Sports

Whitey Herzog, the Hall of Fame manager who led the St. Louis Cardinals to three pennants and a World Series championship in the 1980s, died on Monday in St. Louis. He was 92 and had been the second-oldest Hall of Famer after Willie Mays.

His death was announced by the Cardinals.

“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it,” Herzog liked to say.

Signed by the Yankees in 1949, he never made it out of their minor league system, though he picked up a lifetime of baseball knowledge from Manager Casey Stengel at spring training camps. He played the outfield for four American League teams over eight seasons with only modest success.

But Herzog found his niche as a manager with what came to be called Whiteyball, molding teams with speed, defense and pitching to take advantage of ballparks with fast artificial turf and spacious outfields, first at Royals Stadium in Kansas City and then at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to three consecutive American League division championships in the 1970s, then took the Cardinals to the 1982 World Series title with a team he had built while general manager as well. And he managed the Cardinals to pennants in 1985 and 1987.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2009.

“The fundamental aspects of the game were some of the things he always highlighted,” the Cardinals’ Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith once said. “It simply came down to the way he prepared us to play the game.”

But for all his baseball savvy, Herzog looked beyond Whiteyball in developing a rapport with his players.

As Bruce Sutter, the Cardinal reliever and also a Hall of Famer, once told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?

Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog was born on Nov. 9, 1931, in New Athens, Ill., about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis, to Edgar and Lietta Herzog. His father was a brewery worker. (The nickname Whitey came from his light blond hair.)

As a boy, Whitey sometimes cut school to visit Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis and watch the Yankees play the St. Louis Browns (the team later became the Baltimore Orioles).

Herzog was signed by the Yankees out of high school, but they gave up on him after a long apprenticeship in the minors and traded him to the Washington Senators in 1956. He also played for the Kansas City Athletics, the Orioles and the Detroit Tigers. He appeared in 634 major league games with a career batting average of .257.

After two seasons with the Athletics, as a scout and then a coach, Herzog joined the Mets as their third-base coach in 1966, scouted for them in 1967, then spent five years overseeing their farm system.

Herzog was named manager of the Texas Rangers in 1973, taking over a young ball club, but was fired in early September with the team in last place in the American League West. He became a coach for the California Angels in 1974, filling in for four games as interim manager during a managerial change.

He replaced Jack McKeon as the Royals’ manager in the middle of the 1975 season, then led them to A.L. West titles the following three seasons, losing to the Yankees each time in the League Championship Series.

He regarded his 1977 team as the best he ever managed. It finished the regular season at 102-60, featuring speedy players like Fred Patek, Frank White and Amos Otis, the hitting of George Brett and the pitching of Dennis Leonard.

Herzog was fired after the Royals finished second in their division in 1979 and was named the Cardinals’ manager in June 1980. He was given the general manager’s job as well in late August, when he turned the managing over to Red Schoendienst.

He reclaimed the managing job in 1981, remaining as general manager until early in the 1982 season, when the team he had assembled in a flurry of deals went on to capture the Cardinals’ first pennant since 1968.

That ball club, featuring Smith at shortstop, Keith Hernandez at first base, Willie McGee, Lonnie Smith and George Hendrick in the outfield, Darrell Porter at catcher and the relief pitching of Sutter, went on to defeat the Milwaukee Brewers in a seven-game World Series.

After managing the Cardinals to two more pennants, Herzog resigned on July 6, 1990, when his team was in last place in the National League East. He worked after that as an executive with the Angels.

He is survived by his wife of 71 years, Mary Lou Herzog; their three children; Debra, David and Jim; nine grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren, the Cardinals said.

Herzog never forgot his baseball roots, most notably the wisdom imparted by Stengel when Herzog was a Yankee hopeful.

“Casey broke it down into the hundred little things that would make the difference,” Herzog recalled in “You’re Missin’ a Great Game,” written with Jonathan Pitts. “Once I began coaching and managing, I kept passing them along to my own players, to everybody from the youngest rookie-league bushwhackers to the George Bretts, Ozzie Smiths and Vince Colemans of the world. In Casey, I had an Einstein.”

Stengel could discourse on every facet of baseball, but Herzog recalled how one piece of advice Stengel imparted had nothing to do with strategy.

As Herzog once related it to The New York Times, “Casey told me, ‘Let ’em ask you one question and you keep talking so they won’t ask you another one.’”

Victor Mather contributed reporting.

They had won one battle, and then sat to watch a battle of a different kind. Eight Ukrainian National Guard soldiers who had helped stall a Russian offensive in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine took the afternoon off on Monday to watch the men’s national soccer team play its first game of the European Championship.

