Illustration of Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Crane” by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend, M.A./Wikimedia Commons.
In Aesop’s fable “The Wolf and the Crane,” a wolf is in the midst of devouring an animal he has killed when a small bone from the carcass becomes lodged in his throat. In terrible pain, the wolf runs frantically through the forest, promising each animal he encounters that he will “do anything” for them, if only they will help him remove the bone, but to no avail.
At last, the wolf meets a crane. He makes the same plea, with the same promise of recompense. The crane tells him to lie down and open his jaws as wide as he can. The wolf does this, and the crane puts his head into the wolf’s mouth, using his long beak to work the bone loose and remove it. The job done, the crane asks the wolf for the reward that had been promised. In reply, the wolf bares his teeth in a rapacious grin.
“Be content,” says the wolf to the crane. “You have put your head inside the mouth of a wolf and removed it again without being harmed. Let that be reward enough for you.”
This little tale came to my mind on Monday evening, June 1, following the much-anticipated revelation by Ray Watts, the president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that he is reversing the decision he made six months ago to pull the plug on UAB’s football program. At that time, Watts cited the costs of the program, which he said was losing money in sufficient quantities to imperil the university’s ability to fulfill its academic mission (he also snuffed the UAB rifle and bowling teams, which also will be reinstated, Watts said Monday).
In the months since the December announcement, Watts has been subjected to a relentless barrage of criticism, for both the decision itself and the unceremonious way in which it was handed down. As the old folks used to say, he has been called everything but a child of God, especially by UAB students, boosters and alumni who insisted that, had they but known that Watts was considering terminating the program, they would have raised the millions necessary to sustain the program and otherwise demonstrated their support for its continuation. It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say that these folks wanted Watts’s head on a platter, though most would have settled for his resignation as the university’s chief executive.
Hand-in-hand with the outrage over the loss of a football team that, many argued, was heading in the right direction under Coach Bill Clark (that a 6-6 season gave such cause for optimism probably says all that needs to be said about the history of the program to date; during its 19 years as an NCAA Division I-A school, the Blazers have compiled a record of 86 wins and 136 losses, for a .387 winning percentage) came various theories and allegations about the role of the University of Alabama Board of Trustees in the program’s demise.
There’s no denying that the UA board is weighted heavily with alumni of the university’s Tuscaloosa campus, all presumably fans of the nationally storied football program that plays there. Whether those trustees feel their team is somehow threatened by the presence, less than an hour’s drive northeast, of the Blazer football juggernaut, or, as has been suggested by some, that the board has ultimate designs on gutting UAB’s undergraduate programs in the interest of increasing enrollment in Tuscaloosa to help pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars in new construction undertaken on that campus in recent years, remains open to question.
With those questions has come the charge that Watts is nothing more than a tool of the BOT, installed as president solely to carry out the board’s plans to ensure that UAB — and Birmingham — remain subservient to its larger agenda, whatever that may be. And so, the demands that Watts resign have been accompanied by calls for an overhaul of the board to reflect the prominence of UAB, which with its medical school, research facilities and world-renowned hospital, is the system’s cash cow, not to mention the largest single employer in Alabama.
In none of this has Watts helped himself. To the contrary, from the December announcement, to the disastrous meeting with the newly redundant football team a couple of days later (from which he had to virtually flee for his life from a mob — er, crowd — gathered outside the football complex), to…well, pretty much his every public utterance in the ensuing months, Watts has attempted to justify his decision with all the aplomb of Richard Nixon in the final days of the Watergate scandal that drove him from the White House in disgrace. If I was Ray Watts’s public relations advisor and had watched things transpire as they have — presumably due in no small part to my own advice, given at the expense of Alabama taxpayers — I like to think that I would have had the decency before now to commit some kind of professional hara-kiri, in hopes of salvaging the shreds of my own reputation.
Actually, though, Monday’s press conference announcing that UAB still has a football team after all is the first smart thing Watts and his handlers have done. After six months of recrimination and acrimony, they gave the people what the people want. Hosanna in the highest, right?
Well, yes and no. PR is all about the moment — “winning the press conference,” as they say in the business; or alternatively, at least getting out of a tight spot with your scalp intact. The immediate jubilation surrounding the announcement has given Watts’s critics the illusion of victory. Though the calls for his departure have not abated in the succeeding hours, those who demanded the return of the football program must now turn their attention to trying to ensure that the program can be sustained beyond its immediate return from the dead, miraculous as that is (and admirable as the efforts of its boosters have been).
In the meantime, though, the press conference left a lot more questions than it answered. Not least of those is whether it can be sustained for the long term — or whether, as more than one online conspiracy theorist has suggested, Watts is totally cynical, and brought the team back simply to let it die a natural death rather than have the plugged pulled. While announcing that supporters — including the city of Birmingham — have committed a total of about $15 million toward covering the losses the team incurs, Watts made it clear that, other than investing in a new football facility and practice field, UAB will not increase its financial commitment to the program. From where, then, will the money to sustain the program come?
There’s also the question of where the Blazers will play. It’s hard to argue with the notion that Legion Field has outlived its usefulness, particularly for a major college team, but where does that leave UAB? Watts said on Monday that the university cannot afford to build a new stadium for itself, and so would rely on the city and the private sector to do so.
In making that declaration, Watts referenced Regions Field, the Birmingham Barons’ crackerjack of a baseball park, as a model for the kind of thing he has in mind. I will remind the reader that this is the same Regions Field for which the city of Birmingham still owes nearly $5 million more than two years after its completion, in a dispute that has led to the threat of litigation by the contractors who are owed the money. I will further remind you that the city of Birmingham simply doesn’t have the money to build a football stadium for a university with an annual budget in excess of $3 billion. Nor should the mayor and city council attempt to find the money, when most residents of the city — which has a poverty rate of over 30 percent and more than enough human and capital need to make decent leaders ashamed of their neglect — could not afford to buy a ticket to a game there.
Perhaps the plan is to have UAB play in the domed stadium that Mayor Bell and others — i.e., those who would profit directly from its construction and operation — want so badly to build. That, of course, will come at a cost to local taxpayers of roughly a half-a-billion dollars.
Which brings us back to Aesop and his wolf and crane. I probably don’t have to explain this, but the wolf is UAB, the crane those who stuck their necks out to “save” UAB football, and thereby relieve Ray Watts of his immediate discomfort. With the university’s apparent lack of intent to lift a finger to sustain the program for the long term, here’s hoping that having their football team back is reward enough for them — even if it costs them, and the rest of us taxpayers, much more than we can afford to pay.
