Dallas ? Nearly four decades ago, as a young track coach at Kansas State, DeLoss Dodds had an eye for speed. Nothing he saw in those days impressed as much as haste with which his boss, the athletic director, made it to the golf course each afternoon.

“I told my wife,” Dodds recalls, “‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”‘

He got his wish sort of. Dodds was named Kansas State’s athletic director in 1976 and five years later landed in his current position, as AD at the University of Texas, where the athletic department budget is a whopping $75 million and growing. It was $6 million when Dodds arrived just two decades ago.

“I don’t know that I’ve grown up,” Dodds says. “But everything else has changed. It is so different now.”

The difference is readily apparent by the dinosaur-like disappearance of ADs from the nation’s golf courses. When the athletic chiefs of America’s colleges gather today in Dallasfor the three-day National Association of College Directors of Athletics convention, it’ll be all business. Topics will range from rules compliance to the war-horse issue that trampled the old AD stereotype nearly a quarter-century ago Title IX.

Back then, any gathering of ADs would have been dominated by good old boys, many of them former football coaches, all eager to bask in old memories while bounding along in a golf cart. Today, what former coaches there are in the AD profession keep their clubs stowed and their ears open to ideas delivered by experts on marketing, accounting and even the law, many of whom have themselves infiltrated the AD ranks.

“There was a time when football coaches retired, became ADs and played a lot of golf,” Rice AD Bobby May says. “But that was a time before deficits and women’s sports. The world was a lot simpler then. Today the job is 24-7. There are no breaks. For the most part, football coaches now would run the other way.”

“My handicap has gone way, way, way up,” confesses University of Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione. “I really don’t have time to play anymore.”

Fund raising, because of what administrators call the “arms race” in facilities and coaches’ salaries, remains a major priority. In addition, AD’s now find themselves deeply involved in TV negotiations, bowl contracts, ensuring rules compliance, providing academic support for athletes and, of course, leveling the playing field for women.

Title IX, which mandated equal opportunity for women, seemed a novel idea by federal bureaucrats when implemented 30 years ago. When strict interpretations of the statute kicked in a decade later, a tidal wave of change swept college athletics and washed away any notion that an athletic program could survive with a “figurehead” in the AD’s chair.

“Athletic directors have been forced to become better business people,” says Texas A&M athletic director Wally Groff, who was promoted out of the school’s athletic department business office.

Greater involvement by college presidents in the NCAA legislative process has produced a new emphasis on academic success and graduation rates among student-athletes.

That, too, has changed the landscape for athletic administrators. At Texas, athletes used to be advised by a single academic counselor. Now the Longhorns have 10.