“Football unites — it gives adrenaline and motivates,” said Evhen, 34, a soldier in the 13th National Guard Brigade who asked to be identified by only his first name, in accordance with military protocol.

The soldiers huddled in a bunker with soft drinks and chips to watch Ukraine play Romania in Munich, only to suffer heartbreak when their team lost by 3-0. But like most Ukrainians, they nonetheless take special pride in their sports team during the war.

“We have one team on the field and a million on the front,” said Andriy Shevchenko, a former soccer star who is Ukraine’s most famous player and now heads the national soccer federation. Like all Ukrainians, he said, “soccer players start their day by opening their phones and checking the situation on the battlefield.”

For the National Guard soldiers, who have been fighting together for more than a year, soccer became a chance to bond in the safety of a basement and cheer their national team. Huddled underground, they watched Ukraine quickly fall behind against Romania.

“At war, we look at things differently,” said a commander who uses the nickname Jackson. “Even now, while watching the game, we understand that at any moment we might have to leave and go into the trenches to fight. We are always ready.”

Soccer, he said, is important for Ukrainians, even during the war. “I don’t question it,” he said of people who support soccer players along with the army in wartime. “We are fighting and playing for our country.”

When Russia launched a cross-border attack north of Kharkiv last month, opening a new front in the war, Ukrainian soldiers stopped the advance within about 10 days. In one area of urban fighting, in the town of Vovchansk, they also drove Russian forces back from their leading positions.

With its soccer leagues all but hopelessly disrupted by war and occupation, Ukraine barely qualified for this tournament, needing to beat Iceland in a playoff on March 26 just to get in. That match was played in Wroclaw, Poland, since Ukraine cannot host games on its own territory because of the threat of Russian missiles.

Ukraine also has had no home games since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Since then, professional soccer players who joined the army have been killed, along with countless soccer fans. Numerous soccer fields and other sports training sites have also been destroyed by the war.

The Sonyachny soccer stadium, which was shelled in May 2022, was badly damaged. While under occupation for a month at the beginning of the war, the soccer field in Borodianka, north of the capital, Kyiv, was defaced by Russian soldiers who dug a trench in the form of a huge “V” across the whole field. Russian soldiers mark the letters “V” and “Z” on their tanks.

Oleksandr Tymchyk, who played in the game against Romania on Monday, lost a brother when he was killed in action in Donetsk Oblast in August 2023.

Since February 2022, FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, and UEFA, the European governing body, have imposed a ban on all Russian clubs and national teams.

The game on Monday began Ukraine’s fourth appearance in the European Championship. The first time, in 2012, Ukraine co-hosted the tournament, with Poland, holding several games in the city of Donetsk, two years before Russia occupied the city.

But this year, most of the nearly one million men in the Ukrainian Army, National Guard, paramilitary police and other units could not watch. Some on the front line watched on screens hooked to batteries and satellite internet links also used to convey artillery coordinates and other military data.

Unlike civilian fans of the game, soldiers are prohibited from drinking.

“Beer is really missing here,” Evhen noted. He said he missed his circle of soccer-fan friends at home. “But I also have a really good team of friends here,” he added. “These are great guys.”

Ukraine hopes to use the tournament to draw international attention to the country’s plight, including that of its sports facilities.

Kharkiv is the region where the biggest number of sports facilities have been destroyed in the war. And ahead of Ukraine’s match on Monday in Munich, the national federation, the Ukrainian Association of Football, displayed part of the badly damaged stand from the Sonyachny stadium on the Wittelsbacherplatz plaza in the city.

Members of the Ukrainian national team also recorded a video showing rocket damage to each of their hometowns. Some are from occupied Donetsk and the surrounding area. The midfielder Mykola Shaparenko is from Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region, which is under Ukrainian control but has been destroyed in the war.

Ukrainian sports news media and bars are also using the momentum of the tournament to bring in donations for the army. The Beer Pub Kutovy in Kyiv announced an auction of the soccer player Nazar Voloshyn’s T-shirt to collect the money for the Third Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Ukraine will play its next game, against Slovakia, on Friday. Teams play three matches in a group stage to determine who advances to the knockout rounds. This means Ukraine still has a chance for a victory.

The soldiers lamented the team’s loss against Romania.

“Well, we are all upset,” said Evhen, the soldier in the 13th National Guard Brigade. “But it is good that no one’s life depends on this match.”

Still, they joked, they had plenty of opportunities to vent their frustration.

“We will get some rest with the guys, then go fire mortars until the victory, to let a bit of steam out in this way,” Jackson, the commander, said.

“I guess I’ll just need to win Wimbledon to shut everyone up.” — Andy Murray to The Daily Telegraph in June 2004

Mission accomplished, although it took nearly a decade for Murray to manage it. He had to scrap and scream through all sorts of tennis trouble before finally putting a halt to all the annual chatter about when a British man might finally win Wimbledon again.

