The Myth of the Amateur: A History of College Athletic Scholarships 9781477322871

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The Myth of the Amateur

Terry and Jan Todd SerieS on PhySical culTure and SPorTS Edited by Sarah K. Fields, Thomas Hunt, Daniel A. Nathan, and Patricia Vertinsky Michella Marino, Roller Derby: The History of an American Sport Andrew R. M. Smith, No Way but to Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing Jason P. Shurley, Jan Todd, and Terry Todd, Strength Coaching in America: A History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports Kevin Robbins, Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf John Hoberman, Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids John D. Fair, Mr. America: The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon Thomas M. Hunt, Drug Games: The International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, 1960–2008

The Myth of the Amateur a hiS Tory of c ollege aThle T ic S chol a rSh i P S

Ronald A. Smith

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2021 by Ronald A. Smith All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of anSi/ niSo Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). library of congreSS caTaloging-in-PublicaTion daTa Names: Smith, Ronald A. (Ronald Austin), 1936– author. Title: The myth of the amateur : a history of college athletic scholarships / Ronald A. Smith. Other titles: Terry and Jan Todd series on physical culture and sports. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Series: Terry and Jan Todd series on physical culture and sports | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020041540 (print) | lccn 2020041541 (ebook) iSbn 978-1-4773-2286-4 (cloth) iSbn 978-1-4773-2287-1 (library ebook) iSbn 978-1-4773-2288-8 (non-library ebook) Subjects: lcSh: Professionalism in sports—United States. | College athletes—Scholarships, fellowships, etc.—United States—History. | College sports—United States—History. Classification: lcc gV733 .S65 2021 (print) | lcc gV733 (ebook) | ddc 796.023/73—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041540 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041541 doi:10.7560/322864

To Alan Metcalfe, professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, Ontario, who in 1993 wrote to me that “the historical belief in a major difference between amateurs and professionals is a false dichotomy. . . . When it comes to the meaning of sport, the words ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ should be eliminated.” r. a. SmiTh

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Contents

inTroducTion

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chaPTer one. Amateurism Then and Now 9 chaPTer Two. The Harvard Dilemma— Amateur or Professional 19 chaPTer Three. “Scholarships”: Eastern Authority and Early Payments 31 chaPTer four. Training, Training Tables, and Athletic Dorms 45 chaPTer fiVe. The Amateur Challenge of Summer Baseball for Pay 61 chaPTer Six. The 1929 Carnegie Report: Condemnation of Professionalism 73 chaPTer SeVen. The Southeastern Conference and Athletic Scholarships 88 chaPTer eighT. National Athletic Scholarship Failure: The Sanity Code 98 chaPTer nine. The Cleansing of the Ivy League: No Athletic Scholarships? 109 chaPTer Ten. Recruiting, Full Scholarships, and the Big Ten Succumbs 123

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chaPTer eleVen. Academic Standards, the 1.600 Rule, and Their Demise 134 chaPTer TwelVe. Taxation, Workers’ Compensation, and the “Student-Athlete” 147 chaPTer ThirTeen. Women’s Athletics, Title IX, and the Kellmeyer Lawsuit 160 chaPTer fourTeen. Television, Unions, and the Collapse of Amateurism 177 chaPTer fifTeen. Is NCAA “Amateurism” Alive?: The O’Bannon Lawsuit Impact 189 chaPTer SixTeen. The Alston and Jenkins Lawsuits, and NCAA Fig-Leafed Professionalism 203 chaPTer SeVenTeen. State and Federal Legislative Pay-for-Play Action 218 Afterword

231

Acknowledgments Timeline

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Notes

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Index

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Contents

239

Introduction

The amateur, and not the professional, is the desirable citizen. Theodore rooSeVelT, 1890

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly. anTon chekhoV, 1888

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“ n order To PreSerVe The characTer and qualiTy of [college athletics], athletes must not be paid.”1 This was written in 1984 by US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when, in his majority opinion, he described college football players as amateurs in the first antitrust decision in amateur sport history. Stevens wrote the important decision that removed control of football telecasts from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).2 Supreme Court justices, nevertheless, like other mortals, have troubles with facts as well as opinions. College athletes have been given financial favors or offers from the time of the first intercollegiate American contest in 1852 to the present. College athletics for men, though not for women, have never been truly amateur. Yet well into parts of three centuries, leaders of colleges and universities have claimed that they are. In no other field do institutions of higher learning feel it necessary to claim amateurism—in music, art, drama, or any extracurricular activity. Apparently, that was as true in the past as in the present. No one demands that a trumpeter in a university jazz band be an amateur, not even if the individual is on a music scholarship or if that person is paid

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for performing music outside the institution during the school year or on summer vacation. No college challenges the amateur status of the thespian acting in a Shakespeare play, the student photographer who sells her photos on eBay, or the dancer who is paid for a performance in a play in summer theater.3 That is true for anyone other than an athlete who participates in intercollegiate competitions, as some collegians do in the College Cheerleading National Championships, the College Dance Team Championships, or the National Debate Tournament.4 There is nothing sacred about being called an amateur, nor is being a professional a derogatory term in the twenty-first century. But that was not always the case. This is a saga of how paying college athletes came about through various means, including athletic scholarships—the compensation for athletes to attend college and participate in athletics while being considered amateurs. First, it is an account of how any pay in the nineteenth century and beyond, including athletic scholarships, was considered unethical and anti-amateur. That story changed in the twentieth century when undercover payments were nearly universal in the most important college sports. This led a reluctant NCAA to eventually allow athletic scholarships.5 By the end of the twentieth century, there were calls for outright payment specifically for men competing in football and basketball, the two profit-making Big-Time sports. By then, however, there were major legal reasons why leaders of the NCAA emphatically spoke out about and included in their constitution emphasis on the meaning of amateur sport. The morality of being an amateur had lost any hold it had ever had on the American imagination. Nevertheless, calling college sport amateur was necessary to financially protect college sport, and particularly the NCAA, from harmful legal and legislative action at the state and national level. I have been collecting material on athletic scholarships and payment to college athletes since the 1960s. At that time, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on a group of normal schools, then teachers’ colleges, and eventually colleges and universities that became the Wisconsin State University Conference. Prior to that, I had been recruited to play baseball and basketball at Northwestern University and was given an academic scholarship with the understanding that if I did not keep a “B” average, it would turn into an athletic scholarship. With that bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin, I moved in the direction of sport history with a PhD in physical education. During my dissertation research, I was surprised by the hypocrisy in athletics at the two-year teacher-training normal schools in Wisconsin. This included such activities as payments to athletes and enticing members of the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League to 2

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Introduction

participate so that Oshkosh Normal could beat Stevens Point Normal for the normal school football championship.6 It made me suspicious of all college athletics, especially when I found in the institutional archives that presidents knew of the illegal player payments and did nothing to stop them—or even contributed to the athlete outlays. When I arrived at Penn State in the late 1960s, I was already a skeptic, a good quality for any historian. I wanted to know how well the Nittany Lions administrators were following the rules at the same time that I was enjoying watching a variety of very good Penn State teams and cheering them on over more than three decades of purchasing football season tickets. My skepticism about Penn State became apparent when I was interviewing in 1968 for a faculty position with the assistant and associate deans of the College of Health and Physical Education, where the athletic department was located. I asked a question of Nick Thiel, the right-hand man of Dean Ernie McCoy. “Is there,” I queried, “ever any pressure placed on professors for athletes’ grades at Penn State?” “Let me tell you a story,” Thiel answered, for he had been at Penn State since the 1930s, when he was lacrosse coach. “When Joe Paterno was assistant football coach,” Thiel told me, “he once put pressure on a faculty member for an athlete’s grade to keep him eligible.” It turned out that when Dean McCoy heard of the Paterno pressure, he called Paterno into his office. This straight-shooting, former academic All-American basketball player from the University of Michigan told Paterno, “If I ever again hear of you putting pressure on a professor for grades, you will no longer be coaching at Penn State.”7 To my knowledge, he never did. For my twenty-eight years on the Penn State faculty and as a researcher in over eighty archives, this skeptic came to believe that Penn State, of all the major schools, likely had the cleanest athletic program in America. I concluded that the athletic scholarships given to students at Penn State were within the NCAA rules. I did not hear of extra payments going to the star athletes on the football team, as had occurred to the national power Southern Methodist University in the 1980s, which eventually led to the “death penalty” for football at that institution. SMU has still not recovered from that penalty. Nevertheless, Penn State remained clean, if not squeaky clean. It has the distinction of being one of only four universities to have never had a major penalty imposed by the NCAA.8 My research, however, found illegal athletic scholarships and other payments to athletes in many institutions. Illegal recruiting and financial benefits to athletes are the primary reason why the NCAA has given out major penalties since the 1950s, when it first took over national legislation and handed out punishments for breaking its constitution and bylaws. 3

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Introduction

This inquiry into amateurism and the history of men’s and women’s athletic scholarships begins with the first contest between Harvard and Yale. In 1852, the men on both crews had all their expenses paid for eight days while they vacationed in New Hampshire and rowed a couple of times on Lake Winnipesaukee before hundreds of spectators.9 These were commercially paid athletes nearly a decade before the start of the American Civil War. The saga continues, but the payment of athletes has not been solved satisfactorily after two decades of the twenty-first century of athletes being officially compensated financially to participate in “amateur” sport. That is why I am calling this volume The Myth of the Amateur. If the colleges cover up our embarrassed amateur privates, the NCAA can continue the “purity” strategy that sportsmen and sportswomen once believed, erroneously, came from the ancient Greeks and the Olympics.10 The fig leaf is a cover-up, in some ways similar to the biblical story, but in college athletics there was no original Garden of Eden, no sinless time when there was purity in amateur college athletics. The fig-leafed professionals were there from the beginning. Few volumes are written without the help of others who have written on the same or similar subject, in this case college sport. When I began my original research, the only individual devoting full-time academic efforts to understanding the place of college sport in the nation’s history was Guy Lewis. His 1964 PhD at the University of Maryland was titled “The American Intercollegiate Football Spectacle, 1869–1917.” Two years later, I was beginning my research that would result in a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin on the history of an intercollegiate athletic conference. Since then, many academics have taken up researching and writing about college sports in many disciplines. Books or major research projects have been conducted in African American studies, American studies, anthropology, business, classics, economics, education, geography, history, Judaic studies, kinesiology, labor relations, law, literature, mass communications, philosophy, political science, religion, sociology, and women’s studies. Some studies stand out. We should all be indebted to the outstanding research of classicist David  C. Young, who shows convincingly in The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics that the ancient Greeks, and their Olympic Games, had no such word as amateur. Remaining the best institutional history of college sport is Robin Lester’s Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. His book, based on his early-1970s dissertation at the University of Chicago, emphasizes primary sources and was the first and is still the best department of history study on college athletics. It includes material on coach Amos 4

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Introduction

Alonzo Stagg’s questionable amateurism at Chicago. A political scientist who wrote like a historian, Joseph Crowley, contributed a valuable history of the NCAA, In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century. As a university president and former president of the NCAA, Crowley produced an insightful and objective work, surprisingly because In the Arena is an NCAA publication. Historian John Watterson has a solid volume on College Football: History—Spectacle—Controversy that notes some subsidies to athletes but little on amateurism controversies. Educational historian John Thelin’s Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics (1994) emphasizes four major reform efforts in college athletics but does not emphasize amateurism and the payment of players. Michael Oriard, a professor of American literature, wrote three fine books on college athletics, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle in the 1990s and later King Football and Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era. However, he says little about college athletes being paid and its impact on the concept of amateurism. Another literature professor, Murray Sperber, produced two 1990s histories of college athletics, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football and Onward to Victory: The Crises That Shaped College Sports. Sperber notes amateurism, but almost nothing before the Sanity Code of the 1940s. Ray Schmidt, a sport historian, has written a great deal on college football, including Shaping College Football: The Transformation of an American Sport, 1919–1930. In it, he notes the prominent 1929 Carnegie Foundation report American College Athletics but makes few comments about amateurism and the payment of players. Only a few scholars have spent years looking at college sports for women as well as men and how their sports related to amateurism and education. Sociologist Alan Sack and sport management scholar Ellen Staurowsky looked at both men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletics in their College Athletes for Hire. Their volume condemns college athletic commercialism and traces much of the breakdown of amateurism to the Sanity Code in the 1940s and the full athletic scholarships that followed. Scholarships for college women were part of the professionalism that followed. The professionalism of college women is dealt with in two other important volumes. One was by a sport historian, Ying Wushanley, in his Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle for Control of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960–2000. He expresses little about amateurism but a great deal about how payment to women came after the Kellmeyer lawsuit in the early 1970s. Welch Suggs, a journalist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, contributed a fine work on Title IX and its impact on women’s sport and the payment of women athletes. His A Place on the Team: The Triumph and 5

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Introduction

Tragedy of Title IX contributes almost nothing on amateurism but a great deal on the impact of scholarships for women, which were the antithesis to amateurism under the original Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and soon accepted under the NCAA. Joan Hult and Marianna Trekell explore many aspects of women’s basketball in their edited A Century of Women’s Basketball. My understanding of college women’s sports was enhanced significantly by Susan Cahn’s Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. She was one of the first women writers to see the negative impact by college women physical educators on skilled college women athletes for much of the twentieth century. A number of economists have looked at intercollegiate athletics historically, but they appear to be far more interested in the behavior of cartels and monopolies than in the concept of amateurism. Authors Arthur Fleisher, Brian Goff, and Robert Tollison, in The National Collegiate Athletic Association: A Study in Cartel Behavior, and Paul Lawrence, in Unsportsmanlike Conduct: The National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Business of College Football, take no account of the origin of amateurism. Nor does Mark Yost in Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics. Charles Clotfelter, in Big-Time Sports in American Universities, does a good job of discussing the hypocrisies in highly commercialized sports and showing how athletes are not benefitting greatly from the profits of men’s basketball and football. Andrew Zimbalist, in The Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in BigTime College Sport, is one of the economists who has a concern for the treatment of athletes. All of the economists’ studies show clearly that the financial side of athletics has dominated the direction taken by college sport, including the payment of players, through much of the twentieth century and into the next. A great deal has been written about legal impacts on the development of college sport, though most studies are found in law journals. Lawyer Brian Porto’s The Supreme Court and the NCAA is instructive on the various court cases, especially those dealing with the commercialism of college sport. His fine volume is dominated by the 1984 Supreme Court television decision breaking up the NCAA football monopoly and the lack of NCAA due process in the Coach Jerry Tarkanian case. He notes comments on amateurism by the justices in the case but does not pursue the impact. Neither does he emphasize the influence the justices’ words have had on the concept of amateurism and the increased payment of athletes in the 2010s. Attorney Marc Edelman, writing prior to the major lawsuits against the NCAA in the 2010s, offered a prescient observation on labeling college athletes as amateurs for legal effect. In “A Short 6

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Introduction

Treatise on Amateurism and Antitrust Law,” Edelman notes that the US Supreme Court has stated that the NCAA’s violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 could not evade scrutiny simply by the NCAA giving ongoing violations a popular name and a label. If that were successful, Edelman noted, “all trade associations would simply define their activities as amateurism as a way to circumvent the antitrust law.”11 Until the Ed O’Bannon case (described in chapters 14 and 15), the NCAA had been successful in doing just that. Several books by leading educators and administrators have contributed to my better understanding of commercialized-professionalized college sports. Walter Byers, who was executive director of the NCAA for decades, was not a lawyer, but his observations about college sport, legal and otherwise, were vitally important to my better understanding of the NCAA’s role in preserving amateurism and limiting the payment of athletes. Following his retirement from the NCAA in 1987, Byers’s exposé, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, gives an insider’s view of how colleges have controlled male athletes in the name of amateurism. Important to my understanding of commercialization of college sport was former Harvard president Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Bok clearly confirms that athletic commercialization came first, but later nearly everything in higher education took on a commercial price, from funded research to distance learning. William Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Sarah Levin’s research published in Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values shows how educational values have been distorted by the recruitment of athletes. This was true of small elite colleges as well as universities. At a large institution, Michigan, former president James Duderstadt shows in Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University the commercial-professional nature of intercollegiate athletics and the myth of amateur athletics. Several twenty-first-century histories have helped strengthen my understanding of college sport. One wonderfully written volume by a patent attorney is Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football by Roger Tamte. Specifically, Tamte fortified my understanding of how the two most important early intercollegiate institutions, Harvard and Yale, viewed amateurism. Brian Ingrassia’s The Rise of Gridiron University offers a strong case for the progressive-era NCAA leaders trying to prevent further commercialization and professionalism in college sport by strongly advocating faculty control and traditional amateurism for athletes. Kurt Kemper’s book about the Cold War and college athletes, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era, made me think more about 7

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Introduction

the Cold War’s impact on women’s sport. A physician, David J. Young, has published two fine books involving Michigan State University in the development of college sport. He has shown how presidents have been involved in intrigue and professionalizing college athletics in Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten: Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition and in The Student and His Professor: John Hannah, Ralph Aigler and the Michigan State-Michigan Rivalry. Howard Chudacoff, a historian from Brown University, has pulled together a well-written synthesis of recent literature in his volume Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sport. He emphasizes money, media, race, gender, and reform in the period after the Sanity Code was passed in the 1940s. A book by Matthew Lindaman, Fit for America, is a biography of athletic leader and Big-Ten commissioner Major John Griffith. His work indicates how difficult it was in the first half of the twentieth century to keep Big Ten athletes amateur while Griffith was strongly opposed to any control by the NCAA. Another book on amateurism with a marked Griffith emphasis is Winton Solberg’s Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization. Only tangentially related to amateurism is Albert Figone’s Cheating the Spread: Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball. It shows that colleges paid thousands of dollars through athletic scholarships to “amateur” players while gambling among college students and players was increasing, leading to several noted scandals. These and other recent writings have enlightened and reinforced my historical understanding since my book on intercollegiate athletics, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, was first published in 1988. This volume, however, is written principally from primary sources that I have collected over the past half century. It is a historical attempt to account for the controversial college athletic “amateurism” and payment of men’s and women’s athletics in America for more than a century and a half. I will leave to the courts or legislatures to decree or legislate the payment of college athletes and to justify those payments. Payment of college athletes in the future will likely be strongly influenced by how they have been paid in the past, and it would be good to know how those payments have occurred over parts of the past three centuries. I believe that the Russian writer Anton Chekhov made sense in the late 1800s when he told us that the task of the writer is not to solve the problem but to state it correctly.12 May the history of fig-leafed college professionals be expressed accurately.

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Introduction

ch a PTer one

Amateurism Then and Now

When the world was managed by a few rich and powerful individuals, . . . they were fond of professing that it is praiseworthy . . . that good should be done without hope of reward. alexiS de TocqueVille, 1840

S

horTly afTer world war i, a commiTTee of The National Collegiate Athletic Association told the truth about amateurism and the commercial-professional spirit existing for a half century before and more than a century after the war. “We are told by the college officials that we must conduct our sports and play along amateur lines,” the letter read, “but we must finance them along lines that are purely commercial and professional.”1 A few years later, a writer for the North American Review noted that the amateur code was “obsolete and impractical from the first.”2 Still, there was a spirit of amateurism attached to clearly commercial-professional college athletics from the nineteenth century to well into the twenty-first century. What was considered amateur kept changing from the 1800s until the 2000s. Activities that were once considered professional became acceptable, while activities no longer amateur were still part of the amateur myth and written into the NCAA constitution and bylaws. In other words, true intercollegiate athletic amateurism did not exist, but the concept of amateurism lived on. The saga of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of amateur sport in the management of collegiate commercial and professional sport needs to be more fully told and understood.

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The amaTeur- ProfeSSional dilemma One of the paradoxes with which the NCAA was involved during the twentieth century was the definition of the professional coach. Early on, the professional coach, like paying athletes to attend college, was anathema to true amateurism.3 Nevertheless, the leaders of college sport eventually allowed the coaches of specific sports to become the highest paid college officials, and in state-related institutions generally the state’s highest paid employee.4 Coaches were revered as godlike individuals throughout the twentieth century. The pro coach, however, was once opposed by purists nearly as much as were various outright payments to athletes. The professional coach came into existence in college athletics, specifically in competitive rowing, in the decade after the first intercollegiate athletic contest took place in America. The paid coach, indeed, violated the concept of amateurism first created in England, a topic that will be developed later. What was American athletic amateurism, and how and why did the term come into existence in the nineteenth century, lasting until well into the twenty-first century? Answers to these questions lie in the emergence of intercollegiate athletics in America. Since the nineteenth century, many Americans have expressed the amateur ideal in college sport, yet they have accepted the practice of professionalism in collegiate contests. It occurred early on in rowing, baseball, track and field, and football, the first four important American collegiate sports for men.5 One might ask why American athletics accepted the professional model in colleges and why the controlling administrators felt the need to justify their actions in the name of amateur athletics. For Americans, a historical amateur-professional dilemma in sport has occurred, and, as in the case of any dilemma, all alternatives are undesirable. The dilemma of the past might be stated as follows: If a college has truly amateur sport, it will lose prestige as it loses contests, but if a college practices outright professional sport, the college will lose respectability as a middle-class or upper-class institution of higher learning. The unsatisfactory resolution to this dilemma historically has been to claim amateurism to the larger society while hypocritically deploying a professional mode of operation. Thus, for most of intercollegiate athletic history, colleges have claimed amateurism to the world while they pay the expenses of athletes and teams, such as providing academic tutoring, giving free meals at a training table, and offering athletic scholarships. At the same time, the colleges have collected gate receipts and hired professional coaches, both of which were at one time violations of amateurism. 10

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The Myth of the Amateur

The term amateur has long been a charged word. Historically, since the mid-nineteenth century, the word amateur used in sport has stood for positive values in relation to professional, which has had negative connotation. Amateur for years meant good and elevated, while professional denoted bad and degraded. The praise of the amateur and the condemnation of the professional have a long history; they came to America in the nineteenth century from the British Isles, a function of British social class elitism with a false salute to supposed ancient Greek “amateurism.” There is “no evidence of amateurism” in ancient Greek society, according to classicist David C. Young. He has shown that the term amateur was conceived by nineteenth-century upper-class partisans in Britain who wanted to separate themselves from the working class, that is, those who worked with their hands for a living. “Ancient amateurism is a myth,” Young clearly shows. There was “no mention of amateurism in Greek sources, no reference to amateur athletes. In fact, there is no evidence that the concept of ‘amateurism’ was even known in antiquity.”6 It was, in short, a made-up British concept.

The uPPer- claSS briTiSh model The British upper classes did not want to compete against those considered well below them socially. The British were the world’s leaders of organized sport in the nineteenth century, and their social elite created the word amateur relative to sport to separate themselves from other sport participants.7 Amateurism is what British historian Tony Collins has called “a means of imposing social distinction.”8 It may be coincidental that amateurism first occurred in America’s original collegiate sport— rowing. In 1870, the British Amateur Rowing Association excluded from amateur rowing anyone who was a “mechanic, artisan, or labourer or engaged in menial duty.”9 Since then, almost every definition of amateur has not been one of affirmation but rather disapproval, a rebuff of professionalism. Thus, an amateur is one who has never competed in a competition open to professionals; never competed for money; never competed with a professional; never competed in a contest in which gate receipts were collected; and never taught or pursued athletics as a means of livelihood.10 The term “never” is important. Amateurism has always been defined in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. It is nearly impossible to find a positive, workable definition of amateur in athletics. If amateurism is not defined in negative terms, such as never participating for remuneration, then it is generally defined as a state of mind 11

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Amateurism Then and Now

determined by the imagined motives of the athlete. The amateur athlete, it has often been stated, participates only for the love of the sport, or as the NCAA has stated in the twenty-first century, for the “physical, mental and social benefits” derived—merely an “avocation.”11 Amateurism, to many believers, is an attitude, not a state of being. If amateurism is an attitude determined by the athlete, it leads to a perplexing problem. First, external judges can never prove the motives, the state of mind or attitude, of the amateur. Second, the historic claiming of positive virtues of the amateur relative to the professional is a false concept. There is simply no evidence that an amateur is more virtuous than a professional. In fact, the reverse may be true, for the amateur at the upper levels of competition receives financial advantage for participation in amateur sport, certainly a hypocritical stance. This has been the situation in college sport from the first competitive contest.

