One of Sport's Shining Lights

WINTER PARK. Fla., April 22 -- The First United Methodist Church was packed here Thursday afternoon. Everywhere you turned there was a conference commissioner, a TV network executive, a basketball coach. There were former Atlantic Coast Conference interns everywhere, not to mention writers and sports information directors from around the country. Close to 700 people came to say goodbye to Tom Mickle, one of those people the casual sports fan knew little about, but someone respected and adored by those who knew him.

To the general public, Mickle will be remembered as the Father of the BCS, which might sound like a decidedly mixed legacy if you don't know the entire story. To his friends he will be remembered as the life of every party. Few people in college athletics were smarter than Tom Mickle. Even fewer enjoyed living more than he did. He was 55 when he died Monday at his desk in the offices of Florida Citrus Sports, cruelly taken by an apparent heart attack just three days after learning that he was cancer-free following two months of chemotherapy at Duke University Hospital.

His death sent shockwaves through collegiate sports not just because he was one of the truly bright people in athletics but because everyone who knew him had a "Mick" story.

"If the true measure of a man's life is the number of people he has touched, then no one had a better life than Tom Mickle," former ACC commissioner Gene Corrigan said in his eulogy. "He had a remarkable brain. He had great ideas." Corrigan paused and smiled. "And he loved to party."

Mickle graduated from Duke in 1972 with a degree in engineering, but his love of sports took him into athletic administration. He was a student assistant in the sports information office, then the assistant SID, the SID and later became Tom Butters's No. 2 man in the athletic department before leaving to become Corrigan's first lieutenant in 1989. Richard Giannini was the SID who hired Mickle, but he shook his head Thursday when someone said he deserved credit for starting Mickle on his career path.

"Actually, it was [then-Duke athletic director] Carl James," Giannini said. "I went into him in the spring of '72 and told him I really needed an assistant. Carl said I could have one but only if I could convince Tom not to go to graduate school and come to work for me instead."

When Giannini left Duke in the summer of 1976 to return to Florida, his alma mater, James put Mickle in charge. By then, I was starting my senior year at Duke, and Tom and I were close friends. We had first met because he was the person I tracked down in the middle of the night looking for phone numbers for the wrestling and fencing coaches or for a box score that somehow hadn't found its way to the Chronicle, the student newspaper.

That fall, when I showed up at Duke's first football game, I was shocked to find that the Chronicle's seat had been moved from the last row in the corner of the press box to front row center. Mickle's answer to other writers who complained was simple: "Those are Duke students out there playing. The students covering them should have the best seats."

He did the same thing for basketball games. To this day, the Chronicle still has the best seats -- for better or worse -- at all Duke football and basketball games.

In the early 1980s, Mickle came up with the idea to organize former athletes into a club, not only for fundraising, but in order to make sure they stayed in touch with their school, scheduling events for teams from all sports that brought athletes back to campus. The concept, "The Varsity Club," has been copied at almost every school in the country in one form or another. It also was Mickle, while working for Corrigan in the ACC office, who came up with a plan to improve the bowl system in the early 1990s. During his eulogy, Corrigan remembered how it happened.

The idea, as Mickle told people later, was to move the bowl system closer to producing a true national champion -- eventually, he hoped, leading to a playoff system. He wanted to try to guarantee that, at the very least, the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked teams would meet every year. His doodling became the Bowl Alliance which, once the Rose Bowl contract with the Big Ten and the Pacific-10 expired several years later, became the Bowl Championship Series.

"Maybe I should have kept it to myself," he would say years later when the college presidents used the BCS as an excuse not to create a playoff system.