Now, at 37 and at the end of his career — win or lose (or forced to withdraw because of recent back surgery) — he is saying goodbye to a tournament he conquered not once, but twice. Three years elapsed between his first victory in 2013 and his second in 2016, when his proud country rewarded Murray with a knighthood. In that same year, he won his second Olympic gold.

For more than 70 years, the hope that a British man would win Wimbledon had become a tradition in a country that still likes its tradition: a part of the landscape at the well-tended All England Club where Fred Perry had won the men’s singles in 1936, but had long gone without a British successor.

Tim Henman was still the local focal point when Murray emerged in 2005. Henman had reached four singles semifinals by rushing the net, but had always fallen short, handling each setback with a firm handshake and a dignified demeanor.

Murray — a scruffy shock-absorbing baseliner from Scotland — managed the pressure and the project quite differently: muttering, moaning and sometimes swearing between points. But above all, he embraced the challenge as he trundled about the grass with a heavy gait only to move with astonishing quickness once the ball was in play.

He was a prodigy who first played in the Wimbledon junior tournament at age 15 and first played in the main event at age 18, immediately becoming a star by reaching the third round in that 2005 debut.

Murray declared his intentions. He wanted to win Wimbledon, and watching him chase it each summer you could feel how much he wanted to win it. There was no masking the raw ambition and no stopping the tears when in 2012, with his complete game coming together, he lost in the final in four sets to Roger Federer.

“All right, I’m going to try this, and it’s not going to be easy,” Murray said to the crowd after he lost, his voice cracking with microphone in hand.

He did not have to speak again for about 35 seconds as the fans roared their support. When he resumed, he managed a joke about Federer being pretty good for a 30-year-old, thanked his team and family and then broke down again when mentioning the crowd.

“Everybody always talks about the pressure of playing at Wimbledon, how tough it is,” Murray said. “But it’s not the people watching. They make it so much easier to play. The support has been incredible, so thank you.”

Murray did not know it quite yet, but he had turned a corner. Just a few weeks later, on the same patch of grass and dirt, he routed Federer in straight sets to win the 2012 Olympic gold medal.

“The biggest win of my life,” he said.

It was not quite Wimbledon, but it was an extraordinary achievement in a very familiar place.

“The similarity is that it’s at the All England Club, and that it’s against Roger, but other than that, it’s a very different dynamic,” Paul Annacone, a Federer coach, said after that Olympic win. “When Wimbledon is happening, the country stops. But when the Olympics are happening, there are four million other things going on. It’s a different level of expectation, a different level of pressure in my amateur psychologist’s opinion. But I also think Andy is playing every big match better, and I think this victory will help him.”

That proved true. He won his first Grand Slam title at the U.S. Open later that summer, defeating Novak Djokovic, his former junior rival and doubles partner, in five grueling sets.

When Murray returned to Wimbledon in 2013, he was ready for the real deal.

“I think both of them obviously will have helped me in different ways,” he said of the Olympic gold and U.S. Open title. “But the Wimbledon final last year was also important for me. There are some shots I would have liked to have changed, but I went for it and kind of lost the match on my terms. I felt I didn’t just sit back and sort of wait. I think that’s maybe why I managed to recover from that defeat well.”

With history on the line in 2013, Murray beat Djokovic in straight sets in the final to end Britain’s 77-year men’s singles drought.

“You needed a tough gritty kid to do it,” Pat Cash, a former Wimbledon champion from Australia, said after Murray won.

Andy and his older brother, Jamie, were coached by their mother, Judy, who had spent a short time on the pro tour. Andy would become No. 1 in the world in singles and Jamie No. 1 in doubles. But her sons might not have had pro careers at all. In March 1996, a gunman and former scout leader shot and killed 16 students and a teacher at the gymnasium of their primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. According to Judy Murray, Andy’s class was on its way to the gym before being turned away.

“At the time you have no idea how tough something like that is,” Andy Murray told the BBC in 2013. “It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to actually research it and look into it a lot because I didn’t really want to know.”

By the end, Sir Andy’s body started to break down. He had arthroscopic hip surgery in 2018 and then, more radically, hip resurfacing surgery in 2019, breaking new ground for singles players by returning to the tour after that procedure. He has been competitive if rarely triumphant, winning just one singles title, in Antwerp, in 2019.

His tennis legacy was secure more than a decade ago, but perhaps sooner rather than later, the chattering classes at the All England Club will resume wondering when the next British man will win Wimbledon.