The kindS of amaTeur PaymenTS Examples of actual payment of athletes early on in intercollegiate athletics are numerous, including at the first intercollegiate contest, a crew meet between Harvard and Yale at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. In 1852, the crew members were given an eight-day vacation with all expenses paid, payment enough for the Harvard and Yale rowers. Or as the owner of the new Boston to Montreal Railroad offered to the captain of the Yale crew, “If you will get up a regatta on the Lake between Yale and Harvard, I will pay all the bills.”12 Soon, though, explicit financial gifts would arise in the sport of rowing and in other sports. Three examples will suffice. By the early 1870s, during the intercollegiate regatta at Lake Saratoga, New York, the winning crew members were given silver goblets worth $500. Comparing the prize to average laborer’s wages of $300 a year, one can judge the enormity of the award. At the same regatta, intercollegiate runners competed for a similar award worth an estimated $500. A Harvard student noted that it was worth several months of intense practice to win one of the track prizes at Saratoga.13 Yet, even before regular intercollegiate contests were held, Charles W. Eliot, who would become Harvard’s president in 1869, was competing as an undergraduate for the same elite institution for a $75 prize in an open contest in a Boston regatta, and Harvard competed for purses as high as $500 in other Boston regattas.14 If monetary awards were anathema to the concept of amateurism, the payment of a coach was a clear violation of amateurism. The professional 12

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The Myth of the Amateur

coach may have been the single most important element in intercollegiate professionalism. Only a dozen years after the first intercollegiate crew meet in America, the first professional rowing coach was hired. In the midst of the American Civil War, with General Ulysses S. Grant making his historic assaults on the Confederacy in Virginia, Yale students hired a professional oarsman from New York City, William Wood, to train their crew in a successful attempt to defeat Harvard for the first time in the college regatta.15 Within a generation, professional coaches were hired by most colleges in the dominant college sports of rowing, baseball, track and field, and football. Football led the way by the early 1900s, often paying coaches more than professors for ten weeks of work in the fall. For example, John Heisman at Georgia Tech in 1904 was making $2,250 in addition to 30 percent of the gate receipts. Fielding H. Yost at the University of Michigan in 1901 was paid $2,300 plus housing and living expenses during the season.16 College professors were making considerably less. Harvard, without a pro coach, was still using only unpaid Harvard graduates as coaches, struggling to win against its chief rivals. For years, Harvard’s President Eliot had attempted to keep athletics an amateur endeavor while he led American higher education into a professional attitude more in tune with nineteenth-century, urban-industrial America. The president wrote in 1894, “With athletics considered as an end in themselves, pursued either for pecuniary profit or for popular applause, a college or university has nothing to do.”17 Eliot, however, had demanded a professionalized faculty while he expanded Harvard professional schools, such as law and medicine.18 Though Eliot called for the Harvard man who “excels in manly sport” in his 1869 inaugural address, he opposed the professional mode that clearly created excellence in athletics.19 Eliot was thus truly in sympathy with the English upper-class individuals who gave America the amateur concept. Two American college crews, both of which had professional coaches, rowed in the English Henley Regatta in the early 1900s. Reacting to the American professionalism, the headmaster of Eton, an elite English public boarding school—similar to President Eliot, who condemned the practices among American colleges—wrote, “I do earnestly desire that our amateur oarsmanship may be preserved from the deadly inroad of professionals, which is already making a business of so much that ought to be pleasure, and threatens to crush the life out of the sports of merrie England.”20 Still, the athletic professionalization of American colleges continued in earnest. There was probably no college in America that was able to preserve amateurism in men’s sport by the early twentieth century. Pervading the 13

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Amateurism Then and Now

American intercollegiate athletic scene were professional coaches, competition for money and expensive nonmonetary prizes, contests against professional teams, collection of gate receipts, support for training tables to feed athletes, construction of dorms for athletes, provision for the tutoring of athletes, and recruitment and payment of athletes. As educational historian Edwin Slossen sarcastically noted in 1910, “the professional spirit prevails in Yale athletics, and the amateur spirit prevails in Yale scholarship.”21 Professionalism, at Yale and most other institutions, had invaded college sports and had defeated amateurism as it was understood and had emanated from Britain in the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, the foundation for an anti-amateur ideology existed before amateurism in sport even existed. Alexis de Tocqueville, the keen nineteenth-century French aristocrat-observer of American society, traveled widely in America in the early 1830s. He wrote about freedom and equality in antebellum America and was writing before amateurism became important in sport in America and elsewhere. The insightful Tocqueville might have predicted the different British and American versions of amateurism. “When the world was managed by a few rich and powerful individuals,” he writes in his famous Democracy in America, “these persons loved to entertain a lofty idea of the duties of man.” If applied to amateurism in sport, Tocqueville’s comments would suggest that the new regime of democracy in young America would not long tolerate the old regime of aristocracy in which the elite dictated how the games should be played, and that amateurism should prevail. Aristocrats, he states, “were fond of professing that it is praiseworthy to forget oneself and that good should be done without hope of reward.”22 Amateurism to the British elite was supposedly done without the hope of reward, but it was conducted in the name of noblesse oblige—the idea of high-birth gentlemanly obligation to the less privileged.23 Gentlemanly obligation did not translate well into an America that lacked an aristocratic tradition and was now favoring, to use Tocqueville’s terms, an “equality of conditions.”24

The Paradox: amaTeuriSm and freedom of oPPorTuniTy The historical paradox in amateur college sport of the nineteenth century is still with us. As American universities move well into the twenty-first century, college coaches are paid with extraordinary salaries, athletes are recruited and paid to participate in a number of sports,

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and institutions engage in numerous other professional athletic activities, such as allowing coaches to have endorsement contracts. It is both a selfcontradiction and hypocrisy, the pretense of virtuous character without possessing virtue. To call collegiate sport amateur is in fact playacting, the true ancient Greek definition of the term hypocrisy. College sport, with its many asserted virtues, is being represented as amateur sport while being played like professional sport. One should ask if amateurism could ever have worked in American colleges as it did at the elite institutions of higher education in England, Oxford, and Cambridge. The probable answer is not likely, because of a unique ideology. No matter how much America aped the nineteenthcentury English Victorian culture in style, literature, art, and music, the American ideology emanating from the split from England and the resulting Revolutionary War would not likely permit a fraudulent amateur spirit in American sport. The aristocratic, elite-based concept of amateurism of the British did not fit well into the American ideology of freedom and equality. This ideology is best exemplified by the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson began America’s “sacred” document with the claim of a universal birthright to equality and an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As Danielle Allen of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has noted, “the Declaration starts and finishes . . . with equality.”25 In America, unlike the traditional aristocracy in Britain, there was a belief in the equality of opportunity, an equality under the law, and freedom to pursue life’s goals. Though this was an ideal, it was not always practiced, as has clearly been seen in the treatment of women, Native Americans, and African Americans. However, it could be expressed in many areas of life, including the male-dominated collegiate athletic field. The dominating nineteenth-century American ideology based upon freedom and equality would not long allow the British upper-class concept of amateur sport to permeate American college sport. Numerous historians have commented on this ideology. In his classic study The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, Gordon  S. Wood states that the American Revolution brought about “one of the most coherent and powerful revolutionary ideologies the Western world has yet seen—an ideology based upon the principles of liberty.” Roger Burlingame, author of The American Conscience, agrees that the concept of liberty and equality “has remained, to the great body of the American people, an instrument of conscience replete with ideals as sacred as those of the gospel.” David Potter, in his brilliant volume Freedom and Its Limitation in American Life,

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expresses belief that the freedom growing out of the revolution meant to America an equality of opportunity. Even the British historian J. R. Pole writes in The Pursuit of Equality in American History that liberty and equality are the “two central commitments of the American Republic.”26 More recently, historians have continued to point out the American emphasis on freedom and equality. This includes Danielle Allen in Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. She emphasizes that “we cannot have freedom without equality.” Eric Foner in his The Story of American Freedom agrees that there was a “triumphant march of two principles: freedom and equality.” A strong case for an emphasis on freedom and equality in America can be made, and it may be assumed that the ideology strongly influenced college athletics—at least men’s sports. Combining the two ideological concepts, it might be argued that the pervasive ideological belief of freedom of opportunity led to a breakdown of amateurism and the rise of professionalism in college sport. A general freedom of opportunity would have influenced American colleges to develop differently from the system of higher education in England that catered to its upper class. One of the major differences was that Oxford and Cambridge had a monopoly on higher education in England, a monopoly of the socially elite. Those two universities dominated the entire period of the development of intercollegiate sport. In America, no two institutions, even the leaders, Harvard and Yale, could control higher education, though they might have chosen to do so. There was a greater freedom and opportunity to found colleges because private, religious, state, or local money was available. Thus, the great private institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale evolved alongside outstanding state-supported universities such as California, Michigan, and Wisconsin. There was no upper-class control of higher education and upper-class control of athletics, with its elite concept of amateurism, such as occurred at Oxford and Cambridge. Even if American institutions of higher education had wanted to develop amateur sport based on the Oxbridge model, they could not have succeeded. There simply was no easy way to control sport in a select group of colleges, because there was no way to control the quality or quantity of institutions of higher education. Any individual, group, or city or state government could found a college. Furthermore, any college that wanted to raise intercollegiate athletics to a level of excellence could do so with a commitment of time, effort, and financial backing. Freedom of opportunity was a pervasive feature in the development of the American college and its athletics. Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, had no equivalent to the American intercollegiate experience in crew in the 16

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1870s. There was no competition for Oxford and Cambridge. In America, however, small colleges with freedom of opportunity could develop crews as Yale and Harvard had done before them, challenging the more elite institutions. Thus, the “farmers” from Massachusetts Agricultural College (later the University of Massachusetts), the “mechanics” from outback Cornell University, or the Methodists from Wesleyan College could produce crews by hiring professional coaches and recruiting and subsidizing rowers, and challenge the established colleges from the colonial era. They could also produce victories at the intercollegiate regatta, the most publicized intercollegiate event until football took its place in the 1880s and 1890s.

harVard and yale are noT oxford and cambridge Egalitarian principles were more dominant than any elitist desires that might have existed at Harvard or Yale, the closest equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge that America had to offer. Separate dual competitions between Harvard and Yale, in an attempt to keep themselves socially and athletically above the fray, as Oxford and Cambridge had done for generations in England, were unsuccessful. Harvard’s and Yale’s attempts at isolating themselves from the lesser colleges would eventually mean a loss of athletic esteem and prestige. Harvard and Yale could not long remain athletically superior to, nor separate from, the newer and less prestigious institutions in an America that had strong egalitarian principles and belief in freedom of opportunity.27 In a similar way, the upper-class amateur ideal of participating for the enjoyment of the contest and for no other motive, including financial consideration, could not easily exist in a society whose freedom-ofopportunity ideology allowed all to seek excellence through ability and hard work. Intercollegiate athletics fit well into that ideological model, and a meritocracy based upon effort and talent (often recruited and paid in some form) resulted in men’s college athletics from an early time. Achieved status in colleges and in athletics became the American way rather than an ascribed status based on social class, as seen in England’s elitist universities and their athletics.28 The English amateur system, based upon participation by the social and economic elite and a rejection of the social inferior, never gained a foothold in American college athletics.29 There was too much competition, too strong a belief in merit over heredity, and too abundant 17

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an ideology based on freedom of opportunity for the amateur ideal to succeed. It may be that amateurism can never succeed in a society that has egalitarian beliefs. It may be that amateur athletics at a high level of expertise can exist only in a society dominated by upper-class elitists. The historic amateur-professional dilemma that has existed for several centuries persists. As Senator William Fulbright, former president of the University of Arkansas, once stated several generations ago, college sport “pretends to be amateur, while it is in fact professional.”30 The dilemma is founded on the need to protect college sport from outside criticism by using acceptable amateur language while at the same time desiring the prestige and status that comes from a highly professionalized model producing excellence and winning. The name amateur given to college sports by the National Collegiate Athletic Association will likely remain until the NCAA and the larger society no longer value the use of the outdated term. Or it may be that outside forces, such as government legislation or judicial decisions, force colleges to accept the reality that college sports can no longer be considered amateur.31

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ch a PTer Two

The Harvard Dilemma—Amateur or Professional A gentleman has something better to be than a professional athlete. charleS e. norTon, 1889

You, Harvard, show the world that at least one American university recognizes sport for sport’s sake. caSPar whiTney, 1903

A “

lThough we dePlore [knowlTon “Snake”] ameS’ receipt of money on this occasion,” a Princeton professor noted in reference to an 1889 Harvard accusation, “this fact does not constitute professionalism which is a habit.”1 Snake Ames, a star running back on the Princeton team from Chicago, had received money the previous summer for playing in a baseball game between the West Ends and the Whitings of the Chicago City League. He had also been paid for participating in a baseball game outside Chicago between Joliet and Aurora. He was thus a professional by the standards of Harvard, most other colleges, and traditional English amateur regulations. Ames should have been ineligible to play football for Princeton against Harvard toward the end of the fall football season. To the contrary, Princeton’s facultydominated Athletic Advisory Committee pointed its finger at the other two members of the athletic powers of the nineteenth century, Harvard and Yale, claiming Princeton was “the least prone to irregular practices in former years.” It declared, “Harvard initiated the practice of importing players, and Yale of bringing back or retaining graduate experts on her teams.”2 Each of these questionable activities was considered a violation of amateurism in the early years. 19

The 1889 big Three conflicT and winning in america The habit or non-habit of payment to Snake Ames and others for playing “summer baseball,” as it was known, set off a controversial blaze that ended in Harvard withdrawing from the Intercollegiate Football Association, the dominant football organization begun in the mid-1870s. The dispute also caused a six-year break in athletic relations between Harvard and Princeton. Not only was the question of amateurism raised, but the polemic was originally stirred by playing graduate students, especially by Harvard. College graduates were often more mature athletes who had generally played at other institutions before being recruited to join the esteemed institution as graduate students, usually in the law, medicine, or divinity graduate schools. While the 1889 conflict was only one of many over student-controlled athletics in the nineteenth century, it involved the Big Three, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, reflecting the problems of the breaking of amateur traditions and the paying of athletes to compete at the highest levels in the 1800s. Harvard was by far the oldest college in America, but it was also the most prestigious institution outside of a few universities in Europe and on the British Isles. Where Harvard led, it was common for the rest of American colleges to follow. This was true in athletics, where, for instance, Harvard alone fought for and succeeded in bringing rugby football (expanded into American football) to replace soccer, but it was also true in other college affairs.3 For instance, under President Charles Eliot (1869–1909), Harvard was a national leader in the development of graduate education, setting higher standards for its professional schools, expanding the elective system for undergraduates, constructing a union for students to congregate, eliminating the daily religious chapel requirement for all students, and raising salaries, providing pensions, and offering sabbaticals to professors.4 Paradoxically, when President Eliot in his inaugural address called for Harvard to excel in manly sports, he placed great value not on winning but rather on competing in the spirit of amateurism and gentlemanly participation. Eliot and some other elites were more in tune with John Muirhead, an upper-class British traveler to America who favored amateur sport. Muirhead criticized American collegians, claiming that “the desire to win must be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play”—the amateur ideal.5 The intense desire to win, as opposed to a sense of honor and fair play, was also a concern of Endicott Peabody.

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Peabody was an American patrician by birth, like Eliot, and educated in the English public school of Cheltenham and at Cambridge University. He returned to America and in 1894 founded the elite Groton School for Boys in Massachusetts. He believed that the object of sport in England “is recreation, in America it is victory.” In America, Peabody believed, “we take the most promising men and make them practically perfect in our teams.” He claimed that England was a better place to live, but America was a better place to work because “life of the ordinary man who is in earnest counts for a good deal more.” In other words, American society allowed ordinary individuals who worked hard to get ahead both socially and financially, as opposed to England, in which society was more rigid and ruled by the elites at the top. American society, Peabody emphasized, was “plastic,” not unchangeable as in England.6 The American belief in the plasticity of society provides a key to understanding the emphasis upon the drive for perfection and winning in American intercollegiate athletics. It offers a basis for why amateurism never took hold and why colleges in America have accepted, among other non-amateur ideas, the recruitment and payment of athletes. Unlike England, America did not have a sharply defined, stratified society in the nineteenth century. To a great extent, performance rather than established peerage determined an individual’s place in the social order. Alexis de Tocqueville made the point a decade before the first American intercollegiate contest: “The great advantage of the Americans,” Tocqueville states in his perceptive Democracy in America, “is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution, and that they were born equal instead of becoming so.”7 If Americans had no feudal system, no ancient regime, to revolt against and none to return to, and if America never had an established aristocratic class, American society would naturally differ from a society such as England’s, historically ruled by aristocrats.8 An aristocratic gentleman’s code of social behavior easily translated into an amateur code of conduct befitting a rigid class structure such as that found in nineteenth-century England. If individuals did not have to prove themselves continually to maintain status in athletics or in anything else, there was less of a demand for excellence of performance. In America, such a gentleman’s amateur code had much less chance of taking root and dominating athletic performance.

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The Harvard Dilemma—Amateur or Professional

harVard: achieVed VerSuS aScribed STaTuS PredicamenT In nineteenth-century America, when organized sport first appeared, there were, of course, elite gentlemen on college campuses, especially at Harvard. Some probably believed Charles Norton, a Harvard professor of fine arts, who commented about the 1889 Big Three conflict that “a gentleman has something better to be than a professional athlete.”9 Nevertheless, America’s strong tradition of egalitarianism, not equality of talent but that of rights, came into conflict with elite attitudes early on. Where opportunity for advancement existed, there was likely to be a greater struggle for success. Therefore, performance was more likely to be judged on the individual’s pursuit of excellence. In athletics, successful pursuit generally means winning. In a more open society that acknowledges excellence of performance, status through winning seems only natural. One wins or one loses. Achieved status results, which is worth more than ascribed status. Harvard was considered the most elite and patrician American college in the nineteenth century. One would have expected Harvard, more than other American colleges, to display a greater spirit of amateurism and gentlemanly behavior in athletics. Others, sensing this, believed that Harvard must either relax its gentlemanly ideals or lose out in its efforts to strive for superiority in athletics. This was the Harvard dilemma in athletics: participate as the gentlemen from Oxford and Cambridge did and lose, or drop their pretense of gentlemanly amateur sport and win in athletics as the largest and most prestigious American institution of higher education.10 Athletics at Harvard did quite well among the Big Three with Yale and Princeton when it was nearly completely run by the students. But when the more gentlemanly President Eliot and patrician members of the faculty became involved in athletics, the wins diminished. This occurred in the 1880s, when Harvard faculty created the Harvard Faculty Athletic Committee and President Eliot called for a conference of eastern colleges to preserve amateur rules. In the 1880s, the Harvard faculty banned football for a short time, prevented both the baseball team and the rowing crew from hiring professional coaches, and placed limitations on how many games and with whom the baseball team could compete.11 These rules were made by Harvard faculty who believed “that college sports should be conducted as the amusement of amateurs and not as the business of professionals.” Further, the faculty was “in favor of forbidding college clubs and crews to employ trainers [coaches], to play or row with 22

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‘professionals’ or to compete with clubs or crews who adopt either of these practices.”12 Prior to the Harvard faculty and president’s intervention for gentlemanly amateur sport, Harvard from 1852 to 1882 had winning records against Yale in crew, 16–6, and baseball, 21–15, but a losing one, 1–4, in football. In comparison, for 1882 through 1909, Harvard had a 7–19 record in crew, 32–37 in baseball, and 4–18 in football versus Yale. An emphasis by Harvard on gentlemanly amateur sport was unsuccessful among its chief competitors in the quality Americans emphasized in sport—winning.

The harVard- PrinceTon criSiS Right in the middle of Harvard’s faculty and presidential influence on the more sportsmanlike direction of athletic effort came the 1889 crisis between Harvard and Princeton, but with Yale involvement. There was strong precedent for the major conflict among the Big Three. There were charges that the Big Three were recruiting graduates of other institutions to compete on their baseball, crew, and football teams, the three major sports.13 The American College Baseball Association (1879– 1887), led by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, had an eligibility rule to prohibit professional baseball players from playing and banned any student “whose college expenses” were paid for participation.14 The Athletic Abuses Committee of the Harvard Overseers reported, a year before the 1889 eruption, numerous abuses in college athletics, including the payment of athletes to attend college. The Overseers, part of the ruling body of Harvard, even wanted to prohibit all intercollegiate athletics during the school year because, among other things, athletics disturbed the “serious work of students.”15 Yale’s Walter Camp, the “Father of American football,” reported that preparatory school students would often write to various colleges asking that their tuition be paid before attending a specific school.16 One letter was from Highland Stickney, who ended up at Harvard. Stickney’s message to Yale read, “Have received good offers from Harvard and Princeton to play football. What will you give? Success to you.”17 The situation worsened in the fall of 1889. In football, Harvard and Princeton were each undefeated in early November before they were about to play each other. The Harvard team should have been nervous, as Princeton had just beaten its previous three opponents (Pennsylvania 72–4, Wesleyan 98–0, and Columbia 71–0). Yale, too, was undefeated and would play Princeton the week after the Harvard game. Yale’s Walter Camp, the titular head of Yale athletics, who 23

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was concerned about the amateur status of Yale’s opponents, asked for a special Intercollegiate Football Association meeting five days before the Princeton-Harvard game. Both Yale and Harvard were concerned and had evidence that Princeton was playing athletes who had been hired to compete for Princeton. One was E. O. Elwood “Woody” Wagenhurst, who had played football and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania but was now attending the Princeton Theological Seminary. After Wagenhurst played in the minor Princeton games early in the season, both Harvard and Yale charged him with breaking amateur rules by being paid to play summer baseball for a Cape May, New Jersey, resort a few months before. Another questionable Princeton player was their star back, Snake Ames, who had played for money in Chicago the summer before. Ames himself had tried to recruit an athlete for Princeton by telling him that Princeton will “get your board, tuition, etc., free” as Princeton athletes “get by all odds the best treatment in any of the colleges.” Another Princeton recruit was offered a scholarship and was told another scholarship was available “for any particular friend that you may have.”18 Princeton was in the hot seat, but not alone. The Graduate Advisory Committee of the five schools in the Intercollegiate Football Association met, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan. Princeton claimed the meeting was unconstitutional and that Harvard and Yale needed an affidavit by Ames that would disprove charges that he was a professional. Three schools, though not Harvard and Yale, voted to table the professional charges, and the committee meeting broke up, leaving the Princeton games against the other Big Three to be played.19 Only Princeton’s E. O. Wagenhurst withdrew and went back to Penn to complete a law degree, while Princeton tore Harvard apart 41–15, but not before charging Harvard with playing fifteen ineligible athletes.20 Princeton then completed its undefeated season by shutting out Yale 10–0. Harvard almost immediately withdrew from the Intercollegiate Football Association and broke relations with Princeton for a number of years. The verbal battle over professionalism and the playing of graduate students, especially by Yale and Harvard, continued until well into the twentieth century.

Trying To PreSerVe amaTeuriSm The football crisis of 1889 was symbolic of the unsuccessful fight to preserve amateurism in college sport and ban the payment of players,

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among other disqualifiers, to participate. That it occurred in football is symbolic of the place that football had taken in colleges, replacing baseball as the dominant sport, along with crew, in the East. There were many individuals in America who spoke out against the professionalism of intercollegiate athletics. Possibly the most ardent champion of amateur sport was a professional journalist, Caspar Whitney. Born the same year, 1864, that the Yale crew hired the first college professional coach, Whitney four decades later wrote, “The most serious menace of college today” is the pro coach.21 But, like the elite who wrote the amateur rule for the British Amateur Rowing Association, Whitney did it for the wrong reason to be acceptable in America. Whitney, the faux aristocrat, wrote that college athletes should separate themselves from the “great unwashed,” as he called the lower class.22 Those who idealized college athletics as amateur were destined to be disillusioned. Yet an editor of the Harvard Bulletin dreamed along with Whitney. “Some day it may seem good policy . . . to say that the undergraduates alone shall be responsible for their crew, their nine, their eleven. If that time ever comes,” the editor wrote hopefully, “college athletics will then be truly sports.”23 Whitney, along with the Harvard editor, looked wistfully to the English universities where the emphasis was on “gentlemanly sport, not victory.”24 The Harvard amateur-professional dilemma continued. In the early twentieth century, Harvard alumni of the class of 1879 collected an enormous sum of $100,000 to construct a stadium, continuing the process of athletic commercialism. The year that class graduated, the Harvard faculty banned gate receipts on campus because it was an “undesirable professional tone” for student-controlled athletics. The students then defied the wishes of the faculty and held their baseball games off campus in Boston.25 Two decades later, the question of collecting gate receipts had abated, but the question of building the nation’s best stadium and further professionalizing football, which was attracting tens of thousands of spectators, had not. President Eliot opposed the use of such a large sum of money to construct a football stadium, while few college presidents have historically rejected money for any purpose.26 Eliot, though, could rationalize the edifice if it were built across the Charles River, out of the way and sight of the academic buildings. Besides, he reasoned, the campus would no longer be “defaced by unsightly banks of cheap wooden seats.”27 With the construction of the first steel-reinforced stadium in America in 1903, Harvard contributed to the professionalization of college sport, another move away from amateurism. Harvard’s president had

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been outmaneuvered by the Harvard alumni of the class of 1879, some of whom likely had been in attendance as undergraduates when Harvard and Tufts played the first rugby game by US colleges on the Harvard campus in 1875.

harVard abandonS The amaTeur model By the turn of the century, Harvard had abandoned the amateur model in athletic practices, if it had ever truly experienced it. A good example is that of its exceptional baseball pitcher Walter Clarkson. He was born into a well-to-do Cambridge, Massachusetts, family, with two older brothers who had already played in the major leagues by the time he attended Harvard. Clarkson needed no financial incentives to attend Harvard, but his interest in baseball led to playing summer baseball in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, for fifteen dollars a game. While it could not be proven that he was no longer an amateur, he continued to play college baseball even after he signed a major league bonus contract with the New York Highlanders (later Yankees) of the American League. It was worth it for Harvard baseball, for in his four years with his college team, he lost only four games and never lost to Yale, a remarkable record.28 He was made collegiately ineligible as a pro by the Harvard Athletic Committee only at the end of his last season with Harvard.29 In the Clarkson case, the result was Harvard 1, amateurism 0. Orville “Home Run” Frantz was on the team for one year with Walter Clarkson. If the first baseman and slugger was not on an athletic scholarship, his scholarship was the next thing to it. Frantz, with a baseball bat larger than any other Harvard man could handle, majored in extra base hits, not in academics. Strangely, he held a prestigious George Emerson Lowell Scholarship. One of Harvard’s two Lowell Scholarships was awarded “to a deserving student who has shown excellence in athletics.” Yet Frantz was only a mediocre “C” student. When a New York newspaper charged Harvard with recruiting trained athletes, the chairman of the Harvard Athletic Committee, Ira Hollis, raised the question of the scholarship held by Frantz. “To outsiders,” Hollis conveyed to President Eliot, “it might seem that the University is insincere.” Disingenuous or not, Eliot scribbled a reply: “Corporation have accepted the trust and propose to execute it.”30 Frantz kept his “athletic” scholarship, but the athletic committee soon declared him ineligible for another reason. Eight years before attending Harvard, Frantz had received thirty-six dollars and expenses for playing baseball in Wellington, Kansas.31 He was thus 26

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a professional, dropped from the team, and then made, with some irony, head baseball coach the following year. Playing with both Walter Clarkson and “Home Run” Frantz was another individual caught in the Harvard amateur-professional controversy early in the twentieth century. Bill Reid had competed with Clarkson and Frantz, but would become a highly paid and controversial “amateur” coach at Harvard. Reid was the son of a former president of the University of California, Berkeley, and starred for Harvard in both football and baseball. Because of his leadership in beating Yale in football in 1898 and beating Yale in baseball as a starting catcher for four years, he was invited back as graduate football coach in 1901, when, with a rare victory over Yale, his team won 22–0. After leaving Harvard to go back to his native California, he was invited back to again coach in 1905. Harvard was in a continual quandary whether it should hire professional coaches for any of its sports. Colleges at that time considered hiring their own as not being professional. Because he was a Harvard graduate, Reid was offered $3,500 by the Harvard Athletic Committee, and an additional $3,500 was raised by the alumni to get him to return after four years, when Yale had shut out Harvard in their annual football game. This was a staggering salary, the highest coaching salary in America. Reid’s pay was 20 percent higher than that of a US senator and nearly double that of Harvard professors. His salary approached that of sixty-five-year-old Charles Eliot after thirty-five years as president of Harvard.32 The professionalized actions at Harvard pointed to the conflict at that elite institution to keep a semblance of amateurism in its important sports. When Harvard agreed to pay twenty-six-year-old Bill Reid $7,000 in 1905, a Boston Brahmin elite and Harvard faculty member was motivated to write an article titled “Professional Coaches.” Archibald Coolidge, a member of the Harvard Athletic Committee, favored amateur coaching and the belief that winning was not the “chief object of sport”— it was rather “sport for sport’s sake.” Because of the years of defeat by Yale in football, Harvard had turned to a highly paid coach, something the Cambridge institution had tried to avoid. Coolidge asked whether “technical perfections [were] more important than true sport.”33 The answer, to the consternation of Coolidge, was yes. Harvard had finally succumbed to the lure of the professional coach. Paying the Harvard graduate more than any other football coach, or Major League Baseball manager, certainly made Bill Reid a professional. It had taken almost a generation to reach this point. Less than a half year after the faculty had created the Harvard Athletic Committee in 1882, it 27

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The Harvard Dilemma—Amateur or Professional

voted to fire the student-chosen baseball coach, who was a professional and not a Harvard alumnus. At the same time, the crew was forced to agree to use only Harvard graduates as coaches, not allowing the crew members to hire outside professionals. In the 1880s and 1890s, the athletic committee sometimes wavered on the question of hiring professional coaches. In 1888, the committee members agreed to allow John G. Clarkson, pitching star of the Chicago White Stockings, to coach baseball for several seasons, and in 1892 the committee allowed Timothy J. Keefe, a star from the New York Giants, to coach pitchers. The committee also allowed the football team to employ a professional wrestler as a football trainer, provided that the team employ a “reputable physician” to supervise the team’s health. In the same year, the committee asked President Eliot if he opposed hiring William A. Bancroft for three years as crew coach for a total salary of $10,000. Eliot pressured the committee to reject the idea, telling them that he would make a public statement “disclaiming all responsibility for it” if the appointment were made.34

The ProfeSSional coach and amaTeuriSm By 1900, almost all major colleges had begun to hire professional coaches for sports they considered important. Harvard students and many alumni felt they could no longer bear the cross of this aspect of amateurism. Stated one student enthusiast, “The undergraduates want a man who will stand in the same relation to athletics at Harvard as that which Mr. [Walter] Camp holds to athletics at Yale.”35 William Blaikie, former Harvard crew member of the class of 1866 and current New York City lawyer, sent President Eliot a twelve-page letter on the same subject. Blaikie suggested hiring a crew coach for $3,000 a year. “Suppose you do it, and Harvard wins,” Blaikie appealed, “will you ever grudge the effort?”36 After wavering, the Harvard Athletic Committee hired a new crew coach for $1,000 a year in 1904, the year before Bill Reid got his $7,000 for football coaching. The fight over professional coaches at Harvard was not quite over. With a football crisis in America after the 1905 season, over whether football should or should not be banned for its brutality and unethical practices, Harvard authorities set up the Joint Committee on the Regulations of Athletic Sports. It was to represent the two ruling bodies at Harvard, the Harvard Corporation (trustees) and the Harvard Overseers. The committee recommended that “professional coaching be done away with as soon as possible.” Nevertheless, the Harvard Athletic Committee 28

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defeated a motion to abolish all paid coaches after the 1909–1910 academic year. The athletic committee would agree to amateur coaches only if Harvard’s “important rivals” would do the same.37 Few colleges were willing to give up pro coaches. Rather than eliminate paid coaches, the Harvard Athletic Committee hired Percy Haughton to coach football in 1908. Though Haughton was a Harvard graduate, he had been highly criticized in the early 1900s for his ungentlemanly captaincy of the baseball team for actions “almost everybody would condemn,” according to dean of Harvard College LeBaron Briggs.38 Nevertheless, the athletic committee hired Haughton, who would become the most successful football coach in Harvard’s history. Haughton, whose attitude epitomized the American goal of winning, held secret practices from the middle of October to the final game with Yale in his first season, not a gentlemanly amateur action. For the first time in seven years, Harvard defeated Yale, 4–0. The English attitude of sport for sport’s sake took a back seat, and during the next decade Harvard lost only two football games and only three of the next twelve rowing meets, and won a majority of its baseball games with Yale. Much of its success appears to have resulted from professional coaching and the abandonment of the English amateur ideal in sport.

