The Lincoln Times

"TERRIBLE TATUM AS WINNER" . . . We had intended to comment in this corner on the recent editorial "pouting" of several student newspaper editors regarding the coming of Jim Tatum to UNC as the new head football coach... But, we feel another member of the (newspaper) sports writing fraternity has expressed it better than we would have . . . But, this will be our last reference in this column to the UNC coaching change until the football season rolls around.

We hereby give you the comment of Greenville, (S. C.) News sports editor Jim Anderson in his "Top Of Morning" column on 'Terrible Tatum As Winner':

"JIM TATUM was only a successful football coach until the North Carolina move came along, and now it seems in some quarters he is considered some kind of ogre.

"The editor of the North Carolina student newspaper displayed how juvenile college boys can be by writing that professionalism "has come home to roost in Chapel Hill." For Charley Justice and others who wore the blue didn't play football entirely for the love of the game.

"The only difference in "professionalism" at North Carolina and Maryland this past season was that the Terps won with their scholarships-the Tar Heels didn't. Whereas the Chapel Hill student can be excused for his youth, it's a different matter with the editorial writer of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This gentleman should know the facts of life. But he missed them somewhere.

"Here is a quote from the Richmond editorial: The University of Virginia has never gone in for coaches of the TATUM type, we are happy to say. True, it makes no bones about offering athletic scholarships, and there are many who regret that it goes in for this sort of business at all, but at all events it doesn't go after coaches with the kind of record that TATUM has made at Maryland.

"Now aren't those noble words! The Virginia gentleman might glance over Charlottesville way and observe that Ned MacDonald was recently fired as football coach . . . not because he was the TATUM type, but because he wasn't.

"The student president of UNC, Donald Fowler of Winston-Salem, had a much more level-headed approach to the subject when he said: "Surely Coach Tatum weighed many factors in deciding to return to Chapel Hill. Certainly it was not a matter of prestige; or of finances, as he is taking a cut in salary; or of a better athletic set-up, because at Maryland he had the best possible. It seems to me, thus, that his love for the university and the desire of a good, small-town atmosphere for rearing his children were the two basic reasons in Coach Jim's decision to come home."