence delivered that a couple years later. what gave him the lasting influence over science by inventing the rusher in the era of big science, the big era of multimillion dollars apparatus come of that era that brought together foundations, government, universities, consortium for government. you could not build the

equipment he invented or at least the latest generations about incorporating industry and the military, all these things come into science. he really was the godfather essay argued that military industrial complex. only three or four years after his death that dwight eisenhower sounded the alarm when he said we are getting to the point where the military and industry come together with science to a degree that they are all going to pursue their own interests and the public interest is going to be left behind. so this is a paradigm that is left is today. excited is all around us on this campus. the debary lab is the next sample of science. ernest lawrence's first cyclotron cost less than $100 in material benefit in the palm of his hand.

the latest generation, the latest iteration of that invention is the large collider that cost $9 billion fits inside it, underground 17 miles circumference under the landscapes of france and switzerland so you can see the evolution. we are constantly debating whether we spend too much money on these projects, whether we are cheating other needs of society because we are so involved in mental science of a sort that lawrence began to process his role in the manhattan project. the single most important scientific figure in the manhattan project, more important at oppenheimer, his friend -- initially his friend, later his bitter enemy and continue the process after the war by promoting thermonuclear

weapons. so that is part of the nuance of his career. he started off as a great scientific euro and ended up at the rail shadow. >> in preparation for this i read back over eisenhower speech. if you haven't done it recently, you should. not only because of the mornings, but also because it is less a speech about the military more about science. it is a speech about big science. >> that is true. amazingly if you've read it today, you say this is the world we live in. what he was talking about was a threat to science and scientists in academia from this incursion of big money and the influence of the military and industry and what really should be a straightforward search for the truth. >> last thing i want to ask you about. in your book, a small section you redeem harleigh stassen.

>> he passed away not long ago, ran for president nine or 10 times and became something of a national comic relief. but the young man. >> he was a remarkable figure actually. i think he made himself into a national by continually running for president at a point when everybody knew -- i don't know who was an expression of vanity or just the triumph hope over reality. early in his career he was a very successful governor. he was brought to washington by dwight eisenhower and he was put in charge for the disarmament policy in the eisenhower white house had a point when we were involved in the very delicate dance with the soviet union over how to get testing -- how to monitor tests of atomic weapons

and how to disarm. and stassen was appointed he told eisenhower should introduce me to the predecessor secretary of peace. eisenhower thought about that for a moment and decided not to go with it. but then he went out in setting the secretary of peace. he was not successful in actually executing a disarmament plan, but his influence really did laugh and blood in its way the first advances in disarmament negotiation we had. >> michael spoke to the lovely, lovely job of weaving a dispute about buffer and adlai stevenson and all the scientists into how we should look at this, this great wrestling over whether we will see where science can go no matter what a rather be baby will put a few constraints. >> this is an era when science

became political. ernest lawrence was always says he said dead set against allowing politics in the lab. he thought it would be a terrible distraction. they got involved in politics itself. >> michael hiltz. >> your book out as much politics and money as a book about the auto industry and a book about big science. you are looking at sports. you correctly point out that there are many figures that flow through here. i was especially interested in your kind of intellectual and personal interaction with a certain coach at the university of alabama. >> lack of interaction. >> yeah, exactly.

it is getting $7 million a year, which as you point out with 10 times that the president of the university god and 70 times with a full professor guy. tell me about this and how do we learn from him a little bit about big surprise. >> one of the things i thought about, this is basically about big football for college football. i became interested in the economics of college football and how it had become, the fight over the decades and how the revenues grew from here right around 85 to appeared in 2011, 2012. i want to explain what was the business model? part of that, you can't help because everybody in this room knows that the salaries for coaches at these major universities have double, triple, quadruple whatever over

the years particularly in the last decade. it was interesting to me because i got to sit down with sabin back in 1999 when he left michigan state. he was in at $697,000 of the football coach at michigan state. put this on the table right away. he's a terrific football coach. he's the bear bryant of our era. but it's also a disinterested money. he was unhappy at michigan state for two reasons. he didn't think they were giving him enough an opportunity. all these deals where you do a car dealership. he felt he was being held back. he was more accustomed play at that point in time. lsu had been going through a tough stretch football wives at the same time. they had a couple losing yours

are marginally successful years and they fired coach joey dinardo and they were looking for a new coach. of course nick sabin is on their radar. what is interesting is they send out a plane to pick up saving pretty much in the night and bring him down to lsu. who is on the plane to think to bring him back? the chancellor of the university a guy by the name of mark everett who is now the president of the ncaa. so if you think anybody will try to tempt down the salaries of coaches or raise issues about this, it's not coming from the ncaa. and there's about 2 million or as little more than 2 million. but anyway, fast-forward to today, he goes to lsu, with the championship, goes pro, just terribly. someone else comes at a plane to pick him up. you get tired at alabama, works his way up, wins championships.

so my background is numbers, economics, business. i'm interested in the question of how does the marketplace work for coaches and how does it impact and universities. there really is no marketplace for these coaches per se. if the coaches and the ages so the mythology is that there are they so many guys who can run a major football program is to bring all the money and bring a few games. there's nobody else has got to go find these big names and then we have to open up the checkbook and pay them 7 million, 5 million, 6 million, whatever it is. when i was thinking about this back in 99, there were six coaches in all sports who earned a million dollars just for the wild as of last year there was something like 80 who are earning more than a million

dollars. 10 guys now earning $5 million or more. so that gives you an idea. savings justification for being paid 7.1 million is always a business wants. you have to look at the return on investment. so i went and looked at the return on investment. it's real interesting if you look at it as a business in alabama, they bring in more money, but it's also really good and the cost of the program when it magically. and just really interested in the idea of how you set the metrics for a guy like this. if it championships? is it filling up the stadium week after week or as a branding at the university which is that the president and chancellor of the alabama system have suggested in which case basically what they are saying is they cap our applications and warehouse corp. and people are interested in our school. so that is true up to a point.