The oxbridge amaTeur model deParTS The Harvard elite’s attempt to preserve gentlemanly sports in the English Oxbridge tradition had failed by the end of President Eliot’s era in 1909. Eliot himself had become somewhat depressed about human nature in general and pessimistic about possible reform in college athletics. Shortly before retiring, he wrote, “After all, education and civilization put gloss or polish on manners on primitive man, but do not seem to have changed much his real fiber, or his emotions and passions.”39 It appeared that the gentlemanly amateur ideal in sport at Harvard had been unsuccessful, because that system had not produced what was important in American society and at Harvard—winning and excellence of performance. The gentlemanly restraints that Harvard had attempted to place on its athletes—often imposed by the athletic committee, faculty, president, or governing boards—had, for a time, thwarted attempts to perfect athletics to the level achieved by its chief rival, Yale. Harvard authorities were trying to impose a system of values based upon an upper-class notion of breeding and honor that did not have deep roots in America. If Americans were “born equal” or “born free,” 29

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as Alexis de Tocqueville had suggested in the 1830s, a more open society would produce excellence in performance and a winning attitude. The model favored by Harvard elitists, such as President Eliot, gave way to the demands of American society and to Harvard students and alumni who wanted to win. Amateurism was not preserved, though the term was kept by Harvard and other institutions of higher learning.

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ch a PTer Th ree

“Scholarships” e aS T ern au Thori T y and early Paym en TS

[In baseball, boating, and football, there are] about two or three dozen young men in each college where expenses are paid by their fellows. howard croSby, 1882

Amateur standing is a mere aristocratic furbelow. herberT J. barTon, 1904

I

n The decade before The naTional collegiaTe Athletic Association was established to reform college football in 1905, students at the first college formed in the south, William and Mary, asked the faculty for a strange baseball request. The studentcontrolled athletic association at the college petitioned in the winter of 1898, “Upon the organization of the base-ball team for this year, we find that we have all the requisite material save a good ‘pitcher.’ Therefore, we wish to request that, if we should secure a ‘pitcher’ and would provide for his support at the College Hotel, that you would allow him to matriculate free of charge.”1 The faculty responded, as other faculties were doing in the eastern colleges, calling the student request a “cloak and a fraud” for trying to bring in an athlete with no intention of being a student. The faculty denied the request and resolved the matter by stating that they “heartily deprecate anything in the direction of what is known as ‘professionalism’ in College athletics.” William and Mary, as the second college created in American history (1693, after Harvard in 1636), was, however, late in the game of procuring athletes by paying them to attend and compete athletically.

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The earlieST formS of recruiTing and Paying aThleTeS Procuring and paying athletes began several decades before the William and Mary student attempt. One would expect that it began at one of the Big Three institutions, likely at Harvard or Yale in rowing, the first intercollegiate sport. It, though, appears to have occurred at the newly established Syracuse University within two years of its opening, when crew members hired some Irishmen to row in their inaugural rowing efforts in 1873. By June of that year, the Syracuse crew raced for prizes worth $400, more than an average laborer’s yearly salary.2 Crew may have been the first college sport to pay its performers, but it was followed closely by baseball and football at other eastern colleges. Wrote an early 1880s observer, “The college base-ball, boating, and foot-ball which make so much talk in the newspapers are shared in reality by about two or three dozen young men in each college where expenses are paid by their fellows.”3 Students were supporting fellow students. It is logical that more players in baseball were being paid by 1880 than in any other sport, for according to one knowledgeable author, Andrew M. F. Davis, “the most popular game, not only with students, but also with the public, is base-ball.” But, football, he stated in 1883, might “usurp the present popularity of base-ball.”4 That was certainly true for most institutions before the end of the decade, and with it came financial support for the players, especially in football and baseball. If athletes in the 1880s were being paid to play baseball in college, it was not surprising that the Harvard University newspaper reported, “Some students come to college for the avowed purpose of engaging in athletic contests.”5 At Princeton, President James McCosh was shocked when told that a football player said he “had come to Princeton to play football, not to study.”6 At the same time, one author asserted that “certain colleges did not shrink from offering financial inducements to promising [baseball] players.”7 At Brown University, an 1879 graduate later wrote that some baseball players who had competed for up to seven years “had no occasion to worry about the wherewithal to meet their termbills and other expenses.”8 At Cornell, a future Ivy League institution, a reporter claimed that three of the smaller New York colleges, Hobart, Rochester, and Union, all had hired professional baseball players for their teams. Sometimes, the colleges even had them register in the college before playing. He noted that “in many cases it is more convenient to draw men from the colleges, but after all, there are times when it is

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better to secure, for a consideration, professionals.” A man from Rochester College admitted that “when he played with only college men, they lost.”9 This was a far reach from the more idealistic Oxbridge attitude toward sport. The payment of athletes in baseball was so blatant that the Intercollegiate Baseball Association, consisting of Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, made a rule in 1882 that no student was eligible whose college expenses were paid. Rules were made, and rules were broken.

fooTball PaymenTS begin To dominaTe The recruiting and paying of football players would become dominant, however, after important colleges dropped a form of soccer football in the 1870s and adopted rugby football in 1876. That is, the Big Three adopted rugby football, after Harvard demanded that they play rugby or they wouldn’t compete with Yale or Princeton. Soon, nearly all colleges followed suit, reaching many colleges in the South and West in the 1880s. The Big Three rugby football game became an immediate social event when the championship was played in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. Other schools soon followed, as the Thanksgiving Day football contests contributed to making football the dominant game. The tradition was due in no small part to Yale’s Walter Camp, who guided rugby football into American football within a few years by rule changes. His dominance on the football rules’ committee created a “scrimmage” out of a rugby “scrummage” and developed yards to be gained in a certain number of attempts, or downs. Thus, the downs and distance rule (originally three attempts to gain five yards) transformed American football to be the dominant college game well before the turn of the century.10 With it came the long-established American need to win, not the “sport for sports’ sake” Oxbridge-type game. The emphasis upon recruiting and paying athletes was the American way. Before alumni became dominant in helping athletes to enter certain institutions with their financial awards, most of the recruitment was done by college students. Often, the team captain or the student manager of the team would lead in recruitment. A clear majority of precollegiate players recruited by the best college teams came from the eastern elite preparatory schools, such as Andover, Exeter, Groton, and Lawrenceville. President Eliot of Harvard was informed in the mid-1890s that “members of the University of Pennsylvania foot-ball team were hired

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by the undergraduates to enter college and are paid a regular salary in consideration for work on the foot-ball field.”11 Creeping professionalism was moving rapidly under student control. Few athletes seemed concerned. The recruiting of prep school athletes was a common practice in the 1890s. This occurred prior to the rapidly growing high school movement that turned out dominating athletes by the early twentieth century. An example came to light when two prep school athletes were recruited from Exeter, the elite New Hampshire school that had been established shortly after the American Revolution. The boys were wined and dined by supporters of the University of Pennsylvania football team at a Penn-Cornell game. “They must have spent $200 setting us up,” one athlete bragged. “I tell you they are good to the fellows at Penn. It ain’t just this student, either. The city folks,” the Penn recruit explained, “take an interest in the boys. One man offered Greene his room and board, and he bought him a sixty-dollar overcoat.” Greene, who then felt wealthy, evidently had arrived at Penn with only “twenty-seven cents.”12 The recruiting and payment of prep school athletes remained a dominant practice. It was superseded only when public high schools were formed and began turning out star athletes by the twentieth century, in areas especially outside the East. Columbia University, in mid-Manhattan, was determined around the turn of the century to match athletic talent with the leading institutions, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. After eight years without football, the completely student-run Columbia team decided in 1899 to hire its first professional coach, a former Yale player, George Foster Sanford. Under the leadership of the captain and team manager, Columbia began paying some of its players. Football manager William Mitchell, without the knowledge of coach Sanford, paid tuition, board, and room for five men on the team. A sixth member had his fees paid and received free tutoring. Mitchell gave a report to the Advisory Committee of the Columbia University Athletic Association after Sanford’s first season as coach. The six athletes were to pay Mitchell back, he told the Athletic Association, “if they possibly could.” Coach Sanford, the team manager reported, “knew nothing about this and was not told” until after the season.13 Four of the paid players were significant in Columbia’s major upset of Yale, 5–0, in what the front-page article in the New York Times called “one of the most disastrous defeats Yale has experienced in her athletic career” dating back to 1852. Noting the importance of the new coach, the Times reported the pep talk to the players at halftime of the scoreless game. “Don’t consider yourselves football players,” coach Sanford told his starting eleven who played the entire game, “until you wipe up 34

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the ground with that team of greenies and cripples. Schoolboys ought to beat them.”14 Whipping his “boys” into a frenzy, one can understand why a coach, even if hired by the players, would soon become the autocrat if successful. Coaches themselves would soon feel the need to begin to recruit players who were subsidized so that they would win and retain their coaching positions. Coach Sanford, with his successful season and win over Yale, was soon given a $5,000 contract, the highest of any coach in the nation, much more than a number of college presidents were then paid. Even Nicholas Murray Butler, the Columbia University president, who dropped football at Columbia less than a half decade later, must have been surprised at the fall season payment to a coach, for it was more than full professors were paid as a yearly salary at Columbia.15

The big Ten: The firST maJor reform conference What the eastern schools were experiencing with the payment of athletes in crew, baseball, and football, the schools in the Midwest, and to some extent the South, were beginning to encounter by the 1890s. Except for the concern that baseball players were being paid during summer vacations for their skills in baseball, a questionable amateur transgression, football was the area of major amateur violations. One Midwesterner reported in 1895, “It is well known that the expenses of many football players are paid at the college . . . and that some of them draw salaries.”16 It was football, and football alone, that motivated a group of Midwestern institutions to join together to reform the game that had come to dominate institutions of higher education in that decade. Mass momentum plays in football brought about cries of brutality, even after the flying wedge was banned after only one full year of it being exploited. The flying wedge was invented in 1892 as a method of having nine of the eleven men on offense come together at full speed in a “V” formation. From as far as twenty-five yards back and running at full tilt, the ball was “centered” into the middle of the wedge to a running back, aimed directly at one player on defense. Following that fateful 1893 season, the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, abolished the annual Army-Navy football game because of the brutality of the flying wedge and other mass formations of a game that caused twenty-four Annapolis players to be admitted to hospitals during the season.17 Banning the flying wedge did not stop other mass momentum plays, resulting in injuries and continual cries of the need for reform. 35

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In the Midwest, the presidents of most of Indiana’s football-playing institutions convened following the 1894 season to place restrictions on football, especially to limit foul and brutal play. President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago, a strong promoter of football under his coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, responded negatively. Harper commented that the conference held by Indiana college presidents “will not interfere with the game except in Indiana.”18 One president, James Smart of Purdue, which had the strongest football team in Indiana, may have been influenced enough to call a meeting of some of the strongest football-playing institutions from the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Two weeks after the Indiana presidential conference, six Midwestern institutions met in Chicago in what was the commencement of the Big Ten Conference.19 The meeting was exactly one month after it was announced that University of Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg was to accompany his football team to the West Coast to play Stanford, a team coached by vacationing Walter Camp of Yale.20 Of the seven institutional presidents invited, only the president of Michigan was absent. The invited conferees included the university leaders from Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin. So many issues were debated that the meeting did not adjourn until after midnight on January 11, 1895. Purdue’s President Smart began the meeting with a proposed resolution for the football managers at each school to revise football rules so “that the liability to injury shall be reduced to a minimum.” Possibly as important was the second part of the resolution “to prevent professionalism of every form” from intercollegiate contests.21 The presidents, none of whom had ever played football, drew up twelve rules, including no payment of players, that they wanted each institution to ratify. The athletic guidelines looked similar to the rules that some individual eastern institutions had adopted over the years. For instance, each Big Ten institution would need to have a committee on college athletics, something similar to athletic committees of eastern schools, all of which included faculty when introduced in the early 1880s.22 In addition, an athlete had to be a bona fide student, certified by the institution’s official, and not be delinquent in studies. The student-elected managers and captains of teams would require approval by the faculty-dominated committees on athletics. As important as any regulation, no athlete could be paid or receive remuneration of any kind. Nothing, however, was stated about the judiciousness of the University of Chicago traveling two thousand miles to play a football game in California. The seven 36

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institutions adopted the presidents’ rules, with the exception of the president of the University of Illinois, who believed the regulations were too lax.23 The next year, 1896, the Big Ten became a more formal organization of the seven original Big Ten schools. It was decided that a faculty representative from each school would determine the rules governing who would be eligible for intercollegiate participation. The Big Ten was a football conference from the beginning and eventually grew into a conference of all intercollegiate sports. That the presidents were successful in bringing about the first important intercollegiate sport conference is significant, because presidents in the eastern United States, where sports first thrived, generally failed to control the games originally governed by students. The initial twelve rules constructed by the presidents were accepted by the faculty members that would form the first faculty-controlled conference in America.24 It would soon be called the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives. Other than their strong recommendation that an athletic board be formed at each institution, dominated by faculty and with representation of athletes and alumni, the presidents emphasized two fundamental principles: athletes must be bona fide students, and athletes must receive no remuneration for their athletic abilities. Obviously both principles had been violated in both the East and the Midwest. The presidents’ guidelines to each university were continued the next year when the Big Ten was formally constituted. Agreed upon by all faculty representatives was that “no student shall be admitted to any intercollegiate contest who receives any gift, remuneration, or pay for his services on the college team.”25 Opposition to any financial benefits for athletes remained the basis of amateurism in the Big Ten for over a half century. The University of Illinois faculty representative to the Big Ten Conference wrote in 1904 that the conference had “elevated athletic standards and gone far toward relegating the professional athlete to obscurity.”26 That was on paper, not in practice. As historian Winton Solberg shows in his Creating the Big Ten, the conference of faculty representatives, though well intentioned, failed in its efforts to preserve amateurism well into the future.27

bloodied amaTeuriSm: glaSS before cuTTS While the major universities in the Midwest were attempting to produce faculty-led athletic reform, at the same time the national leaders in the East were not able to join together, even in possible dual agreements, over issues of amateurism and professionalism. The two leading 37

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educational institutions in America, Harvard and Yale, could not agree on who was an amateur or which students should be allowed to compete. A football player from each institution clearly illustrated issues that represented similar problems well beyond Harvard and Yale. The two athletes involved had nearly perfect names for major disputes—Glass and Cutts. Precedents for conflicts among universities in the twentieth century involving athletes, alumni, faculty, and presidents were clearly laid down when the eligibility cases of Yale’s Edgar “Ned” Glass and Harvard’s Oliver Cutts caused a ringing dispute just prior to the HarvardYale football game in 1901. Conflicts between Harvard and Yale were not new, for they began in the second crew meet between the two institutions in 1855. Yale challenged the participation of Harvard’s coxswain, who, after graduating, was brought back to lead the Harvard rowers three years after his first participation in the 1852 original race.28 Were athletes who had graduated and been brought back solely to compete truly amateur? In the half century before the Glass-Cutts eligibility quandary, there had been many other disputes between the two institutions, including several broken relations and a failed attempt in the 1890s at a dual league.29 The 1901 eligibility cases of Edgar Glass and Oliver Cutts were precipitated by a track and field controversy the previous spring. John Spraker, a star high jumper and long jumper, was brought into the Yale Law School without a mandatory examination so that he could participate in track, especially for the Harvard-Yale meet. Harvard challenged the participation of Spraker without success and lost the close contest when Spraker won the high jump. Harvard did not forget, and that fall it challenged the football participation of Edgar Glass for breaking Yale’s own eligibility rules.30 Glass had played football at Syracuse University before entering a prep school, Mercersburg Academy in Southern Pennsylvania, in preparation to enter Yale. At Mercersburg, he received no financial rewards for his athletic abilities, according to the head of the prep school, but he took both academic and athletic talents to Yale and its great tradition in football.31 Because Glass attended Syracuse prior to attending Yale, it was technically illegal for him to play at Yale. It was considered recruiting from another college and, as a transfer student, he would not be eligible until after a year’s matriculation at Yale. Yale eventually removed football All-American Glass, but not before a crisis at Yale involving not only the football captain but also Walter Camp as advisor to Yale athletics, the alumni, and Yale’s president, Arthur T. Hadley.32 Yale, unlike a number of other eastern schools, would continue to place great faith in student control of athletics, particularly the key role 38

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of team captain. This was unlike the Big Ten, which had already created faculty control of athletics, or Harvard with a faculty athletic committee. Yale’s football captain and leader of the team, Charles Gould, was adamant that the talented lineman Glass would play in the two most important games, the one against Princeton and the season-ending Harvard contest. Walter Camp, Yale class of 1880, advisor to Yale teams and controller of athletic finances, worried about the negative impact on Yale’s image if Gould played an illegal athlete. Camp called a meeting of three influential Yale alums who were close to athletics and then wrote to President Arthur T. Hadley indicating that captain Gould would not listen to their advice. “He absolutely refuses,” Camp told Hadley, “and says he shall play him.”33 They were not the only members of the Yale alumni to show their concern for Yale’s standing. Letters soon came from influential alumni. One writer to Camp was an important member of the Yale Corporation and bank president in Boston, Alfred Ripley, raising the image question: “Will Yale’s prestige in athletics suffer more from two defeats [Princeton and Harvard] in which she has voluntarily declined to use a player because of a strict and honorable interpretation of her own published rules, or from two games . . . in which she flung her rules to the winds to gain a hoped-for advantage?” To Ripley, the “real amateur spirit” of Yale was missing.34 Samuel Elder, a Yale lawyer living among Harvard men in Boston, told Camp, “If we should win, there would be a long period of bitterness and recrimination, and if we should lose, the glorification would be unendurable.” If Glass were to play, Elder wrote, “I should prefer to see the game lost.”35 Another Yale alumnus, George Adee, an All-American football quarterback and confidant of Camp, noted that playing Glass would “break our rules as plainly as they can be broken.” He was as concerned as the others about how Harvard and Princeton men would criticize the actions of Yale and team captain Charles Gould.36 What some Yalies were counting on was for Harvard leaders to act as gentlemen in allowing Glass to compete against Harvard and to “waive their technical rights” even though the “letter of the law [was] against” Yale.37 If Harvard had acted similarly to the more amateur-acting Oxford and Cambridge Universities, it would have conceded that Edgar Glass did participate at Syracuse but that he decided to get a better education at Mercersburg Academy, in which he was in the top 10 percent of his graduating class, before attending Yale. Technically he had violated the letter of Yale’s rules, but he had followed the spirit of the rule that had been enacted to prevent Yale from recruiting talented athletes from one college to immediately compete for Yale. Other colleges had similar 39

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rules to prevent “tramp athletes” from revolving from one institution to another just to compete in athletics, a common occurrence at the turn of the century. The Harvard-Yale contests showed that winning was far more important than how the game was played. They may have been the hardestfought collegiate athletic events in America as it entered the twentieth century, but they were also symbolic of the emphasis on winning in America. William James, the great psychologist and pragmatic philosopher at Harvard at the time of the Captain Gould controversy, observed that Harvard athletics were caught between beating Yale and preserving the ideals of athletics.38 The Glass case would indicate that most of those involved in Harvard athletics were on the side of beating Yale, not on whether amateurism and fair play were upheld. Harvard may have been one of the last institutions to attempt to retain gentlemanly sport from a faculty and administrative standpoint, but the athletes’ attitudes were seldom in concert with President Eliot’s. A few years before the Glass participation dispute, Eliot maintained, “With athletics considered as an end in themselves, pursued either for pecuniary profit or for popular applause, a college or university has nothing to do.”39 Eliot’s gentlemanly attitude of participating in amateur sports, playing within the spirit of the rules, and being magnanimous toward opponents was far more apparent in his faculty and some alumni than in the student body and among the teams.

bloodied amaTeuriSm: cuTTS afTer glaSS The Oliver Cutts situation at Harvard prior to the same HarvardYale game in 1901 clearly showed that the desire to win dominated any emphasis on gentlemanly amateurism. Oliver Cutts, like Glass at Yale, had played intercollegiate football at another institution before joining a leading athletic program. Cutts began undergraduate schooling and football playing in 1892 at Bates College in Maine, nearly a decade before the Yale controversy. Upon graduation, he was hired to teach mathematics at the Haverford (Pennsylvania) Preparatory School. While at Haverford for four years, he helped coach its football team and worked with students in the gymnasium but was evidently not paid for that service, thus remaining an amateur. He then enrolled at the Harvard Law School. After attending for one year, thus making him eligible to participate in athletics, he decided to participate on the football team. His talent as a

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twenty-eight-year-old lineman, six years older than his coach, Bill Reid, was evident as the Yale game approached in 1901. The withdrawal of Yale’s Edgar Glass had already occurred when, just days before the Harvard game, Yale challenged the eligibility of Cutts. Yale at first claimed that Cutts had been paid for athletic services while at the Haverford School, but that was denied by the head of Haverford. A deciding letter came from the head of the preparatory school three days before the big game. Charles Grossman wrote that Oliver Cutts “was absolutely free from any taint of professionalism during his four years” at Haverford.40 The Harvard Athletic Committee met during the two days prior to the Yale game to determine the eligibility of Cutts. In a split vote two hours before the Yale game, the Harvard Athletic Committee, led by a faculty member, Ira Hollis, declared that there was not enough evidence to claim that Cutts was a professional for coaching at the prep school.41 Cutts played the entire game and, according to one report, “stood out as a great power in the Harvard scheme.” Another account noted that “Cutts, the great tackle” was a major contributor in a 22–0 shutout of Yale in which Harvard gained 385 yards to only 66 by Yale. The surprise was not that Cutts was a dominating player in a contest between two unbeaten teams, but that Harvard won so easily. The team from New Haven, Connecticut, had been a slight favorite playing before a record Cambridge crowd of thirty-seven thousand, with some fans paying forty dollars for regular two-dollar tickets.42 Yale had lost only one game to Harvard in the previous decade and had never been beaten so badly by the team wearing crimson. Following the game, Yale coaches and players did not make up excuses for not having Edgar Glass in their lineup nor for Oliver Cutts not being removed as a professional. However, some Yale followers would not allow the Cutts case to be dropped. A couple weeks after the Yale loss, an alumnus, Julian Curtiss, secretary of the A. G. Spalding and Brothers sporting goods company, got hold of a check written by a Haverford student for fifteen dollars to Oliver Cutts. It was the cost of boxing lessons for a young man, Irving R. Fisher, paid in the spring of 1899 to instructor Cutts. A copy of the check was handed over to Yale’s Walter Camp, and the whole situation blew up again. The Cutts receipt, signed by him, was clear evidence:43 16 May 1899—For twenty (20) half hour lessons in boxing at $.75 per hour, $15.00. Received payment, Oliver T. Cutts.

