Category Archives: hofstra

Professor of The Big Picture

Take it from an old sportswriter who knows the score (though not much else). For the guru-on-the-mountaintop illumination of What It All Means, for how otherwise superficial endeavors fit into real life, there are folks like Hofstra University history professor Michael D’Innocenzo.

I was reminded of this last week in attending the school’s dedication of D’Innocenzo’s eponymous seminar room on campus. It was just the most recent in a fairly endless stream of awards, fellowships, recognitions and widespread praise earned by D’Innocenzo for his teaching, researching and writing about major events and consequential human affairs over six decades. And counting,

The man is a walking, talking historical landmark. An activist for non-violent social change. An expert on immigration and civil rights. (He was an instrumental figure in bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to Hofstra for a 1963 speech.) A big-picture guy who, for me, has been a vital source for understanding that sports—recess; fun and games—in fact are of significant consequence.

We met when my wife was taking D’Innocenzo’s “Sports and the American Character” class at Hofstra in 1974, and among the suggestions he posed to his students then was a doctoral dissertation on the effect of sports on the aspirations of people, particularly minority groups. Or sports’ effect on the male-female relationship. Or the effect of college athletic recruiting. On winning. On losing.

He spoke of how, for so long, “scholars, sad to say, looked at sports as frivolous,” never bothering to go beyond “mythology.” He saw the connection between sports’ “No. 1 mentality” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Policy and how Americans “have always thought of themselves as models for the rest of the world. Sports has been an enormous factor in this country since the 1920s.”

Babe Ruth, he said, “was a sign of early America—up from the bottom with his broken home,” and ultimately a symbol of America’s post-World War I power.

D’Innocenzo noted the “robber-baron mentality” of sports, that “succeeding is the thing, no matter how you do it. Offensive holding is accepted as a part of football. Think of Ty Cobb in the ‘20s sharpening his spikes; anything to steal that base.”

So now I teach a sportswriting course at Hofstra, as an osmotic beneficiary of D’Innocenzo’s learned observations, and one of my objectives is to reinforce the fact that covering sports is more than balls and strikes. That it requires something of a sports anthropologist, willing to consider issues of race, gender equity, performance-enhancing drugs, the almighty dollar.

During the New York Yankees’ run of nine consecutive first-place finishes in the early 2000s, when they were operating with the league’s highest payroll, D’Innocenzo compared their ability to “go and buy some established player” to the United States “using its leverage with NATO to project our influence elsewhere in the world. Historians call that dollar diplomacy.”

In the relatively early days of the Super Bowl, as the National Football League began to wallow in self-importance, the league offered a $10,000 college grant to the teenager who submitted the best essay on “The NFL’s Role in American History.” D’Innocenzo found it interesting that the winner was a female “because she is not part of it, except from the outside. She is reinforcing the old status-quo that men participate and women appreciate.”

That is changing. And none of this is to say that D’Innocenzo is anti-sports. He’s a Mets fan, for goodness sakes, and for decades has been an eager practitioner of tennis and softball. He believes in “so many affirmative values in sports,” he said. “Discipline, though it can be perverted. The camaraderie. The sense of getting beyond one’s self.” He said he would love to see more of those qualifies in the classroom setting.

But surely it is a healthy thing to be shaken out of our passive spectating stupor by considering things beyond the final score. Long ago, I wrote down this quote from D’Innocenzo: “Anytime you study something closely you will find yourself being critical of parts on it. Even in the competitive world of sports I have come to know and love.”

I should get to work on one of those doctoral dissertations….

He outlived Hofstra football

IMG_0934

It was just last week that one of my Hofstra University journalism students, for his final paper of the semester, wrote a lament of the school’s 2009 decision to disband its football team. “A Lost Program Gone But Not Forgotten,” he called it.

And now comes the news that a central figure in both Hofstra and Hofstra football history is gone as well: James Shuart, dead at 85.

By the time Shuart retired after 25 years as University president in 2001, he had come to be a sort of Father Hofstra. He had Dutch roots, like the school itself. He had earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Hofstra. He had been one of the first 12 football players to receive a Hofstra athletic scholarship and was a member of the original Hofstra lacrosse team.

He had returned to his alma mater to work as admissions officer, faculty member, dean and vice president before assuming the presidency in 1976, at a time when the university was struggling financially. During his tenure, Hofstra increased enrollment, expanded academic offerings and library holdings, initiated presidential conferences, became the first private university campus in the nation to be fully accessible to the physically challenged, moved its athletic department into top-tier Division I and founded the school of communications—where I now work after 44 years as a reporter for Long Island’s Newsday.

The year after Shuart retired, the football stadium was renamed in his honor. James M. Shuart Stadium still stands, but in 2004, the school’s athletic nickname was changed, from Flying Dutchmen to Pride, and in 2009 Shuart’s successor, Stuart Rabinowitz, did away with intercollegiate football for fiscal reasons.

stadium

I am the first to acknowledge that, in the reality-based world of 21st Century college sports, it is difficult to rationalize the expense of fielding a football team at a small private school. Enormous costs for insurance, equipment and staff are virtually impossible to offset when there is none of the rabid spectator following or the massive television-fueled revenues of thoroughly professional powers such as Alabama or Ohio State.

Furthermore, it is not impossible to be a top-flight institution of higher education without a football team.

But it was sad to see the Dutch label ditched. Hofstra takes its name from William Hofstra, an early 1900s Long Island lumber magnate of Dutch heritage upon whose land the university is built. And Shuart told me, during a long interview shortly before he retired, how his surname “really is from the Dutch ‘Sjoerd,’ which means ‘George’ and was used as a last name when Napoleon insisted that people had to have last names. I’m one-quarter Dutch; one of my grandparents allegedly was Dutch.”

When the teams were called the Dutchmen, Hofstra dressed a coed in a Dutch-girl costume as a mascot, complete with wooden shoes, and called her Katie Hofstra—after William’s wife. (Hofstra still holds an annual spring Dutch Festival to showcase a campus flooded with tulips—another Shuart initiative.)

tulip

More to the point, Shuart epitomized the sound mind, sound body ideal in college, a “student-athlete” before the term was coined by the NCAA as a brand to rationalize the recruitment of jocks whose primary purpose was to win games and boost the salaries and resumes of coaches and athletic directors.

Shuart, a history major, was captain of the 1952 Hofstra football team his senior year, when Hofstra lost only one of nine games. That loss was to Alfred, when an Alfred punt took an odd bounce, glanced off a Hofstra blocker and afforded Alfred the fumble recovery that set up the winning score.

“We were so upset,” Shuart recalled. “Young men—20, 21 years old—tears streaming down our faces.” Hofstra’s coach then was Howdy Myers, who in 1950—Shuart’s sophomore year—had started the school’s lacrosse operation.

“He called his first meeting of the football players that February,” Shuart said, “and handed us gloves, a helmet with wires and sticks. He said, ‘Gentlemen, this is lacrosse.’ That was his spring training.”

As president and after his retirement, Shuart remained a passionate Hofstra football fan until the sport was dropped, a fixture at the team’s home games long before the stadium assumed his name. For years, a Jim Shuart Football Scholarship went to one of the school’s players.

In 1999, when Hofstra advanced to the Division 1-AA football playoffs before losing to Illinois State, a star of the team was Long Island native Kahmal Roy, a sophomore wide receiver who had been granted one of those Jim Shuart scholarships.

“They never threw the ball to me when I played,” said Shuart, who had been an interior lineman. “But when Kahmal scores a touchdown….oh, man!”

shuart