Professor Weldon Johnson

It is, first of all, a sympathetic description of the heartbreaking experiences of a group of young men trying to find their way in a horrible collegiate football program during the 1960s; at the same time, the book is a powerful indictment of one university's inhumanity and confused priorities at an earlier time.

At another level, The Thin Thirty calls into question the entirely exploitative role of collegiate athletics among American universities, then and now. There have been some changes over the years in the treatment of student-athletes at Big Time schools, but those changes have been more of degree than in kind. As much as any other book on collegiate athletics in the United States, this book effectively challenges the morality of sport's place in the American university system.

In this respect, many of the experiences described in this book reminded me of an earlier time in my life (1970-1977) when I was a college professor in the Big Ten (University of Wisconsin, Madison) whose introductory survey courses in sociology drew many of the school's athletes; I didn't fully appreciate the breadth and depth of how college athletes are exploited by big time universities until they were my students, my continually exhausted and distracted students often absent from class (because of away-games) but whose academic progress was rigorously monitored by a coaching staff with regular telephone calls to teaching faculty members -- they just wanted the professors to understand "how important" it was that their athletes show "satisfactory" performance in the classroom; no special treatment was requested, but the pressure of oversight was continually applied with repeated phone calls at the middle and end of each semester. In those stormy Vietnam protest days, the Madison campus had many watchdogs, from undercover FBI agents in the classrooms to the university's board of regents to state legislators at the capital -- and the coaching staffs who had their own politics.

Another quality of Thin Thirty which is very attractive is the anchoring of this historical period in its socio-political context -- the emerging civil rights movement in the South, the Vietnam War and its attendant draft, the subcultural social and political significance of collegiate football in the cities of the SEC and the more general innocence and naivete about homosexuality in American society. These themes of larger context add greatly to our understanding of the experiences described in The Thin Thirty.