(Alex) It's Thursday, September 21. And this is the 1909 the state news weekly news podcast featuring state news reporters talking about the news. I'm your host Alex Walters. This week I'm joined by state News's Kayla Nelson for a real scoop, a twist a scandal at MSU dairy store. And after that, we've got a deep dive for you. Attempts to tell the story of the national championship winning MSU football team widely credited with integrating American college football have gone awry. It's a story of a book published in violation of the university presses academic integrity policies. A slap together Hollywood movie script rife with complete fabrication and racist tropes, and then a conspiratorial criminal movie producer at the center of it all. With that, let's start the show. All right, our first guest is here. Kelly gonna introduce yourself. Welcome to the show.
(Kayla) Hi, guys. I'm Kayla Nelson. I'm the business reporter here at the State news on the regional desk.
(Alex) So your great story this week about MSU is dairy store. You know, before we get into the details, do you want to tell for those unacquainted what is the dairy store? What does it mean for campus? That kind of thing? You know?
(Kayla) Yeah, so the MSU dairy store is a ice cream shop here on campus. And they are in partnership with the MSU dairy plant, which also functions on campus through our food and agriculture programs.
(Alex) And he talked to some people who are you know, longtime customers that are store new customers who love it like to then go on there their whole lives. You talk about sort of what it means to people on the campus.
(Kayla) Yeah, so it's definitely a focal point of campus that brings a lot of people together from what I heard, people have been coming for years. There is a couple I talked to they've been coming for around 50 years at this point. And so they've seen the dairy store change. But then it's also a great a great resource for new students to come and get acquainted just with the feel of campus.
(Alex) But you also learned something that I guess sort of maybe spoils that allure a little bit do want to talk about sort of your big discovery.
(Kayla) Yeah, so people tend to assume that the milk for the ice cream comes straight from our dairy farm just down the road. But I talked with the dairy plant operations and productions manager, Matthew Wilcox. And there's definitely been some changes happening within the dairy plant, especially since the COVID 19 pandemic, cause some shutdowns and so that's that's not necessarily the case.
(Alex) So it is not all you know, from those cows, you see, as you're driving in the campus,
(Kayla) it is not, he told me, I can't just drive my truck down and hook up to the cows down there. So what happens is, so the MSU dairy farm is part of a Milk Cooperative up in Ovid, Michigan, and so that that milk from those cows, gets shipped up to Ovid and pooled with milk from cows all over the Midwest, and then that can be used to make other dairy products like milk and cheese, and dry products as well. So the one difference between what's happening now and what's been happening before COVID was now the dairy store lost its manufacturing license during the shutdown just because things weren't being updated. And so they can no longer make ice cream with fresh cream from that from that plant. So they use a pre pasteurized mix, really, but
(Alex) even so it was from the MSG cows directly before the pandemic or it was never,
(Kayla) it was never really from directly the MSU cows
(Alex) twist scoop. Yes. A lot of overlap with like story kind of lingo and ice cream lingo, which is probably nice free writing about it. Yeah, did that change? You know, you talked to some people who are customers, you talk to them about this that changed sort of their perception of their ice cream.
(Kayla) All of the the people I talked to still were very enthusiastic about the ice cream. They said it still tastes different. There's something about the texture, something about the creaminess. It's just different from other ice cream shops around.
(Alex) That's nice to hear. It must be something special about MSU. Wow. All right. Well, unless there's something you think we're missing. Thanks for coming on Kayla. Great to talk to you about this story.
(Kayla) Thanks for having me. Yeah, appreciate it.
(Alex) This next segment, we're talking about one of my stories so my guest is me. We're flying solo. Earlier this week, we reported that MSU is Academic Press has returned the rights of a biography of iconic Head Football Coach Duffy Doherty to its author's a state, that means MSU won't be selling the book anymore. For context, Doherty coached here in the 60s and is largely remembered for his trailblazing recruitment of black players. And the National Championships he won with the integrated team he built doing so the football building is named after him. There's a statue of him currently building built being built on campus. He's a beloved figure. So why ditch the biography? Well, it's sort of a long story. So for the rest of this week's 1909 We're gonna dig into it. It of course, involves the book, which seems to have been published in violation of the university presses academic integrity policies. But it's also a lot more than that, because it all got a lot messier when a conspiratorial criminal movie producer began work on a film adaptation of the book that's full of complete fabrication and racist tropes. But let's start at the very beginning with David Clare about. He's a lot of things.
He's a Methodist pastor. He's a commercial realtor, a basketball coach, a professor at a small university, but he's also an author, and he's also not alive, which means he was unavailable for comment on everything you're about to hear. But in 2018, while he was alive, he wrote a book. It's called Duffy Doherty, a man ahead of his time, and it reads like a biography. it chronologically tells the story of his life at work. But it's missing one big thing citations. The sources clear about us like newspaper articles, photographs, interviews, university documents, they aren't mentioned in the text on an index. And that's a really strange thing. According to Johnny Smith, who's an associate professor of history at Georgia Tech, and the author of a couple popular sports biographies. He also did his master's research on Duffy Doherty and how his integrated team can be credited with improving not just football at MSU, but also racial integration across the state of Michigan. Smith says that lack of citations makes the veracity of clear bouts book of mystery, because there's no trail that lead readers back to how clear about his supporting statements. Nevertheless, the book was published, and not just by any mass market publisher was published by MSU as Academic Press, which usually focuses on you know, scholarly research by academics.