if you look at alabama and their applications, guess what? two thirds of the students who go to the university of alabama come from out of state. some of what point does alabama stop being a state school and wondering them is that really a good thing if you are there to try to lift up your populace and bring in two thirds of your kids from out of state really a good day. economically it's a good thing because they are probably full freight in the second inning on a scholarship. i'm just not so sure about that. >> gober, you read about the intersection of media and the state programs. you have this striking close to your book and i will read it. you said breathless -- that it up, he's doing what he probably does every day, which is sit around and watch sports on tv. and it's safe to say that this is something he loved.

at some point in your life you love watching sports on tv. >> when i was 19 years old, yes. >> there so many games now with all these schools. you've got to close this deal by being in the game or been one of the game. restless and and increasingly poor, unable to enjoy any single game because of the spectacle. he turned out to watch the movie. as i read that, i thought to myself a question to ask you is are we ruining this thing? >> oversaturation assert they have ended it. a number of threats to college football. i look at college football and the moment as a bubble. over the next 10 years is probably going to break at some level. the tv companies at espn, cbs. if overpaid dramatically for

this. there are technological threats. the younger generation of kids are more interested in looking up their cell phones than they are encoded to games. they are declining students in the stadiums. georgia in fact had to buy back 2000 tickets from the student because they weren't interested in going to games. the good thing for georgia can sell them through adults, make a whole boatload of money. maybe not so good. my issue in terms of media and saturation was i had this odd conflation when i was watching these games. on saturday night is like 10 games on simultaneously on television. they're all good games in terms of watching the spectacle of the sport. my problem is i would watch one and i would wonder what is going on and i would start clicking the channel. after a while i had no interest,

no investment in any of the games. i would go would watch a movie because it sort of run over. >> maybe that's about you as much -- >> it may be. i'm willing to admit. >> tell me about the intersection of capitalism in sports. >> this has been going on for a long time. that part is that we are all a little bit numb too. in college, what is interesting is just how good measure schools, including a place like this, it has grown so big a college athletic apartment thanks to the president that the schools are basically stand-alone entertainment division and that is how they operate. they've got barged problems from the universities and it turns out the athletic directors are good at business and making tons of money.

it is good in terms of how much money you can get. and end up having huge impact on the schools. everything from the areas to academics. a week doesn't go by in which there is a major scandal. directly or indirectly, all of them involve teams of immense football fans particularly with the academics. they are sports in terms of the athletes they bring and. despite millions and millions of dollars a of dollars to educate the athletes eligible, a lot of a lot of them still fall by the wayside. >> where does the benefit, and where does it start to fall apart? >> as they think i mentioned within a few years in 1958,

1961, one of his disciples who was at that point running but national lab, which warrants have founded in actually designed for the project. alvin wrote an article in science magazine in which he coined the term big science and raise the number of questions about it about with the info of money was going to do to science. he was very skeptical of the future of science under these conditions. he said what we are ending up with are the construction of monuments. these are our peer immense, the arcs, the triumph, these huge cyclotron's, adam smashers come at the idea of going to the mid-and it is going to inevitably raise questions as to whether this is the best way to spend society's resources. we want to be known for having put a man on mars more than

having solved the mysteries of cancer, which is funded of as much to big science. he said we are turning our university administrators, science department heads into bureaucrat, promoters, impresarios have to go out and raise more money to make science bigger and that is not going to be a good thing. we have seen that because we have seen a lot of programs that need more nurturing been overwhelmed by the idea that we can throw three or $4 billion set in our program with a quest for an achievement that may not actually have been. so this is a debate that started long ago in the 1960s. we are still having that. if played into some at the end of the doubt that the super

collating -- the super collider in texas in the 1990s when congress decided it was just too expensive and the physics community couldn't get its act together to say this is why we need it. so these projects are becoming harder to justify to the average taxpayer and they are becoming more expensive than the odd thing is i think you can still make the case that this work still needs to be done and if that value. just the scale of its expenditure is overshadowing the whole enterprise. >> if you haven't read michael's book yet, he spoke a lot about history and thanks from 50, 60 years ago. it's a staggeringly book because michael's book, all of these arcs that began 50, 60 years ago provided to this moment and you see so many of them very well

realized. dave. did capitalism failed detroit or did it just get beyond? how do we look at that intersection? >> destroyed is a symbol of the rise of capitalism and of its flaws. certainly the auto industry in motown both were capitalist successes in many ways. the four says of capitalism or of market and of decisions by corporate executives helped kill detroit. the auto industry bailed out of the city both physically and emotionally a long time ago. so you can see, you know, my book takes place. the heart of it is 1963. this is before the race rebellion arrives in 67, before

the difficulties the city pensions, before the municipal corruption. structural problems were already dared and had to do with capitalism. but the industry moving away from the city and the people who built the city. conglomerate that that was the slow decline of the labor movement, which was to push back. you read the papers that walter was the road in 1963 and you'll see him again, another prescient person predicting what would happen with technology and the effects it would have on the work force over the next 50 years. and now you have michigan which was part of the labor movement is a right to works day. so detroit in many ways is the next saturation of the american dilemma at almost every respect, but almost certainly in terms of the push and pull between government, capitalism and regulation and deregulation and

