Sometimes, they get a little off their rocker.
Friday morning’s Marketplace Morning Report included a brief report and commentary on the state of college athletics, apropos of Reggie Bush’s current dilemma of sorts.
The commentator, some woman named Diana Nyad, complained that Southern California should not be held responsible for the activities of its students. At least, that’s the upshot of her rant, anyway.
She railed against a system that kept student-athletes from affording to take their girlfriends on dates, from doing their laundry in a timely manner. She came this close to suggesting they couldn’t afford to eat.
She suggested that the taking of $100,000 worth of gifts and services by Bush and/or his family wasn’t wrong, in a moral sense. Portraying Bush as some starving athlete (whither the starving artist, eh?), he had no choice, in her estimation, but to accept the money and the gifts and the bribes to sign with this agency or that one.
What a load of shit.
(I love the blogging life. I curse like this, perhaps even more, in my natural speaking, so it’s difficult to get around in a forum or what-not where your curses will be redacted, nullifying the stunning efficacy of such meaningless words as shit and fuck.)
She completely ignored the fact that these student-athletes are supposed to be amateurs. Not paid for their effort. Playing for the love of the sport, the competition.
The definition of amateur, according to the electronic dictionary built into my operating system defines amateur thusly:
a person who engages in a pursuit, esp. a sport, on an unpaid basis
Further, the origin of the word amateur comes from the Latin amator, meaning “lover.”
In other words, in any society not obsessed with cash, these kids are playing their sport for the love of the game. Not the cash.
I know what’s coming. “But the world is different! It doesn’t work that way! Those kids need that money to eat and do laundry!”
You forgot, “And buy XBox 360 video games.”
And I nearly forgot, “And weed.”
I’m not completely naïve. I know things aren’t what they once were. That sports are a means to an end, not necessarily an end unto themselves. I’m also aware of the fact that sports have long (always?) been an endeavor of finance for the colleges and universities sponsoring them.
Yet, I just can’t get past the fact that student-athletes (walk-ons excepted, of course) are getting a payment that goes beyond cash, goes beyond sports, in the form of a free education. And I can’t wrap my head around the idea that that isn’t enough.
If we were getting stories of student-athletes who were starving and had to give up their beloved sport so they could have a job in order to eat two meals a day, well… I’d be way more sympathetic.
The story out of Clemson two weeks ago regarding the NCAA making an exception to their rules that forbid the extra-scholarship financial support of a student-athlete is an exception that I not only understand, but support whole-heartedly. It’s this sort of situation that requires the NCAA to make its exceptions. And perhaps these stories are more common than we know. (The NCAA could use a public relations expert.)
But, it’s these stories that make us overlook why the NCAA has its rules in place in the first place.
The Bush story isn’t even a very good reminder, because the agent in question appeared to be simply attempting to secure the services of a future pro athlete who would bring the agent tons of cash and invaluable credibility points. The agent has no concerns about what Bush does on the field, insomuch as he steps off the field healthy after each game, and preferably after juking a couple kids of their jocks, leaping over Touchdown Jesuses and scoring no fewer than 24 points a game on 35 touches.
Let’s return, then, to the Troy Smith story of nearly two years ago. We see a younger OSU QB taking cash from a university booster, presumably for no reason at all. The idiot booster brags about owning Smith.
Owning him.
As I noted above, I’m not naïve. Boosters give handouts mostly so that these student-athletes can go about living their lives in a relaxed state. A mind too occupied by wondering when he can next do his laundry, buy his girl something not on the dollar menu, etc., is not conducive to scoring points and winning games. And that’s generally all boosters want: points and wins.
But, some boosters provide money with a quid pro quo. “Take this money and do what you can to keep the total under 55.” “Here’s a little something for you. There’s more if you guys win by ten or less. Or fifty or more. Or score another touchdown.” Whatever proposition the “booster” has lined up for his weekend deal.
Nefarious characters are everywhere. (If they can be in Oregon, they can be anywhere!)
Then there’s the other reason (some might even call it a “real” reason) universities are forbidden providing extra cash to their student-athletes aside from the scholarship and stipend: fairness.
A university such as Harvard or Yale or Carnegie Mellon (my alma mater) could have every athletic championship plaque and chalice in their gold-adorned cabinet in the Hallway of Champions if they were permitted payouts to student-athletes. These schools, among others, would pay enormous sums to bring in the best athletes and quickly forsake their academic values because those kids bring in wads and wads of real cash.