A sealed case filled with unopened boxes of Canadian hockey trading cards sold for $3.72 million on Sunday after a father and son found them while cleaning the father’s house in Saskatchewan.

The high price takes into account the mystery inside: The case could contain as many as 30 of the holy grail of collectible hockey cards, a Wayne Gretzky rookie card from 1979. Or it might not.

The buyer is likely content with the uncertainty, and prepared to never know the answer, explained Jason Simonds, a sports card specialist at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house that brokered the sale.

“The person who buys this, one night could crack open a couple beers and open up the case and then go to town on these 16 boxes,” Mr. Simonds said. “But chances are it’ll stay as a case for at least the foreseeable future.”

This is because unopened boxes are not purchased just for the potential riches inside. Some people appreciate the nostalgic value of boxes from the 1970s and 1980s and might display them as they are. Others buy unopened boxes as investments. If the Gretzky card and others continue to increase in value, so will the case sold on Sunday, Mr. Simonds said.

“When it comes to card collecting, a lot of times it’s not just purely for profit,” Mr. Simonds said. “It’s because they have some sort of draw toward Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or, in this case, Wayne Gretzky, which is the hockey equivalent of those guys.”

The 1979 Wayne Gretzky card issued by O-Pee-Chee is prized by collectors. In May 2021, one of the cards sold for $3.75 million in a private sale that was brokered by Heritage Auctions.

Mr. Simonds said that the case sold on Sunday, the kind that would have been shipped to a corner store or other card distributor, could include 25 to 30 of the Gretzky cards and that it would be a “statistical anomaly” for the box not to contain any based on how many cards are inside.

The case was found while a father and son in Saskatchewan, who remained anonymous, were cleaning out the father’s house, which had a storage room stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, Mr. Simonds said. He said that the father was an “avid” collector in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, often purchasing a couple of cases of cards each year from a distributor and selling or trading the cards inside. He never got around to examining the case that sold on Sunday, which would have cost him about $150 in 1979, Mr. Simonds said.

The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Mr. Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most anyone has spent on a hockey collectible.

Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specializes in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that 16 wax boxes were inside the case. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, for a total of more than 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, which means that if the assortment were perfectly random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house’s listing.

If the case does contains a couple dozen of the prized Gretzky cards, they might not be in good condition, Mr. Simonds warned. The cards could be slightly off-center, have ink smudges or other flaws.

The buyer might never find out.

Mr. Simonds said that if the case were to be opened, it would likely be to sell the individually sealed boxes inside. “There’s not a lot of people that are willing to spend $4 million on a case of hockey cards,” he said, “but at a quarter-million dollars a box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”

Willie McRae, a caddie who spent more than seven decades at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, the host of this week’s U.S. Open, was a beloved figure who did his utmost to help his players.

“My dad would always tell the story that his job depended on what kind of tip he got,” said Paul McRae, his son who is a golf instructor at the Pinehurst Golf Academy. (His father died in 2018 at 85.) “He’d occasionally come home with holes in his pocket so he could drop a ball for a golfer. Those other guys would say, ‘Man, you sure play good when Willie is here, but you don’t when Willie isn’t around.’ He knew how to make players feel good.”

Pinehurst is a cradle of American golf. Donald Ross, one of the most prolific golf course architects, lived in the town and tested out ideas about course design at the club. But it also has an underappreciated role in American caddying.

What was once a profession that was looked down upon, caddying has gained respect over time. It’s now an integral part of the experience at golf resorts around the world. After all, there is no one else who spends five or six hours with guests as guides, psychologists and storytellers.

“During the last U.S. Open, Justin Rose came in early and took my dad out on No. 2 so he could read the greens for him,” McRae said. No. 2 is the championship course. “My dad caddied for Ben Hogan. Hogan would ask him, ‘Where should I aim?’ My dad would say, ‘Aim at that tree.’ Hogan would say, ‘Which part of the tree?’”

Two years after the first Open at Pinehurst in 1999 — this is the resort’s fourth — Pinehurst recognized some of its most famous caddies with a hall of fame. Willie McRae, Fletcher Gaines, Robert Robinson, Jimmy Steed, Teddy Marley, Robert Stafford, Hilton Rodgers, John T. Daniel and Jeff Ferguson were in that first class of inductees in 2001.

In addition to being the course designer, Ross was also the resort’s caddie master and recruited men from the community.

“The caddie game at Pinehurst is thriving for a number of reasons, among them the facts that caddies are a part of the Pinehurst tradition, the No. 2 course is imminently walkable, and the curious design of the greens makes their local knowledge worth several strokes a round,” wrote Lee Pace, in his 2012 book “The Golden Age of Pinehurst.”