free trade and restricted trade. all of that comes into play in the rise and fall in perhaps the rise again of detroit. >> one of the most painful things about the current debate in norway at today in politics is the incredibly use with which the people of detroit get away and forward for at least kind of scene as somehow -- >> i agree with that completely. the demonization of citizen in a situation in which they are big guns as part of the american political reality today which is inexcusable. certainly there are problems in urban centers that have to do with individual responsibility. but the structural forces that surround the people of detroit were overwhelming. you know, that is the reason my

book, the most important word in my title is in. what is in a great city. it is still a great city if the forces that relates to trade helped make america help bring it back. >> a ready with some questions. you have to go to the microphones here because your questions will be picked up by c-span. millions of people across america are fascinated by your insights in the value of your contribution to this discourse. before we go to the first question, i know this is a completely -- i am in pain to ask you to do this quickly but we are in the midst of an election year. david, you're just been been out traveling all across the country, looking at this. this is a really simple

question. i'm sure we'll be able to do it in 10 seconds here. >> hopefully. i don't know. but look at this moment and take what you learn from doing in the book, what you gain your insights in how they intersect with the moment we are in politically. >> the moment we are in politically as some lesser minds in 1968, but it's completely different in a larger sense. it is just the culmination of several forces at one. you know, the devolution of political debate down to the level of reality television, the changes of technology leaving people behind, the forces of race again which are key to what is going on in different ways. all of this has come together and when you look at detroit and flint, the immigration problem, the collected the cities north of detroit where many of the

reagan democrats were born in 1980 and i went up there and a lot of them are trumped democrat so you see all of that being played out this year. >> michael. you were saying you are writing more steps now online. but you are writing like crazy. you follow a script a lot about politics. where do you find intersections this year? >> what we have all noticed is the deterioration of faith and trust in our institutions. we certainly see that, just sticking to the theme of the moment in science, american science, american and british science emerged from world war ii with incredible credibility as scientists are particularly face-to-face for retreated as superman, who had won the war and so they became real heroes,

but that couldn't last it didn't last because expect nations were laid on them that they simply couldn't shoulder. science could solve the problems that it claimed to be able to solve. scientists who came out of the manhattan project went into the nuclear power -- nuclear power technology. some of them as a way to expiate the guilt they have begun to feel. but of course, nuclear power has been a real challenge depending on what turned you want to use. it clearly hasn't lived up to its expect patience. today, we see a great deal of skepticism in science and it is basically fomented by politicians who want to use politics to undermine science in the area of climate change. so i think we have seen that

very strongly the loss of faith and the loss of trust in what we used to treat as authoritative institutions that i think is really affect that american politics and lead us to the point where it today. >> you. >> sports is all wrapped up with politics. it is wrapped up its funding of universities, funding stadiums. it doesn't necessarily play out across presidential politics. give me a download on intersections there. >> along the way i had an interesting conversation with an athletic director at one of the largest universities in the country. that's all i've got to say. he explained to me how once a year he and a couple other athletic pursuit get-together and go to washington and they would always bring along a football coach her to football coach or two. why would she do that? very simply. the congress then i'll slobber

over the football coaches. it's absolutely true. the way this plays out in a concrete way is as follows. it's basically about the tax status of college football. college football falls under the umbrella of the universities. universities are treated as 501(c)(3) under the law treats of an effect, college football is a charitable enterprise despite the fact it is now a two or $3 billion a year charitable enterprise. so, i mean, the irs has several times attempted to do with this issue and do exactly what it should do, which is when it sees donors, somebody buying seed at alabama or whatever. you don't just pay the face value of the ticket. now days because they're such demand, you are required to join up or strip club or make an

annual payment which can be up to 15 or $20,000 a year. the irs looked at that and said that's not charity. that is a quick pro-quote and 84 they began to go after it and this is where the politics come in. the football body turn to their friends in congress and got them to pay back the irs. the tragic and once one got beaten back yet again. eventually in 1988 it was with them to legislation that if you're a fan -- i make in this number out. $10,000 a year as the donation even though clearly commanded through payment, not a gift, you get to deduct 80% of it. that is how politics plays out in college football. >> that is a very reassuring thought. >> we've turned our notions of charity in this country upside down and a lot of it is simply that there is no break elation

anymore and congress won't allow the people in the tax exempt organization section of the irs to regulate. >> and i'm not happy now, let's go to our first question. the gentleman over here. you even have your sports hat on. question for gilbert. should college, football and basketball players be paid? should they be required to be students? and if they do get paid, how do you keep good successful programs from literally put his dollar programs out of business? >> okay, so it's a great question. there's a number of spices to it. i'll try to do it really quickly. in short term we are now beginning to pay the football players in the other athlete at all the elite schools that a surprising number of what i call the half knots, a 65 schools that does great sums of money

trying to play football. they look at this cost of attendance purchased three, four, $5000 a year in addition to their arctic scholarship and a lot of these kids are poor. they need a little pocket money. that's great. i have no problem with that whatsoever. where this all gets tricky is a couple years down the line. the football players and basketball players are going to be happy very long getting 3000 or $4000. they are going to want to get $20,000 or $25,000. i had an interesting conversation with one guy who's arguing we are going to go to a competitive bidding model for athletes in particular football players. if your great quarterback from california, five schools were prepared mustard 50,000 to $100,000 a year for you to come in. the argument come up with a narrative is rich and largely and this is what bothers me, the players are all of the dems and

the big system is taking advantage of them and they are the ones putting their lives at risk. they ought to be getting a share of money. i don't care whether they pay them or don't pay them. you are going to have consequences once you go to a model where you start paying the athletes large amounts of money. you immediately are conceding what ought to be conceded that this is a commercial business in which case raises the tax issue again. if you raise the tax issue and say we are going to start tag methods have become, the model begins to waver. if you go after the seat donations said that's not charity. we are going to begin the to begin to tax the to begin the tax base. then the model collapses. there's not enough money to keep it going the way it's going now. not to be overly critical sportswriters, but they are not included in the narrative. they are not thinking it through fully. >> no way.

