Dear: F. King Alexander, LSU President.
I would like to give you a starting point for you to go search for the right man as LSU new Athletic Director. Who will have the intangibles of a man who thoroughly knows what he is doing. Who you can hire to build the LSU College Football Program into one of the top performing Football Teams in America.
Below is the quality that you can study in the Hall of Fame likeness of Jim Corbett. That can help you in your search for hiring a better AD than LSU now employs. In the best interested of LSU Athletics.
I would like to give you a starting point for you to go search for the right man as LSU new Athletic Director. Who will have the intangibles of a man who thoroughly knows what he is doing. Who you can hire to build the LSU College Football Program into one of the top performing Football Teams in America.
Below is the quality that you can study in the Hall of Fame likeness of Jim Corbett. That can help you in your search for hiring a better AD than LSU now employs. In the best interested of LSU Athletics.
--------------- Jim Corbett
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http://www.lasportshall.com/
Jim Corbett
Sport: Football
Induction Year: 1985When a Louisiana State University football team that suffered three regular season losses snapped the Arkansas Razorbacks' 22-game winning streak in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, 1966, the picture of athletic director Jim Corbett and head coach Charlie McClendon embracing at the end of the game epitomized the thrill of victory in college athletics.
It was the boundless enthusiasm and promotional genius of Corbett, as much as the coaching Paul Dietzel and McClendon, that carried LSU to the top level of college football in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
His father died when Corbett was four months old, and the boy was sent to live with grandparents. The promotional skills that served him so well in Louisiana surfaced when he was entering high school. He wanted to go to a private school, and raised the $300 it required by convincing three men to pay an extra $100 for their sons' tuitions.
Corbett hitch-hiked from Massachusetts to Louisiana in the fall of 1940, answering a newspaper advertisement for football players at Southeastern Louisiana College . He paid for the trip along the way by working in a bottling plant and as a trucker's helper. When he arrived on the SLC campus in Hammond , he earned a football scholarship.
A knee injury one year later ended his playing career, but Corbett convinced Southeastern officials to keep him on scholarship as the school's first sports publicity director.
Corbett, who had been a part-time stringer for a Boston newspaper while he was attending high school, got a job with the Associated Press bureau in New Orleans following his graduation in 1944. Then he persuaded his boss to transfer him to Baton Rouge . In August of 1945, he became sports publicity director at LSU.
In 1953, Corbett joined NBC as coordinator for its college football series. A year later, he applied for the athletic directory vacancy at LSU—leaving a job that paid $14,000 a year for one that paid $10,000—“because I've always wanted to be an athletic director.”
The previous year, average home attendance at LSU home football games was 27,800. With Corbett as athletic director and Dietzel as head coach, a 1955 team that won only three games played before crowds averaging 47,894—including 6,243 season tickets sold. In Corbett's 13 years as athletic director, season tickets would climb past 35,000 and the average hom attendance for each of the last seven seasons was over 62,000.
Corbett and Dietzel went all over the state promoting LSU. “We sold a product we believed in,” said Corbett. “We'd drive as much as 200 miles to speak to as few a 10 persons.”
Corbett's contacts with network TV and his rapport with the press gave LSU a favorable image both nationally and regionally. With his public relations approach to running an athletic department, he made LSU a household word throughout the nation. “He probably initiated the trend of selling a university that was never tried or thought of before,” said long-time Baton rouge Morning Advocate sports editor Bud Montet.
“Jim was one of the pioneers for restricted TV for football games in the 1950s. He didn't want to oversaturate the market—which is what has occurred today.”
“Jim was a pioneer with television in college football,” recalled McClendon. “And he had the ability to expedite things in five minutes.”
Corbett envisioned the “spirit of Tiger Stadium” as a unique blend of people. “What we have is the Great Society of Equality at work,” he said. “They all band together in a single social stratum. In Baton Rouge , the focal point of everything is LSU football. The average fan doesn't seem to have a good week in his job if the Tigers lose.”
Read more...http://www.lasportshall.com/
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