Still, the Pinehurst caddies are less well-known than their counterparts at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. Augusta required golf professionals to take a club caddy for the Masters Tournament until 1982, and that rule made golf stars out of men like Carl Jackson, who caddied for Ben Crenshaw for decades and was with him for both of his Masters victories.

“The Augusta caddies developed this niche as a great caddie pool from the Masters,” said Ward Clayton, the author of “The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National.” “Augusta is well known for its mysterious greens. But Pinehurst has a similar sense with those inverted-saucer greens that Donald Ross built. Players are a little bit flummoxed by those greens. A caddie was like having a coach in those rounds.”

This week, few players will show up without their regular caddie on the bag. But for any who do, the go-to guy is Thomas Trinchitella, who caddied for Tiger Woods during practice rounds before the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst and Rory McIlroy before the 2014 one. He’s a bridge between the past and present of Pinehurst caddie history.

“I got to caddie a little bit with Willie McRae toward the end of his career,” Trinchitella said. “Listening to those guys go back and forth in the caddie room about who is the best green reader, who could play this hole better, it was comical. They were the veteran guys. People just loved them.”

One critical thing has changed over the decades: the money. McRae finished caddying and went to work the night shift, his son said. The winning caddie at the U.S. Open will earn 10 percent of the $3.6 million first-place prize.

When Oakland University’s 14th-seeded men’s basketball team defeated No. 3 Kentucky on Thursday night, delivering the first shocking upset of this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, it cast a spotlight on the relatively anonymous university in Rochester, Mich.

And if history is any indication, the next few days and weeks — and perhaps longer — promise to be a lucrative time for the school.

Upset victories by double-digit seeds are not just a big deal for busted tournament brackets. They also raise the profile of the schools that pull off the shockers. Big wins routinely lead to spikes in applications, enrollment and, as the university community rallies around its team, alumni contributions. Media coverage leads to attention that is otherwise hard to come by, and the name recognition can be long lasting.

“It was a bit surrealistic,” said Eugene Cornacchia, the president of St. Peter’s, whose men’s basketball team also upset Kentucky in 2022. “It was exciting to win, but I didn’t necessarily understand the onslaught of the attention that would ramp up so quickly.”

After the victory, Cornacchia said, his phone was ablaze with text messages from friends, alumni and members of the media. His school, a Jesuit university in Jersey City, N.J., with an enrollment of around 3,000 students and an endowment of less than $40 million, had previously been to three tournaments and won zero games.

The team went on to win its next two games, before falling in a regional final to North Carolina.

The tournament run was good for business. In the eight months before the win by St. Peter’s over Kentucky, the university sold roughly $58,000 worth of merchandise, Cornacchia said. After the upset and through the end of that month, it sold more than $300,000 worth of merchandise and ran out of its supply in a matter of days. Yearly commitments from donors rose from $450,000 to more than $2 million.

In 2006, after George Mason’s improbable run to the Final Four, a professor at the university estimated that the school had received more than $600 million worth of free publicity and a 22 percent increase in applications. For public schools that make runs in the tournament, a subsequent jump in students coming from out of state boosts receipts from tuition.

In the initial hours after its win over Kentucky, St. Peter’s was caught flat-footed. Unlike their counterparts at larger schools who are usually detached from menial tasks, officials at the university found themselves personally handling ticket requests for the team’s next game, as well as season ticket orders for the next year.

Brad Hurlbut, the athletic director at Fairleigh Dickinson, whose men’s basketball team defeated top-seeded Purdue last year, described “lugging boxes and vacuuming trash” at his office in Hackensack, N.J., a far cry from the duties of his peers at larger schools.

University staff members, inside and outside athletic departments, are less plentiful than at the schools that typically dominate the N.C.A.A. tournament. So when a team scores its biggest win in program history, a skeleton crew of employees is left to handle media requests, craft new marketing campaigns and otherwise seize the moment.

David Vazquez was the director of budgets at Florida Gulf Coast when it defeated Georgetown in the 2013 tournament. The school followed up that surprise win with another in the next round, becoming the first No. 15 seed to make it to the round of 16. All the while, Vazquez said, employees in public relations and marketing were “burning the midnight oil because everyone wanted to learn about us.”

By the time the team arrived back to campus after its first two games, the school was already changed. The university’s “dunk city” moniker, a reference to the team’s athletic style of play, caught on. The next year, its applications spiked, particularly from out of state.

With an enrollment of about 16,000 students, Oakland is considerably larger than some other March darlings. But compared with Kentucky, it’s in a different stratosphere athletically. Oakland’s athletic department spent $15 million in 2022, about one-tenth of Kentucky’s expenses last year.

Cornacchia, the president of St. Peter’s, acknowledged that the school was limited by its size and reach, and that recreating the magic of 2022 was a tall order for future teams. (St. Peter’s returned to the tournament this year and lost Thursday night in a rout to Tennessee.)