really? [laughter] >> ilec sports writers. let's take this gentleman. >> this is a question for gilbert and john and that is when you think about the high salaries paid to coaches, as a question of paid players, even if they are not paid today the kinds of scholarships and benefits given, that legislatures in various states that taken kind of a jaundiced eye toward space. they certainly don't support much in the line of athletics that both state schools. are those high salaries being paid to coaches and what is going on at sports carry over to the legislators in many states backing off in terms of their support of the state schools? >> there's very little to do with it. they have surprisingly little to do with it for very good reason.

the president's back in the 70s and 80s were so embarrassed by all the scandals of college sports. they pushed him off of the far corner of the university and then find the money if you want to keep doing what you're doing. you do it, but we are not giving me the money. the athletic astronaut to be really smart people and they raised a heck of a lot of money. that includes money for the coaches. the legislature i was day has very little to do with this. >> in this sentence that with respect to the salaries being paid and the stadiums being built and the athletic department, go find your own money and the tickets can still be sold and the systems are supported. there's a lot of cutbacks in state legislators over the dollars that flow back to the universities.

>> the deeper question and i'm not going to give you big answer because we could do a good five hours on this. >> one other quick point is a lot of legislators get comped and free tickets and they set up in the luxury boxes at the game. they are going to take this on. a little over a century ago, the way we broke a reduction in the stasis and barbara got elected governor of wisconsin he took away the river passes. you start to get debates. the poor thing you are going at here is something much bigger in academia, which is we literally are allowing entities to come to exist separate. the state becomes a secondary player. it is a spectator rather than something intimately tied in where you end up with situations that jill is talking about doing so many students coming from outside saying the connection start to get broken.

>> i might want to throw in here that we have seen this in science. we have seen basic science basically get impoverished because you need government honey to fund it and the governments are withdrawing because they don't want to spend the money. what's taken over? industry. businesses are funded programs. their funding institutes at universities. inevitably when businesses find something, it is doing it for its own interest and as a result we have seen a in any universe of these from science to basic science is to apply to the industrial science. some of these institutes are pursuing what their patrons want. the whole patenting system, you know, we have professors who basically are being funded in large part of the public, who are patenting their discoveries. they are close enough that they

have discovered to their own colleagues and they are really in it for the main chance. i think we see a lot of unease in academia about this, but very little desire to do anything concrete about it. >> and no more clearly than the state john and i both live in, wisconsin, where the whole idea was to university with a laboratory for the entire's date and now it is a laboratory for corporate america. >> literally to the point they were debating how to restructure tenure the other day. a good question over here. >> it goes back to the question of the university relationship sports department. is there any relationship between the success of and athletic program and the donor money that comes in from the academic institution itself? >> there have been studies on this question. the universities will commonly claimed that there is this

outflow of money from athletics from donations that the big athletic donors are giving big dollars to the university for academics. the studies are split exactly down the middle. half of them say all of -- no. and half of them say there's an impact there. from what i can tell talking with athletic directors is in some cases very sudden impact impact but it tends to be temporary and it is not nearly as large as you might think would be clean. >> let me bring this woman in here and then this gentleman here. bring the microphone down a little bit. we will hear you better. >> i want to make sure i understand the point were clearly about corporate america have been involved in colleges and business, hobby and more at dictating perhaps for having

input in the kinds of people who graduate from college and can have a marketable skill and get a job when they get out. where is that part of the conversation? do kids want jobs when they get out? >> quite a few of them do. >> they do, but would businesses and corporations that are funded a lot of this research in universities and which are exploiting patented discoveries and inventions, that is a pretty short-term interest that you are seeing their. i think anybody coming in now, serious scholars of science and history of science to say that the seat that commend the seed corn of science is basic research and that has really been minimized in universities because there's not enough money for it. but if google or amgen bridgend

attack comes in and says we want to create an institute of biotechnology. they will say yeah, sure it will allow a corporation to dictate a lot more than a responsibility university at the straighter should allow. so we don't really get the range. we are not trained in young scientists who follow their noses as much. they have the university grants, foundations grant, things that are narrowly focused. we have seen that evidence already. >> before we take this, you have done incredible books on presidential campaigns like many of them over the years. is it really this question and

this occurred at the heart of the stuff with your book, if we have industrial policy, with the government comes into government comes and implants in the way in germany or someplace like that, that we have is an event not in this country to a corporation decide the right way to organize an economy, how we do jobs, all sorts of things. detroit gets left behind in a game like that. >> it does. i think that it's a very valid question that you raise. there is another answer to it is so, which is jobs come to a place that has a good public education system. that is one of the drawing points of why people would come to madison, wisconsin for detroit in the 1940s. so it is both a high school public education, elementary in college. things that diminish and narrow

the scope of the public education in terms of funding and in terms of the centrists have a longer-term of deleterious effect on jobs that does the simple notion that we are just going to train people for these jobs of the jobs will come. it is the foundation that brings the jobs and that is what i think would have been to detroit and what is happening to a lot of places around the country, the foundation crumbles. >> this gentleman right here. >> a question about big science. i'm in a funny position of starting out in high energy physics myself ending up writing the economic history of silicon valley where he lived for 20 years and our son is a computational geneticists in the geneticists in a field that certainly didn't exist when i was in college. but your earners pics science, which is high-energy physics, has wonderful heyday.