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As amateur athletics were then defined, Cutts was a professional and should not have participated in Harvard’s victory. Questions about the nature of amateurism had increased since the British excluded from amateur sport those who worked with their hands for a living, and the American collegiate adaptation excluding those who made a dollar from their athletic abilities. Harvard did not forfeit its game with Yale, but Harvard authorities soon publicly admitted that Oliver Cutts was a professional. More than that, the incident led to the suggestion that a new eligibility agreement be reached by the two institutions including the possibility of an arbitration board to consider any future protest of players. Meetings between the two institutions took place under the leadership of Walter Camp for Yale and Professor Ira Hollis for Harvard. Yale wanted another five-year agreement to participate annually in the major sports, baseball, crew, football, and track and field. Yale emphasized that it intended to use its own eligibility rules as had been the practice in the past.44 Harvard was concerned with Yale’s student control. Athletic officials believed that with students running athletics at Yale, there was a change in eligibility policy every year with the election of new captains and team managers. An athletic committee at Yale, Harvard believed, was needed for stability. As it turned out, the two mistrusting schools agreed to continue dual competitions for the spring sports of baseball, crew, cricket, lacrosse, and track and field, but that mutual eligibility rules for the important fall sport, football, would need to be negotiated. By the fall of 1902, little had been settled between Harvard and Yale. When the Yale coach challenged Harvard’s starting center before the annual Yale-Harvard football game, the Harvard Athletic Committee researched the accusation and found that the player had competed not three years at Indiana University, as the player stated, but four years in the early 1890s and was thus not eligible. Harvard immediately withdrew the athlete, who, like Oliver Cutts the previous year, was attending the law school. Once again, it became apparent that the two institutions needed to agree on the whole question of amateurism and eligibility rules. This is where Harvard and Yale differed greatly on what the Big Ten was trying to do collectively. Institutions in the East felt threatened by giving up their independence to a set of conference rules. This was true, especially, for Yale. Yale refused to enter multi-institutional arrangements, wanting to maintain autonomy. It steadfastly refused to meet with other institutions in the 1880s and 1890s to agree to uniform amateur rules. No better example can be found than a reform conference proposed by Brown University in 1898. Only Yale refused to attend, while the other seven

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institutions, which would form the Ivy League a half century later, met to develop rules for the administration of collegiate athletics.45 Yale and Harvard did have a five-year agreement on eligibility rules that was about to end shortly after the Cutts case broke. Action was dictated. Because the Cutts situation arose again after the Yale defeat, the situation between the leaders of Yale and Harvard athletics came to a head around more than the Cutts decision about whether he was a professional. There were heated discussions between Yale’s principal representative, Walter Camp, and the chair of the Harvard Athletic Committee, Professor Ira Hollis. Because of competition in the important sports, the controversy also played out at the presidential level. In a two-month period, there were at least twelve letters or telegrams between President Eliot of Harvard and President Arthur Hadley of Yale.46 While Camp and Hollis were mostly concerned with the practical nature of any future Harvard-Yale agreement, the two presidents were mostly concerned with how the two institutions would continue cordial relations when the athletic interactions were so strident. Nationally, players “tramping” from one school to another, like Cutts and Glass, were becoming more prevalent. Generally, there were no collective rules, such as those the Big Ten had passed in the 1890s, against athletes professionalizing their athletic skills in more than one institution. “Under the present loose system,” a writer for the New York Times noted, “it has become more and more evident that a real danger lies in the increasing number of noted athletes from small colleges who come to one or another of the large universities to continue their athletic careers in the professional schools.”47 By 1903, Harvard and Yale signed a twoyear rather than a five-year rules agreement, including a one-year residency rule to participate in athletics and a limit of four years of competition.48 It took another two years for the two universities to ban graduate students from participating and to pass a freshman ineligibility rule. This time, the last school in the so-called Big Three, Princeton, was brought into the agreement, creating common rules similar to those the schools of the Big Ten had created a decade before. This would, a Harvard partisan asserted, “shut out the men who come to college solely to engage in athletics.” Or as another wishful thinker believed, no freshman participation would likely end “athletic proselyting” and “unfair inducements.”49 The reform rules of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, like the Big Ten rules formed earlier, did reduce some of the problems emanating from the highly competitive games, but proselytizing and payment of athletes in various ways continued.

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What the Cutts and Glass cases had shown was the tendency in American colleges to professionalize their sports as much as possible while continuing to call them amateur. It is problematic whether Glass should have been considered a professional by going to Syracuse University, then entering a prep school, before attending Yale. It is equally questionable whether Harvard’s Cutts should have been banned because he had been paid fifteen dollars for giving boxing lessons to a boy at another prep school years before. Each institution believing that the other was unethical is understandable, because the outcome of a contest depended to some extent on whether the individuals participated. There was no doubt that collective action was needed in the East to attempt to create a more level playing field for the contesting parties. The Big Ten began the process, and the eastern institutions would eventually follow. Nevertheless, in a fiercely competitive society, collective action could accomplish only so much when the actors would seldom follow the spirit of the rules and often stretched the limits of those rules. How much institutions would extinguish the spirit of amateurism to achieve athletic success was seen in more than the payment and recruitment of athletes. That was evident in action related to the emphasis on athletic training, the quality of food given, and the place of living on campuses.

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ch a PTer four

Training, Training Tables, and Athletic Dorms The athletic dormitory and training table should be abolished. ThomaS S. gaTeS, 1931

Those facilities aren’t technically athletic dorms, because the NCAA outlawed those. henry mckenna, 1984

W

hen harVard builT The naTion’S moST advanced stadium, hired professional coaches, and allowed a university scholarship to go to a mediocre student but first-rate athlete, it became more acceptable for lesser institutions to do the same. Others often followed where Harvard and the Big Three led. These non-amateur aspects of collegiate sport were established well before the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1905. Other commercialprofessional activities began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Three of the most significant were the development of vigorous professional training, the creation of the athlete training table for team building and better nutrition, and the fashioning of dorms to house the athletes. The desired end was to improve the chance of turning out victories on the athletic field. Training methods, athletic dorms, and athletic training tables were first developed in the elite institutions in the East and then spread quickly to the West and South, endangering the concept of amateurism.

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crew and The beginning of collecTiVe Training and eaTing As rowing, or crew, was the first intercollegiate sport, it was natural for it to become of interest to the general public, to be commercialized, and to attract the attention of college student bodies. With its growth, it was natural to rationalize or make the sport more efficient, creating the best environment to attempt victory over other institutions. Living, eating, and training together were three of the rational means of doing so. It is true that at the first intercollegiate event on Lake Winnipesaukee between Harvard and Yale, the competitors for both schools ate together and lived together at a resort hotel. However, there was no thought of doing this on Harvard or Yale’s campus. While there were possibly one thousand spectators, including presidential candidate Franklin Pierce, at the August 1852 event, there was no talk about the future possibility of ten to twenty thousand spectators at a college regatta on Lake Quinsigamond in Massachusetts before the decade was over—but that was the outcome.1 Original crews had few gastronomic or training rules when competition arose. When intercollegiate athletics commenced, there was no authorized training table for better nutrition for the boating members. For the initial meet at the New Hampshire lake resort, the Yale crew’s “abstinence from pastry” was its major constraint. Harvard had no restrictions. Prior to the row, Harvard’s team had a hearty meal, and “after a little rest and a cigar,” they were taken to the starting line for the two-mile row resulting in a Harvard victory.2 Presumably the effort was concluded with another cigar and drinks for the victors. There was little scientific data to guide the crew captain or other participants, nor was there a prolonged period of training for a major event. Neither crew had trained vigorously prior to that first meeting. A Harvard crew member remarked that “they had not rowed much for fear of blistering their hands.”3 Five years later, Charles Eliot, a graduate and then tutor at Harvard, was rowing for Harvard. Taking a kind of Oxbridge amateur attitude, Eliot wrote to his fiancée, “I am going to remember your injunctions, and take the best possible care of myself and row just as hard as I comfortably can, and not a bit harder.” Eliot, who would be the president of Harvard in just over a decade, took rowing as a recreation because, he said, “rowing is not my profession.”4 Not everyone agreed with Eliot, though, as other eastern colleges had initiated the sport and the training table, and collective housing was soon organized prior to the important end-of-year rowing regatta.5 For 46

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Columbia University in 1859, the training included a gentle run for a half hour prior to breakfast, which consisted of oatmeal, beef or mutton, bread, and a pint of ale or beer. After a morning row and another run, lunch (called “dinner”) comprised beef or mutton, potatoes, bread, another pint of beer or ale, and bread pudding. This was followed by a walk and a row prior to supper of oatmeal porridge and dry toast. The training table was short on fruits and vegetables. Eating and training together, the Columbia oarsmen were housed at Lake Quinsigamond near Worcester, Massachusetts, and “kept together day and night,” up at 7:00 a.m. and in bed by 10:00 p.m.6 Collective eating and living arrangements were becoming more common, certainly for training at the site of the competition if not on the campus during the year. Other institutions, such as Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Trinity, likely had similar regimens. We do know that Yale crew members following the regatta were “no longer ‘on diet.’”7

The ProfeSSionaliZaTion of Training and The regaTTa on The ThameS When Harvard and Yale crews renewed their competition during the Civil War, Yale had hired a professional coach. William Wood, a professional physical trainer from New York City, introduced a training regimen and training table. It consisted of a three- to five-mile walk/run at 6:00 a.m., breakfast, and class recitations, followed by a fourmile row at full speed in the afternoon. The rowers also worked out with weights in their gymnasium. The training table consisted of beef, mutton, chicken, toasted bread, boiled rice, weak tea, a few vegetables, and no wine or beer. The training and meals were enough for Yale to finally win the regatta with Harvard.8 Once the Civil War concluded at Appomattox in 1865, eastern colleges returned to rowing more vigorously, with the annual Harvard-Yale meet most prominent. The importance of winning became more pronounced as thousands poured into Worcester, Massachusetts, near Lake Quinsigamond each summer leading up to the Harvard-Yale race. Betting large sums made the outcome even more weighty as the annual contest grew: baseball games, billiard matches, and chess contests were added to what one newspaper called the “grand bacchanalian carnival.” The Yale faculty complained of these “gross immoralities” attending the races.9 The commercial success of the regattas placed even more pressure on the two crews to train vigorously and eat more wisely in the training period 47

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before the races, as athletes were quartered near the site. Harvard kept winning, and with those wins came a desire to test its social superiors from Oxford University. When Harvard challenged Oxford to row on the Thames River in London, Oxford and Cambridge had been rowing intercollegiately for a generation. In the winter of 1867–1868, Harvard first approached Oxford for a four-oared race in England. Oxford opposed the race at first because Harvard wanted to row without a coxswain guiding the boat. Later, the proposition was nearly defeated by the Oxford University Boat Club because “the O.U.B.C was formed only to row against Cambridge.” Nevertheless, in an 11–10 vote, the OUBC accepted the Harvard challenge for the summer of 1869.10 The Harvard crew raised money for the London meet principally by subscriptions from “wealthy Harvard men and their friends,” and by putting on private theatrical performances by Harvard students. The costly trip from New York to Liverpool and on to London had the added expense of their five-week stay at the “White House” on the Thames to train for the race.11 While there, the crew purchased its food secretly to prevent any attempt at poisoning, and it spent days on the Thames preparing for the end-of-August event. Whereas the Harvard crew earlier in the 1860s had trained on rare beef and mutton, stale bread, oatmeal gruel, only small quantities of milk and water, and no fruit or vegetables, the new Harvard crew in London had no limits on most foods, with larger quantities of fruit, and milk rather than beer. Harvard’s training of the crew had also intensified by the 1860s, consisting of walking, running, and gymnasium work, including tossing twelve-pound cannon balls, as well as regular rowing in the morning and afternoon.12 The change in training came after Harvard had been defeated for the first time by Yale in 1864. William Blaikie, a Harvard grad and friend of the crew, traveled to Oxford to learn the English rowing technique and returned to teach the Harvard crew. He was not considered a professional coach, such as Yale’s William Wood, because he was a Harvard graduate and thus an alumnus coach. Blaikie opposed the former training procedure of lowering weight by overheating with flannel garments, a training method copied from professional boxers. He believed that reducing to the traditional mere flesh and bone was harmful, and he did away with the near absence of liquids. He also opposed the old idea of eliminating fruits and vegetables, allowing crew members to eat nearly anything they enjoyed.13 By copying the Oxford training methods, Blaikie believed that the American crew could successfully challenge the best of the British.

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The world’s most watched athletic contest of the nineteenth century, Harvard versus Oxford, became a match to establish which of the two most industrialized nations would dominate. If American colleges were to challenge the best of England, it was logical that Harvard should lead the way. It was the oldest, wealthiest, and most prestigious American college, and in America’s first intercollegiate sport, crew, it was the best. In a way, the international crew meet was similar to the United States versus the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, in the 1960s and ’70s. During the Cold War, the number of Olympic gold medals collected was considered a symbol of the strength of the two countries. It was hardly different in the Oxford-Harvard rowing match of about a century before. In 1869, it was ironic that the two leading universities agreed to the international crew meet a week before a leading US senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Charles Sumner, spoke in Congress about “a deep-seated sense of enormous wrong” the British had done to the United States during the American Civil War a half decade before. The British had provided naval vessels to the Confederacy, including the Alabama.14 The “Alabama Claims” controversy maintained that the British caused the Civil War to drag on, and Sumner claimed that the British owed America a large reparation for the damage done. This led to a demand by a senator from Michigan, Zachariah Chandler, for Great Britain to cede Canada to America as punishment “for her national sins.”15 This resulted in greater nationalist pride in the outcome of the Oxford-Harvard boat race. Calmer voices eventually prevailed; America did not send its armed forces to Canada, nor did Canada build a wall across its southern border. As the race moved toward weightier international significance, the American crew moved toward greater professionalism prior to the race. Originally, in addition to Harvard bringing two boats to Britain, a New York boat builder was invited to bring a model and all the ribs necessary to construct a new shell that he thought might be necessary for the best rowing on the Thames. While the crew was training, the builder constructed a new boat, but three English boat builders were asked to construct their best for the Harvard crew while the team borrowed another. With seven boats to choose from, the rational approach began to seem irrational as the crew had not decided upon a boat until the week prior to the contest. The crew finally chose an American-built shell and was satisfied with its five weeks of training on the Thames. This was much more than the 1852 “jolly lark” that crews believed was necessary in the preparation for their original meet in New Hampshire. Seventeen

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years later, it was an international event in which an estimated 750,000 or 1,000,000 mostly Londoners lined the four-and-a-quarter-mile shore from Putney to Mortlake, the same Thames River course Oxford and Cambridge had been rowing since 1845.16 With this kind of attention and regular post–Civil War Atlantic Cable telegraph reports back to America, is it any wonder that crew became the most important intercollegiate sport even while baseball, cricket, and track and field events were taking place before 1870? While the Lake Winnipesaukee Harvard-Yale crew meet was attended by the next US president, Franklin Pierce, the Harvard-Oxford boat race could claim Prime Minister William Gladstone, novelist Charles Dickens, philosopher John Stuart Mill, the “Swedish Nightingale” singing sensation Jenny Lind, and Thomas Hughes, the author of a best-selling book about Rugby School, Tom Brown’s School Days.17 Hundreds of columns in American newspapers leading up to the race and duplicated following the Oxford victory of three or four boat lengths told of the importance to the two nations’ identities. Even the brass band’s playing of “Yankee Doodle” and “God Save the Queen” made a statement about the momentous occasion. What was lacking was the hundred-gun salute New York City had planned for the Harvard crew, had there been an American victory.

The crew Phenomenon exPandS Crew held first place in the hearts of eastern colleges for a good portion of the 1870s, and racing continued its unparalleled popularity with the annual regatta. It moved to the Connecticut River at Springfield and then to Saratoga Lake in New York when the Connecticut River could not easily accommodate eleven college crews. Training for the meet became more intense while nearly all crews, Harvard being an exception, hired professional coaches.18 The various crews moved closer to a training table during the school year rather than just at the annual regatta, where they were housed for a week or more. At Saratoga Lake, the College Regatta Association negotiated a mid-1870s agreement allowing the various crews free transportation for boats and crews, free boat houses with board at ten dollars a week per man, regular stage runs into town, and daily delivery of mail.19 Yale, by then, had a training table for its crew of eight from early spring until its annual contest with Harvard in midsummer.20 However, Yale had dropped out of the regatta after 1875 because it could not win, desiring to compete only against Harvard, where it believed it had at least half a chance of winning. 50

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The 1875 regatta was a high point of crew in the nineteenth century, as thirty thousand spectators crowded the banks of Saratoga Lake and thirteen colleges came to compete. The role of Cornell University is worth noting, for the outback New York institution had come into existence less than a decade before, considerably more than two hundred years after Harvard. Cornell’s president, Andrew D. White, had rowed at Yale as an undergraduate in the early 1850s and saw the value of rowing to increase Cornell’s prestige among eastern universities. President White presented a new boat to the Cornell crew when it competed at the regatta for the first time in 1873. Two years later, the “boat load of mechanics from Ithaca” trained under its captain, John Ostrom, for the regatta. His training methods rejected the old techniques of “bundle up in flannel suits,” run for seven miles, and “huddle into a small room, close all the doors and windows and stay there until we were nearly suffocated with heat.”21 The skin-and-bones look from the lack of drinking water was rejected for a balanced diet with plenty of liquids, and the meat would be cooked to individual tastes rather than raw as before. Ostrom trained his crew by racing three miles twice daily prior to going to Saratoga Lake. At Saratoga, he determined the speed and quality of each competing crew after borrowing a large telescope from a Cornell professor. Observing or spying on his opponent crews daily, Ostrom was sure his crew would beat all comers. And win Cornell did. When President White received the victorious message, he telegraphed the crew, “The University chimes are ringing, flags flying and cannons firing.” A special palace car, the most stylish of Pullman’s railroad cars, was ordered for the return of the victorious crew to Ithaca. Arriving at the station, the crew members were taken on a float down Main Street and up the steep hill to Cornell, where they entered through a huge triumphal arch constructed of evergreens for the occasion.22 Vigorous training by the Cornell crew was rewarded with a victory. Both Harvard and Yale were disillusioned by the result. Yale had finished in sixth place after being last the previous year. Yale soon withdrew to participate only against Harvard, which had never won the open regatta. Having the two dominant institutions withdraw ruined the éclat of the regatta, and crew’s dominance in college sport would never again reach the popularity it had in the 1870s. Harvard and Yale would continue their joint meets as Oxford and Cambridge did in England. The Harvard-Yale meet, however, never meant to America what the OxfordCambridge contest meant to England. This was despite what a Harvard alumnus wrote at the time: “We, the aristocrats, prefer to race with each other, and not compete with farmers and mechanics, who are brought up 51

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to hard work.”23 Harvard historian Albert B. Hart dismissed the aristocratic platitude when he wrote, “There is no ‘Oxford and Cambridge of America.’”24 Harvard and Yale athletics had not waned by 1900, but crew had already taken a less prominent place on campus than either baseball or football. That was true at most American colleges that promoted rowing teams.

The Training Table SPreadS wiTh fooTball Training, training tables, and athlete housing would intensify and become a theme of college athletics by the early twentieth century, particularly in the new dominant sport—football. Rugby football, transformed principally by Yale’s Walter Camp, had become American football by the early 1880s. Americanization of football meant that, unlike in rugby, a team had undisputed possession of the ball after a player was tackled, the line of scrimmage replaced the chance possession found in the rugby scrum, and a team had a set number of “downs” and yards to be gained before surrendering possession.25 This game quickly caught the fancy of students and increasingly other members of society. Even upper-class society members were swept up by American football, especially that of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The prominent opening of the winter social scene in New York City, for instance, began with the annual Thanksgiving Day football game, most often a contest between the two leading football schools, Yale and Princeton.26 With the rapid expansion of football in the 1880s and 1890s nationally came increased professionalism and commercialism, and the demands for both housing for the football players and a training table for the recruited athletes. Creating athlete housing with a training table was promoted first by the Big Three. Paying the expenses of the training table generally meant that each athlete would be responsible for paying only what he ordinarily would for meals. The added expense of better or greater quantity of food was often paid for by the athletic association, a financial and moral support group that nearly every school had formed in the latter 1800s. Getting the athletes to pay their fair share was a problem each college had to deal with. Harvard’s crew members had a training table during the school year beginning sometime in the 1870s, at which time crew meal expenses amounted to only $385 out of total crew expenses of about $5,000. In 1882, a training table for football players was established.27 Soon, according to the Harvard Athletic Committee, recruiting of star athletes from 52

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preparatory schools resulted, in part, in the full board being paid for some members of Harvard’s football team.28 The payment of star athletes at Harvard and elsewhere was arising in the nineteenth century in direct opposition to the spirit of amateurism. When board was added to tuition, room, and books in the twentieth century, it would become a “full athletic ride.” Amateurism would be challenged and defeated with only the name remaining. Princeton and Yale were not to be outdone by Harvard. Princeton also began a football training table in 1882 that cost the team only $50.55 for the year when the total expenditure for football was $1,826. Eight years later the training table cost over $2,500 in a football budget of almost $16,000.29 It is not clear how many football players had their entire board cost paid by athletics, but a few years later the captain of the Princeton football team informed a prospective football player, “You will find everything already provided for you in the way of room, food, etc., which of course . . . will be of no personal expense to you.”30 Princeton was used to winning almost all of its games, but in 1892, it lost to the University of Pennsylvania for the first time and was shut out by Yale 12–0. The next year, the entire team was required to sleep at the Princeton Clubhouse and to follow a carefully prepared training table.31 Yale was certainly not behind Harvard and Princeton in anything to do with football, as Walter Camp was the dominant figure from the time he ended his six-year varsity football career in the early 1880s.32 In the next decade, the Yale training table for football consumed about 40 percent of the football budget, providing all three meals to over forty men. The training table expenses in New Haven were more than the total cost of the football team’s traveling expenditure for hotels and meals.33 Yale professor Eugene Richards, who loved Yale athletics, complained that the two major evils of intercollegiate athletics were athletic scholarships and training table abuses, causing athletics to become “mercenary.” Richards made clear that Yale was clamping down on athletes who refused to pay their fair share of board, opposing the athletes who claimed that free food was “their due for work done.”34 Few players had ever been concerned about the concept of amateurism—nor would they in the future. The idea of a training table was spreading South and West as football became the dominant college sport by the 1890s, and paying for players’ food was eating away at the concept of amateurism. In the South, football was being initiated only by the 1890s. When Tulane University in New Orleans did not win a game in its second season, 1894, its student newspaper suggested that Tulane operate an athletic dorm so that players would all eat at a training table and be under the eyes of a professional 53

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coach.35 This did not happen, but in the Midwest, two private universities moved in this professional direction around the turn of the century. At the newly established University of Chicago, President William Rainey Harper, a promoter of athletics, hired Amos Alonzo Stagg in 1892 as the first professor, athletic director, and head coach at any college. Within four years and shortly after the Big Ten was founded, Stagg rented private apartments for his football team, where they were given a special diet. By 1902, Stagg moved the team to the University of Chicago luxury Hitchcock Hall residence, then called the “millionaires’ den.” Stagg had early on segregated his athletes from the rest of the student body. Students from Chicago had petitioned the faculty to mix athletes with the other students, but it was denied.36 Just north of Chicago at Northwestern University, a small dormitory on campus was given to the athletic association to house and feed the football players.37 Another Big Ten institution, the University of Minnesota, roomed its football team in one of the dormitories.38 As the Big Ten was one of the first conferences created to control football (1895), the university presidents who led the reform might have (but had not) banned training tables and athletic dorms from the beginning. That action to try to preserve amateurism would come in the Big Ten when the conference prohibited training tables following the football crisis of 1905.39

aThleTic dormS, amaTeuriSm, and The gaTeS Plan Other colleges were moving in the direction of training tables and dorms for athletes, but many could not do so principally for financial reasons. Many coaches, such as Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg, could see the value in turning out victors by isolating athletes from the rest of the student body and feeding them better than other, less physically active students. Yet the dynamic growth of both athletic dorms and training tables would have to wait for the “golden age of sport” following World War I. One of the best examples was California’s Stanford University, which had dropped football following the football crisis of 1905 and reintroduced the American game to replace rugby football in 1919 only so that it could compete again against its San Francisco Bay rival, the University of California. Stanford built a new sixty-thousand-seat stadium in the early 1920s and made enough money in its first game with California to pay for the stadium. Moreover, with additional football revenues Stanford constructed a new $450,000 dormitory run by the athletic board 54

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of control that was not only for football players but also for the general student body.40 Across the bay at the University of California, there was a perceived need “to build spirit in an athletic squad,” so the team should be “allowed to live together night and day except while in the classroom.” A spokesman for California athletics stated that one of the reasons for the construction of an athletic dorm including a dining room was that it would help solve the problem of “bootleg whiskey” and “women of weaker morals” who would “seduce our lusty young men.” A coach and trainer could keep a better watch on the football players, or so it was believed.41 While the growth of athletic training tables and athletic dorms was going on nationally, some questioned both professional activities. One was the president of the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1930s, Thomas Gates. He was one of the few college presidents who attempted to reform the growing commercialism and professionalism of intercollegiate athletics. This followed the attack by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching after its three-year study of the prostitution of college amateurism following World War I. The 1929 Carnegie Report, titled American College Athletics, became the major reform document of the twentieth century when it was released the day the stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression. The Carnegie Report condemned the rampant recruiting and subsidization of athletes, professional coaches, and training tables as subsidies, among other violations of amateur sport.42 Pennsylvania’s Thomas Gates believed athletics should favor the interests of all students rather than those of the professional coach. He stated that if he could not find a coach to be paid a professor’s salary, he would then raise the salaries of the entire faculty. The Gates Plan, as it was called, had the strong backing of the board of trustees. The plan included abolishing spring football practice and early preseason fall practice, doing away with “rest” trips for athletes at resorts, controlling financial assistance to athletes by the university scholarship committee, competing against natural rivals, seating students at the center of the stadium, and eliminating the free training table and the athletic dorm for athletes. Football at Pennsylvania would not be given special treatment and concessions until after World War II.43 Real amateurism thrived while Penn lost contests. The Gates Plan was considered a radical reform for colleges nationally but especially for eastern colleges, which had long before abandoned amateur ideals. An attempt by Gates to carry his call for “athletics for all” to a national level was met by strong resistance. The Association of 55

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American Colleges (AAC) was founded in 1915 to reform higher education by attempting to save liberal arts colleges. The AAC campaigned for Gates’s recommendations, such as dropping athletic dorms and training tables. However, which colleges would take the lead in eliminating the powers of the professional coach? Probably only those to whom winning was not important, and American colleges had already made a choice of winning over other goals more than a half century before. Professionallike activities, including special training tables and athletic dorms, were part of the winning traditions already deeply entrenched in American intercollegiate athletics. Gates had been wrong in his assessment of college athletics and the presidential role in reform. Even the small AAC’s resolution to appoint a commission to make “a comprehensive survey of the athletic situation” was voted down in 1936.44 It was the last time the president-led AAC made a concerted effort to reform college athletics. Among other reform ideas gone awry, athletic dorms and training tables would continue to lead intercollegiate athletics away from the amateur ideal.

