Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams are gone — but at least Chip Hilton is back. That’s good news for sports-loving boys desperately in need of someone to admire in this age of steroids, rampant drug use, and pro stars with rap sheets as elaborate as their tattoos. If you don’t remember Chip, then you weren’t a young jock in the 1950s and early 1960s, avidly following the exploits of Hilton and his pals at Valley Falls High School and later State College. The tow-headed, triple-threat Hilton was the creation of Clair Bee, the famous basketball coach for Long Island University, a national powerhouse in the 1930s and 1940s. Bee still holds the record for lifetime winning percentage among college basketball coaches, an astonishing 82.6 percent. An annual “Clair Bee Award” honors college basketball coaches — and, even more interestingly, an annual “Chip Hilton Award” is given to the basketball player who exemplifies the character traits of Bee’s fictional hero. Bee wrote twenty-three Hilton novels, which sold — despite stiff competition from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys mysteries — more than 2.2 million copies. Young readers inspired by the series include author John Grisham, sportscaster Bob Costas, Baltimore Orioles manager Mike Hargrove, and basketball coaches Dean Smith and Bob Knight. (Knight knew Bee well when he was an assistant at West Point and Bee was athletic director at nearby New York Military Academy after leaving LIU in the wake of a point- shaving scandal in which he was not implicated.) The books have been out of print for nearly forty years, but no more. A Nashville religious publisher, Broadman & Holman, started reissuing them in paperback four years ago. The entire series is now on bookshelves, joined in August by an unexpected delight — Fiery Fullback, a twenty-fourth volume whose manuscript Bee never submitted to his publisher because he feared Chip had become pass . The resurrection of Hilton and his sports-happy associates, however, comes with a few twists that some readers will find jarring. There’s the obligatory infusion of ethnic and gender diversity, which serves to remind us that it isn’t just liberals who play the political correctness game. But the primary departure from the originals is an unapologetic insertion of religious themes to appeal to Christian readers. “Our audience demands something a little more overt in terms of Christian concept,” says Gary Terashita, the publisher’s senior acquisitions editor. “That’s part of our mission statement as well as a marketing consideration.” The new books, which have sold about half a million copies and are nearing profitability, are also doing well in nonreligious bookstores. Clearly, the book-publishing rules are changing. Harry Potter has broken all the conventional notions about how kids aren’t reading anymore. The runaway success of “Left Behind” books buttresses the publisher’s belief that “religious references don’t impede sales in the commercial market,” as marketing director Paul Mikos puts it. Still, the literary tampering doesn’t go down well with all readers, including many, now in their fifties, who attended a recent Long Island University symposium to celebrate those halcyon days in which they learned life’s lessons from Chip and his supporting cast — Speed Morris, Soapy Smith, Biggie Cohen, Red Schwartz, Fireball Finley, and the crusty but nurturing Coach Henry Rockwell. The fans who journeyed to Brooklyn from nineteen states are the truest of believers, willing to pay $750 for a copy of Hungry Hurler, the last and rarest original. One of them, Gordon Mehaffey of Fortville, Indiana, named his firstborn son Chip. Barry Hauser of Hollywood, Florida, owned fifteen hundred copies until his exasperated wife forced him to prune it back to a mere four hundred. “And compared to some collectors,” Hauser says, “I am totally sane.” These are the guys who read Hiltons with flashlights under their bedsheets, celebrate the books a half-century later as a magical link to lost childhood, and echo what Bob Knight writes in a foreword to one of the new editions: “The lessons that Clair Bee teaches through Chip Hilton and his exploits are the most meaningful and priceless examples of what is right and fair about life that I have ever read.” Alex Orlov, who learned about Hilton as a young basketball nut in Stalingrad and is now sports editor of New Russian Word, the oldest Russian language newspaper in America, was particularly dismissive of the makeovers. “If you read A Farewell to Arms, it’s not politically correct,” he said. “But no one would think of changing Hemingway’s words. Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin were slaveowners. Nobody talks about rewriting them. Books are a product of their time. Rewriting history for this political correctness is a very bad thing.” Cindy Bee Farley, who bears a striking resemblance to her father and reworked the books with her husband Randy, is sympathetic, to a point. “We would have preferred not to change a single word,” Cindy says bluntly, “but then nobody would have published them.” And a fresh generation of eight- to twelve-year-olds would never be exposed to the old-fashioned values of Chip Hilton, a hero for all times. An athlete of unparalleled prowess, Chip leads his teammates to triumph upon triumph on the football field, basketball court, and baseball diamond. Perennially All-State and All-America, he is the Michael Jordan of his era. Particularly in football, Chip does it all: quarterbacks the team, booms kickoffs and punts, plays