we were right in moving public money out of that area. we got genetically higher gains. removed the money into a little bit material science, which helped global microelectronics business take off. it went beyond the government very quickly. this little thing is a million times better than the computer i used as an undergraduate at harvard. and biotech we have invested in. we are making major progress in that area and that is a combination of public and private money. but money was a good thing. >> i think you are right in very briefly -- >> michael, you would be amazed at how briefly. >> it is an evolutionary process. it stars companies government patronage because no corporation can see how it can profit and said to the basic level. we saw that in the creation of

the internet through darpa at the time. the question is, at what point do you free a technology that was created with government funding? do you free to be commercialized? the tendency has been to the much earlier in the process than we used to. >> rather, we are on the very cusp of this. we turn to you for final brilliant and very quick question. ... >> i don't have a question. i have a comment. i am canadian from a city called windsor, south of detroit, just across the river. i i have no ax to grind but detroit has really made some great progress in the last, three-five years. i have heard only bad things and

i thought somebody should say something good about them. >> no, detroit is on its way back. both in the downtown area that is thriving, the midtown area that is becoming a new brooklyn, and you know, until it gets all of the neighborhoods involved in that recovery you cannot call it a true renaissance but the essence of my book is it as a great city and it is coming back. thank you for your comments. >> that is very important. these three gentlemen have written beautiful and poetic books. the heart of his incredible writing. also personal writing that reflects their hearts and their souls. we didn't have a chance to talk -- you can have a chance to talk to the more.

dave and mike will be over at the signing tent in a few minutes and you can meet with them. gilbert is going to go on c-span and that's a question for a half hour. but he will wander over there when it's done answering the questions with the great masses of americans. but let me close off by saying that what you've seen here is what journalism can do. journalism is still the most vital core of our democracy. it's what tells us about how things work and how we can make things work. i hope you'll join me in thanking three great journalists. dave merritt is, michael hiltzik, and gilbert gaul. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us here and on c-span. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> and c-span2's booktv continues with our live coverage from the tucson festival of books. and in just a minute gilbert gaul who spoke about his book "billion-dollar ball: a journey through the big-money culture of college football" will be joining us to take your calls. especially if you've been involved in college sports or high school sports, or professional sports we would love to get your perspective as well. the tucson book festival is held on the campus of the university of arizona just off of downtown

tucson and the team here is the wildcats, and gilbert gaul am have you looked at the finances of the wildcats transferred i look at them enough to i'm a little bit familiar with them. i did not focus on arizona for a number of reasons. there were a handful of schools i chose to focus on proposal but more than a handful but for specific reasons. >> host: we are here on the campus, large football stadium, nice basketball stadium. two good teams. what do those programs provide for the whole university? >> guest: i'm sure they provide some exposure. the basketball team is one of the better best buildings in the country. football team has in improving a bit in recent years. they've done a bit better. you're getting some exposure from that.

you were getting alumni feedback. they come to games. if some student involvement, some excitement from them. so you're getting a little bit of branding for the university although as i argue in the book it's really more of a temporary phenomena than anything. in some cases it's maybe not even that good a thing. >> host: are students hitting a lower tuition? >> guest: no, no, no. 's one of the things you hear allah is that well, it's a big football program that is contributing a lot of money to university. the reality is in college athletics very little money generally goes toward athletics. somewhat larger schools, alabama, texas, or someone ago to academics but is not a huge amount of money. it's not the kind of money that will make a critical difference on the academics. in terms of tuition, if anything it's helping to drive up tuition

at a number of schools were not for the smaller schools, major programs that are trying to compete at a larger level. because they have to fund those programs so that the they don't have the revenue streams that these larger football program said. their stadiums or half empty most of the time. they don't have television revenue. what do they do? they take the money out of the tuition and fees of the universe has charged. akron or eastern michigan, probably 90% of athletic department budget is coming out of the students. >> host: gilbert gaul sr guest. .com sports and money. you referenced this a little bit in thereference th dock, the pol thing. state legislature support for these big programs. >> guest: to support at the state level is more indirect. that were not going to do anything that's going to hurt

the college football team. think about it, politically you don't win any votes by taking on your college football team if you're in nebraska, texas or louisiana. that's just not going to happen. so they basically keep their hands off. you know, they may provide some state capitol some money for new stadiums, they may kick in towards that, they may approve the bonds that you're selling to fund your stadium. >> host: all right. i've been asking this question for the last week or so. >> guest: yeah. >> host: my mom's a big indiana university basketball fan. indiana won the big ten. >> guest: right. >> host: why is there a big ten tournament after that which indiana's already lost in? >> guest: right. i'm not a basketball expert, but the answer's real simple, because you can get television. if you get television exposure, you're getting yet more revenue blowing into the athletic d.. it's the same reason with march madness. all of the excitement is great, right? but you have to step back and think about the hundreds of