The PoPulariZaTion of aThleTic dormS: The armS race Though the Great Depression and World War II placed some restraints on the professionalization of intercollegiate athletics, as soon as Germany and Japan were defeated, activities such as building athletic dorms and refining training tables intensified. Shortly after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan and the war came to an end, Penn State alumnus and football fan Ben “Casey” Jones purchased a stone mansion for housing football players that he called the Gray Stone Manor. Jones had been illegally recruiting players and giving them athletic scholarships since the 1930s, and he began housing them just before Penn State had an undefeated season, sending its team to the 1948 Cotton Bowl.45 Jones and other Penn State boosters were in violation of Penn State’s own rules prohibiting athletic scholarships that had been in effect since the 1920s. The off-campus “athletic dorm” was short lived, as was the unsuccessful ban on scholarships that was called the “great experiment”—trying to win without purchasing athletes with financial aid. Athletic dorms were being built elsewhere, especially in the South in the territory of the Southeastern Conference. The SEC had sanctioned athletic scholarships in the 1930s, making athletic dorms at places such 56

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as Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, and Tennessee logical additions to their growing football programs.46 The dorm at Tennessee may have been the grandest, for Tennessee was the dominant power under coach General Robert Neyland for more than a decade. The Tennessee dorm was built at the 46,000-seat stadium with rooms for 124 athletes if needed. The cost was a significant $1.5 million, probably the most expensive in the nation.47 Dorms were being constructed, but there was opposition by those who felt that athletes were being “wet-nursed” and “watched over like indolents” rather than being part of the student body. One individual wrote to the president of the University of North Carolina that athletes might “get a genuine college education” if they were not sequestered from the rest of the student body.48 This reflected what the dean of Harvard College had professed a generation before: the football team, Dean Briggs stated, “should live as nearly normally as possible among the other students and not be an isolated body of men.”49 A half century after Briggs, Stanford’s athletic representative to the NCAA, Rixford Snyder, again warned about “housing athletes apart from other students . . . in a ‘jock house.’”50 The controversy over the propriety of athletic dorms would continue through the end of the century and into the next. One of the chief opponents of athletic dorms was the executive director of the NCAA (1951–1987), Walter Byers. Byers became executive director shortly after the failure of the first NCAA attempt to limit athletic scholarships and control athlete recruiting, the Sanity Code of 1948.51 Athletic dorms and training tables had been around for a long time, but there was an expansion of country club living and gourmet food. Byers seems to have thought that Texas A&M began the athletic dorm armament movement when it constructed a dorm in the 1950s with a central swimming pool and TVs in each room.52 Still, Texas A&M was only adding glitter to the movement to recruit athletes, mostly football and men’s basketball players, with better facilities. Obviously, Tennessee had already done this, with schools such as Alabama, Auburn, and Georgia trying to win the athletic dorm sweepstakes in the 1950s and 1960s. Basketball also became a focal point for dormitory enhancement. Kentucky’s most successful basketball coach, Adolph Rupp, may have topped all others with a renovation of a private mansion for his basketball players in the 1970s. In the planning stages of Rupp’s jock house, the NCAA opposed Kentucky’s “special benefits” for athletes with private bathrooms and gold faucets. The NCAA told Kentucky that it must eliminate this anti-amateur action before completion or be charged with violating NCAA bylaws. Nevertheless, the Wildcat Lodge was constructed and known as the “rich man’s club.” One must remember that Executive 57

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Director Byers had been part of the NCAA’s first punishment of any NCAA institution in the early 1950s. At that time the NCAA gave Kentucky the first death penalty following the basketball point-shaving scandal that engulfed a number of individuals and schools, including coach Rupp and Kentucky.53 Byers was not a lover of Kentucky athletics. By the 1970s, a majority of the football powers had formed the College Football Association, in an effort to gain additional revenue from the monopolistic NCAA TV contract. The CFA surveyed football players, asking, among other questions, whether they lived in athletic dorms, in regular dorms, in fraternity houses, or off campus. Nearly 70 percent of white and 27 percent of Black players from the sixty colleges surveyed lived in athletic dorms, with less than a third living in regular dorms.54 One might speculate that the low percentage of Black players living in athletic dorms was attributable to the fact that they were living off campus rather than in integrated athletic dorms. However, the increasing number of athletes living in athletic dorms appeared to NCAA member institutions to be adding to problems of athletes living separately from other college students. An inquiry into the continued professionalism and commercialization of college athletics and away from academic integrity was created by the American Council on Education, an umbrella association for numerous higher education organizations. The inquiry was financially supported by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Among other areas needing further research, according to the study head, George Hanford, was the impact of athletic dorms and training tables on academics. Hanford suggested that ethical problems of “on-campus care and feeding” of athletes, along with the need to study the recruiting and payment of athletes, was serious enough to mount a national study similar to the Carnegie Report of 1929. The Hanford report surprisingly stated that “more violations probably take place in the care and feeding than in the recruiting of athletes.”55 No additional funding was approved to carry out a full study, and it died as a reform effort. According to Hanford, the presidents who run the American Council on Education “wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.”56 As with other areas of intercollegiate athletics for more than a century, amateurism versus professionalism was low on the list of concerns to be acted on by presidents and other athletic leaders. Negative events tend to bring about what are considered positive changes, such as Social Security being passed during the Great Depression and improved civil rights following the defeat of Adolph Hitler. On a smaller scale, athletic dorms had a similar experience. As Big-Time 58

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college athletics continued to increase revenues toward the end of the century in concert with additional television profits, so did the “arms race” for institutions to improve athletic facilities including athletic dorms and accompanying board amenities. Yet jock dorms were coming under increased scrutiny. This was especially true after University of Oklahoma football players, under highly visible coach Barry Switzer, committed a series of felonies in their athletic dorm. Switzer’s team had won nearly 85 percent of its games over the past sixteen seasons, including twelve Big Eight conference and three national championships. Then, in the dorm named for Oklahoma’s greatest football coach, Bud Wilkinson, a series of illegal acts emerged. They included cocaine use, a gang rape, and the firing of a gun in the dorm. It became national news, and a most prominent football coach resigned following the players’ criminal trials. “We felt like we were above the law,” noted one of the players convicted of rape, “like OU would protect us from anything.” Some, including those in the NCAA, blamed the corruption that resulted from housing “omnipotent” athletes, as a prosecutor claimed, in athletic dorms like those at Switzer’s Oklahoma.57

The So- called ncaa ban on aThleTic dormS Coming out of this and numerous other on-campus athletic scandals of the 1980s, the NCAA’s Division I in 1991 voted 278–31 to do away with athletic dorms, one of a dozen or so reforms the NCAA claimed it had produced in the first couple years of the 1990s.58 That decision, stated Tennessee football coach Johnny Majors, was “a smash to the mouth of the southern schools” who were the dominant institutions that had emphasized athletic dorms. A Mississippian by birth, Jim Walden, complained about the national organization dictating on-campus policy: “Don’t we all believe in states’ rights and local control?” Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff condemned the whole concept of athletic dorms as “a sort of cross between Animal House and Animal Farm. These were monuments to the twin propositions that Animal House’s ‘Anything Goes,’ and Animal Farm’s ‘Some Students Are More Equal Than Others.’” Wolff agreed with the majority of NCAA legislators that “jock dorms warp one of the fundamental premises of college life,” that athletes should be integrated into the life of the university.59 However, as athletic scholarships dictated that room and board was provided, athletes needed to be housed somewhere. So, NCAA officials, lacking a consideration of unintended consequences, dictated that 59

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nonathletes must make up at least 50 percent plus one of any dorm with football and other athletes. They did not reason that each new athletic dorm could still have 49 percent of athletes living together.60 There they would again basically isolate themselves from other students. Not only that, but the athletic department of the wealthier football schools, and a few like Kentucky in basketball, could construct sports complexes. These would include dorms (with swimming pools, billiard rooms, TV lobbies, and even quiet study rooms and tutoring centers), restaurants (with chefs and nutritionists), and weight training and other workout facilities. Athletes and a majority-of-one wealthy nonathletes, to fulfill the NCAA requirement, could spend their four or five years of athletic competition in luxury living. The result was a way around the desire of the NCAA with the construction of such living venues as Ohio State’s lavish $37 million, six-story facility housing many of its athletes; a $17.5 million apartment complex at the University of Kansas; the $51 million suitestyle Donahue Hall at Auburn; and the $75 million Headington Hall near Memorial Stadium for Oklahoma’s football players. Basketball coach at the University of Kentucky John Calipari would recruit his basketball team to live in “Wildcat Coal Lodge,” where, as he stated, “all of the needs of our players are met,” including sinks and beds for sevenfooters.61 Athletic dorms still existed well into the twenty-first century, while the NCAA continued to deny their existence. Another NCAA athletic reform regulation failed in an attempt to prevent the further professionalization of college sports. Meanwhile, the term amateur remained in the NCAA bylaws.

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ch a PTer fi V e

The Amateur Challenge of Summer Baseball for Pay [With summer baseball] the actual life of the amateur spirit is really at stake. Prof. george w. ehler, 1911

If the amateur rule is yielded in one sport, it will ultimately be relaxed in others. Prof. charleS w. kennedy, 1926

I

f The Training Table, aThleTic dormS, and aThletic training crept into intercollegiate athletics and became acceptable, summer baseball for pay was a more direct violation of “amateurism.” There were many violations of pure amateurism as college athletics moved into the twentieth century, but three stood out: outright payment of athletes through what became known as athletic scholarships or grants-in-aid, the hiring of professional coaches, and summer baseball for pay while remaining amateur. Summer baseball, unlike the training table, was difficult to masquerade as amateur, and like the fig-leafing of Vatican statues, the cover up was controversial.1 Playing baseball for pay in the summer was always based on the question of whether getting paid for an activity in the summer should impact the athlete for the academic year. To some, it involved any athlete being paid for any kind of athletic activity being a violation of the sacredness of amateurism, if in fact amateurism was sacred. To others, playing baseball all summer for money unleveled the playing field for those who competed against them in the fall or following spring. Nevertheless, to nearly all baseball players, it

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was a fun activity for which they could be paid, and an endeavor for which they might need to use an assumed name to protect their collegiate eligibility.

lee richmond and eaSTern Summer baSeball Summer baseball began in the resort areas of the East and soon spread nationally. Who the first collegian was to play baseball for money in the summers or at any time is not known, but Lee Richmond of Brown University is the first important college athlete to do so. And it was not exactly summer baseball. By the end of the 1870s, a group of eastern colleges, Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, began playing regular home and away series. In 1879, after the College Baseball Association had been formed, the best of the teams was Brown University, led by the left-handed pitcher Lee Richmond. According to the Harvard newspaper after Harvard was beaten twice by Brown, Richmond “surpasse[d] any college athlete, combining skillful pitching, heavy batting, excellent base-running, and at the same time splendid executive judgment in the management of his Nine.”2 While Brown was winning the new conference championship, and before the season was completed, Richmond received a telegram from a professional team in Worcester, Massachusetts. It read, “Will you pitch in Worcester tomorrow pay you well.”3 He couldn’t accept, but three days later he agreed to play in Worcester against the Cap Anson–led Chicago White Stockings, leaders of the National League. Richmond brought his catcher, Bill Winslow, to Worcester, and they combined for a no-hitter in their professional debuts before returning to play again for Brown University. Complaining about Richmond, a writer for the Harvard Advocate claimed, “The line must be sharply drawn between professional and amateur players.”4 Richmond’s playing against professionals and for money set the stage for a more common occurrence of college baseball players spending their summers, often at resorts, playing baseball and getting free room and board and an allowance of five dollars, ten dollars, or more per week. A good pitcher might be paid by the game, while others possibly received subscriptions made up by the patrons attending the games. During the summer of 1889, a Harvard player competed with some Princeton players at a summer hotel while being paid twenty-five dollars per month. His eligibility was challenged by Princeton when he played football for Harvard that fall.5 By the 1890s, summer baseball was becoming a major

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amateur crisis for colleges. The University of Pennsylvania’s faculty ruled as ineligible all but two members of its baseball team, while Brown University allowed its paid summer athletes to continue to compete on its varsity baseball team.6 The amateur crusader and journalist Caspar Whitney claimed, “A day of reckoning is coming for Brown, now the only institution which persists in harboring the ‘summer nine’ players.”7 Whitney couldn’t have been more wrong, both about “reckoning” and about Brown University. The Brown University faculty called for a conference in 1898 to discuss needed reforms for college athletics, including summer baseball. All the institutions that became the Ivy League in the mid-twentieth century attended, except for Yale. Yale wanted no faculty controls. The Brown Conference was chaired by a Brown University professor, Wilfred Munro. He favored faculty control of athletics, not student control as had generally existed since intercollegiate athletics came into existence. The faculty-controlled Brown Conference came up with twenty suggested rule reforms. They included the banning of players involved in summer baseball as well as any athlete receiving financial support to attend college. In an early draft of the final report, the faculty stated they wanted to “weed out” any “student who ha[d] entered the university for athletic purposes solely,” not just summer ball players.8 Nonetheless, the Brown Conference recommendations, including a summer baseball ban, were not accepted at any of the eastern colleges. The resulting report was aimed at preventing intercollegiate athletics from the taint of professionalism and commercialism. It spoke to the upper-class British collegiate model found at Oxford and Cambridge, where they were “not engaged in making athletes.” Athletics in nineteenth-century America, however, were student controlled and win oriented, and athletes from each university rejected the Brown Conference reforms.9 Even Harvard’s board of trustees, the Corporation, had stated shortly before the Brown Conference that “athletics were apart from the ordinary affairs of the college, and a matter which the Faculty could not well control.” Yale’s president, Arthur Hadley, opposed faculty control of athletics with a strong desire to keep athletics in the hands of students and alumni. “The action of faculty,” Hadley stated, “tends to weaken its force in the places where it really belongs,” meaning the students.10 The year after the Brown Conference, any baseball player at Amherst, Dartmouth, and Williams could “barter his baseball skill for a summer’s board and lodging, and still be eligible.”11 Summer baseball participation was not slowed by the Brown Conference report.

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The SPread of Summer baSeball and ncaa diScuSSionS The summer baseball problem in the early twentieth century also existed in the Midwest, the West, and the South. Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago complained about a member of the University of Illinois baseball team who played summer baseball for money as well as a Northwestern athlete who was to be paid to participate in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Nearly the entire team at little Beloit College in Wisconsin played summer ball in Granville, New York, a vacation town of about five thousand in the Adirondack Mountains.12 Stagg, though, in a hypocritical action, recruited a future great Chicago athlete, Walter Eckersall. This was against the actions of the Amateur Athletic Union, which suspended Eckersall after a summer of paid baseball.13 On the West Coast, a journalist wrote that the difference between a professional and amateur player was that the professional “gets a stated salary and the [amateur] takes his chances on the box-office returning him a fair remuneration for his day’s work.”14 In the South, a regional conference attempted to do away with summer baseball. When the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association was established in 1894 with member institutions such as Alabama, Georgia, and Vanderbilt, it passed two rules. Any athlete who transferred schools would have to attend for a year before participating, and summer baseball for money was prohibited.15 The debate over summer baseball would continue. The crisis of amateurism became the second most important issue, next to violence in football, for the new National Collegiate Athletic Association, formed in 1905. On the cusp of the formation of the NCAA, a prime example of playing baseball for pay was that of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Of the fourteen men on the Georgetown baseball team in 1905, six had played summer baseball for pay, two were not bona fide students, and two had played under assumed names. Wrote a recent Georgetown graduate, “Such a reputation as we have made in baseball and football would be something to be proud of, if it were honest.”16 The muckraking reporter Henry Needham commented that “it is easier to convict a legislator of a bribe taken . . . than to convict [a summer baseball player] of taking money.”17 While faculty representatives to the NCAA raised the issue of summer baseball, the NCAA could take no legislative action to regulate college sport nationally. Because of a policy called home rule, the leaders of the fledgling NCAA, dominated at first by small colleges, agreed that they would take no legislative action so that the Big-Time universities would 64

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join the association. Then as now, the large universities did not want the small-time colleges directing them how to run athletics. Besides, the NCAA had no money to enforce regulations even if its faculty representatives passed legislation: it had a bank account of $28.82 after the first year of operation and $107.20 after the second.18 Nevertheless, in the first years of the NCAA, its faculty members tried to counter the perceived social evil of athletic professionalism through, as Progressives would state, bureaucratic measures. A number of faculty representatives spoke out about the threat that summer baseball posed to their notion of amateurism. The first to condemn summer baseball was Amos Alonzo Stagg, a star Yale football and baseball player who was hired by the University of Chicago as the first professor of physical education and football coach in America. Stagg opposed home rule and wanted the NCAA to regulate college sport. He wanted the banning of summer baseball as its first regulation. At the first annual meeting of the NCAA, Stagg took up the issue of summer baseball for pay, asserting that it was “the worst form of creeping professionalism in intercollegiate sports.”19 Just before the NCAA meeting, James E. Sullivan, the longtime secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union, noted that colleges permitted professionals to participate on their baseball teams as well as on their football teams. The teams and the “colleges should not be recognized by any association of the A.A.U.”20 As the AAU, formed in 1888, was the strongest amateur sport organization in America, the statement could not be ignored. Sullivan was asked to speak to the NCAA at its first annual meeting. There, Sullivan chided the organization and called for it to become a true “national” body that would define “amateurism” and create “uniform athletic laws” for the colleges.21 Home rule would continue among NCAA institutions until after World War II. Among other issues, it would include individual institutions enforcing their own rules or conference regulations on whether college baseball players could play summer baseball for money and then return to participate in intercollegiate athletics.

muScular moraliTy, ProgreSSiViSm, and Playing Summer baSeball Why was there such a divide in American college sport in the early 1900s over the question of summer baseball, and why was it such a moral issue for so many? One should consider the concept of “muscular morality” in context with the Progressive Era in American culture in the 65

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early twentieth century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of those interested in intercollegiate athletes were physical educators, and many who were involved in coaching were also physical educators. Numerous individuals in this college-educated group were caught up in the Progressive Era.22 The Progressives are often thought of as those who pushed for reforms to correct political corruption, break up business monopolies, increase women’s rights, and prohibit alcohol. There were Progressives in education in the early twentieth century who believed that problems could be addressed and solved with logical reforms in the public schools and in higher education. The reforms might be as broad as organizing playgrounds to help bring about positive changes in childhood activities or changing the education of the medical profession with stricter standards. There were also Progressives who dealt with college athletics and felt the need for national guidelines and legislation for the betterment of intercollegiate athletics—particularly men’s athletics. Many of these reformers were what might be called “muscular moralists.” The leaders of the muscular moralists were often trained in the medical profession but were mainly concerned with moral issues in sport, such as preserving amateurism and opposing activities such as summer baseball for pay. They believed that collegians playing baseball for money was dishonorable. While the ancient Greeks had no term for “amateur,” they did have two other words for how athletic sports might be played. Muscular moralists favored honor and fairness in competitions, something the ancient Greeks called aidos. They were not nearly as concerned about another fine quality, excellence in competition, which the Greeks named areté. The result was that many of the educated professors interested in athletics emphasized the moral issue in opposition to summer baseball and its violation of the tenets of amateurism that they falsely believed came from the ancient Greeks. In the Progressive Era, athletes playing summer baseball emphasized intense competition and winning. They often paid much less attention to fairness in competition and whether they were following amateur rules. Many players emphasized areté, leaving the question of aidos to others. The quality of aidos was often found among the professors attending the NCAA conferences as faculty representatives. A number of the muscular moralists found themselves being appointed faculty representatives to the annual NCAA conventions beginning in 1906. One of those was Amos Alonzo Stagg, who once was about to attend divinity school after graduating from Yale. Though his biographer used the term “heavy pious” when describing Stagg, he was often referred to as a “muscular Christian” similar to those who believed 66

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in “muscular morality.”23 Stagg had first been hired out of Yale by the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. At the time, Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick, the head of the physical training department, was a muscular Christian. Dr. Gulick was also the designer of the YMCA triangle logo, “Spirit, Mind, and Body.” Gulick was a leading sport figure in the Progressive Era of early twentieth-century America. He was the first president of the Playground Association of America as well as the founder, with his wife, of the Camp Fire Girls.24 When he spoke at the second NCAA conference in 1907, Gulick was director of physical training in the New York City public schools. Luther Gulick spoke to the NCAA delegates on the topic of amateurism. Agreeing with many of the men leading the NCAA, Gulick differed with the highly competitive, win-at-all-cost intercollegiate athletics that had developed over the past half century. He wanted the NCAA to lead in keeping sports “as a medium of fun and recreation,” for, he stated, “the moral side interests me most.” Like many Progressives, he rejected the rampant individualism of the times in favor of social engineering through collective actions. Intercollegiate athletics, Gulick stated, “do not exist for the individual playing; they are not done for the benefit of the competitor. They are for focusing the consciousness of an institution, and in that they meet the coming social demand.” Summer baseball for pay did not serve the moral side of athletics, and various forms of professionalism were a misrepresentation of the NCAA’s focus on the meaning of amateurism.25 Leading the discussion of Gulick’s NCAA paper on amateurism was another muscular moralist from the University of Missouri, Clark  H. Hetherington. He was chair of the NCAA’s Summer Baseball Committee and gave his report to the gathering in 1907. When he gave his report, he was in charge of both physical education and athletics at Missouri. There, he led in the founding of the Missouri Valley Conference—an attempt to bring about reform and eliminate professionalism in college athletics. Hetherington, like many Progressives, wanted educated administrators to lead social reforms and human advancement. These would include such reforms as playgrounds managed by trained adults under the Playgrounds Association of America; settlement houses for immigrants such as Hull House, administered by Jane Addams; or state interscholastic athletic associations run by trained administrators to control amateur school athletics. Hetherington’s Summer Baseball Committee recommended that the NCAA investigate further the summer baseball issue and take “appropriate action.”26 67

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Action by the NCAA, however, would not take place because of home rule. The concept of home rule was created to entice the larger universities to join the NCAA because the new organization would not pass national legislation that might adversely affect the major athletic institutions. Because of home rule, all amateur questions, including athletic scholarships and limits on recruiting, would not be acted upon by the NCAA until after World War II, a half century later. Home rule, similar to the political tradition of states’ rights, meant rule at home by institutions or conferences, not nationally by the NCAA. Even the representative from the US Military Academy at West Point, Palmer Pierce, who called summer baseball a “vexed question,” could be considered a muscular moralist as he attempted to solve the baseball question. Pierce became the first president of the fledgling NCAA and continued as president for many years. An army captain in 1907 and later a general, Pierce delivered a talk on the history of the NCAA in which he considered the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge as the leaders of aidos, or “fair play and true sportsmanship,” as they upheld “the ethics of amateur athletics.” He wanted national leadership from the NCAA faculty representatives to bring about “sport for sport’s sake,” a statement, unfortunately for Pierce, as difficult to define for these leaders as was amateurism. Even as Pierce knew that the NCAA could not ban summer baseball because of its endorsement of home rule, he believed the NCAA was “a league of educated gentlemen who are trying to exercise a wise control over college athletics.” As a good Progressive and muscular moralist, he believed that “the good effect will react on every playground of every schoolhouse of the United States.”27 The Pierceled NCAA, to the contrary, was more a debating society than an action association. There was no consensus in the first decade of the twentieth century on the amateur nature of summer baseball. Another Progressive reformer, William L. Dudley of Vanderbilt University, proclaimed erroneously that the summer baseball “evil is practically eliminated from college sport.”28 Nevertheless, there were those who felt that athletes earning summer money was neither anti-amateur nor unethical. There was no consensus at the NCAA, though the majority probably favored no summer baseball for pay. One dissident was Penn State professor Judson “J. P.” Welsh, who said the athlete should be “let alone in the full, free, untrammeled exercise of his American citizenship, which entitles him to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”29 Students at three small colleges in New England, Amherst, Wesleyan, and Williams, felt the same way and voted overwhelmingly, 627–169, to approve the summer game for pay, while 68

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the NCAA district representative, Professor Frank W. Nicolson of Wesleyan, stated that “summer ball is the most irritating and most in need of settlement.”30

Jim ThorPe, The aau, and lack of reSoluTion For the next generation there were various committees on summer baseball, but there was no agreement on what constituted pay or amateurism for this activity. As one 1910 committee concluded, “We do not deem it advisable to recommend rules [as] different conditions exist in each college.” Still, the committee stated firmly that “sports in colleges should be on a strictly amateur basis.”31 An NCAA faculty representative from the University of Wisconsin conceded that organized professional baseball had tended toward “the elimination of baseball as an amateur sport.” Professor George W. Ehler believed the role of amateurism was at stake because, as in baseball, “a compromise between amateurism and professionalism in one sport cannot help but lead to the rapid growth of professionalism in all forms of sport.”32 He was correct, though it took several generations for this amateurism-professionalism domino theory in college sport to take effect. By the twenty-first century tennis professionals could participate in college sport, successful college Olympians were allowed to receive tens of thousands of dollars, and scholarship athletes were able to receive money well beyond the cost of tuition and fees, room and board, and books. The case of Jim Thorpe is the most celebrated case of summer baseball, though neither was he a collegiate player nor did the NCAA take up his case. Thorpe, who was rated the greatest American athlete in the twentieth century, was sent as a sixteen-year-old from an Oklahoma Indian reservation to Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School in 1904. There he became a star athlete under coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, but left and played in the Eastern Carolina League for purportedly sixty dollars a month in the summers of 1910 and 1911. He returned to Carlisle to compete against colleges as a star in track and field and especially football, helping to beat the strong Harvard team 18–15.33 After Thorpe won the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon in Sweden, the Amateur Athletic Union condemned his violation of amateur rules in North Carolina, forcing him to relinquish his Olympic gold medals.34 Thorpe at that time admitted he had accepted money, but he said, “I was doing what I knew several other college men had done; except that they did not use their own names.”35 Though it was an Olympic and not a collegiate summer 69

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baseball issue in 1912, the question of amateurism was raised again and continued for the next seventy years, after which the International Olympic Committee restored the Olympic medals to Thorpe’s family. The AAU’s James Sullivan, a short time before he died in 1914, remarked, “For 21 years I have been fighting to keep amateur and professional sport strictly apart” and noted, “Summer baseball is professional baseball.”36 To the contrary, the Athletic Board of Control at the University of Southern California, reflecting other universities, voted “to favor summer baseball” without jeopardizing amateur standing. Yet, the faculty-controlled athletic committee at Stanford suggested “the abolition of baseball as a ‘Varsity’ Sport” for its professionalizing tendencies.37 In the Big Ten, while the conference of faculty representatives voted for each university to ratify the discontinuance of baseball, the newspaper editors of those same universities were overwhelmingly in favor of summer baseball for pay.38 There was no consensus on summer baseball. The absurdity of the Big Ten faculty representatives attempting to keep amateur sport amateur was seen in the roaring twenties when professionalism and commercialism were dominating the collegiate scene. The new Big Ten commissioner, Major John L. Griffith, felt the need to send a representative to Mississippi to check on a baseball player after Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg accused him of playing baseball during the summer. Stagg accused another from the University of Illinois of playing summer baseball, not because he was proven to have accepted money, but because the home team attached a money box to the grandstand and every spectator was urged to deposit fifty cents upon entry. Indeed, gate receipts in summer baseball had previously been made an amateur crime by the Big Ten.39 In a similar mid-1920s situation, Yale and Princeton summer baseball players were competing at a resort in Kennebunkport, Maine, wearing their college baseball caps, under a former major league star, Jack Coombs. The Harvard Athletic Committee, knowing that Harvard would have to play against these “professionals” the next year, thought it was unfair for Yale and Princeton men to get jobs at a summer hotel and play under a professional coach, who was paid $1,000 for his summer efforts. A Harvard graduate complained that “players are hired at a price to win these games [under] a ‘professional coach’ with ‘a distinct professional atmosphere.’” A Princeton Athletic Committee professor and amateur advocate was concerned. “In these days when professional football seems to be so rapidly on the increase,” Charles Kennedy wanted to know, “what is to prevent a college student at the end of the football season

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from slipping away from college for a day, playing professional football for money?” Kennedy reasoned, “If the amateur rule is yielded in one sport, it will ultimately be relaxed in others.”40

accommodaTion and Summer leagueS While the summer baseball for pay question was never settled to the satisfaction of those who believed in the tenets of amateurism, it was settled principally by inaction and accommodation. Following World War II, the athletic director at Dartmouth, Bill McCarter, asked at an NCAA conference, possibly seriously, “What attitude should we take toward summer baseball?”41 Allowing summer baseball as an organized “professional” league was a major answer. Cape Cod, where summer baseball had been going on since the 1880s, became the Cape Cod League in the 1950s. The Cape Cod League was generally considered the premier summer league for collegians after their college freshman participation. The Basin League, principally in South Dakota in the Missouri River Basin, came into being with teams in such communities as Chamberlain, Mitchell, Rapid City, and Sioux Falls. There, future baseball Hall of Famers such as Bob Gibson (and his ninety-five-mile-per-hour “heater”), Jim Palmer, and Don Sutton starred. Frank Howard, the Ohio State slugger, and even Phil Jackson, the future basketball figure, played there.42 There were several other leagues, including a well-advertised Alaska League, another feeder for the professional major leagues. A player might be given a “cushy” job as payment for June, July, and August participation, such as once a day sweeping off the steps of a hotel where the player was likely housed. The players would thus remain amateur, returning to play additional college baseball. By the late 1950s, the NCAA made accommodations to any summer league as long as it was certified by the NCAA.43 The association allowed athletes to be gainfully employed for at least twenty-eight hours, paid prevailing rates, and reimbursed for their transportation costs. In addition, the NCAA allowed the summer players to compete against professionals but not to play with them. The summer league team, however, would not allow the coach to be employed by a pro team or receive money from a pro team. Curiously, a major league team was not allowed to contribute directly to a league or team, but the major leagues collectively could contribute to a league.44 The NCAA agreed that this would keep summer baseball amateur.

