In an interview on American Football (and its Dark Side)

I’m looking forward to learning more as we discuss your five book selections. A college coach’s story seems like a good place to start. Introduce us to Bootlegger’s Boy, a memoir by Barry Switzer.

I covered college football during the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s, so I knew Barry Switzer, the legendary coach of the Oklahoma Sooners, quite well. He was a unique one and Bootlegger’s Boy is the unbelievable true story of his upbringing and triumphs on the field. It’s great reading.

As the title says, Switzer was the son of a bootlegger. His dad would occasionally fire a pistol through the ceiling, Barry’s mom shot him and he died in a car crash. Barry had as awful an upbringing as anyone could have and yet he ended up running the number one college football team in the country.

He always believed if he got the best players he could win and propriety be damned. He found kids who wouldn’t get a chance at another school and led them to play to the limit of their potential. He had a quarterback named Charles Thompson, back in the eighties when they were number one, a little guy, whom Switzer had first seen breakdancing on a piece of cardboard at a car dealership in Lawton, Oklahoma. This kid becomes his starting quarterback as a freshman and led the Sooners to a great record but ended up being arrested, indicted and found guilty of distributing cocaine. Switzer found a lot of kids like Charles Thompson who wouldn’t get a chance at some other college. As he said, “the magic was in the players”.

College football is big business in the US. The games are televised nationally, the athletes become celebrities and the merchandise is marketed as professionally as in the NFL. You played for the Northwestern Wildcats in college, a Big Ten team. Switzer’s Sooners were also Big Ten. What exactly is the Big Ten and how important are university football programmes to the sport overall?

It’s a peculiar part of the American system that big money athletics are part of universities. Spectator sports are tied into university life in a way they aren’t in Asia, Europe or South America. They see the Big Ten as bizarre and they’re right. University should be about higher education, yet sports can produce a lot of revenue for an American college. It’s part of our tradition here – it probably shouldn’t be, but it is.

The Big Ten is a 115-year-old, 12-school intercollegiate conference that embraces big land-grant state schools in the Midwest – including Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and has a big academic aspect to it, but it’s synonymous with Division 1 sports.