millions of dollars that are generated by the tournament that flows back to the conferences which in turn, you know, they act like atm machines for the schools. they then pump the money back to the athletic departments. >> host: so the bowl system that college football plays, all about money in. >> guest: it's all about money. it's completely about money. yeah, yeah. and the playoff system that they just revamped two years ago is kicking out extraordinary sums of money to those conferences in the so-called five super conferences, the sec, the big ten, etc., pac-12 here in arizona. i think it was $70 million per conference just from those playoffs last year. >> host: it's a market thing. this is what people want. >> guest: yeah. [laughter] that doesn't mean that there aren't issues. [laughter] people like to be entertained, no question about that. i mean, we're talking about the economy. the largest change in our economy over the last three decades is that we now focus far

more on our entertainment economy than we do on manufacturing. and sports is a big part of that. >> host: gilbert gaul is our guest. cece is calling in from portland, oregon. go ahead, please. >> caller: yes. i just wanted to get your comments about paying athletes. i just really think it's unconscionable, the degree to which everyone has an excuse as to why the athletes don't need any money as they're raking in millions. we're in a capitalist society. we get, oh, be satisfied, you know, with your degree that you may get that you probably won't use, the scholarship that can be cut at any time, or if i get hurt, i don't get paid. i'm raking in millions, and i can tell you, you don't need any money. i'm just galled at the fact that we allow that. but it just really speaks to just the greed in the program and the way that they're really making money off the backs of the labor of these young men. and i just think it's horrible.

but everyone seems to think that's okay as long as their pockets are getting filled. >> guest: yeah, i don't think that's accurate. i mean, i think that a lot of people think it's not okay and that the argument is that the players ought to be paid and that that's where the momentum is going. so in the short term, they're doing this thing called cost of attendance, full cost of attendance, and they'll be paying the athletes certainly in these five super conferences anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to $5,000. that's pocket change in the grand scheme of things. you're absolutely right, this is a business. there's no argument about that. but you have to think through what you're suggesting. if you're going to start paying these players $20,000, $30,000 or even more if you go to a competitive bidding system when you're recruiting a star quarterback, for example, and in five schools offer him between $50,000 and $100,000, how does that then impact back on, a, the business model for the athletic

department, how does it affect the tax status of athletics at universities? i would argue that if you're going to pay the players huge sums of money, you're going to immediately have tax issues for the players, and you're going to have tax issues for the business model because you're no longer able to hide behind the notion that this somehow is purely an educational exercise. you're acknowledging it's a business, and if it's a business, then it's going to be taxed. and once you begin to tax it, then the model begins to unravel. so there's some complications to paying players. i'm not arguing whether you should pay players a lot of money. i agree with you, they're the ones who are getting the concussions, they're the ones who are generating the huge sums of money. all i'm saying is you have to think it through that there are complications at the end of this. >> host: steve is in stafford, virginia. hi, steve. >> caller: hi, eric. i have a question for the author, and that is -- >> host: please go ahead. >> caller: i'm a graduate from the university of oregon, and i

know several years ago phil knight, a fellow graduate, had contributed multimillion dollars to the university -- >> guest: yep. >> caller: -- to build a very, very fine state of the art, perhaps one of the finest in the nation, training and athletic facility. and my question is -- >> guest: yeah. >> caller: -- was, did he receive any tax breaks as a result of that contribution? >> guest: phil knight would not talk with me, but you have to assume that he took the same deductions from taxes as a charitable gift that anyone would take giving that huge sum of money to the university. i've been to both of -- well, knight has financed, i don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million in athletic facilities at oregon including the $70 million football performance center and a $42 million academic support center that looks like the modern museum of art when you go in it.

it's just -- both facilities are extraordinarily lavish. finish so, yeah. i mean, i assume that he took tax deductions. he would have been nuts not to. >> host: gilbert gaul, speaking of large sports companies like nike, do they have a vested interest in bigtime college sports? >> guest: oh, yeah, yeah. this has been going on for decades. it started with nike probably, i'm guessing here, back in the early '90s or maybe even the late '80s, shortly after the company was formed. phil knight is a genius, let's acknowledge that. and part of that is marketing. and he realized that if he gets his brands on the backs of the athletes and you see the nike swoosh, the ubiquitous swoosh every time you turn on a game, that has some marketing/advertising value. he also, nike also has played a very integral role at oregon in terms of helping their marketing for their athletic department. the money that he's given to the

university with, everything from designing the uniforms that they wear on saturdays to mixing and matching which uniforms they're going to wear on saturdays. so it's a huge impact. >> host: next call for gilbert gaul, author of "billion dollar ball," comes from dave in louisville. >> caller: hey, thanks. so, you know that the university of louisville had a self-imposed ban on their post-tournament play and the ncaa tournament. >> guest: right. >> caller: can you help me understand a rough estimate of the amount of money not flowing to the university from that choice? [laughter] >> guest: yeah. i'll just correct you and say not flowing to the athletic department, not to the university. because that's where the money would have gone. i, you know, boy, a really rough ballpark estimate is going to be it's clearly going to be several million dollars that they would lose out. the way -- it's a little bit

tricky because the money flows through the conference, and then the money gets divided up. each conference has a slightly different formula for how to determine how much money a school's going to get depending on how far it gets in the tournament. but louisville always has a great basketball team, so i'm sure they would have gotten at least a couple rounds into the tournament which means, you know, more money for the conference which in turn would have meant a bigger payout to louisville. you know, for the sake of argument let's just leave it at $1, $2 million. >> host: gilbert gaul, one and done. what is this doing to athletics at the college level? >> guest: again, i'm not a basketball guy, but it's obviously. it makes it a much more commercial enterprise. you're bringing in a kid who's clearly not there as a student-athlete. he's looking at this as, basically, the minor leagues or the development league for the nba to play basketball. so, you know, it's the pretense that these folks are