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Summer baseball leagues continued to grow in the twenty-first century. They served the purposes of developing more experienced college players and providing a venue for major league scouts to determine who might make it to the majors. Cape Cod continued to be considered the top league, with others spread across America, including the Coastal Plain League in North Carolina and Virginia, the Hamptons League in New York, the Northwoods League in Wisconsin, the Jayhawk League in Kansas, and the Golden State League in California. After the first generation of twenty-first-century college athletics, there were more than forty “amateur” leagues to accommodate keeping baseball within the amateur rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.45 There was no longer a reason for baseball players to use assumed names during their summer vacations to avoid being made ineligible. Summer baseball was amateur in name only, as the NCAA defined pay for play for its own purposes. Other than that, by the twenty-first century, amateurism had little meaning as colleges continued to move toward greater professionalism.

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ch a PTer Six

The 1929 Carnegie Report conde mnaT ion of Profe S SionaliSm

Athletics has absorbed the college, it is time for the college to absorb athletics. henry S. PriTcheTT, 1926

The man who is most likely to succeed in uprooting the evils of recruiting and subsidizing is the college president. howard J. SaVage, 1929

I

f There iS one documenT ThaT criTiciZeS Summer baseball for pay, the training table, athletic dorms, the professional coach, athletic scholarships, and other forms of commercialism and professionalism, it is the 1929 report American College Athletics. It was funded by the esteemed Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.1 By the 1920s, the lack of amateurism was apparent to most observers, especially the college faculty representatives who gathered for the annual NCAA conventions. As America entered World War I in 1917, the president of the NCAA, Palmer Pierce of West Point, sent out a resolution to all members supporting the continuance of intercollegiate athletics. For, as Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had told Pierce, “There are not enough star athletes in colleges to fill our armies.”2 But the NCAA made the war resolution into an amateur reform document under Pierce’s leadership. He asked for reducing pay for coaches, eliminating training tables, calling for freshman ineligibility, eradicating preseason practices, and rejecting the notion of lowering eligibility standards for athletes.3 Little, however, was done to reform the commercialism and professionalism of athletics that followed the war. 73

The originS of The carnegie rePorT Having a prestigious foundation such as the Carnegie Foundation conduct a lengthy study of the problems in intercollegiate athletics was suggested well before it was taken on. The condemnation of athletics did not come from students or alumni lovers of intercollegiate athletics. The students, especially, had organized men’s college athletics and had often supported them through athletic associations from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. The athletic associations were run by undergraduates who created them to give moral and financial support to the student-controlled teams they supported—often crew, baseball, football, and track and field. Amateur ideals were violated because the desire to win was far more important to the students than how the sports fit into general education goals. In contrast, faculty athletic committees on campuses were established to limit the extent that extracurricular sports would overshadow the educational curriculum.4 Woodrow Wilson, who would be elected president of the United States in 1912, may have best summed up the negative side of college athletics. Wilson had been a faculty member in political science at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he had helped coach the football team for a short time. In the 1890s, he joined the Princeton faculty, and by the early twentieth century, he was chosen as its president. Before the end of his presidency and prior to running for and winning the governorship of New Jersey, he became disenchanted with Big-Time college athletics and wrote, “The side shows are so numerous, so diverting—so important if you will—that they have swallowed up the circus, and those who perform in the main tent must often whistle for their audiences.”5 Wilson’s condemnation of the extra-curriculum, as opposed to the college curriculum, reflected that of those who condemned athletics for their professionalism and commercialism. Athletics were then ripe for reform. National standards were needed to create requirements of amateurism for individual schools and conferences. But because of the NCAA’s early decision to uphold the idea of home rule, its faculty representatives could neither legislate nor enforce amateur rules. They could only advocate that individual colleges and conferences adopt their recommendations. In an effort to curb athletic excesses, the NCAA produced nine fundamental principles that it urged member institutions and conferences to adopt: (1) adhere strictly to the NCAA’s definition of amateurism; (2) adopt freshman ineligibility rules; (3) limit eligibility to three years; (4) oppose tramp athletes, or those who migrated from one school to another; (5) allow no graduate student participation; (6) limit athletes’ 74

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participation to the institutional team, even during vacations; (7) suppress all betting; (8) recognize only faculty control; and (9) adopt the rules by conferences.6 To gain acceptance of these principles, the NCAA asked each NCAA district representative to visit all colleges in his district to advocate for them.7 The two principles that were almost never instituted were adhering to amateurism and recognizing faculty control. While the concept of amateurism had been universally accepted by colleges and conferences, it had nearly always been rejected in practice. Relative to faculty control, even with conferences such as the Big Ten being run by faculty representatives, the wishes of faculty could easily be trumped by presidents, governing boards, or outside agencies. And they often were when important issues arose. To the credit of the NCAA representatives, more conferences were formed and most eventually eliminated graduate student participation while limiting freshman and migrant athletes from immediate participation. Some athletic leaders thought that an outside educational institution with prestige might be able to pressure universal adherence to amateurism. Even before the United States entered World War I, Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago called for an organization outside the NCAA to conduct a survey to establish athletic standards. Stagg, the successful football coach and athletic director, appealed to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Sage Foundation, and the General Education Board to do the survey.8 Amateur sport was the goal. In 1916, the Amateur Athletic Union, the principal amateur athletic organization outside of colleges, and the NCAA agreed in principle on the definition of an amateur. The amateur athlete was one who competed “only for the pleasure, and the physical, mental, moral, and social benefits derived therefrom.”9 The NCAA then resolved to petition a foundation to survey intercollegiate athletics. However, this action was not taken for another decade—during the 1920s and the “Golden Age of Sports.”

The carnegie foundaTion for The adVancemenT of Teaching By the early 1920s, as commercialism and professionalism intensified, such as stadium building or the granting of athletic scholarships, people again called for reform in intercollegiate athletics and what was considered amateur sport. The NCAA’s Dr. Edgar Fauver, longtime physician and physical educator at Wesleyan University, suggested that 75

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a large foundation such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the Carnegie Foundation conduct a thorough study of intercollegiate athletics. He wanted facts, not sentiment, on which future college athletics could be conducted.10 Only a short time before, in 1921, the Carnegie Foundation Executive Committee had brought up the idea of a national study of athletics, but the committee had only suggested possible “action in the future.”11 Four years later, the Carnegie Foundation asked a staff member, Howard Savage, to summarize the situation in America. He was then sent to England to study athletics at Oxford and Cambridge, the accepted ideal of amateur sport. However, incorporating the Oxbridge athletic model in America had been rejected in the nineteenth century and was not likely to be suitable a half century later. Shortly after World War I, no one had effectively answered the comments of an NCAA committee led by Frank Nicolson, the treasurer of the NCAA. He poignantly pointed out the dilemma in American colleges of participating in sports on an amateur basis while being forced to finance them commercially.12 No person or study for the next century would solve the dilemma of trying to play amateur sport with a commercial-professional model. That is except for women’s sport in colleges, but that will be dealt with later. Nevertheless, after a petition by the NCAA in 1925, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced in January 1926 that it would carry out the study that Edgar Fauver hoped would end the commercial-professional evil he saw in college athletics. So, a half year after star football player Harold “Red” Grange left the University of Illinois early to sign a contract with the Chicago Bears in the National Football League to make over $100,000 his first year, the Carnegie Foundation surged ahead.13 The Grange signing was the most publicized action of an “amateur” turning professional in collegiate history. In all likelihood, it added to the Carnegie Foundation’s pointed mission to condemn the commercialism and professionalism in college athletics and to do it through a lengthy study.14 It may have been only a coincidence that the Carnegie Foundation took up the reform cudgel directly after the Red Grange signing of a professional football contract, but it was no coincidence that the foundation knew what its results would be before the three-year study began. Amateurism would be the goal following the national revelations of rampant professionalism and commercialism in men’s intercollegiate athletics. One only needed to know who was president of the Carnegie Foundation to predict how the study would turn out. A former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Henry S. Pritchett, had been

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the Carnegie Foundation’s first president in 1906 and, early in his tenure, had been instrumental in the creation of one of the most important documents in the history of American medical education. Led by Pritchett and Abraham Flexner’s Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), the Carnegie Foundation helped change the method of educating doctors and raise standards in the medical profession. In Pritchett’s introduction to Medical Education, he showed that the Carnegie Foundation not only was surveying medical schools but was a “work of advocacy and a catalyst for change.”15 In a similar way, Pritchett’s written preface to the Carnegie Foundation’s American College Athletics advocated for the position he had already taken on athletics before the study was initiated. Major John L. Griffith, commissioner of the Big Ten, was correct when he stated soon after the Carnegie Report was released that “Pritchett judges education in American colleges and universities by the German education concepts and our athletics by the British standards of sport.”16 Americans acknowledged some German attitudes toward research, but they never put into practice the Oxbridge amateur standards.

The carnegie rePorT concluded before The STudy began Well before any research was undertaken in the over one hundred colleges and schools researched, Pritchett had written, “Athletics, in large measure professional in its methods and organizations, fills a place in the eyes of students and even of the public than any other one interest.” To Pritchett, college athletics constituted “a reproach of American colleges and to those who govern them.” Specifically, he claimed that “the paid coach, the professional organization of the college athletics, the demoralization of students by participation in the use of extravagant sums of money” should not be tolerated.17 Why then conduct the study if he and the Carnegie Foundation already knew this? Was it to create a greater authority from the document that the Carnegie Foundation would produce and widely disseminate, as it had so successfully done with the Medical Education report two decades before? Almost assuredly. Just as the Carnegie survey was set to begin, Pritchett spoke at a graduation ceremony with the strong words, “Hitherto, athletics has absorbed the college; it is time for the college to absorb athletics.”18 One need not have questioned how the three-year study would turn out. It was predestined, just as was life according to the Protestant Reformation clergyman

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of the sixteenth century John Calvin. Just as souls were foreordained and predestined in Calvinism, the results of the study were sealed in Pritchettism before it was investigated. Henry Pritchett was an educational elitist who condemned colleges for allowing nonintellectual activities to garner the interests of college undergraduates. “Commercial athletics,” he claimed shortly before the Carnegie Foundation began its study, “should no longer retain their pre-eminence in our distorted scale of academic values.”19 When the report was completed three years later as American College Athletics, it had the unfortunate release date of October 24, 1929—the cold and cloudy day the stock market crashed, helping to usher in the Great Depression. Yet the Carnegie Report was news across the nation, for, as newsworthy as was the crash, few foresaw the economic collapse that would result. It was the ringing denunciation of Pritchett’s preface, rather than the body of the report, that caught most of the attention.20 The paid coach, the gate receipts, the special training tables, the costly sweaters and extensive journeys in special Pullman cars, the recruiting from the high school, the demoralizing publicity showered on the players, the devotion of an undue proportion of time to training, the devices for putting a desirable athlete, but a weak scholar, across the hurdles of the examination—these ought to stop.

News of the report, which might have been front-page news in most newspapers, was overshadowed by the shocking stock market crash. It was relegated to page 17 of the prestigious New York Times. Nevertheless, American College Athletics had an immediate impact upon colleges and universities nationwide. Even the Midwestern Daily Iowan carried the front-page column “Colleges Throughout Country React to Carnegie Report on Commercialism in Athletics” next to “Terrifying Wave of Selling Sweeps Stock Exchange with Record Turnover of Shares.”21 The latter column was a portent of a world-changing event, the Great Depression, while the other was looked at closely and commented upon. For the most part it was agreed to in principle but discarded in practice.

AmericAn college Athletics Because American College Athletics, authored by Howard Savage, named specific colleges and universities that were breaking amateur concepts and moving intercollegiate sports toward professionalism and 78

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commercialism, those institutions felt the need to respond to the attack on their specific athletic programs. Examples of accusations made against colleges from the East to the West included that Dartmouth had complete alumni control of athletics rather than faculty; the University of Pennsylvania segregated its athletes within an athletic dorm; Penn State paid seventy-five athletes with scholarships, mostly for football; little Washington and Jefferson College had a “slush fund” to pay for specific game performances; Notre Dame provided tuition, room, and board for nominal services; Illinois built an extremely expensive stadium at the expense of providing intramural sports; Alabama had a double standard, admitting athletes with far lower academic standards than other students; Southern Methodist created academic scholarships only for athletes; the University of Denver created a specific athletic position for the purpose of recruiting and subsidizing athletes; athletes at Oregon State were provided monthly stipends; and Southern California athletics provided football tickets to fraternities to entertain prospective athletes. These were among the nearly one hundred violating colleges American College Athletics noted for the nation to see and condemn.22 The 350-page document attacked current practices and condemned the rampant commercialism found in college athletics. In short, the Carnegie Report criticized the abandonment of amateurism. The report indicated that the trend could be reversed, and Savage pointed the finger at university presidents to do so. “The man who is most likely to succeed in uprooting the evils of recruiting and subsidizing,” he concluded, “is the college president.” Strangely, he emphasized that “under capable leadership,” the individual college or university that “makes up its mind to cast out these practices, can do so.” The president, he noted, will be helped if other presidents cooperate, “but under no circumstances which we have been able to discover is it impossible even if he stands alone.”23 If Howard Savage had known the history of the power of college presidents, and of presidents standing alone, he would not have made such a strong statement. He never would have said that the president could correct the professionalism and commercialism, including the recruitment and payment of players, if he had the will to do so. Savage did not recognize that nearly all presidents at that time were cheerleaders for athletics, not reformers. They had been in the previous century, and they would be in the following one.24 Even the most prestigious and powerful president in American collegiate history, Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, failed to control college sport in his time—as did almost every president after him.25 Eliot could not ban football at Harvard. He claimed it was useless to become involved 79

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in the reform that ended in the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. When asked to help reform college football in the football crisis of 1905, the three-decade leader of Harvard telegraphed the chancellor of New York University, Henry M. MacCracken, telling him that university leaders “certainly cannot reform football.” “I doubt if by themselves they can abolish it,” he wrote.26 Presidents other than Charles Eliot may have wanted to limit the professionalism and commercialism in college athletics, but few had the strong interest or courage to do something about it. Edwin E. Slosson, the noted literary editor of The Independent, may have been right in his volume Great American Universities. He wrote that many “a college president is ‘ex officio’ somewhat of a coward and a liar; Eliot is not.”27 Nearly all college presidents shied away from any reform of college athletics in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century—a portent of inaction of presidents in the future. Not all presidents have been liars about athletics, but nearly all have been cowards. Even the University of Wisconsin head Donna Shalala commented at the end of the twentieth century that presidents are “scaredy cats” when it comes to making athletic decisions.28 Slosson had good insight into the leaders of colleges and universities in the early twentieth century, and Shalala was as astute at the century’s end.

college PreSidenTS, The carnegie rePorT, and aThleTic ScholarShiPS College presidents were divided on the accuracy and importance of the Carnegie Report. A number of university leaders rejected the report findings of their own institutions, a tradition of presidents well into the twenty-first century. They acknowledged professionalism and violations of amateurism at other institutions but not at their own. President James R. Angell of Yale even made fun of the Carnegie Report for giving Yale a clean slate in a talk shortly after the report’s release. Angell said he would be happy to swap the purity credited (erroneously) to Yale “for a couple of good running backs or a pair of great ends.”29 Other presidents indicated that they would strive to take greater control of athletics by reducing the role of alumni while placing athletics under university control. Only a handful of presidents took the Carnegie Report as a call for action to try to reestablish amateurism at their own institutions. A few presidents did take the advice of the Carnegie Report and challenge the status quo. Four stand out for their actions shortly after American College Athletics was published—Thomas S. Gates of the University of 80

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Pennsylvania, John Bowman of the University of Pittsburgh, Frank Graham of the University of North Carolina, and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. Thomas Gates was a wealthy lawyer who, after being a longtime member of the University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees, was elected president of the institution less than a year after the Carnegie Report was released. Agreeing to take the presidency with no salary, Gates was not beholden to anyone for his financial well-being. This was unusual for any college president. He could challenge the University of Pennsylvania’s athletics status quo. Gates expressed his belief that athletics should not “interfere with the prosecution of normal student life and the enjoyment that comes from wise and proper participation in sports of all kinds.” Setting up a committee that was in line with his beliefs, a report was soon in his hands, and a new policy was announced—the Gates Plan. His policy dictated that the professional coach who had been enriched by the system previously would no longer be so, at least at Penn. Gates criticized college football as a “contest between professional coaches and their systems.”30 The Gates Plan specifically included eliminating athletic dorms and the free training table for athletes, and abolishing spring and early preseason football practice. It also eliminated “rest” trips at resorts for athletes, controlled financial assistance to athletes given by the university scholarship committee, and advocated competing against natural rivals. The athletic budget would be brought under general university control, not that of alumni, and football would not be given special treatment as it had in the past. These reforms were intended to limit alumni control, something that eastern colleges had become accustomed to since the late 1800s. Henry Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation was pleased that one of the elite institutions that would later become a member of the Ivy League was responding to the American College Athletics report and returning to some of the major amateur ideals. This included students regaining some of the control of athletics, even being seated in the middle of the stadium rather than relegated to the end zone, and students being actively involved in the University of Pennsylvania Athletics Advisory Board.31 Gates then attempted to place his reform agenda on the national level through the Association of American Colleges, which was founded in 1915 to reform liberal arts colleges. Gates became chair of the AAC Commission on College Athletics. The commission recommended eliminating the practices of recruiting and paying athletes, and abolishing the training tables and athletic dorms. In addition, it recommended paying coaches professorial salaries with academic ranks and promoting amateur 81

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athletics for all. Like the NCAA, the AAC had no power to enact legislation, nor would most institutions join in the changing direction of Big-Time athletics.32 Gates was wrong in his assessment of college athletics and the importance of a presidential role in reform. Even his own AAC voted down a resolution to appoint a commission to make “a comprehensive survey of the athletic situation concerning subsidization of athletes.”33 By 1936, the Gates Plan had made no headway on the national level. Nevertheless, the Gates Plan at Penn continued until after World War II, when an ex-governor of Minnesota and aspiring US presidential candidate, Harold Stassen, took over as president. With Stassen and his “victory with honor” policy, Penn returned for a short time as a major athletic program with a unique institutional TV contract, the largest in the nation, and the end of the attempt by President Gates to return to amateur athletics. On the other side of the state of Pennsylvania, Chancellor John Bowman was transforming a 1930s “professional” football team at the University of Pittsburgh and moving toward an amateur model. The research team from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching did not fully study the University of Pittsburgh and its blatant professionalization of athletics. If it had, it would have discovered the salaries of football players throughout the 1920s. Even though the Carnegie Report stated that Pitt had fully cooperated with the study, it had not. It may have been because Chancellor Bowman had been secretary of the Carnegie Foundation in the early 1900s; the foundation did not want to investigate Bowman and Pitt. It is clear, however, that from the time Glenn “Pop” Warner was coach at Pitt (1915–1923) until well into the Depression years, Pitt was paying its players a salary, up to one hundred dollars per month plus tuition and books. This may have been the highest paid team in America, as John Bain “Jock” Sutherland, like Warner before him, had won year after year.34 During the depths of the Great Depression, the salaries had been reduced to forty-eight dollars per month. Nevertheless, it was enough so that a number of players were married, and sportswriters referred to Jock Sutherland’s team as the “married men’s team.”35 Athletes at Pitt were earning more than athletic scholarships—they were true wage-earning professionals, likely paid more than the players in the National Football League such as the competitors with the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers. Chancellor Bowman had to deal with athletic turmoil at Pitt when the football players voted 17–16 not to accept the invitation to go to the 1937 Rose Bowl. This was because they were not promised $200 each and

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a two-week vacation to go to Pasadena, California, and the players were told that they must work for their monthly payments in the future.36 In addition, the accrediting of the University of Pittsburgh was being questioned by the Middle States Association. Bowman decided to eliminate athletic scholarships and added academic requirements to remain athletically eligible. The new requirements to control athletics were named Code Bowman, and as Bowman remarked, it was sinful to pay players “to go to college to play a sport.”37 The successful attempt to remove the payment of players and to compete only with amateur athletes was a disaster to the winning fortunes at Pitt for three decades. The Pitt Board of Trustees investigated Bowman for antagonizing the Pitt alumni and for causing the resignation of coach Sutherland. When President Walter A. Jessup of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching heard that Bowman was going to strongly reply to the trustees, Jessup persuasively urged Bowman not to do so. He told Bowman that “every college president he knew who started a fight with the board got into a mess.”38 Pitt did not lose accreditation, but it might have since the library at Pitt was of poor quality. Bowman had won the battle to control Pitt athletics, and strangely he did not get fired by the trustees. In the long run, amateur athletics under the Code Bowman administration could not be sustained. The students and alumni were dissatisfied, and Pitt football suffered for years, losing twenty-four straight games to sister institutions in the Big Ten. Successful Big-Time athletics would eventually return to Pitt more than three decades later. Another loser to amateur sport was a president who wanted to do away with athletic scholarships not only at his own institution, the University of North Carolina, but also in the Southern Conference, of which UNC was a member. Frank Graham was elected president of UNC in 1930 and was strongly influenced by the Carnegie Report of 1929 and by Abraham Flexner, who wrote the original Carnegie Report on medical education two decades earlier. In 1930, Flexner wrote a volume on the universities of three major countries, titled Universities: American, English, German. Flexner was on the side of the minority who felt American universities needed to be intellectually invigorating and unencumbered by the distractions of a host of undergraduate extracurricular activities, including athletics.39 From that standpoint, Flexner agreed with the head of the Carnegie Foundation, Henry Pritchett, and the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who will next be discussed. Flexner gave a talk at a meeting of the National Association of State Universities (NASU) soon after Frank Graham became head of the

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University of North Carolina in 1930, the original land grant institution of North Carolina. President Graham, like the authors of the Carnegie Report American College Athletics, believed that recruiting and subsidizing athletes were the greatest problems facing athletics. Presidents, he believed, should lead in solving the amateurism problem in college athletics.40 President Graham became chair of the NASU committee to study the place of athletics in state universities. His committee came up with an athletic reform plan, the Graham Plan, that would end athletic scholarships, ban athletic recruiting, and prohibit freshmen athletic participation, among other issues.41 Almost as soon as the Graham Plan was announced, it was “unanimously” denounced by North Carolina alumni, students, and even faculty on the athletic council who favored athletes getting preferential treatment in scholarships. North Carolina teams, the Graham detractors stated, could not compete successfully under these conditions and would ruin the reputation of the institution. Even with massive opposition to the Graham Plan, President Graham took his plan to the Southern Conference, consisting of North Carolina State, Clemson, Duke, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Washington and Lee. At about the same time that the Southeastern Conference, consisting of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, among others, had voted to allow full athletic scholarships, Graham won a 6–4 vote to ban athletic scholarships in the Southern Conference. The North Carolina alumni went ballistic in condemning the Graham Plan, with Graham conceding, “This is the hottest wire that I ever got my hands on.” The North Carolina Montgomery County Alumni Association resolved to “withdraw all our support from the University until such injustice is corrected.”42 The president of Yale University, James Angell, sympathized with his colleague. He told Graham, “There is no such irrational group to be dealt with in our academic life as the athletic brethren.”43 The death of the Graham Plan came almost immediately upon its conception. Few colleges in the Southern Conference obeyed the Graham Plan even though the conference had passed the measure to try to preserve amateurism. Because of the turmoil that the Graham Plan had produced, within months the conference voted to abolish the new amateur rules. Shortly afterward, North Carolina alumni created a tax-exempt and independent foundation, the Educational Foundation, to raise money to fund athletes attending the institution. President Graham conceded, “We had a bitter fight in North Carolina and there was practically unanimous opposition” to the Graham Plan. He commented that there was unanimity among 84

