July 2, 2007
Near the end of May, Gerald Myers went with a group to Scotland, playing two rounds of golf a day for five days in a row - on a seven-day trip. Golf carts, Myers discovered, are far less common in Scotland than in the United States, so he walked the 36 holes a day.
The Texas Tech athletic director is plenty fit, then, for recreational pursuits, but he's not ready to devote himself entirely to hobbies.
Not even at age 70.
Myers is among a small group of major-college athletic directors who are blowing past conventional retirement age, still enjoying their work too much to quit, evidently."I think it keeps you active,'' said Myers, who will turn 71 on Aug. 5. "I think it keeps you young, in a sense. There's always issues every day that you deal with, a lot you think about. I guess I never really think about myself being 70.''
Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles has announced plans to retire on Dec. 31, just days after he turns 83.
Jodi Miller / StaffTexas Tech Athletic Director Gerald Myers says one of the best things about his job is the view from his office.Order a print
Birthdate/age information isn't systematically recorded by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA), a spokesperson for the organization said, so where Myers ranks among the oldest is uncertain. But he intends to stay in the game a while longer. Myers just completed the first year of a three-year contract that runs through May 31, 2009.
He says he doesn't have a time frame for when he wants to retire.
In that regard, he's not alone. At least three ADs will turn 70 on their next birthday - Old Dominion's Jim Jarrett (July 7), Texas' DeLoss Dodds (Aug. 8) and LSU's Skip Bertman (May 23). All said in interviews with the A-J last week that they have no immediate desire to get out.
Bertman who, like Myers, has two years left on a three-year deal, can't see himself hunting, fishing or playing golf.
"I don't do those things, haven't ever done those things, doubt if I would become real good at those things,'' he said. "If I would retire, I don't know what I would do. ... And personally to me, it's never been a job that's been tough.''
Vince Dooley was almost 72 when he retired as Georgia's athletic director in 2004. Dodds could easily top that. He's just finished the first year of a five-year deal and says retirement is "not on my radar.''
If Dodds completes his contract, he will have spent 30 years as UT athletic director.
"I've watched a lot of guys retire, and they're not happy,'' Dodds said. "I want to be happy, and I love to be around kids and coaches. It keeps you going.
"As you get older ... These jobs are never easy, but they seem more doable. The job seems more doable to me today than it did 15, 20 years ago. The experience that you gain and the wisdom that you gain serves you well.''
Another angle, according to Dodds, is that pay for athletic directors has escalated significantly just in the last few years.
"I'm shooting in the dark here,'' he said, "but I think the average salary in the Big 12, highest salaries are in the 600(-thousand range) and bottom's probably in the 300 (thousands). Five years ago, (the bottom) was probably like 100 (thousand), 150.''
Myers current deal pays him $310,000 a year.
Neither of the Big 12 veterans seem to be doing it for the money, though.
Dodds isn't surprised at the thought that Myers will be alongside him as they soldier into their 70s.
"Some people fit their jobs really well,'' Dodds said. "He personifies that. You can tell in meetings that he has a passion for the university and he's got a passion for kids. He's been a coach. He knows how to talk to and deal with and support coaches. It's been a win-win for Tech and for Gerald. He's been good for Tech, and Tech is really where he wants to be and is his love.''
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Gerald Myers never pictured himself being Tech AD at age 70 - nor at 60, for that matter. He won 326 games in 20 1/2 seasons as the Tech men's basketball coach, and he'd coached at Monterey and Houston Baptist before that. He was known for running battles with Southwest Conference referee Mike Tanco and for spirited rivalries with coaching colleagues such as Shelby Metcalf, Eddie Sutton and Abe Lemons.
The idea of administration ended at the limits of his team.
"I never intended to be an athletic director,'' Myers said. "I mean, that thought never crossed my mind when I was coaching. I never had any intentions of being an athletic administrator.''
But Myers had to do something when then-AD T. Jones asked him to step down in 1991 after a string of four straight losing seasons, including three with single-digit victories.
At 55, he was a fish out of water, reassigned to a job as an assistant athletic director.