Sure, some of that cash gets reinvested in next year’s crop of über-athletes, but some of it can go toward a new dorm (probably for the atheletes), some of it can go toward a new wing in the library, some of it can go toward that really controversial professor with the book about the thing that everybody’s excited about.
Which would be really cool for the ten or fifteen schools whose endowments would permit them a kind of carte blanche in buying up every super-athlete under the sun.
But, what about the state schools, where geeks like me would end up having to go because all the students in the Humanities & Social Sciences College at Carnegie Mellon are attending for free because they play lacrosse, football, soccer, baseball, ballroom dance? “We love your SATs and your high school GPA,” they could have started (like they did), “But we simply don’t have room for a student your caliber,” could have been the terrible ending.
And those state schools, wildly underfunded anyway, are trying to educate kids with fifty year old textbooks and three-hundred year old globes (which are cool for history class, and really nothing else).
Of course, hyperbole rules the day. Of course it wouldn’t be that bad (did they make globes three hundred years ago? I didn’t really study history in college or high school. Not the history of education or navigation, leastways).
And the libertarians are screeching (you can hear them, can’t you? sounds kind of like a train screeching to a stop) “What’s wrong with that?! Free markets rules!!” (They will have gone to state schools, after all…)
What is wrong with that? Is it any different than our current situation, in which schools like the University of Miami or Ohio State University or University of Akron lure in the better athletes with the lower standardized test scores with the promise of not having to attend classes (or taking tests, anyway)?
Well, I suppose it has something to do with the definition of a word. Amateur.
These kids are supposed to be amateurs. They’re supposed to love the game. In a fairer society, perhaps they would play for the love of the game. Instead, they play for the highest bidder and in hopes of getting a fat paycheck.
Instead of fixing the inequities of life and money and assuring that the student-athletes go to college first and play a sport second, let’s just pay them, the commentator on NPR says. Let’s open up the market. Let’s pay the athlete-students. Far too onerous a proposition to deal with gamblers (a too lucrative venture to be completely abolished, ever), well-meaning boosters, or degenerate extortionists (all those who bribe have something they want to take from you, else they wouldn’t offer you that envelope with three thousand dollars cash in it). Far too something, expensive, I guess, to provide an education at an appropriate level for these kids to use and fall back on. Let’s just pay them. They are, after all, making gobs of money for their school.
Who treats them so shabbily. “Fuck tuition. I just wanna do my laundry.”
You can hear them all saying that. I heard it all the time from the football players on my dorm floor in sophomore year. I think I overheard Johnny Majors complain that his kids couldn’t even afford fries at “The O,” and they were starving, and that’s why WVU whipped their asses at the one game I attended at old Pitt Stadium.
I have another idea: Let’s do away with college athletics altogether. Universities can open athletic academies, if they’re so inclined, wherein they teach the best of the best how to run go routes, how to swing for the fences, how to bounce pass across the paint. The academies can be the conduit to the professional world for these athletes. The academies can join in business alliances with specific agencies, practically promising agents a certain number of clients, and hence a certain median income. The academies can spend significant time teaching the athlete-students the do’s and don’ts of illegal drugs, loose women, and “autograph signing when you can’t read.” These academies can even be a for-profit arm of otherwise non-profit universities, allowing the universities to suck up all the cash from boosters and agents and whatever other riffraff and put it right into the pockets of their athelete-students and into the well-groomed pants of their own suits.
Ultimately, I’m not opposed to a real-world informed stipend for each student-athlete. If the stipend provided by The Ohio State University isn’t enough to get by in Columbus, by all means, OSU should increase the stipend. I don’t know and am too lazy to go learn how stipends are determined. I assume they’re enough for these kids to get by. I’m guessing Diana Nyad’s proclamations otherwise are false, because I’ve never heard of a student-athlete who starved. One (hundreds!) who did illegal things? Absolutely. Never starved, though.
And Southern California, if the regulatory body of the NCAA deems it so, should be punished for allowing Bush his liaisons with agents and what-not. The NCAA has rules that are meant to protect the integrity and the amateur nature of the sports played at the college level. If USC allowed (it seems nearly impossible to believe that the administrators at USC were unaware of where Reggie’s beach house came from, who he spent some of his non-football/non-college time with) Bush his little promiscuities, they should be punished. It seems unfair, since Bush has moved on to his professional life, and is giving so much of his massive contract back to the city where he plays. But, USC knows the rules. If they allowed one player to bend them, they’re likely to allow others to do so, too. And it’s a fair bet that Bush’s kickbacks didn’t happen in a vacuum.
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