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alumni, student body, public, and the press.44 In short, Frank Graham was a victim as one of the handful of presidents who believed that amateur athletics was a possibility under the leadership of university presidents. The Graham Plan had attempted to do what few individual presidents had tried to do in the period following American College Athletics and what no other conference was successful in taking up in the 1930s. The effort to preserve amateurism, for which the faculty-controlled NCAA had been fighting for three decades, was one conference’s attempt at a time when unofficial financial aid to athletes, especially in football, was growing throughout America. By the end of the Depression and just before the United States entered World War II, the NCAA decided that it needed national controls to attempt to preserve amateurism and uncover the fig-leafed professionalism. That did not occur until just after the war, when the NCAA passed what was called the Sanity Code to limit aid to athletes and control recruiting. Frank Graham was still president of North Carolina, but he never again attempted to pass amateur athletic legislation. The last of the four reforming presidents who put their heads on the block yet obtained a measure of success in retaining amateurism was Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. Hutchins is the only president who was successful in achieving what he wanted while knowing that he couldn’t achieve amateur athletics outside his own institution. Hutchins was a young dean of the Yale Law School before becoming president of the University of Chicago in 1929 at age thirty, less than one month after the publication of the Carnegie Report. Chicago was already undergoing an educational reform to raise its academic standards before Hutchins ascended to the presidency. However, Chicago had one of the greatest names in collegiate football history, coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had been at Chicago since 1892.45 Stagg was the best-known individual at Chicago, had won a number of Big Ten football championships, and began losing contests only after academic requirements had toughened in the 1920s. Hutchins, on the other hand, had little use for athletics and was far more concerned that students read the “great books” than watch or play intercollegiate sports. Because the Carnegie Report American College Athletics was not one of the “great books,” Hutchins may never have read the report nor been influenced by it.46 Nevertheless, he would have agreed with many of the report findings. President Hutchins likely desired to eliminate football in his first decade at the University of Chicago, but it was not until the late 1930s when the status of football was so damaged that Chicago’s board of trustees would even consider dropping the football program. Hutchins had 85

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written his famous condemnation of football, “Gate Receipts and Glory,” a year before the disastrous season of 1939, when Chicago lost 46–0 to Illinois, 61–0 to Harvard and Ohio State, and 85–0 to Michigan. In his Saturday Evening Post article in 1938, Hutchins proclaimed that “young people who are more interested in their bodies than their minds, should not go to college.” He was satisfied that if the less intellectual universities kept football, “the good ones may be saved.”47 Hutchins was not going to pay athletes to go to college, especially at Chicago. The Michigan score, 85–0, was the result of paying athletes at Michigan and not at Chicago in the climactic year of 1939. The president told his trustees that Chicago did not want to play the lesser schools such as Illinois Wesleyan, Carroll College, or Monmouth College because it would diminish Chicago’s status as a premier university. The trustees were told that the only way out was to drop football and remove itself from the most prestigious conference, the Big Ten. Chicago would not subsidize athletes, and it would support only amateur sports.48 The trustees were eventually convinced by Hutchins and voted to drop football. Chicago did not, according to the educational elitist Hutchins, need football gate receipts and glory. It needed intellectual vigor. Unlike President Gates at the University of Pennsylvania or President Graham at the University of North Carolina, Hutchins did not attempt to bring the Chicago “Plan” to other institutions. He did, though, move the University of Chicago to a level of intellectual inquiry that few other institutions of higher education could or would match. This was certainly true at the undergraduate level, and it continued that tradition well into the twenty-first century. Chicago, however, did begin a low-level football program three decades after dropping the sport. Hutchins, in the 1930s, was out of tune with nearly all colleges and universities, including the Ivy League, which never dropped football or indicated that extracurricular activities were unimportant to its undergraduates. Chicago, among major universities, was in a league of its own. American College Athletics did have an impact, but it was not longlasting. However, nearly all later reform efforts for amateur college sports have referred to the document. This included the 1952 document by the reformist and presidentially driven American Council on Education, the 1974 American Council on Education’s “Inquiry into the Need for and Feasibility of a National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics” by George Hanford, and the 1991 Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics’ “Keeping Faith with the Student-Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics.”49 All were dominated by presidents or ex-presidents of American colleges and universities, and all failed to 86

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significantly reform athletics. Charles W. Eliot appeared to be correct when he noted in 1905, relative to the crisis in American football, that presidents can’t or won’t reform college athletics and bring about the amateur model.50 Fig leaves remained firmly attached to the athletes and those who professionalized college athletics before the Carnegie Report in 1929, and they have persisted ever since. Howard Savage, the principal author of American College Athletics, was wrong when he stated, “The man who is most likely to succeed in uprooting the evils of recruiting and subsidizing is the college president.”51 Most college presidents, individually or collectively, have never been in the lead of a successful parade toward amateurism. They have far more often been the cheerleaders promoting and allowing the compensation of the fig-leafed professionals. They included the leaders of the conference in the South who first officially legislated the payment of athletes, the Southeastern Conference.

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ch a PTer Se Ven

The Southeastern Conference and Athletic Scholarships Still, something is wanting . . . the Manly. Johann wolfgang Von goeThe, 1831

[The NCAA cannot survive] half amateur and half professional. lynne ST. John, 1939

W

hile a few PreSidenTS in The 1930S were moVing to restore what they believed were amateur athletics following the Carnegie Report, the Southeastern Conference proceeded in the opposite direction by granting full athletic scholarships. Historically in institutions within the SEC and across the nation, male athletes had been paid in one form or another since the nineteenth century by appreciative students, alumni friends, or those who were in some way attached to particular institutions. According to an eastern professor in the early 1880s, the baseball, boating, and football teams were composed of “about two or three dozen young men in each college, whose expenses are paid by their fellows.”1 In the same decade, the captain of the Princeton football team recruited Highland Stickney with a promise of a “scholarship” that included free “board, tuition, etc.” Stickney instead went to Harvard.2 Farther south, the baseball team at the College of William and Mary, the second oldest college in America (1693), attempted to get the college administration to allow a pitcher to receive a tuition waiver while the team picked up expenses for his stay at a local Williamsburg hotel.3 To the west at the University of Kansas, a farm boy was hired to be on the football team in 1895. The team obtained financing from Lawrence citizens and paid the athlete’s parents to release him 88

from farm work.4 These were not unusual payments for recruited college athletes. Walter Camp of Yale had warned about this kind of professionalism. Camp foretold the point-shaving and throwing of basketball games a half century later. He wrote, “A man who begins by selling his skill to a college may someday find himself selling an individual act in a particular contest—selling races, selling games.”5 If there were bribes and game throwing in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, they were not revealed, but shortly after World War II, a gambling-bribery scandal broke open. Camp’s prophecy came to be.

PreSidenTS, manlineSS, and The SouTh Presidents may have condemned gambling, but few opposed football. Presidents often praised football for the values it brought to colleges and universities—developing esprit de corps in the institution, fostering courage and self-control in players, and above almost anything else, bringing manliness to the institutions. It was common in America for non-collegians to consider those who attended the “effete” colleges unmanly, soft, and delicate. This was even more evident when many young male Americans were seen as part of the decline of manly virtues at the end of the nineteenth century as America moved rapidly from a rough and hardy agrarian populace with a frontier mentality to a less physical and vigorous urban society.6 No one spoke out more against the loss of virility of collegians and the rest of society than turn-of-thecentury Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who fought with imperialistic America against the Spanish in Cuba and soon became president of the United States. “If we lose the virile, manly qualities,” Roosevelt, the Harvard graduate, wrote a year before his Cuba adventures, America would “reach a condition worse than that of ancient civilizations in the years of decay.”7 Masculinity was on the minds of leaders in America and within institutions of higher learning in both the North and the less urbanized South. In southern states, football and intercollegiate athletics were part of that discussion. For it was in the generation following the military and cultural loss in the Civil War that football and the need for winning came to dominate university life below the Mason-Dixon Line. It has even been suggested that winning football games, especially over teams outside the South, though rare until the 1920s, became a substitute or at least a partial payback for losing the war.8 Or as one historian of southern masculinity suggested, if the North coerced the South into submission 89

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in the Civil War, the South would resist in intercollegiate athletics a half century later when football became the dominant game in southern universities.9 For the southern schools to compete successfully, they needed to obtain players in ways similar to the undercover payment of athletes attending northern colleges. This may have concerned some college administrators, such as John Abercrombie, the president of the University of Alabama (1902–1911). Acting on his concern cost him the presidency. Alabama lost a football game in the fall of 1911 following the ruling by the faculty and Abercrombie that a player was ineligible because of an academic failure. The football coach, J. W. H. Pollard, with twenty-one wins and only four losses, threatened to resign if the president or faculty interfered in athletics again. Abercrombie went before his board of trustees and demanded that athletes meet educational requirements. The president claimed the coach was playing men with failing grades, was using men playing under assumed names and thus ineligible under rules of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, and was benefiting from players who registered at Alabama only to play football. He did not receive the support of his trustees and soon resigned, stating, “I do not consider the mere winning of athletic games to be the chief objective of an institution of learning.”10 Abercrombie was gone, but football was not, not then or for more than a century. Southern universities did not gain a great deal of national attention until the University of Alabama was chosen to play in the Rose Bowl. After an undefeated season in 1925 and the refusal by several northern teams to play in Pasadena, Alabama accepted a bid to play the superb University of Washington team. Down by two touchdowns in the first half, Alabama stormed back and scored three touchdowns in the third quarter, winning with a stunning 20–19 upset. This glorious achievement was a victory for southern states after the year in which the Darwinian Scopes Trial in Tennessee and the height of the Ku Klux Klan in the South placed the old Confederacy in the unenviable position of being under siege. Southern football was not respected outside of Dixie, but the one Rose Bowl victory of the South over the North on January 1, 1926, put a positive stamp on not only Alabama but all the defeated Confederate states. After this triumph, Alabama president George Denny presented “amateur” engraved pocket watches to team members. This gave the South something to celebrate for years as the most important game in the South’s history.11 Many more victories of the South over the North would occur in generations to come.

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Those victories would often come from a conference that was formed a few years after the Rose Bowl conquest, the Southeastern Conference. A group of major universities in the South decided in 1932 to leave the Southern Conference, formed in 1921 out of the 1890s’ Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association. Thus the SEC was born. Alabama was one of the universities in the conference, which also included Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Louisiana State, Mississippi, Mississippi State, North Carolina, Sewanee, Tennessee, Tulane, and Vanderbilt. Sewanee (University of the South) was an Episcopalian school formed just before the Civil War “to materially aid the South to resist” the North religiously, but not athletically.12 Sewanee, nevertheless, became the dominant southern football power in the 1890s, but never won a game in the first eight years of the SEC. Sewanee chose not to give athletic scholarships, while the other members of the SEC were openly paying their players to compete.

The leVel Playing field: full aThleTic ScholarShiPS An attempt to level the playing field with full athletic scholarships came about in the 1930s with the help of University of Florida president John  J. Tigert (1928–1947). Nearly every football-playing school was paying players in one form or another in the 1920s and ’30s, as was noted in the Carnegie Report of 1929. During this time, a southern researcher was gathering data from 128 college presidents and deans in 1927. He claimed, “Athletes sell their services today, and while this is denied, yet I feel sure, that it is taking place in nearly all institutions today.”13 There was, however, no uniformity in the payments to help level the playing field. Leading the fight for open, rather than sub-rosa, payments was Florida president John Tigert. Tigert was a son and grandson of bishops of the Methodist Church, a Protestant religious sect not always favorable to football or competitive athletics.14 Tigert, though, had a strong background in sports and participated in baseball, basketball, and track and was all-southern halfback in football at Vanderbilt at the turn of the century. Because of his academic and athletic ability, he was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar, attending Oxford University in England, where he received his master’s degree while rowing, playing cricket, and running track. Returning to the United States, Tigert began a teaching career while coaching football. He eventually rose to the presidency of

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several colleges, and after becoming commissioner of education under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, he was chosen to be president of the University of Florida in 1928.15 There he continued promoting athletics and eventually fostered SEC athletic scholarships. Two weeks after the National Association of State Universities adopted the Frank Graham Plan to ban athletic scholarships, the Southeastern Conference rejected President Graham’s attempt to prohibit athletic grants. Led by President Tigert of Florida, the SEC voted with a conference vote of 11–1 to openly accept athletic payments to include tuition, fees, room, board, books, and laundry.16 Two years before, the NCAA faculty representatives had debated the question of recruiting and subsidizing. Most NCAA members were opposed to full athletic scholarships, but one professor, B. F. Oakes from the University of Montana, made the statement to the assembled NCAA delegates that sub-rosa grants could be stopped by “giving legitimate athletic scholarships.”17 Most of the faculty representatives opposed Oakes, including the NCAA president. At that time, Major John L. Griffith was president of the NCAA and the commissioner of the Big Ten. He countered Oakes by recommending the isolation and boycotting of institutions that offered athletic scholarships. Favoring amateur athletics, Griffith told NCAA delegates that “institutions that do not subsidize their athletes in any form whatsoever will ultimately be forced to schedule games only with institutions of similar ideals and aims.” Griffith, though, was a believer in home rule and opposed national legislation banning payments to athletes. He argued against giving the national body “police powers” and that the NCAA would never “admit [its] inability to govern [itself] and consequently ask this organization to assume dictatorial powers.”18 Griffith, an arch conservative and strong opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and government intervention, was projecting his political views upon the NCAA to limit its power to control athletics at the national level. “We believe,” Griffith emphasized, “in states’ rights.”19 That would last only a few more years among NCAA members, but the NCAA did what it could do without national legislation by adopting a nonbinding, anti-subsidy-recruiting report. The 1934 NCAA convention called upon its member institutions to oppose all subsidies to athletes—no loans, no scholarships, no remission of fees, and no employment of athletes not open to nonathletes. There would also be no recruiting by coaches, athletic directors, or others associated with athletics, including alumni and fraternities.20 A year later, the NCAA surveyed university presidents on whether individual institutions 92

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were following the code opposing recruiting and subsidization. Only about a third replied that the rules were being observed.21 Members of the SEC rejected the majority opinion of the NCAA’s new code. They justified athletic scholarships in many of the schools in the South by arguing that their locations did not have enough jobs available for athletes to earn their way through school.22 In December 1935, the SEC voted overwhelmingly (Vanderbilt opposing and Sewanee abstaining) for “states’ rights” to allow open, rather than continuing sub-rosa, payments to athletes, especially football players.23 When the Carnegie Foundation concluded its study six years before, only eight significant southern schools among the 130 schools were studied: Alabama, Georgia, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Tennessee, Tulane, Vanderbilt, and Virginia. While there was probably resistance by southern schools to having the “damn Yankees” from the Carnegie group investigate their recruiting and payment of players, there was likely less interest by the team of Carnegie investigators in probing the institutions in the South than in investigating power athletic universities of the North and East. The University of Virginia in the Southern Conference may have been one of the few institutions in the South not subsidizing its athletes. The Virginia Board of Visitors made a strong statement in 1935, stating that a Virginia student shall not “be given a free way through college merely because he is a good athlete.” The board made clear that “no compromise will be made with professionalism,” that unfortunately the “purchase of players and victory might well be measured by the size of the purchaser’s purse.”24 Virginia agreed with the Southern Conference’s North Carolina and its president Frank Graham, who claimed, “In no part of our athletic life . . . do we directly or indirectly [accept] subsidizing or the wrongful recruiting of students.”25 Not so in the SEC. The Southeastern Conference leaders believed that if out-in-theopen scholarships including tuition, fees, room, board, books, and laundry were allowed, then each school would be on a level playing field in recruiting and payment of players. That is exactly what a University of Georgia student, and future gold medal Olympian, was paid three years before the above-board scholarships were written into SEC law. Olympian Forrest “Spec” Towns was given a tryout in track and then accepted a four-year athletic scholarship at Georgia, a gift of a wealthy lawyer working for Coca-Cola in 1933 at the depth of the Depression.26 Elsewhere, amateur ideals were seldom observed by individual institutions, something recognized by the chair of the athletic council at the University of Texas. “I would rather see a slight lowering of our ideals and a clearing of our consciences,” noted W. E. Metzenthin in reference to the 93

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SEC athletic scholarships, “than to wink outright at evils in endeavoring falsely to preserve ideals as higher than we can expect to maintain.” Forrest “Phog” Allen, the great basketball coach at the University of Kansas, believed the SEC was “fearless enough to do openly a thing that many schools have been doing for years.”27 An example of an SEC football player’s pay in 1936 with the new open scholarships was that of Tulane’s Albert Gorman. His yearly pay at the private institution in New Orleans with a 6–3–1 football record was $762, including $200 for tuition, $355 for board, $90 for room, $44 for fees, $28 for books, and $45 for laundry.28 With the exception of Sewanee and Vanderbilt, other SEC institutions were state supported and often the pride of their states. Even with the nation languishing in the midst of the Depression, money was available for star athletes, and the SEC took advantage of that. The payment of players such as Gorman became a major concern to NCAA members, especially if the athletes were recruited from the North. The northern apprehension became greater after the Southern Conference joined the SEC in offering full athletic scholarships in 1938. Thus, institutions such as Clemson, Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Tech, and Washington and Lee, would be on more equal ground with the SEC in the procuring of financed athletes.29

home rule and oPPoSiTion To The Sec ScholarShiPS Alarmed about full athletic scholarships, the NCAA Executive Committee called for a report, and it was completed and presented by the athletic director of Ohio State, an institution impacted by southern recruiting of Ohio athletes. Lynn St. John, the longtime Ohio State athletic director, gave his 1939 NCAA report with great concern that southern schools were procuring talent from northern states, particularly for football, the dominating sport. St. John complained that of fifteen outstanding Ohio athletes, at least ten entered southern institutions. He asked how educational institutions could justify the expenditure of gate receipts for tuition, board, room, books, and incidental expenses solely for athletic performance. He questioned whether or not the NCAA could any longer be just an educational organization or if home rule would have to be abandoned to legislate nationally. He doubted whether the NCAA could survive “half amateur and half professional,” a play on Abraham Lincoln’s contention “half slave and half free” and the questionable 94

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survival of America seven decades before.30 Could college athletics among the major universities of the North survive as non-scholarship institutions while those of the South gave full scholarships? It was not as contentious in the nation as were Lincoln’s concerns, but to the members of the NCAA, it seemed to be. Rather than legislating an enforced policy on athletic scholarships and thus defeating home rule and becoming a true governing body, the NCAA members decided to skirt the issue by including new financial aid wording in its constitution as a condition of obtaining and retaining membership in the NCAA. The 1939 constitution had a section on “Aid for the Athlete,” which clearly stated that “athletic participation shall not be a condition” for financial aid, and it shall only be granted “on the basis of need.”31 Therefore, what the two major conferences in the South, the SEC and the Southern Conference, were doing was illegal under the NCAA constitution. An institution “failing to maintain acceptable scholastic or athletic standards” might have membership terminated by a twothirds vote of the membership.32 However well intentioned, there was no protocol for determining the standards, nor was there any enforcement mechanism for eliminating those who violated the constitution. It could do so only by becoming a regulatory agency with enforcement powers. “We can and should subscribe to the code,” a skeptical engineering faculty member from the University of Colorado wrote to his president, “even though it is a great deal like a Mother Hubbard in that it [the code] covers everything and touches nothing.”33 At the time, the amateur code could not be effectively enforced. The NCAA decided to go halfway toward becoming a regulatory agency. It now had an athletic code in its constitution, but enforcement of recruiting and subsidizing athletes, according to home rule, was left to individual institutions or to conferences. In particular, presidents of colleges and universities would need to enforce the code. This was a proposition doomed to failure, if past precedent was any indication. Most presidents had been athletic cheerleaders and certainly not athletic reformers attempting to ensure amateurism. Presidents were not prone to antagonize alumni, who were providing most of the money for financially sponsoring athletes. Though the NCAA constitution allowed for the removal of a violating institution by a two-thirds vote, there was no mechanism for investigating “sinful” institutions and no money in the NCAA treasury to provide investigators. The 1940 NCAA convention voted to authorize its executive committee to “investigate alleged violations,” thus turning a discussion body into a regulatory organization.34 The faculty representatives agreed that an educational foundation, such 95

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as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching or the American Council on Education, representing presidents of universities, should fund such an effort. The NCAA had only about $10,000 in its treasury and was in no position to conduct any activity that required financing. The NCAA basketball tournament brought in the most income, but it averaged only about $5,000 profit for the first seven years after its founding in 1939.35 Nevertheless, the NCAA was getting closer to becoming a regulatory agency at the national level for one purpose—to stop the payment of athletes to compete in intercollegiate athletics.

The world war ii inTerlude The attack on the United States by Japan at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, brought a delay in attempting to control the recruitment and payment of athletes. World War II, fought on both the Asian and European fronts, placed a damper on intercollegiate athletics for the next four years, as students were enlisting or being drafted into the armed forces. There was greater concern about continuing competition than about controlling the pay of athletes. Instead of the NCAA faculty representatives putting more controls on athletes, they agreed that freshmen, who were generally forbidden by conferences from varsity competition, could once again compete. In addition, a number of the athletes of military age were competing collegiately while being paid in specific military-sponsored training programs. Many athletes were paid fifty dollars per month plus tuition in programs such as the Navy V-5 or V-12 and the Army Specialized Training Program in hundreds of colleges and universities across the country.36 Numerous young men training for the military later became prominent in the nation’s history. Those who joined these military programs included Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Senator Bob Dole, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, astronaut Scott Carpenter, and Heisman Trophy–winner Angelo Bertelli of Notre Dame. One example of an athlete who was paid all throughout World War II, both by the institution and by the government V-12 program and West Point, was Barney Poole, an SEC player originally from the University of Mississippi. Just prior to Pearl Harbor, Poole was a freshman, and thus not eligible for the Ole Miss varsity football team. Nevertheless, the next year he starred as an end for Mississippi while also playing basketball and baseball. He joined the Marines and entered the V-12 Navy officers’ training program at the University of North Carolina, continuing his 96

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education and participating as a V-12 athlete. He was then recruited by the US Military Academy at West Point, which was the dominant football team at the end of World War II and following. After three years and the 1946 season, he transferred back to Mississippi and played two more years. In his eight years of college, seven as a varsity athlete, he won a total of twenty-two athletic letters (eight in baseball), surely a record in intercollegiate athletic history.37 Being paid throughout his career at Ole Miss, in the Navy, and in the Army, Barney Poole could be considered a real professional—but a legal amateur under 1940s SEC and NCAA rules. One might suspect that discussions of paying athletes were dropped during World War II, but that was not the case. Just prior to the war, university presidents were asked if the NCAA should be given legislative and enforcement powers. Slightly more than 50 percent responded affirmatively. As the war came to an end in the summer of 1945, presidents were again polled. This time, a large majority of institutional leaders affirmed the NCAA constitutional mandate opposing both recruiting and subsidization of athletes.38 At every NCAA conference during the war, the question of paying athletes was raised. NCAA president Philip Badger of New York University proclaimed that the NCAA must “weed out extravagant practices which crept in during the past two decades.”39 As the war came to a conclusion and the GI Bill of Rights became national policy to pay military veterans to attend colleges, the question of how this would affect athlete subsidization was a major issue.40 Without question, the SEC and Southern Conference and other schools would continue to pay athletes to compete, and some of the conferences in the North, such as the Big Ten, would demand that the NCAA act to prevent outright athletic scholarships. The battle to determine if half of the nation’s intercollegiate athletic institutions could be “professional” and half could be “amateur” would soon be settled—more or less—as the role of the fig leaf appeared more opaque than transparent. An unclear Purity Code (a.k.a. Sanity Code) would be the next proposal to be enacted.

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ch a PTer eigh T

National Athletic Scholarship Failure T h e SaniTy c ode

Once the principles become part of the constitution it will be a case of “conform or get out.” karl e. leib, 1947

How can any of us vote to expel these seven when we are all just as guilty as they are? roberT neyland, 1950

O

ne of The moST conTroVerSial acTionS Taken by the NCAA, just three years after the end of World War II, was its first decision to openly pay athletes—a little bit. Strangely, it was at first called the “Purity Code” for purifying collegiate amateurism through officially allowing the payment of athletes, as if college athletics needed more contradictions. For nearly a half century, the NCAA had opposed any athletic scholarships as a violation of the concept of amateurism, but in 1948, it took an action to rescind its earlier code of amateurism and move in the direction of full scholarships begun by the Southeastern Conference in the 1930s. It was painful for many of the longtime faculty representatives of the NCAA. In the process, the NCAA eliminated the concept of home rule that existed from its first year (1906) attempting to attract the prestigious universities to join the fledgling, mostly small college, organization.

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The beginning of The PuriTy code It was a tall task for the NCAA to approve financial aid for athletic participation and to call it “pure” amateurism. The Purity Code was at best a euphemism for only a little pay to male athletes. The idealists could use the name Purity only knowing that it was not. The pragmatists trusted that a little payment to athletes would preserve “amateurism.” The southern pragmatists would go their own way in granting open athletic scholarships beginning in 1935, paying little attention to the new Purity Code. The movement toward the ill-fated Purity Code began in earnest after the fall of Nazi Germany and the surrender of Japan after the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In less than a year, the NCAA leaders called for a meeting to discuss national controls of recruiting and subsidization. In the summer of 1946, twenty conferences met in Big Ten country, Chicago, in what was called a Conference on Conferences.1 A standing NCAA Constitution Committee had been meeting, leading to the Conference on Conferences, and was controlled by reformers Clarence Houston of Tufts College, Karl Leib of the University of Iowa, and Ogdon Miller of Yale. Because of the increased workload for NCAA officials, the NCAA Executive Committee asked for and received permission to open, for the first time, an NCAA office with a secretarial assistant. The movement toward legislation and enforcement had begun. This had been made financially possible because the NCAA basketball tourney, begun in 1939, was beginning to produce considerable money. The basketball tournament raised far more than any other activity, including NCAA dues. For instance, in 1945, selling of football rule books brought in more money than dues, and the basketball tourney income was four times that of rule book sales. The one basketball tourney brought in fifteen times as much income as the combination of the other five NCAA tourneys—golf, swimming, tennis, track and field, and wrestling. It is no wonder that basketball has been the key financial consideration for the welfare of the NCAA since World War II, but the profit of $27,667 in 1945 seems insignificant compared to the $1 billion “March Madness” profits in the twenty-first century that pay for over 90 percent of the administrative costs of the NCAA. Yet the 1946 basketball tourney nearly doubled the previous year’s income.2 It was becoming more clear that the NCAA was coming closer to being able to both legislate and, more importantly, enforce its legislation, though that would take a few more years.

