Two-time Pulitzer winner Gilbert Gaul makes sense in "Billion-Dollar Ball"
The words "I wondered why" are to Gilbert Gaul what the words "Once upon a time" were to the Brothers Grimm.
"I wondered why" is Gaul's stock opener when he tells a story about his remarkable career as a journalist.
The things that Gaul has wondered about have won him two Pulitzer Prizes and brought him to the podium for journalism's highest award four other times.
The first Pulitzer, for investigative reporting, came in 1979, just six years after he graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He was a reporter at the Pottsville (Pa.) Republican and wondered why one of the largest coal companies in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania went belly up. He also wondered who was behind it. The trail led to Teamsters' boss Jimmy Hoffa and some well-known gangsters.
The second Pulitzer that Gaul won was the coveted Public Service award in 1990. He was working for the Philadelphia Inquirer and wondered how the nation's blood supply pulsed from donor to transfusion recipient.
He came up with some scary and startling answers. He found that in the early in 1980s, as AIDS began to move through the population, the government actually pulled back from policing blood banks and donor agencies. His reporting forced the Food and Drug Administration to investigate its own tracking of the national blood flow.
In that run of Pulitzer-level investigative reporting, Gaul also wondered about the economics of big-time college football and its impact on academics.
"I had been an athlete myself, so I had a sports background," said Gaul, 64, who threw the javelin well enough at St. Benedict's in Newark to win several state and county high school titles, and get to Fairleigh on an athletic scholarship. "But I've always been curious about the economics and business of things, and approached stories through that framework."
That's what led him to investigate the commercialization of college sports at Penn State University and other schools while working for the Inquirer.
"Scandals come and go. To me, scandals are not the story," Gaul said. "I want to know why they happen. What, in the business model, encourages the economic tension and pressure to win that allows scandals to happen."
Gaul, who grew up in Kearny and now lives in Cherry Hill, was a Pulitzer finalist in national reporting for that story in 2001. In 1994, he was a finalist for investigating sweetheart deals given to nonprofits and their impact on the tax base.
His latest book, "Billion-Dollar Ball" (Viking, 272p. $20.95), is somewhat of a marriage of both those ideas. Gaul documents the explosion of college football as an entertainment juggernaut that has become a $2.5 billion industry. The 60-some elite Division 1 programs - the Alabamas, the Ohio States, the Oregons of the college football world - reap profits Silicon Valley would die for, all while enjoying nonprofit status from their cheerleaders in Congress.
It's a book every taxpayer in a state with a public university trying to go "big-time" - or already there - should read. Because, for people not blinded by some desperate need to sit at the jock table, things are crazy.
How crazy?
In Alabama, where five state parks were just closed for financial reasons, where one city couldn't afford gas for its police cars and ambulances, and where a state legislator started a GoFundMe site to keep the state from going broke, the university's football coach, Nick Saban, makes $6.5 million a year.
At Louisiana State University, a school teetering on bankruptcy, officials authorized an $84 million "lazy river" that spells out LSU as it meanders through the athletic complex.
In most Division 1 programs, the cost of seat licenses - the thousands of dollars of up-front money needed to secure your rightful place in the stadium - is considered a tax-free educational donation. Tax-free for the school, tax-deductible for the fan. Again, thanks to the cheerleaders in Congress.
How crazy?
The sports news scroll has almost daily reports of violent crimes by players at some of the nation's most prestigious colleges. Most of the time, the victims are other students. It's been that way for 30 years.
"I wonder why people turn off the rest of their brain when it comes to college football," Gaul said.
For fans, the reason is easy.
"It's a very emotional, very powerful force," Gaul said.
It's tribal. It's us vs. them. It gives people a sense of belonging - and winning makes them proud of belonging and blind to the obvious dark sides. Everybody knows that. But what Gaul has done in "Billion-Dollar Ball" is shine light onto some of the dark sides most people never think about.
For one, the enormous financial cost of keeping athletes academically eligible, with learning centers and private tutoring that draws resources away from the student body as whole.
For another, his analysis of the huge amount of money spent on football as a marketing device that is not only inefficient but that also hijacks the university brand.
"I asked these college presidents, 'Why not promote your Nobel laureates or your Pulitzer Prize winners? Spend all that money promoting the academic side of the university,' " Gaul said.
"Their response is that football is like the front porch of the university; its the first thing people associate with the university," he said. "That, more than anything, says how football distorts the mission and purpose of the university."
And it also leaves you to wonder, what if that front porch is broken?
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.
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