For Hurlbut, the athletic director at Fairleigh Dickinson, the long hours after the win were worth the payoff: It meant a new locker room for the team, a naming rights deal for its arena and an agreement to have some of its games broadcast on the YES Network.

“This is just so much more satisfying and gratifying to me to be at a small school, and provide your university with all those great things that winning can do,” Hurlbut said. “You can sleep when it’s over.”

It wasn’t just a gold Pontiac Trans Am with a painted bird on the hood. It was the car that Texas A&M gave to Eric Dickerson in 1979, when he was a top high school running back prospect, in the hope that he would become an Aggie. Instead, he drove from his hometown, Sealy, Texas, to Dallas and Southern Methodist University.

At the time, Mr. Dickerson’s cars (S.M.U. gave him one, too) were a symbol of the wretched excess of big-time college sports. It was a time when boosters in the Southwest Conference doled out “$100 handshakes” and the S.M.U. faithful winked as they talked about how they had the best football team money could buy.

The S.M.U. Mustangs went 34-11-1 over Mr. Dickerson’s four years — the team’s vaunted Pony Express era. It gave the oilmen and real estate developers and business titans across Texas who funneled cash to their alma mater bragging rights at the Petroleum Club of Houston and country clubs in Dallas.

And it drove the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, nuts. The organization had rules to stop those kinds of pay-for-play shenanigans and investigators to chase down overeager boosters, who mostly eluded their grasp. Mr. Dickerson remembers that one N.C.A.A. investigator visited his home so frequently, the guy would sit at his kitchen table and eat dinner with his family.

The N.C.A.A. eventually caught up to S.M.U. (Mr. Dickerson was long gone by then, well into a Hall of Fame career in the National Football League.) In 1987, the organization handed the football team the so-called death penalty, the severest punishment it has ever imposed on a Division I school for rules violations. The program was shut down for two seasons, and the university’s reputation was tarnished.

Ever since, S.M.U. has wandered the college sports landscape looking for a home, and a way to share in the ever-increasing riches associated with top-level amateur athletics.

It took nearly four decades, $354 million in major construction and facilities upgrades, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized S.M.U.’s original sin — allowing players to profit financially from their athletic skill — but the university has found its way back. Last summer, S.M.U. was invited to join the Atlantic Coast Conference this July.

It wasn’t cheap. S.M.U. was admitted to the A.C.C. only after agreeing to forgo nine years of conference broadcast revenues, or $270 million, to avoid diluting the pot for incumbent members.

For those wanting to trace the evolution of big-time college sports over the past half-century, there may be no better example of the shifting views on the role of money — and whether student-athletes should get any — than S.M.U.

The N.C.A.A. has lost much of its authority now that players can be compensated through name-image-likeness rules, or N.I.L., which effectively allow athletes to be paid by sponsors or donor groups known as collectives. It is staring down a number of lawsuits and challenges to its longstanding amateur model. In a bid to maintain some relevance, the organization has called for a series of changes that would pave the way for the top moneymaking schools to form a new division that would more closely resemble professional sports.

In the meantime, universities’ search for television money has changed the map of athletic conferences. The Big Ten, for instance, was once concentrated in the Midwest; now it has 18 teams and stretches from Oregon and California to New Jersey. By that measure, expanding the Atlantic Coast Conference into Texas isn’t much of a leap.

“What started more than 150 years ago with football being considered an extracurricular activity that benefited student-athletes and offered a glue for a school community to come back to campus — ‘Boola Boola’ and all that — has morphed into a tremendous industry,” said Oliver Luck, a longtime college sports administrator who was a star collegiate quarterback himself and is now a consultant. “And you got to call it an industry. There’s lots of money and lots of interest.”

Mr. Dickerson was back on campus recently, marveling at the sun sparkling off the new buildings and the six-figure income that some of the current Mustang football players are earning. And these days football is far from the only sport where athletes share in the spoils of economic success. One S.M.U. volleyball player, Alex Glover, makes well into six figures as a social media influencer.

Looked at a certain way, Mr. Dickerson thought, S.M.U. had been less a rogue program than one ahead of its time. He and his teammates had merely been on the ground floor of what has become a $17 billion ecosystem of big-time college sports. The money being reaped by current college athletes, he said, was long overdue.

“Those jerseys that schools sell don’t run around the field by themselves,” he said.

‘Amateur is out the door’

S.M.U.’s new era is personified by Ms. Glover, who merged her two passions — volleyball and social media — into a side hustle as a social influencer.