"I think the first two or three years, it was pretty difficult,'' Myers said. "I still was interested in coaching. That was still something that I would have liked to have done. But I didn't want to coach bad enough to start at a low level - a low Division I or non-Division I school.''
Myers credits Bob Bockrath, who took over as AD in September 1993, with helping chart the course for what's been a rewarding second half to his career.
Bockrath put Myers to work as a game administrator - overseeing a multitude of sports, but most of them women's athletics. At that point, Myers remembered something that he might have lost sight of: He loved women's sports much the same as men's.
"Whether it's going out and watching our girls play soccer or volleyball or going out and watching us play Texas A&M in football, it doesn't make any difference. I enjoy it,'' Myers said. "I enjoy watching kids compete and represent Texas Tech. It's just fun to see them do that.''
Myers said a lot of his appreciation for women's athletics comes from the influence of his mother, Maggie. She died in 2005 at age 87, having lived the last 15 years of her life in Fort Worth. Growing up, she played basketball in Mobeetie, a tiny speck on the Panhandle map. She was a big influence on her son being in sports all his life.
Myers' father, Lynn, who worked as a welder and a pipe fitter in the oil fields around Borger, died from a heart attack at age 56 in 1976.
When Myers was coaching Tech for two decades, his mother didn't often venture down for games at Municipal Coliseum.
"I tell you what she did do, though: She had the best radio she could get, and she'd maneuver around and try to pick up games,'' Myers said. "She'd listen to those games and read the newspapers and follow our games. She came to some of our games, but not a lot. But she tried to listen to all of them on the radio. It was kind of tough to pick up KFYO up in the Panhandle after sundown.''
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At Old Dominion, Jim Jarrett has been athletic director for 37 years. Here's another way of saying it: He's worked for seven university presidents.
"I'm fairly fortunate. That doesn't happen very often,'' he said.
When Jarrett began his tenure as AD, ODU was a Division II program with a $500,000 budget that included only $100,000 for student activities. Now he oversees a $20 million budget for a department that moved into Division I in the late 1970s.
His challenge at the moment is reviving the Monarchs' football program, which will compete in Division I-AA beginning in 2009. Jarrett hired a football coach, Bobby Wilder, in February to bring the sport back to campus for the first time since 1940.
He's giddy at how sales have gone for luxury suites at 20,000-seat Foreman Field - all 24 have been snapped up with five-year commitments. And that'll be all for the time being, because there's no room to construct more.
To comply with gender-equity requirements, the school will add women's softball, volleyball and crew over the next seven years.
So Jarrett has a lot to look forward to.
"It continues to be exciting and fun,'' he said. "We're in the metro area of Hampton Roads (Va.), which is a wonderful place to live and work. I'm very, very pleased with what I'm doing and where I am.''
Unlike some of his colleagues at bigger universities, Jarrett said he has signed one-year agreements every year since he started.
As for how long he'll keep reupping, Jarrett said, "As long as I enjoy it and I'm doing a good job.''
* * *
The move that earned Gerald Myers the most attention as athletic director probably was the hiring in March 2001 of legendary basketball coach Bob Knight.
Professionally, it generated attention for Myers from coast to coast. Personally, it was no less significant. Before Knight arrived, Myers said he didn't own a gun or a fishing rod. He'd never hunted and had fished, uneventfully, with inferior equipment.
"But now I own three shotguns and about four flyrods and about five or six spinning rods,'' Myers said, "since he's been here the last six or seven years, and I've enjoyed that. Now, I'm not in his class by any means. He's a world-class fly fisherman, a hunter. You know, I can't hardly hit the broad side of a barn.''
Myers stresses that he's not one of Knight's most frequent outdoors partners. Nevertheless, with the coach showing him how, Myers says he's learned a little about hunting dove, quail, pheasant and turkey - developing an interest that he'd never had before.
In July, they're likely to take off again for fishing in the far north of British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
On a warm June afternoon, however, it's not hunting gear or a tackle box that a visitor spots in Myers' office. It's a gym bag sitting in the corner.