student-athletes goes out the windowment it makes the sport -- window. it makes the sport very disruptive. it's hard to be a fan if your great player is only there one year and then he's in the nba, which is what's happening. kentucky in particular with john calipari, you know, has made a science out of that. but even duke university with che che sky is now doing the one and done. from the standpoint of competing, i guess you have to do it in order to compete at the highest levels. in terms of the impact on the sport, i would say it's having a deleterious impact on the sport. >> host: what terms are they given? >> guest: well, they get a lot of support which is why i always hesitate when people are quick to say that the athletes are victims. i don't think the athletes are victims. i think they get a lot of support. you could argue they ought to get more money. that's a slightly different issue. but if you come in and you're a major football player, they probably bring you in early at

least during the summer, if not six months before the school season starts. they put you through a summer course that does everything from introduce you to the library to, you know, go over sort of issues about what you and cannot do on the campus before you're going to get in trouble. [laughter] the academic support is extraordinary. one of the biggest changes in college sports, major college sports over the last two decades, is the creation of these things called academic support centers for athletes. they're totally exclusive for athletes. the same services are unavailable to regular students. the schools spend millions of dollars, in some cases tens of millions of dollars on buildings. they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars on tutors. oregon told me that they did 1700 hours of tutoring a week during the school season. during the football season. think about that. 1700 hours of tutoring.

in some cases, they knock on the doors of athletes to wake them up in the morning, in some cases they walk them to class, they have people positioned outside the doors of the classrooms and, basically, have a sign-in sheet. you have to sign in and show the coach that you went to class, and if you don't show up, they call the coach and say, hey, he didn't show up this morning. so the level of support is dramatic. and i will tell you, one of the things i did was i compared it to the services that the schools gave or give to their smartest and best students in their honors colleges at public universities. and who do you think gets a lot more? the athletes. the football players. they get dramatically more than the kids, the smartest and best, most ambitious, aspirational students in the schools. >> host: so if i were here at the university of arizona studying veterinary science, should i be resentful of these programs? >> guest: i don't know if resentful's the right word. i think this all goes to the core issue of what's the purpose

of the university, you know? is it really all about education? i think what we're seeing in bigtime sports, pigtime college football -- bigtime college football is it's really. no i mean, let's give up the pretense that it is and deal with reality and then figure out how we're going to deal with it. but there's no question that the athletes get far more than a regular student does. >> host: hugh's calling in from ashland, virginia, in the washington, d.c -- not in the washington washington, d.c. area. sorry about that, hugh. please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: yes. i wanted to bring forth something very important in these times. it's about spirituality, because that's going to come into play with today's technologies. and back in the days of rome and the olympics, can you name the players? no. 10,000 years from now will anybody know who the famous people were playing sports? probably not. so where is the spirituality with the universities and the sports?

is that going to come into play more now in these times? >> guest: i'm not sure i understand the question. when you say "spirituality," what do you mean? >> guest: i mean being transparent with the money. not the greed, but the things that will do things for the betterment of mankind can overall. if you're a celebrity -- >> guest: oh, well -- >> caller: -- somebody from the community to bless those who can't help themselves. >> host: we got the point, hugh. thank you very much. >> guest: no, i got it. the short answer is this has nothing to do with that. and there's -- other than, i guess, somebody saying i'm getting a good feeling because my cleej college team is 9-0 this season, i'm not sure there's much spiritual impact upon the local communities because the football team's very good. in terms of transparency, one of the things i discovered in writing "billion dollar ball" was, you know, there's actually

very little transparency in college athletic finances. surprisingly so, schools make it hard to get the information. the ncaa, which collects the data, do not make them public. you can't get them from the ncaa. you have to go around and do freedom of information act requests to the public universities themselves in order to get them. there are a few exceptions. i was talking about oregon a little bit. let's give them credit, they're very transparent about their finances. so they're good. county and county state -- kansas and kansas state are very transparent. >> host: late last year we had tom mcmillan interview you for our "after words" program -- >> guest: fun interview. >> host: who's tom mcmillan? >> guest: he was an all-american basketball player at the university of maryland. i think he's my age, about 55, 56. he went on to become a rhodes scholar, he also played in the nba. >> host: and was a congressman, of course. >> guest: oh, yes. he was a congressman from

maryland. >> host: he's back involved in sports, correct? >> guest: i think he is with -- isn't he the ceo of the athletic directors' association? >> host: i think he is. >> guest: i think he might be. very thoughtful guy. >> host: what did he think of your book? >> guest: you'd have to ask him. i mean, i think he liked it, we had a good conversation. there may have been a few things that he may have taken exception to, but during the interview, anyway, he didn't bring them up. [laughter] >> host: wayne's in san diego. hi, wayne. >> caller: yes, hello. with respect to the football injuries, the more irrefutable the consequences of these injuries, depths, suicides -- deaths, suicides, long-term illness, mental deficiencies, the more refutable the concept, it seems to me, is that you should even continue with football at all regardless of whether or not these young men get paid. >> guest: right.

