Penn Sports Plus: Alan Schwarz

Last week I talked to New York Times sportswriter and Penn alum Alan Schwarz (C’ 90) about how he helped save the toast toss at Penn. In 1988, Schwarz and three of his friends smuggled 3,000 slices of toast into Franklin Field for a September football game. A column written by Schwarz ran in The Daily Pennsylvanian on the Thursday before the game encouraging students to join them in their smuggling spree. According to Schwarz, Penn Athletics not only didn’t provide toast for students but security guards confiscated any toast that students brought on their own.

Fortunately there’s plenty of fascinating excerpts left over from our conversation for this week’s edition of Penn Sports Plus.

On Penn Athletics’ policy on the toast toss in 1988:

They told us it was a health hazard and it was not safe. It would be disingenuous to say that throwing toast is not at its very core littering. Of course it is. I think the burden of proof is on the student to justify said littering. I believe that that can be very easily done, but it’s not unreasonable for the athletic department to begin from the default setting that throwing things in the stands, up to and including food items, is not preferable. In this case, it is. But it was clearly not only benign but important to the community. So the benefits outweighed the costs.

On the state of Penn Athletics at the time:

The athletic department at that time was in the midst of transforming from a less formal, more traditional athletic structure to more of a kind of corporate, streamlined, modern image operation. And they underestimated how much their students wanted to keep this silly little thing alive. And clearly it would have disappeared had we not done what we did. I think they bought the toast Zamboni as a form of acquiescence. I may be incorrect about that, but I seem to recall the first Zamboni making an appearance late in my college career. ‘We’re not gonna stop it, so we might as well just embrace it.’ Had they had their way, there would have been no toast to throw. We made it so that they just couldn’t do anything about it.

On Penn Athletics’s response to the column:

I just vaguely recall their general reaction towards me being, 'What an asshole.' Kind of like, 'How dare you tell us how to run our stadium operation.' [But] we were not on the brink of civil war. I think that they were doing something foolish, I wrote something that got some people riled up. [But] we did not storm the Bastille. But it was more important that we smuggled the toast into the stadium than rile people up. Maybe I’m underestimating the power of the written word but I think it’s more powerful to hand out toast at the end of the third quarter.

Schwarz wrote in his column back in ’88 that “a lot of the majesty has left [Franklin Field and the Palestra’s] hallowed halls.” On the national prominence of Franklin Field 24 years later…

I don’t think much has changed a whole lot in terms of its majesty. The last important non-Ivy League game at Franklin Field probably took place in 1956. That’s when Notre Dame played there and Penn was tied 14-14 at the half because Notre Dame had a contract with Penn that extended past the Ivy agreement in 1954. That was it. After Penn won the Ivy League title in 1959, that was it in terms of national importance. And that’s fine. Things change.

On his career as writer for Baseball America and subsequent move into concussion-related writing credited with opening up the national dialogue about concussions in sports:

The first 15 years had been baseball exclusively. But then the football concussion thing fell in my lap. That got a lot of attention and they hired me to follow that and pursue that in early 2007. I was on the concussion story for four and a half years, which included the Owen Thomas story. I was really focused on head injuries and concussions for four and a half years and frankly, I got tired of it. Also because of the way things evolved I became part of the story. And I felt uncomfortable with that. I understood why it happened, but it’s not something I wanted to continue. So I just quit cold turkey. I knew if I stayed in sports, every dead football player was going to wind up on my table. And I didn’t want to do that for a living anymore. The Times is incredibly supportive when you want to change departments and they let me do it. The support I’ve received from them has been flabbergasting.

On what kind of taste concussion work left in his mouth — how much was pride in the progress he was a part of and how much was extreme unpleasantness?

Far more of the former. I think we are raised as journalists to not think of ourselves as part of the story. We cover the news, we don’t make the news. Now in some respects, I made the news for a while. The work that we did a lot of people a lot of good but it’s still a concept I have a hard time assimilating. I don’t know why, it sounds weird, it will sound even weirder if you quote me, but I tried to just sort of leave it behind. It was extraordinarily unpleasant to deal with not only the parents of dead children but also the NFL for a number of years. But you do what you have to do, and I did what I had to do, and now I’m trying to do something else. The passion that the job requires makes it very difficult to acknowledge one’s own accomplishments. That instinct is dulled within us for good reason.

On whether the toast-smuggling was about sending a message to Penn Athletics or joking around:

It was both. We knew it was all very silly. But it was on the very serious side of silly. It was on the very serious side of the silly spectrum. Sometimes silly is very important. We were not planning a bus boycott of Montgomery — it was all just so dumb and so easily fixed. It was nothing that a big toaster and 100 loaves of bread couldn’t fix.