free safety, and kicks field goals. At one point, he throws 176 passes without an interception, and wins the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore. He also tosses no-hitters and leads the nation in scoring in basketball. He is a combination of Winston Churchill, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and Florence Nightingale, navigating challenging moral conflicts with wisdom beyond his years and a rock-solid set of values instilled by his widowed mom. Chip would never wear an earring or tattoo, much less choke his coach or throw his naked wife out of the house. He’s so squeaky clean he refuses an athletic scholarship to work his way through State. “I want to play sports without any strings, just for the sake of the sport,” he tells an incredulous coach in Buzzer Basket. “Getting a scholarship for playing is like getting paid.” With such a young wunderkind at the helm, it’s hardly surprising that his teams almost always win, usually in the waning seconds, and as a result of Chip’s heroics. When his teams — the Big Reds and the Statesmen — are outscored, it’s just a fluke or rotten luck: a basketball deflates, an infield grounder hits a pebble and rolls the wrong way, a ringer causes a forfeit. But even such rare setbacks build character — and that’s the point. The Hilton books are morality tales, a Book of Virtues for jocks. In every volume Chip confronts a crisis that arises in the guise of a troubled teammate, a dirty coach, an unscrupulous scout, a venal businessman, or an unprincipled sportswriter. These conflicts are the genius of the books, keeping readers hooked while waiting for the payoff pitch, wondering how Chip will navigate the ethical shoals. Of course, he always does. “The more Chip gave to others, the more that came back to him,” says Rick McGuire, the track-and-field coach at the University of Missouri. “That message is as old as time.” Even so, reviving the series wasn’t easy. Most publishers, believing that young males don’t read anymore, wouldn’t touch them. Others were interested, but wanted full control of the character. They thought Chip was too “white bread,” out of touch with contemporary youth. One said he’d have to sport an earring, maybe a tattoo, and flip his baseball cap backwards. And he’d need to start scoring with the coeds, too. (For all his savvy, Chip is a klutz around females.) Even the outside consultant who read the originals for the eventual publisher insisted that “Chip” was a stupid nickname and would have to go. (“Brandon” Hilton, perhaps?) But the Farleys were
adamant: Times may change, but never Chip Hilton. They refused to relinquish control of Chip’s persona. Finally — with the collaboration of John Humphrey, a Hilton fan who runs a Dallas group that promotes character in sports and life — Broadman & Holman agreed to take the project on, with, as Cindy Farley delicately phrases it, “some mandates.” That’s an understatement. The books have been updated to reflect changes in sports strategy and society at large, and most of the alterations are unobjectionable. These days, Chip watches ESPN and HBO, has a cat, reads Sports Illustrated, does his homework on a computer, and e-mails his mom every day instead of writing. Speed Morris’s jalopy is now a flashy red Mustang, SUVs have replaced touring cars, and the Rockefellers have given way to Bill Gates. The sports heroes of a half-century ago have been supplanted by more recent superstars: Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith, Larry Bird. The cover art has been redone to appeal to today’s young jocks. The leather football helmets and dumpy uniforms are gone, replaced with streamlined plastic headgear with bright logos on the side and spiffier duds. The covers are glitzier andgauzier. Other changes are goofier, though still innocuous. A renegade coach’s name is changed from Bracken to Brasher for no discernible reason. In the original Touchdown Pass, Coach Henry Rockwell blasts his charges: “This isn’t a football team — it’s a bunch of drugstore cowboys!” In the makeover, they’re “a bunch of wimpy couch potatoes!” In the originals, it’s clear to even a casual reader that Hilton’s best friend is Soapy Smith, a red-headed teammate and wisecracking soda jerk at the Sugar Bowl, the local hangout where Chip works to save for college. But in the updates, Speed Morris is the new best friend — and he’s undergone a pigmentation change. In the first volume, Touchdown Pass, we learn, “Speed’s powerful black hand slid the ball around in front of his body.” Cindy Farley insists that when she read the books decades ago, “I always envisioned Speed as black.” That’s a pretty hard sell. Regardless, it’s gratuitous. The series already had a black athlete, Clem Barnes (who’s called Brevin Barnes in the new books), and he’s the central character in an ugly incident in Hoop Crazy. When a racist hotel manager tries to send Barnes to a colored hotel, Rockwell threatens to pull his team until the bigot backs off. He also persuades his coaching counterpart to shut down a boycott by his players. “The best player gets the job irrespective of race, creed or color!” Rockwell thunders, risking the wrath of his fans and alumni by making Barnes a starter. The diversity changes don’t end there. Two of Bee’s main characters were Jewish — Biggie Cohen (“hands like ham hocks”) and Red Schwartz — but he was short on Hispanics and Asians. So in the new books, Buzz Todd becomes Miguel “Mike” Rodriguez. Bill Porter and Johnny Bates are John Park and Alex Rodriguez. The personnel guy at the Valley Falls