Julie Kendall
The United States is the only nation in the world where athletics at institutions of higher learning carry practically the same cultural importance as their professional counterparts. When you stop to think about it, it is pretty bizarre how huge college sports are. Case in point: as I write this, I, along with an estimated 20 million others, am watching young men who attend the Universities of Louisville and Michigan play basketball for the National Championship title. This year’s March Madness tournament will have generated billions of dollars in revenue for the NCAA and participating schools. That’s a lot of dough, none of which is going to the men who are actually playing the game.
I am certainly not the first person to call the NCAA and the university athletic system exploitative. While colleges often cover at least part of the education expenses of their athletes, the money they make from ticket sales, merchandising, licensing fees and television contracts from their football and basketball teams supports the entire institution. Athletes are not fairly compensated according to their value to the school, but this fact in and of itself is just the surface of the problem.
Seemingly every day, a new scandal crops up in the news involving college athletes, coaches and athletic boosters committing some sort of rule violation, whether it be an illegal transfer of money, academic fraud to maintain player eligibility, player abuse or an extensive plot by the administration to cover up a wrongdoing in order to protect their moneymaking athletic programs. Just in the past few weeks we have seen Rutgers’ basketball program fall apart and a reporter accuse Auburn’s 2010 championship squad of every infringement under the sun. While cheating is not new in college sports, the consistent and repeated problems that plague these organizations invite us to examine the system more closely.
The history of the NCAA’s relationship with its players is a dubious one. According to a piece by Taylor Branch at The Atlantic, the term “student-athlete” came into being in the 1950s essentially to avoid paying workmen’s compensation death benefits to the widow of a football player who died from a head injury he suffered on the field. As a “student-athlete,” he was killed participating in an extracurricular activity, not as an employee of the college — regardless of how much money his extracurricular activity may have generated for the his school.
Rules about what a “student-athlete” is or is not has been used as a legal defense in liability cases ever since, protecting the profiteers and leaving athletes without any leverage. To give a current example, Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered a severe leg injury on the court last week, and it looks as if he is going to be stuck paying the medical bills.
Besides functioning as a contrived legal tool, the term “student-athlete” has served as a symbol of purity, euphemistically describing young men working long unpaid hours while dreaming of playing professionally. Amateurism has become sanctified within a corporate structure, and has led to a lot of morally-ambiguous practices. After seeing the video of the abusive behavior Mike Rice almost got away with, it’s clear that student-athletes deserve more protection from the institutions that profit off of them.
