So Sue Me

The rumor had been stirring up the South for weeks--from Florida baseball training camps to Birmingham bars and Richmond restaurants. The Saturday Evening Post, so the story went, was planning to print "a shocking report" of how former Georgia Football Coach Wally Butts and Alabama Coach Paul ("Bear") Bryant "rigged a game last fall." When the Post finally came out last week, the well-publicized story was tucked away strangely on the back pages, but it was every bit as sensational as billed.

Forget the Fallout. "Not since the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series," trumpeted the Post, "has there been a sports story as shocking as this one." The story came from George Burnett, an Atlanta insurance salesman who claims to have been accidentally hooked into a long-distance call between Butts and Bryant eight days before last season's opening game between Georgia and Alabama. Burnett says he heard the operator call the two men by name, and that when he heard Bryant ask Butts, "Do you have anything for me?" he began taking notes. But he stashed the notes in a bureau drawer and did nothing with them. Alabama, favored by 14 to 17 points, went on to trample Georgia 35-0. Months later. Burnett told a friend of the intercepted phone call, and the story got to Georgia University authorities.

Worried that Butts's supporters would try to strike back at him by dredging up his own record of arrests for passing bad checks, Burnett hired a lawyer in Atlanta and decided to sell the story to the Post. As soon as "The Story of a College Football Fix" appeared on the newsstands, the FBI, the Governor of Georgia, Senator McClellan and just about everybody else in the football-happy Southeast announced plans to investigate.

The Post could hardly have been more delighted with the fuss that it had stirred up. Curtis lost $18.9 million last year, and ever since brash young Clay Blair Jr., 37, was named editorial director of all Curtis magazines last fall, the Post has apparently been trying to hit its readers with a blockbuster a week, though its only previous success was December's notorious "eyeball-to-eyeball" account of the Cuba crisis. But as long as the blockbusters make a lot of noise, the Post does not seem much concerned by any fallout. "The final yardstick" of the magazine's impact, said Blair in a memo to his staff, is the fact that "we have about six lawsuits pending, meaning that we are hitting them where it hurts."

Bizarre Measure. By Blair's bizarre measure, the Post last week succeeded be yond its wildest dreams. Wally Butts's lawyers said that they would strain Blair's yardstick with a $10 million libel suit. Already headed for the courts is a $5,000,000 suit filed by Marlon Brando, after a Post piece said that "he wasted $6,000,000 by sulking on the set" of Mutiny on the Bounty. Bear Bryant, who brought a $500,000 action last fall, after the Post accused him of teaching brutal football, says that he will file another suit for the football fix story.

Butts and Bryant, given a prepublication peek at the Post piece, went on television even before it appeared to issue strong denials. Afterward all the principals submitted to lie detector tests, and according to the results, all of them--Butts. Bryant, and Burnett too--seemed to be telling the truth. How the confusion would end, only the courts could decide. But for the time being, as Post ads like to put it, "People are talking about the Post."

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