(I'm going to post a whole series of articles on the the NCAA and amaterurism, which I hope some of you guys repost. They'll also be in my blog. I'm pretty much convinced that I see the future in this, and a much better system than we have now, and I'd like to get these ideas into circulation).
Understanding why the NCAA has gone so badly wrong in adminstration of college athletics, with respect to fairness to the players, has to begin with a consideration of how professional sports developed in this country. To state the obvious, ALL of them began with a base of enthusiastic amateurs - professionals as a class of athletes came later. But with respect to the three major sports in the United States, there were considerable differences in the basic form of organization.
Baseball began in club mode, like soccer in most of the world. Groups of participants organized themseleves in small towns and communities throughout the US. In the beginning, there was no particular distinction between one club and the next. No one classed a team as major or minor league. But as the game evolved, clubs in major cities became richer and more powerful. They either purchased or affiliated with clubs in smaller cities, and the system of minor leagues evolved. Although baseball was played in schools, participants did not have to go to school to play. You joined a club if you were good enough. Christy Mathewson famously graduated from Bucknell, one of the rare college men of his day in major league baseball. But he elarned to pitch playing semi-pro ball beginning when he was 14 - and that was the way baseball players got into the game.
Basketball and football, on the other hand, began as school activities - extracurricular activities for male students. (Basketball technically didn't originate on a school campus, but it quickly found its way there). The vast majority of participants were students, who played while they attended school and then moved on. The basic organization of the sports were scholastic leagues, and professional franchises of next to no significance. Football was played for nearly 50 years before George Halas organized a professional league, and professional basketball similarly followed well after college basketball was pretty much entrenched.
The practical result of this evolution from school mode is that for several decades the big financial opportunity for an athlete was in college, not professionally. 'Ringers' in the 20's were a problem for college sports, just as 'boosters' were in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. An insistence on an absolute amateurism probably made sense at that point. But not any more - the amount of money at stake in professional careers is now staggering, literally tens of millions of dollars. Boosterism simply is not the problem it once was anymore. I will get to that in the next post.
Finally, which mode is better for a young athlete? Without question, the school mode. As compared with going to school and pursuing an athletic career while at the same time obtaining some sort of education, baseball is a disaster, relegating the athlete to an athletic ghetto for the most formative years of life. If the career works out, fine - if not, he (sic) finds himself in his mid 20's with no real direction. I am fully aware that many 17 year old athletes don't want to do anything but play their sport. But that's because they are 17. Some are going to run right by all of the educational opportunities that exist on a college campus - but at least they DO exist, and many are going to find their way to them.
End of sermon. On to the myth of boosterism.
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