“I wanted to take people on a deep dive of how a Division I student-athlete operates from day to day,” Ms. Glover said. “There’s a lot more going on than showing up for practice and games.”

Ms. Glover scripts and shoots witty, fast-paced Instagram videos for a series called “Day in the Life of a D-1 Volleyballer.” She takes her followers to the gym, to the classroom and on walks with her dogs, as well as offering fashion and beauty tips. She also was a captain on a team that won an American Athletic Conference championship, and she completed undergraduate degrees in engineering and data science. She will complete a master’s in management science in May.

Ms. Glover is not paid by a collective, but Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Ulta Beauty are among her more than 40 sponsors.

“For me, beyond the money, N.I.L. has given me a sense of freedom and pushed me to learn these different skills as far as content creation and running a business” said Ms. Glover, who has written an e-book called “An Athlete’s Strategy to Scoring NIL Deals.”

For athletes in marquee sports like football and men’s basketball, however, the experience has been more unsettling. Jake Bailey, a receiver on the football team who graduated in December with a degree in sports management, wrote a paper on the effects of N.I.L. on student-athletes. Along with the money, he wrote, came more unfamiliar responsibilities like managing your finances.

“The lump sums of money being thrown around is life changing for many players and their families,” Mr. Bailey said, adding: “Amateur is out the door. We’re pros.”

Six years ago, when he was coming out of high school in San Clemente, Calif., there was no money for colleges to dangle beyond the value of a scholarship. Instead, recruiters pitched their facilities and academics and treated him as a superstar on campus visits.

“It was about the glitz and glamour,” Mr. Bailey said.

He chose Rice University in Houston and led the Owls in all-purpose yards — yards gained on runs, receptions and returns — as a sophomore and in receiving as a junior. Mr. Bailey believed he was ready for a bigger stage and entered the transfer portal. Now schools could woo him with the promise of cash.

“I never brought money up,” Mr. Bailey said, “but the coaches would tell you where you fit on the scale of who was making this and what they were paying.”

Mr. Bailey chose S.M.U. but said he was not one of those making six figures. He does make enough to have set up a limited liability company to manage his taxes. In the locker room, he said, his teammates never discuss money. Just as it did in the Pony Express era, however, the parking lot tells all. Mr. Bailey can see who are at the top of the pay scale by the Dodge Chargers and Ford Mustangs they drive.

Last fall, Mr. Bailey was a captain and a leading receiver on a Mustang team that won the American Athletic Conference championship. With a season of eligibility left, he will pursue a graduate degree and play for S.M.U. in the A.C.C. this year.

Mr. Bailey also got a raise.

‘Back where we belong’

Gerald Turner, 78, is a native Texan with a honeysuckle drawl who offers cleareyed opinions delivered in full paragraphs. (He asks reporters to tape him to keep up.) By the nature of his position as S.M.U.’s president, they usually end with an ask. He understands what is important to Texans. He skinned-and-grinned with political heavyweights, business titans and federal officials for a decade to land the George W. Bush Presidential Center on campus.

He came to S.M.U. in 1995 with a mandate to make the university a national destination for academics and rebuild a reputation badly scarred by the football scandal. He has raised nearly $3 billion for 44 development projects, among them engineering and education buildings, five residential halls and a $140 million renovation and expansion of the highly regarded Cox School of Business.

S.M.U.’s professional schools climbed in rankings, undergraduate acceptance rates shrank as incoming freshmen’s test scores rose, and the university attracted more students from out of state.

Last summer, Dr. Turner called members of the board of trustees and donors to his conference room in the Perkins Administration Building to tell them that S.M.U. finally had the pieces in place to land a seat at the adults’ table of college athletics.

Dr. Turner understood the hold that athletics, particularly football, could have on a university. He was previously the chancellor at the University of Mississippi and an administrator at the University of Oklahoma. Shortly after arriving on campus, Dr. Turner set about rehabbing S.M.U.’s athletic facilities. In 2000, the 32,000-seat Gerald J. Ford Stadium opened on campus with a subtle design and an emphasis on community.

The football stadium was sunk into the southern edge of the campus near the Boulevard, a grassy, tree-lined parkway that welcomes visitors to the heart of campus. The Boulevard would be S.M.U.’s answer to the Grove at Ole Miss, an upscale tailgate space where anyone who was anyone had to be seen and that everyone could enjoy.

“If you’re not having winning seasons, there’s got to be something bigger than football to get fans there,” Dr. Turner said.

The Boulevard was an immediate hit. The reinvigorated football program not so much. S.M.U. did not return to a bowl game until 2009, and, since returning to the field in 1989, the Mustangs have managed just 10 winning seasons as they moved through three midtier conferences.