A busy schedule of meetings keeps him from working out every day, Myers said, but he tries to keep up a fitness routine several days a week. About a half dozen types of weight lifts. Situps. Knee raises. Thirty-minute sessions on an elliptical machine.
One of the benefits, Myers said, is that he's gotten to know a slew of Tech football players - kids young enough to be his grandsons. He uses the dressing room where they dress, and works out where they work out.
There's a limit, though, to how hip a 70-year-old AD can be.
"I listen to their music, and I just go on,'' Myers said. "I don't ever say anything about their music. ... They do have a variety.''
* * *
Mike Cleary, executive director of the NACDA, guesses that going forward there will be fewer - not more - athletic directors willing and able to work into their 70s. The way Cleary sees it, the demands of being the public face of a multi-million-dollar operation - and answering to impatient alumni - make it too difficult a job.
"You can't hide in Division I,'' is how Cleary puts it.
Maybe ADs at non-scholarship Division III schools - those who have fewer factions to satisfy - can live long and prosper in the role. Cleary thinks the 70-something set trying to do the work at major universities will be dinosaurs.
"Just looking around the convention this year, there's not a hell of a lot of old-timers,'' he said.
This coming from a man who's 72 and has spent 42 years in his current position.
But more power to the ones who are still doing it, Cleary said, such as Myers.
"Obviously, God blessed him with good health, and the administration has an awful lot of confidence in him,'' Cleary said. "The consituents and alumni ought to take care of him and make sure he stays around as long as he wants to work.''
Even as the work piles up for young and old ADs alike.
Dodds can tick off a long list of the way things have changed since he took over at Texas in 1981. Back then, he said, the UT athletic budget was about $5 million. Next year: $107 million. The department has grown from about 100 employees to about 250, Dodds said, from one half-time compliance person to eight, from one academic counselor to 16. Today, Dodds said, UT athletics grosses at least $8 million annually from its radio network, sponsorships and signage compared to maybe $20,000 when he started. Making the job more complicated, he said, are more legal issues, sponsorship issues and negotiating contracts with the likes of Coca-Cola, Gatorade and Nike.
"The job was one thing 25 years ago,'' Dodds said. "It's absolutely a different thing today.''
With that said, Dodds said he's learned to go about his duties more efficiently now than before. His staff is bigger and, he thinks, better organized.
"And I work smarter than I worked then,'' Dodds said. "I used to work just to work. Today, I work to do what I need to do.''
It isn't the work that Bertman expected to be doing when he retired as one of college baseball's most accomplished coaches. Bertman's LSU teams won seven Southeastern Conference championships and five College World Series in his 18 seasons, the last in 2000. He announced after that that he would go only one more year.
"I definitely wanted to try something else after coaching,'' Bertman said, "but it wasn't being the athletic director. It was professional speaking.''
Bertman said former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown blazed the trail for him by hooking on with a speakers' bureau. That sounded good to Bertman, too, so he jumped from the dugout to the dais.
Bertman said he had done 34 speaking engagements when he was asked by school officials to become the Tigers' athletic director. That was in January 2001.
"The one thing that I've got here as the AD that I didn't have going in coaching is my wife and I can spend more time together whenever we want,'' Bertman said.
Bertman recognizes that there's still a monster to feed in his role as LSU athletic director.
"The number-one challenge as an athletic director is to fill the football stadium. There isn't any question about that,'' he said. "This template LSU operates under is very fragile, like most athletic departments. Have a hurricane, for example, like we did a couple of years ago, and you use up your reserves. It isn't as if we've got endless amounts of money. The only way to succeed for any of us is to fill the football stadium.''
Myers gave a similar answer when asked what he considers the most challenging part of the job: Fund-raising, both for operations and facilities.
He has not only a football stadium to fill, but is trying to come up with the money to enlarge it.
In any event, he'll be at the task for at least a while longer. A certain old LSU coach said he's not surprised to know that when he hits the big 7-oh, Myers will be there to welcome him to the club. In fact, Myers welcomed Bertman in Lubbock last summer when the latter was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.
"Just from what I saw being out there last year,'' Bertman said, "he's pretty young at heart.