Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Jonathan Parks, the student body president at Oakland University, figures his school is the ultimate underdog in its inaugural appearance in the upcoming NCAA men's basketball tournament. He's not talking about just the basketball team, which at 12-18 enters the tournament with the worst record of any of the 65 teams. He's talking about the entire school.

"I tell people in Detroit I go to Oakland, and they tell me, 'You go to school in California?'" said Parks, who, for the record, must travel only 26 miles north to get from his hometown of Detroit to the Oakland campus in Rochester, Mich.

Now, Oakland didn't spend a bunch of money — including $36 million on a new Athletics and Recreation Center — to go to Division I athletics eight years ago just so people in Detroit would realize the school is in Oakland County, Mich., not Oakland, Calif. The school did it so everyone in the United States — particularly those in a position to hire its graduates — would realize the school is in Oakland County, Mich., not Oakland, Calif.

Oakland's problem isn't attracting students. The school, founded as an extension of Michigan State University in 1959, has 16,000 of them, and the numbers grow quickly every year. The problem is energizing those students, alumni and surrounding community into realizing that while Oakland might not carry the prestige, cache and history of a University of Michigan, it's still a dynamic, academically worthy college.

"I'll tell you how disrespectful it is here," said Parks, due to graduate in May with a degree in communications. "You see people in Michigan State hats, MSU sweats, and you see U of M (Michigan) stuff everywhere. People grow up with those allegiances, and they carry that allegiance here."

So Oakland, like many schools in Division I, moved up to the highest level of NCAA athletics in hope that would help give its image a boost. Colleges are hardly the only ones to have done this. The then-nascent Fox network spent billions in 1993 to snatch right to show NFL games, figuring that getting the right to a major-league sport would show the public it was the equal of NBC, CBS and ABC. Many cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, to build stadiums for professional sports teams, figuring that attracting or retaining teams would show the public they were major-league cities in every sense of the term.

The economic results haven't always been pretty. Fox has generally lost money on the NFL. Meanwhile, cities haven't done any better. In 1997, a professor from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis — like Oakland, on its way to moving up to Division I athletics and joining the Mid-Continent Conference — released a book describing the economic success of cities that used sports as a means to get themselves a higher profile. The book was titled, "Major League Losers."

But author Mark Rosentraub — now at Cleveland State University — allowed that perhaps there were psychic successes that came from using sports. Certainly, you get your name in the paper more often. Like all public relations efforts, the question remains, is the money worth it?

Certainly, Oakland right now feels like it is. All the conference swimming titles Oakland won were all well and good, but being a first-timer in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, especially a first-timer with an odd backstory, can be a huge publicity shot in the arm for a school on the make.

"The publicity is priceless," said Parks, who is planning on a career in public or community relations. In the past week, he's gotten a lot of experience in his chosen field, taking calls from local and national media trying to find out what an Oakland is.

For those who don't want to call Parks, here's some fun facts about Oakland, gleaned from its history-of-Oakland website:

— The mother of Oakland University is Matilda Dodge Wilson, who donated the land for the campus. Given how Matilda got her money — she was a secretary who wed the founder of the Dodge Motor Co. — the school's most popular major should be Marrying Well.

— There's a body of water on campus named Beer Lake. Alas, it is not a lake of beer: it got its name in 1965, when a student threw a beer can into it.

— In 1969, as at other schools in the Vietnam era, the campus was torn apart by protests. In Oakland's case, the protests were to prevent the school's president from taking another job. (He left anyway.)

— The school has two 18-hole championship golf courses on campus, for those students wondering how to putter (ha!) away their off time.

— When the school went Division I, it changed its nickname from the Pioneers to the Golden Grizzlies. In reality, the school's mascot bears a strong resemblance to Frito Lay's official Cheetos spokescat, Chester Cheetah.

Of course, Oakland probably also would like to take the opportunity of its moment in the athletic sun to remind people that while it may have spent $36 million on the athletics center that opened in 1998, it also spent $43 million on a science and engineering center that opened in 1996.

"You've got to capitalize on (the publicity) while you can," Parks said. "Oakland is probably not a lot of people's first choice. We're babies compared to MSU. We're babies compared to Eastern Michigan University and Central Michigan University. ... We're the underdog, we're the baby, we're the runt. ... But students don't look at how long a campus has been around. People feel you go (to Michigan or Michigan State), there's more prestige, but to me, an education is an education. The degree weighs the same."

Oakland's basketball team this year scheduled itself against high-profile programs such as top-ranked Illinois, and took its lumps. But the team got better as it went along, and despite its losing record, swept the Mid-Continent tournament. To Parks, the story of the school is the same — taking its lumps against higher-profile colleges, but now hitting its stride. There even was a pep rally for the basketball team Monday, a rare moment of togetherness on a mostly commuter campus.

"To me, (Oakland's) story is different than other Cinderella stories," Parks said. "It seems like with Oakland, we're underrated, and people can really relate to being underrated — in your job, in your workplace, in your relationships."

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.