Still, over the past decade, the university renovated its basketball arena and built a field house, an aquatics center and a soccer stadium. All were improvements necessary to attract the attention of a Power Five conference.

The A.C.C. made the most sense. Beyond athletics, the conference offered an opportunity to stand academically alongside powerhouse state universities like Virginia and North Carolina as well as smaller, elite private schools such as Duke and Wake Forest.

Still, it was going to be a heavy lift, and Dr. Turner made sure his board members knew S.M.U. would have to give the A.C.C. an offer it could not refuse.

“Here’s what we want to offer, but, you know, I can’t do it unless you guys tell me to,” Dr. Turner recalled telling the board. “We’ll tell them that we will give up roughly the $30 million it would get from ESPN for adding us for up to nine years. They could use it for an incentive pool or whatever they wanted.”

Then came the ask. Dr. Turner believed the people in the boardroom as well as other deep-pocketed alums would make up the difference to help the university’s athletic department add coaching and support staff and increase salaries that would help every Mustang program compete at the top level of Division I.

“It’s going to cost each of you probably a million a year for the first five years,” Dr. Turner said.

In September, seven days after the A.C.C. officially invited S.M.U. to become a member, the university raised more than $100 million from 30 key donors and trustees.

“This is a core group who lived through the resentment and hurt feelings of the death penalty and understood this was a healing moment,” Dr. Turner said. “It puts us back where we belong.”

Still, S.M.U. paid a steep price for an uncertain future. One mainstay of the A.C.C., Florida State, wants out of the conference badly enough that it recently sued the league and claimed that it mismanaged its members’ media rights and imposed “draconian” exit fees of $572 million for the Seminoles to leave.

On the Hilltop, as the S.M.U. campus is known, there are no regrets. The football stadium’s $100 million Garry Weber End Zone Complex is loud and dusty, but its locker rooms, weight room, meeting rooms, and full kitchen and training table will be ready for S.M.U.’s 484 student-athletes come August.

“We understand that the ground is still shifting, and no one really knows where this is going to end up,” David B. Miller, the chairman of S.M.U.’s board, said. “But it’s still better to be inside that process instead of on the outside looking in.”

A game of liar’s poker

While gaining entrance to the A.C.C. was a negotiation between well-endowed universities and big donors, the brave new world of name, image and likeness is murky at best. How else to explain the N.I.L. valuation of $3.2 million for Arch Manning, a backup quarterback at the University of Texas, three times last year’s salary for San Francisco’s Super Bowl quarterback, Brock Purdy?

No one in college athletics disputes that the current economy of unregulated name, image and likeness is essentially play-for-pay. Alongside the transfer portal, which allows student-athletes to shop their skills for a potential starting position and more money, the best-funded institutions land the best athletes at the highest prices.

Chris Schoemann, executive director of S.M.U.’s Boulevard Collective, which doles out the university’s athlete payments, likens the current marketplace to a game of liar’s poker.

“Everyone wants to seem bigger than they are,” he said.

To that end, Mr. Schoemann is vague on numbers, allowing that a healthy collective — which he says S.M.U.’s is — requires $5 million to $8 million annually for the football and men’s and women’s basketball teams. There are benchmarks that players and their representatives either already know or Mr. Schoemann will tell them if they inquire. A top quarterback in a Power Five conference, for example, averages about $550,000 a year.

How many Mustang football players earn more than six figures?

“More than a handful,” he said.

For now, what drive the marketplace are talent and the financial wherewithal to take big risks for even bigger rewards. Rick Hart, S.M.U.’s athletic director, said it was difficult to isolate what it really cost to operate a competitive athletic program because N.I.L., the transfer portal and conference affiliation were all intertwined.

“All those things play together to create this free-agency environment that we’re in, which is challenged even further by the fact that there aren’t really any rules,” Mr. Hart said. “How much money do we need? A lot.”

‘They made us outlaws’

Mr. Dickerson was back on campus with his former S.M.U. teammate Harvey Armstrong. Both remain hurt over the blame their team shouldered for decades after the program was shut down.

“We felt abandoned,” Mr. Armstrong said. “They not only didn’t invite us back for homecoming, they made us outlaws. I could not even get an interview for a coaching job that was open.”

Mr. Armstrong’s awkward gait is a reminder of the 15 surgical procedures he has had on his knees and back. He forgets things, gets aggravated easily and wonders if he is showing early signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), the degenerative brain disease that has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L players after their deaths.

Mr. Dickerson has had regenerative stem cell therapy for nearly a decade for a bad back that often immobilizes him. Neither man regrets the toll that the game he loved took on his body. Both do regret the toll it took on their souls.

“We were indentured servants,” Mr. Dickerson said. “I call paying these kids out in the open doing the right thing. Finally.”