The Press requires citations and reviews books and a process called peer review. But Claire bouts book didn't go through any of that. We asked the press why they published the book earlier this year. And all the leadership declined to do interviews. But through an MSU spokesperson, we did get an answer. He said the book is and I'm quoting him directly here, a non academic work intended for a general audience. So it didn't have citations or go through the fact checking process that other books published by the press would for Smith, the historian, that's not a good explanation. To quote him, he says, quote, if you're writing history, you should always document your sources, no matter the audience. And that explanation was also quote, profoundly offensive to Maya Washington. She's the daughter of Jeanne Washington Hall of Fame wide receiver who's written about length on the book, and a photo of him appears on the cover. She's also a historian who wrote her book and produced a PBS documentary about her father's team. She said, quote, I'm shocked and appalled that an institution of higher learning doesn't have a higher standard. The assumption that a general audience is not entitled to the same integrity and reliability of information is unacceptable to me. I believe it's a dangerous stance. And Washington's problems with the book go further than just the lack of academic integrity. She criticizes Claire about for a clumsy handling of race and opinionated commentary throughout the book.
But here's where the story gets more complicated, because everything gets a lot messier when this moves from East Lansing to Hollywood. Now, this is what I have to introduce you to James villas Aires. He was a big time investment firm founder, a college football player, and he's clear about stepson, and a few years ago, Villa sereis, decides to venture into Hollywood filmmaking and adapt his stepdads book into a movie. In the pitch seems like a straightforward winner and inspiring story about the national championship winning team that integrated college football. Ben Corey Jones from HBO is insecure was selected to direct Neal McDonough from Yellowstone was cast as Duffy Doherty and Tiktok megastar Bryce Hall was set to make his big screen debut in the movie. Julian Horton, a former NFL player with a supporting role in the film, told his hometown talk show that he thought the film was so great, so meant to be that it was quote, ordained by God. But based on our reporting, the real story of the film is far from Holy. The movie was made without consultation or even permission from the players whose stories it tells. So a group of dozens of players on the team of lawyer DOP last fall as the film was being shot, they sent Villa series a cease and desist letter. And through that legal back and forth, they were given a chance to review the script being used, and what they read deeply offended them. They saw depictions of themselves frequently partying and being promiscuous. They saw dramatic soap opera subplots about completely fabricated white teammates, and a completely historically undocumented scene were Duffy Doherty talks to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. About the state of his football team. Bob epsa, the first Samoan ever selected as an All American said he was quote profoundly dismayed by the portrayal of him as nothing more than an ethnic stereotype. Specifically, he takes issue with a scene in the film, where he leads the team in a haka dance, which he says never happened. As a slight to his culture, Jimmy Ray who after MSU spent 38 years coaching in the NFL, called the script to quote attack on my reputation by portraying me as a subservient person, lacking an independent thought and character, the family of Bubba Smith, and MSU and NFL star who later stepped into Hollywood acting, said the film is defamatory and false portrayal of their late relative. And the state news has also obtained a copy of the script from a source within the production and in short, what the players say is in there is in there. And but despite their efforts to stop it, the film got made.
And now its path to release has been slowed. It's currently at a standstill. So it's done shooting, but it lacks a distributor to get it in front of an audience. So the movie is made, but someone needs to work to allow you to see it in a theater on a streaming service. And that, too, has been complicated by a lawsuit from members of the cast and crew who say they were never paid for any of their work on the film. This is also a good time to tell you that villas Arias was not able to comment at all on this story, because he's in a federal prison for financial schemes completely unrelated to the movie. So that brings us back to where we started. And since we began reporting on the story back in May MSU, has done a full review of the contents of the book. And they've now given up the rights completely, but they won't tell us what the finding of the review was. Washington, the historian and the daughter of the player that we talked about, she wished the university would do more to one, understand how the book was ever published in the first place. So instead of reviewing the content of the book, she wants them to look back at their actions that allowed it to get published, and to she wants them to work to combat this film that has come because of the decision to publish the book. And with the film looming, she says that her father, his teammates are left full of dread. I'll leave you with her words, she says, quote, unknowing people who will see this film, they'll think, Oh, this is true, because why would someone completely make up another person's life story? And why would it not be true if it's based on something that a university published? That's all for this week. We'll be back next Thursday with more. Until then the stories we discussed and plenty more available state news.com Thank you to our incredible Podcast Directory Anthony Brinson, our guests Kayla and you for listening for the 1909 I'm Alex Walters.