pottery, Pete Simpkins, is now Jonathan Kim. And in Ten Seconds to Play, the track coach at A & M, State College’s archrival, is no longer Jimmie Hale. He’s Dong Shul Kim. The publisher seems to have suffered heartburn over Bee’s nicknames. “Stinky,” “Fats,” “Piggie,” “Tuffy,” “Buster,” “Butch,” and even “Skinny” have disappeared. Predictably, women characters have been enhanced, but not much, since these are guys’ books. The changes are so slight that they smack of tokenism. In Freshman Quarterback, for example, State College’s team doctor has a secretary. In the update, she’s a twofer: “Sondra Ruiz, Dr. Terring’s physician assistant.” In A Pass and a Prayer, the high school principal gets a vice principal, “Ms. Pearce,” who is never mentioned again. Then there is Mary Hilton. If ever a literary figure didn’t need a makeover, it is Chip’s endearing single mom. As Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum, a certified Hilton fan, has observed: “Compared to Mary Hilton, Mother Teresa is a cold-hearted, indifferent clod. The perspicacity of Mary Hilton’s decisions was surpassed only by the fluffiness of her chocolate cakes.” It was Mary who held the little family together after her husband, Big Chip Hilton, died in an accident while saving a careless worker at the pottery. Mary took a job at the telephone company to make ends meet and scrape together enough for Chip to follow in his father’s three-sports shoes at State. In the new versions, she’s a supervisor, after getting an associate degree on the side. But that isn’t enough. The new, not-so-improved Mary is practically a babe: “Mary Hilton strode confidently through the telephone company parking lot, as the autumn breeze swept through her shoulder-length blond hair,” we learn in Touchdown Pass. Eight volumes later, in Freshman Quarterback, we learn for the first time that Mary was quite an athlete in her day: “Mary Hilton, herself a tough tennis opponent and competitive golfer, had enjoyed sports all her life, first as a member of Valley Falls High School’s varsity soccer and tennis teams.” The central change in the new books is an emphasis on spiritual themes. The Farleys are careful not to pick a fight with the publishers, to whom they’re indebted for redeeming their pledge to a dying Clair Bee and bringing these delightful books back to bookshelves. “They took a real chance with us,” Cindy says, “and we owe them a lot.” Neither does she gloss over the obvious: “They wanted to have stronger religious content. We had some fights about that.” If you read the originals, you knew Chip went to church. It just wasn’t a big deal. Now it is: Church and prayer are mentioned many more times, and more fulsomely, as in Buzzer Basket: “Chip picked up his Bible and headed out the door with Soapy.” And bit characters suddenly sport biblical names — like Caleb, Moses, Isaiah, and Solomon. In the original Hoop Crazy, Mary Hilton invites the oily con man T.A.K. Baxter to Christmas dinner. “Baxter said it was an imposition, but he gracefully consented to come because he knew she was influenced by the Christmas spirit.” The makeover spins it this way: “Baxter said it was an imposition, but he gracefully consented because he knew she was influenced by her Christian spirit.” And when Mary Hilton is diagnosed with cancer in Backboard Fever, “Chip Hilton’s world came crashing down around him like the walls of Jericho.” Broadman & Holman don’t want any of their readers to think the devil is glorified. In Ten Seconds to Play, Bee talks approvingly about players who “fought like demons.” Now they battle “like Tasmanian Devils.” The most glaring instance of pressing a religious agenda occurs in No-Hitter, the seventeenth book. Before leaving on a goodwill baseball tour in Japan, Chip is handed a traditional good luck charm by Frank Okada, a Japanese student he’s befriended. The original reads: “‘I wanted to see you off, Chip,’ Frank said, pressing a number of small objects into Chip’s hand. ‘These are called ofuda, good-luck charms. They will guard you on your trip.'” It’s a little different in the reissue: “Chip studied the shiny metal shapes in his hand and thought carefully before responding. ‘Thanks for the thought behind these, Frank. I know you mean well, but I can’t accept them. I don’t believe luck can protect me; I believe God takes care of me,’ he said lightly.” “We’re Christians,” Cindy Farley says, “but we thought that was unacceptable because it changed Chip’s character. He would never refuse a gift from a friend.” To their credit, the publishers are forthright about their faith-based intentions. “Our core customers are in the Christian Booksellers Association,” Mikos says. “But there’s a wider audience today for more wholesome content. My theory is that audience has been there all along.” Some may worry that the Farleys, who promised Clair Bee they would somehow find a way to get the books reprinted, have made a literary deal with the devil for the sake of commercial viability. Purists, like me, think the originals are just plain more appealing and evocative. And yet, for all the tinkering and tampering, the crux of the books, the time-tested val
ues that Chip epitomizes — self-reliance, sportsmanship, selflessness, moral and physical courage, integrity, loyalty, persistence, and teamwork — remain unscathed, available to shape and inspire a new generation unborn back when Chip was always doing the right thing. In these turbulent times, perhaps that’s worth a quiet prayer of thanks. Thomas M. DeFrank is Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News.