>> caller: and they're, in a sense, more than just economic victims, they're victims flat out. >> guest: yeah. and that's a huge issue, concussions and brain damage in particular, not to mention all the other broken bones. [laughter] that is starting to play out at the college level and also at the high school level. there are a number of schools that actually dropped football at the high school level including in, of all places, in texas. so i think you're beginning to see parents saying, you know, i'm not so sure i want my son playing this sport in the future. there's an interesting sort of side question of, okay, well, who will play it then? you could end up with a situation where only the poor kids end up playing football because they see it as a vehicle, a way to get ahead. which would create, you know, a very strange and possibly damaging situation. >> host: gilbert gaul, what happens to a young athlete at a

college if he's injured early on? is he put out to pasture in a sense? does he still have somebody to wake him up and guide him through classes? >> guest: well, it's a mixed answer. that, too, is beginning to change because that's on the table. the schools, some schools had taken away the scholarships when somebody was injured. back when i was an athlete way back in the '60s and early '70s, by -- i was a pretty good javelin thrower. i came in to school one september, and my athletic scholarship morphed into an academic scholarship. [laughter] i think there's a growing consensus that including in the ncc, give them credit for this, that the schools are obligated that if somebody is injured, that they need to continue the scholarship all the way through, and they need to, you know, to give help to those athletes, these damaged athletes and continue to give them tutoring and what not to see them through to get a degree. >> host: next call is in valley

forge, pennsylvania. hugh, you're on booktv with author gilbert gaul. >> caller: hello. thank you, mr. gaul. i didn't know about the tax evasion that was going on, but that was -- [laughter] i recently heard a professor speaking about the sports industrial complex, and it was a phrase i'd been looking for for years when i saw this industrial financial megalist just taking over huge sections of society. and once i heard that, i stepped back and realized it's just part of the entertainment industrial complex that is replacing the manufacturing space of the country. >> guest: yep. >> caller: and it's a rather expensive, exclusive club where most of the members are really sucking off very large incomes, and everyone's wondering why the country hasn't seen raises. where are the jobs, where --

that's where it is, it's in this entertainment nation that we've become. >> guest: yep. >> caller: i can't imagine what -- >> guest: you're spot on. and robert gordon in his new book about growth makes the same point. i mean, if you look at the last couple of decades where the growth in our country has been in the economy has been in entertainment. it's not in manufacturing, it's not in other real job-producing kinds of businesses. and the problem is, you know, sports is a huge piece of -- and college sports is a huge piece of it. and in terms of, you know, again, there are jobs that get created. obviously, you have coaches, back office operations, things like that. but it's not, it's not the kind of industry like manufacturing was where you basically were taking millions and millions of people and putting them in good-paying jobs. so i think you're absolutely right. >> host: could the president of the university of alabama fire nick saban? >> guest: i doubt it. [laughter] not at this point. no. [laughter] >> host: what would happen?

>> guest: he or she -- it's a he now, right? he would lose his job. absolutely. i have no doubts about that. yeah. i mean, nick saban is in such an elevated position at this point in time. he wanted to be governor of the state of alabama, he could be governor tomorrow. >> host: jim is in ohio. hi, jim. >> caller: well, i'm sure your guest has heard of this place. >> guest: i have. >> caller: i've coached junior high, seventh and eighth grade football. that might sound like it's off the topic here except for the fact -- >> guest: nope. >> caller: ing a couple of years ago, i want to talk about trickle down poison from the college system which, of course, is trickle down poison from the pros. we won't get into that. >> guest: i know where you're going. [laughter] >> caller: we had a freshman quarterback who was a pretty large boy in high school. one of those prototypical -- these days -- quarterbacks, 6-4,

210 pounds as a freshman and looked pretty good. skinny as a rail. but he got a letter of intent signed from ohio state university as a freshman. how can we go about getting the ncaa to prohibit -- because you can imagine what this does to seventh and eighth grade players in terms of weight lifting or anything else to get bigger and stronger and harder as seventh or eighth graders if they think they can start to pave the way to their future as a freshman in high school. >> host: jim, now why did you make that reference to the fact that gilbert gaul knows about macelin, ohio? [laughter] >> caller: for people that are involved in sports, they know that the macelin tiger football had a big history in high school football a while back. but they're pretty well known in football, the macelin tiger program. >> host: that's a high school -- >> guest: high school program.

>> host: thank you, jim. >> guest: you raise a couple interesting points. this trickle-down effect is absolutely true where, you know, the high school kids watch what happens at the college level, and they watch what happens at the pro level. and that, you know, i don't coach football at your level or at the high school level, but i'm pretty confident that if you interviewed those coaches, they would tell you that the kids are in many cases difficult to coach, that it becomes -- especially if you're getting a letter of intent as a freshman, you know? is that kid still coachable? is he going to listen to the high school coach, or is he going to strut around and say, look, i've got a letter of intent in my back pocket from ohio state, i must be pretty good and know what i'm already doing. so you have that going on. there is talk at the ncaa, i know, about sort of scaling back the ages at which coaches can go after stud four and five-star high school athletes. i don't know whether that'll go through, whether the coaches

will go along with it at the college level. but, boy, i'll tell you, at the college level it's -- i forget which schools this involved, but i know i was looking at a number of athletes who literally on one day would get 170 letters in their mailbox from -- all signed by the coaches at the schools saying come to our schools. we really want you. you know? one of the schools actually included the zip code in it as a way of trying to recruit the kid. [laughter] and it didn't quite work out. but, you know, the amount of attention that goes to high school athletes these days, look, they're on tv all the time. espn has high school football games on, you know, part of the week. they have all these basketball tournaments and all these potential tournaments for the kids. how can your ego not swell with all of that attention? >> host: could you go back to that zip code reference? >> guest: i forget how it worked. i'd have to go back and read my own book. [laughter] it had something t w