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Nevertheless, football scholarships and recruiting, not basketball, were the dominant concerns of the NCAA in the post–World War II era and have had the greatest impact on NCAA legislation since then. The Purity Code that came out of the Conference on Conferences was intended to ban athletic scholarships and to limit recruiting of athletes. Karl Leib of Iowa was the chair of the conference and advocate for amateurism. He took the recommendations to the next NCAA conference. The Purity Code consisted of six “Principles for the Conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics” that would be embodied in the 1948 Constitution. They included (1) defining amateurism; (2) demanding institutional control of athletics; (3) admitting athletes to college on the same basis as other students; (4) opposing recruitment off campus; and (5) limiting financial aid, in this case to tuition and incidental fees based on need, not dependent upon participation, and awarded only by an agency approved by the institution—any payment for athlete employment was to be commensurate with the service rendered; and (6) allowing competition only with institutions that upheld the rules.3 Five of the six principles passed unanimously, and only the question of recruiting off campus was disputed but lost in a vote of 76–33. After passage, President Leib could exclaim, “Conform or get out.”4 It was not quite as easy as that, because it first needed a second vote in 1948 to conform to the NCAA constitution. In addition, three southern conferences had strong feelings about maintaining their policies to allow full scholarships. The Southeastern, Southwest, and Missouri Valley Conferences agreed three months after the Purity Code votes to meet to discuss the ramifications of the new recruiting and scholarship code. Each conference allowed athletic scholarships including not only tuition, but room, board, fees, and laundry money. Meeting in New Orleans, the three conferences were led by SEC president, and president of the University of Florida, John Tigert. Most of the schools were not about to give up athletic scholarships. The meeting was perceived by some northern schools as a possible withdrawal from the NCAA and the forming of their own sectional organization. Even before the three conferences met, a leader of the Big Ten and athletic director at Michigan, Fritz Crisler, noted the divide. “I can perceive the possibility of a group of schools,” Crisler stated, “seceding from the N.C.A.A.”5 That possibility was almost certainly broached, but after the April 1947 meeting, James Stewart, executive secretary of the Southwest Conference, commented, “This was definitely not an indignation meeting against the NCAA.”6 There was a definite attitude of defiance by some in the southern schools, but there was mixed reaction to the Purity Code in the SEC. 100

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“The N.C.A.A. doesn’t want the schools to pay the room and board of athletes,” the SEC secretary, Bernie Moore, pointed out. “We in the S.E.C. think we should pay them.”7 The president of the SEC’s Louisiana State felt that the SEC should abide only by SEC rules and not those of the NCAA, a states’ rights approach.8 In a similar way, the president of Kentucky, Herman Donovan, assured his SEC colleagues that Kentucky would “not secede from the conference,” but it was possible it might leave the NCAA.9 While these were the majority views of the SEC administrators, there was another side. One was held by the vice chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Charles Sarratt, who thought it was “nonsense” to consider leaving the NCAA.10 The acting president of Alabama, Ralph Adams, believed the SEC would “face ostracism” from other conferences if it did not conform to the NCAA Purity Code.11 The chancellor of the University of Mississippi, John D. Williams, was on the fence and was just hoping the SEC and NCAA would not have differences in the granting of scholarships or in recruiting.12 Fifteen years later, Williams was in the same position trying “to avoid taking sides” in the battle over desegregating his institution between Governor Ross Barnett and the federally backed first African American to attend Mississippi, James Meredith. In each case, straddling the fence was not successful.13 In 1948, there would either be full athletic scholarships or there would be something closer to being amateur, like the Purity Code.

geTTing The SaniTy code inTo The conSTiTuTion The historic 1948 conference was surely the most important meeting of the NCAA since the decision was made in 1905–1906 to form an organization to preserve football. A New York Times headline read, “College ‘Purity Code’ in Athletics Certain to Fail, Experts Believe.”14 By then, Iowa’s Karl Leib had renamed the Purity Code the Sanity Code, for fear that Purity Code might be part of an epitaph, such as a burial inscription.15 The new Sanity Code passed, but only after the meeting’s agenda was set to help ensure that the NCAA would be a national legislative body with enforcement powers that it had never had previously. NCAA president Leib asked the president of the American Football Coaches Association, Elton “Tad” Wieman, to speak to the conference first. Wieman was athletic director at the University of Maine and had previously coached football at Michigan, Minnesota, and Princeton, but 101

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he was somewhat of an athletic idealist. Wieman told the conference that commercialism of football and other sports needed to be slowed down and cautioned about the rapid growth of the commercialized, seasonending bowl games run by those outside of college control.16 The NCAA leaders felt that Wieman would set the stage and get football interests to vote for the Sanity Code. President Leib then called on the president of the American Council on Education (ACE), a college-run organization for reform in higher education. President George F. Zook of the ACE took up the cudgel for reform in intercollegiate athletics. The ACE, unlike the NCAA when it was founded in 1905, hired a full-time paid administrator and established a central office in Washington, DC, where it could have a major influence on educational policy. Zook became president of the ACE in 1934 and during World War II was involved in the creation of the GI Bill of Rights for the support of military veterans’ college educations. Zook placed the NCAA Sanity Code reform effort in historical perspective by noting that most education associations, including medicine, law, and engineering, had often passed “pious resolutions” of reform that were habitually discarded when members went home to their institutions. From this standpoint, the NCAA was similar to other educational groups that set standards by well-intended delegates but returned “home under the naïve assumption that having set up a fine piece of machinery, it will work automatically.” Zook stated that this was what the NCAA had done in 1939 with its first constitutional reform policy relative to recruiting and subsidizing athletes. Zook reported what a college coach said to a Washington, DC, newspaperman: “Many will vote for the code but are figuring out ways to beat it.” Reform legislation in the form of the Sanity Code, Zook told the delegates, would be successful only if it made the NCAA into a regulatory body with enforcement.17 The NCAA needed to be a regulatory body rather than a discussion group with home rule, as it had been for its first half century. Now President Leib was ready for the momentous vote to accept the Sanity Code into the NCAA constitution. There was almost no discussion before the vote was taken that made the NCAA an enforcement agency, but the language of the Sanity Code contributed to the hypocrisy of the NCAA as an amateur organization. For the first time and in a nearly unanimous vote, the NCAA was given the power to enforce an amateur code while it allowed payments to athletes through tuition and payment of incidental fees, in direct violation of the concept of amateurism. One representative of the small Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy (later the University of Texas at El Paso) spoke out about the hypocrisy of the 102

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“Principles of Amateurism.” It was stated in the NCAA constitution: “Any college athlete who takes or is promised pay in any form for participation in athletics does not meet this definition of an amateur.”18 This description was little different from that of the 1906 NCAA constitution stating, “No student shall represent a College or University in any intercollegiate game or contest who has at any time received, either directly or indirectly, money, or any other consideration to play on any team.”19 The hypocrisy of promoting amateurism and offering athletic scholarships went back to the nineteenth century, but now it was included in the NCAA constitution.20 The Sanity Code, which was not “pure” but was supposed to be “sane,” and its “Principles of Amateurism” were passed unanimously.21 Members voted without dissent on the definition of “amateurism,” including no “promised pay in any form”—but how could payment of tuition and incidental fees not be a form of pay?22 Accepting the concept of amateurism and allowing the payment of a part of athletes’ schooling was like voting to oppose drinking alcohol and then allowing some degree of intoxication. It also could be compared to the 1960s NCAA highly professionalized and commercialized football television contracts that required the TV networks to add to the dignity of NCAA football in their broadcasts by stating that college football was “an integral part of the educational program.”23 Neither being amateur nor being an integral part of the educational program was an accurate portrayal of the way intercollegiate sports were practiced by major universities in America. There was, however, a pragmatic reason, to be discussed more fully later, why amateurism and athletes were claimed to be an integral part of education. It was that college athletics would be treated differently than professional sports by being exempt from federal and state taxes due to their amateur and educational nature.24 Claiming amateurism also enabled colleges to be exempt from paying into workers’ compensation for injured athletes as well as benefit from tax-free booster donations to college athletic programs and tax-exempt bonds to build athletic facilities.25

banning The SaniTy code ViolaTorS The Sanity Code did place some controls on the expanding professionalism, though for the first time, it legalized nationally some payments to athletes. A major question arose for the NCAA to solve: Would the many institutional violators who were granting full athletic scholarships be banished from the NCAA? Despite NCAA president Karl 103

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Leib’s pronouncement that the NCAA had “made great progress toward forming a great National Conference” with the new structured Compliance Committee, it was not true, certainly not at first. Through the first year of the Sanity Code, there were few complaints to the Compliance Committee of violations, yet there were numerous abuses. Many of the southern schools were particularly opposed to the new constitutional provisions, though lack of compliance was not confined solely to the South. Institutions bypassed the new rules with impunity. Or as Harvey Harman, president of the American Football Coaches Association, noted, “the Sanity Code will make liars of us all.”26 The Southeastern and Southwest Conferences were joined now by the Southern Conference in allowing full athletic scholarships in violation of the NCAA constitution. In the spring of 1949, the three southern conferences met to discuss whether the Sanity Code served the needs of southern schools. They concluded that it did not, that financial aid for tuition and fees only was not enough, that athletes deserved room, board, books, and laundry expenses. They discussed withdrawal from the NCAA and considered whether one conference alone could successfully leave the association.27 In the summer of 1949, the University of Virginia was the first institution to announce that it would secede from the NCAA if the Sanity Code were not amended. The NCAA Compliance Committee had already announced the taking of action against twenty violators and another nineteen potential violators of the Sanity Code. Virginia had been giving out full athletic scholarships since it left the Southern Conference in 1936 following the passage of the Graham Plan opposing athletic grants. Virginia’s president, Colgate Darden Jr., along with his governing board, opposed the limitation of athletic scholarships in the Sanity Code, and said he would withdraw from the NCAA if that constitutional provision were not changed.28 Darden wanted college athletes to be paid enough to allow them sufficient time to both participate in sports and to study. He believed that holding a job to pay for college expenses as well as participating in athletics would mean the athlete would be “sacrificing his academic career.” Virginia, with only mediocre athletic success, had high academic standards that could be upheld with full athletic scholarships, the president maintained, and, besides, Virginia’s “honor code was more important than the NCAA’s Sanity Code.”29 Darden was standing on solid ground ethically when Virginia decided to leave the NCAA. Virginia was not departing because the school needed scholarships to maintain major athletic status. It was doing so because the athletes needed financial relief from time-consuming jobs robbing them of time needed for study. The school was doing what it thought it should do for athletes. 104

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Virginia’s athletic director, Norton Pritchett, wanted to delay leaving the NCAA until other regional institutions did so and then join the institutions closest to Virginia’s vision of intercollegiate athletics.30 In the first year after passage of the Sanity Code, leaders of the NCAA were waiting for institutions to comply with the new scholarship rules. One of the reasons why violations of the Sanity Code were not noted at institutions in the Missouri Valley, Southwest, or Southeastern Conferences was that each conference voted to abide by the Sanity Code. Outwardly, the conferences appeared to be in compliance. The Missouri Valley Conference had voted to accept the Sanity Code in 1947, before it was voted on at the NCAA convention. The Southwest Conference also agreed to curb full scholarships shortly after the code was accepted. The consequence for an institution’s first violation was probation for a year; for a second violation, participation but no championship standings; and for a third violation, expulsion from the conference. The Southeastern Conference voted to drop full scholarships and its ten-dollar-per-month expense money.31 Whether the scholarships were dropped is questionable. A charge was made by one SEC school that Louisiana State players were being offered specific amounts for specific actions in football games—$500 for an extra point if it decided a game, $250 for injuring specific players, $100, two suits of clothes, plus one year of free laundry for scoring a touchdown, forty-four suits of clothes for the team for winning a specific game, and $25 for recovering a fumble.32 There were plenty of ways to provide financial incentives other than above-table athletic scholarships. By 1949, the NCAA Compliance Committee, with its meager $5,000 budget, was ready to confront institutions that were known violators of the athletic scholarship rules.33 Prior to the conference meeting at the end of 1949, the Compliance Committee announced that seven institutions had not conformed to the Sanity Code and would be brought before the annual meeting for a vote for banishment from the NCAA. The so-called sinful seven was composed of five southern schools and two Catholic universities in the East, Boston College and Villanova. The five from the south included three in the state of Virginia, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Virginia, while the other two were the Citadel in South Carolina and the University of Maryland. Only Maryland could, at that time, be considered a Big-Time football institution. One school that should have been on the sinful seven list but was not was the University of Tennessee. The most successful football coach in the South from the 1920s to the 1950s was General Robert Neyland of Tennessee. He had his own “slush fund” from which he could pay players.34 105

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Neyland spoke out about the sinful seven. “How can any of us vote to expel these seven,” Neyland asked, “when we are all just as guilty as they are?”35 After six hours of debate without a break, President Leib called for a vote, requiring a two-thirds majority, to ban the “seven sinners.” The vote was 111–93 in favor of expelling. Leib, who was a lawyer, should have known better (and may have), but he declared his own wish by stating, “The motion is carried for expulsion.” Loud cries of “no, no” rang though the hall, and after a moment of delay, Leib corrected himself, indicating that the constitutionally mandated two-thirds vote had not been achieved.36 After the vote, a member of the Southern Conference remarked, “How could a member vote to expel another member when he knows in his heart his school is paying athletes thousands of dollars a year to participate in athletics? How could he?”37 From that moment on, the Sanity Code was dead, despite remaining on the books for two more years. The Sanity Code leaders of the NCAA, nevertheless, appeared undaunted by the defeat. The new NCAA president, Hugh Willett of the University of Southern California, and the Big Ten’s Kenneth “Tug” Wilson, the NCAA secretary-treasurer, sent a memorandum to all NCAA members indicating that the “seven sinners” were “not in good standing” and therefore could not participate in NCAA tournaments or be scheduled athletically by members in good standing. Immediately, President Harry C. “Curly” Byrd of the University of Maryland challenged Willett and Wilson, saying if the two broke the NCAA constitution, the authority belonged to the NCAA Council, Executive Committee, and Compliance Committee, not Willett and Wilson. Virginia’s athletic director, Norton Pritchett, agreed, called the action “undemocratic,” which it was.38

The deaTh of The SaniTy code Illegal and undemocratic as was the action of two NCAA leaders, it was natural that the defeat of the Sanity Code vote was upsetting to those who opposed greater pay to athletes than just tuition and incidental fees. One was Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA (1951–1987), who later claimed that the setback was one of the three or four most important decisions in the history of college sport.39 The Sanity Code “died aborning, of hypocrisy,” wrote Tim Cohane for Look magazine. Cohane called on universities to openly pay athletes so 106

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they might receive a free education rather than have them work an outside job or receive under-the-table pay to cover the cost of an education.40 The president of the University of North Carolina agreed. Gordon Gray, following President Frank Graham, who strongly opposed athletic scholarships, believed in full athletic scholarships, as did many others in the Southern Conference. Gray condemned the Sanity Code’s denial of expenses beyond tuition and fees as an “arbitrary compromise grounded on neither logic nor morals.”41 That appeared to be true. Arthur Daley, who covered sports for the New York Times from the 1920s to the 1970s, summarized the era of the Sanity Code as well as anyone. Shortly after the Sanity Code was voted out by the NCAA, Daley wrote poignantly, Two years ago, the National Collegiate Athletic Association adopted a “Sanity Code” to hem in the flood waters of proselyting, subsidizing and pseudo-amateurism in intercollegiate football similar to another noble experiment, the Prohibition Amendment. Yet it also was doomed from the start for the simple reason that it wouldn’t work, human nature being as it is. Primarily this is a question of football, although basketball gate receipts have risen to such lucrative heights of recent years that the dribble division also has lost much of its lily-white purity. The sheer hypocrisy which exists in intercollegiate football is monumental and almost beyond belief. The aristocratic schools look down their noses at such unseemly conduct. Never will they be guilty of such boorish behavior? Their coaches and their athletic directors remain aloof, Sanity Code and conference code adherents to the core. But, they can’t help it if some over-enthusiastic alumnus, who has no official connection with the university, takes it upon himself to corral a prospect. They don’t even know—or do they? that the alumnus is paying tuition fees so that nothing of the transaction appears on the registrar’s records. They don’t know that the alumnus has promised spending money for a four year course. They don’t know that he has promised a well-paying job after graduation. They don’t know that he has put the boy’s father on his payroll. Do you believe that they don’t know it?42

Daley had caught the tenor of the times. The creators of the midtwentieth-century Sanity Code had not come to terms with either amateurism or the level playing field of college competitive sport. Searching 107

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for the level playing field continued for the recruitment and payment of players, but the concept of amateurism had long before lost most of its meaning, and it would continue to deteriorate for most institutions. Notable exceptions, some claimed, were the “aristocratic schools” Daley mentioned, whose leaders asserted they were bringing athletics back to a realistic form of amateurism when a group of eight schools in the East formed the Ivy League.

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ch a PTer nine

The Cleansing of the Ivy League no aTh leTic Schol ar Sh iPS ?

Subsidization goes on in the Ivy League to about the same extent as in other sections, but it is done with more finesse. Prof. allen w. hobbS, 1946

[The Ivy League presidents] adopt a code of high-sounding principles and then remain ignorant or wink at surreptitious abuses. PreS. william STeVenSon, 1957

S

eVen of eighT iVy league inSTiTuTionS were created in colonial America by Protestant religious figures or denominations (Brown—Baptist, Columbia—Anglican, Dartmouth— Congregational, Harvard—Puritan, Princeton—Presbyterian, Pennsylvania—Anglican, and Yale—Congregational; Cornell was created later). There was often a Calvinist theology, including predestination as opposed to salvation through good works. By the mid-twentieth century, all the Ivy League institutions were nondenominational, but could sins of the amateur athletics of the eight Ivy League schools be saved through good works (a Roman Catholic belief)? Could the sinners of the original intercollegiate amateur athletics be redeemed by university presidents who created the Ivy League by mid-century? Or would the good works toward amateurism be rescinded as time went by?

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The amaTeur SinS of The fuTure iVieS The amateur sinners in athletics at colleges that would become the Ivy League gave America its unique emphasis on athletic commercialism and professionalism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The same elite educational schools also gave higher education intense recruitment of precollege athletes, allowed payments to skilled athletes to attend college, hired the first professional coaches, and built the first stadiums to hold the commercialized and professionalized contests. In short, after a century of commercialized and professionalized athletics, would the Ivy schools eventually change direction by the will of their institutions’ presidents? To switch course, the long tradition of athletics being under student control would have to be challenged by faculty and administrators. The policy of student-run recruitment and payment of skilled athletes in American colleges came particularly from the Big Three institutions, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Naming the three institutions in that exact order was nearly mandatory, for not only were they created chronologically in that sequence but their prestige was ranked similarly, with Princeton a distant third. Several examples of recruitment and payment make the point of the importance of the Big Three in the early twentieth century. Harvard, like the other two institutions, recruited its athletes principally from the elite preparatory schools of the East. A prime example was Harry LeMoyne. As a prep school graduate, LeMoyne attended Harvard. He was raised in the elite Brookline suburb of Boston and attended Stone School, a private boarding school in Boston, where he was a schoolboy hero before moving on to Cambridge. LeMoyne was not just a fine athlete; he was a great athlete. LeMoyne set an American high school sixteen-pound shotput record of forty-five feet, nine and a half inches, slightly better than Ralph Rose, who eventually won three Olympic gold medals and was the first athlete to better the fifty-foot barrier. (Rose was the flag bearer for the United States at the 1908 London Olympics who refused to dip the flag while marching by the royal box of Britain’s King Edward VII.)1 As captain of the Stone School crew, LeMoyne’s boat beat the Harvard freshman team that had beaten the strong Harvard varsity. Teenage LeMoyne was even better as a champion swimming sprinter, setting the American record for the 100-yard race at 61.1 seconds; he also set other records for the 60-yard, 80-yard, and 120-yard sprints. These sprints were swum with the old trudgen stroke rather than the Australian crawl introduced in the early 1900s. “LeMoyne,” the Boston Globe proclaimed in 1903, “is the greatest 110

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swimmer of short distance this country has yet produced.” The star from Stone School was also captain of the water polo team and won letters in basketball and football.2 The same year that Harvard built the first concrete-reinforced stadium, 1903, LeMoyne joined the Harvard football team. At six feet one and weighing about 195 pounds, he was one of the four heaviest Harvard players and played guard most of the season while serving as the punter on the team. Harvard did not have a good season, though its record was nine wins and three losses. It lost to Amherst and Dartmouth for the first time ever and ended the season against Yale in “the Game,” a 16–0 loss. In the Yale game, LeMoyne had the misfortune of having two of his punts blocked, one by James Hogan, the well-paid star of the Yale team. That was the last football game LeMoyne would play for Harvard, despite the Harvard football coach’s attempt to have him readmitted to Harvard after he flunked out. The effort by coach Bill Reid to pay Harry LeMoyne’s way back into Harvard says much about the status of amateurism and scholarships at the turn of the century. When LeMoyne left Harvard after the spring of 1904, he journeyed to Idaho to be with his older brother, who was a sheep rancher. That fall, when LeMoyne might have been a sophomore star on the football team, Yale defeated and shut out Harvard for the third straight game. Following the football season, the Harvard captain, who chose the coach in those days, looked for a new coach. Bill Reid, who had graduated in 1901, had starred in both baseball and football. He had been a sophomore fullback scoring two touchdowns in a victory over Yale, the only person to have ever accomplished that feat versus Yale. For the next two years, he did not play football because of injuries and a conflict with the captain, but following graduation he was asked to coach the team. He led the 1901 Harvard team to an undefeated season and beat Yale 22–0, its worst defeat ever. Reid then left for the West Coast. Harvard never forgot the success of Bill Reid, and in 1905 Harvard’s football captain asked the twenty-six-year-old to come back from California, where he was helping to run a prep school. He was given the highest salary of any football coach, $7,000, nearly as much as the thirty-five-year president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot. Harry LeMoyne, the great athlete, was still in Idaho with three years left of eligibility, if he could be readmitted and return to the Scientific School at Harvard. Reid, who kept a day-by-day diary of the 1905 football season from spring practice to the culminating Yale game, recalled his efforts to get LeMoyne to return to athletic glory. Reid began his four-hundred-page diary with his preliminary work as the new coach well before spring 111

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practice. He wrote about his desire “to keep the various candidates off probation at the mid-year examinations; the setting of the [football] schedule; and the attempt at getting Harry LeMoyne back to college.” Reid took on the academic success of the athletes as part of his responsibility. When he arrived on the Harvard campus, he called the leading candidates to a meeting, urging them not to cut class and telling them how to get through Harvard. “Most any professor will pass any man in the course,” he advised his players, “who is regular in his attendance, who gets in his reports or theses, or whatever else it may be, on time, and who shows anything like a decent interest in his work.”3 Harry LeMoyne, living in the Northwest, needed more than that advice. He needed to be convinced by Reid to return to Cambridge from Hagerman, Idaho, and he would need financial assistance to come back. Reid went to visit Harry’s parents in Brookline a half dozen times, but his father didn’t want “to throw away any more money” on his son, who had failed once in high school and once in college. Reid arranged for tutors after successfully talking with administrators of the Scientific School to readmit LeMoyne. He received a promise from a real estate agent for a room for LeMoyne when he returned. To get LeMoyne to come back, Reid obtained a free railroad pass for his trip back to Cambridge from Idaho and a job for the athlete to earn his board. To convince LeMoyne to return to play football, Reid got several men to telegraph and write letters to LeMoyne indicating that his return was secured. Failing to get a response, Reid finally got a storekeeper in Hagerman to take the letters and messages to Harry on horseback. LeMoyne still gave no response. “I was extremely sorry to have to give him up,” Reid asserted, “and did not do so until I had exhausted every means in my power to bring him around.” Later, the Harvard coach confessed, “What I did in the endeavor to get LeMoyne back here was not wholly legitimate, . . . tutoring for nothing, and other privileges.” Reid concluded, like a reborn amateur believer, that “unless the buying up of players is stopped, athletics are going to enter upon a thoroughly decadent period.”4 The decadent period of amateurism might have been symbolized by Yale’s James Hogan, who lettered for four years, 1901–1904, and was chosen as All-American for three of those years, playing at the same time LeMoyne competed during his year at Harvard. Hogan was a rare twohundred-pounder whom students called “Yale” for his dominance on the football team. He resided in a suite in Vanderbilt Hall, the most luxurious of Yale’s dormitories, ate free meals at the University Club, had his tuition paid, and received a scholarship of one hundred dollars each year. More than that, Hogan and two others had the privilege of receiving 112

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the entire profits of selling score cards at popular baseball games. As an entrepreneur, using his “name, image, and likeness,” he became an agent for the American Tobacco Company, for which he earned a commission for each packet of cigarettes sold in New Haven. Following the captaincy of the 1904 football team that defeated both Harvard and Princeton 10–0, Hogan was given a ten-day vacation in Cuba with all expenses paid by the Yale Athletic Association. Walter Camp, the Yale leader and “father of American Football,” oversaw Yale’s athletic “Financial Union” from which Hogan’s Caribbean junket was recorded by Camp as part of “miscellaneous expenses.”5 The established eastern schools were teaching a lesson to those in the West and South on how to conduct “amateur” sport in American institutions of higher learning.

The brown conference and fuTure “iVy” relaTionS LeMoyne and Hogan’s athletic experiences were symbolic of athletic fig-leafed professionalism at the schools that would become the Ivy League a half century later. Only about a half dozen years before LeMoyne and Hogan competed, faculty from all the Ivy schools, minus Yale, decided to change the direction “amateur” sport was taking in the East. In what became known as the 1898 Brown Conference, a professor of history at Brown University, Wilfred Munro, invited the eight schools to a meeting to reform eastern athletics. Yale, the “jock school” of the nineteenth century, did not want the faculty to meddle with its athletics and refused to attend. However, a faculty representative along with a student and alumni member from each of the other seven schools attended. After a day of discussion, the alumni and student members returned home, apparently dissatisfied with the direction faculty members were taking, but the faculty remained and drew up a lengthy Brown Conference report. Among the twenty rules recommended by the faculty of the Brown Conference were that each institution would have an athletic committee on which faculty would be represented; all coaches, trainers, captains, and team managers would be approved by the athletic committee; and freshmen would not be eligible to participate on varsity teams. Most important, an amateur code was written to fight against professionalism. Any athlete who had received financial support to participate, played summer baseball, or received free board at a training table would be ineligible. The proposed rules moved in the direction of the Oxbridge 113

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ideal. Nonetheless, not one of the future Ivy League institutions accepted the Brown Conference recommendations.6 The leaders of what would become the Ivy League continued to tinker with amateur rules. At the time of World War I, the Big Three expanded upon early twentieth-century rules that had forbidden graduate and freshman participation. The Triple Agreement in 1916 disallowed any pecuniary rewards, such as room and board or financial support for playing summer baseball. It also made athletes with poor scholarship, such as Harry LeMoyne, ineligible.7 However, in the 1920s, Princeton broke relations with Harvard over the scheduling of games when Harvard granted Yale “most-favored” status. Harvard refused to schedule Princeton every year in football. This caused an eight-year break in relations that extended into the 1930s; there was no thought of bringing Harvard, Yale, and Princeton together again or expanding the Big Three into a seven- or eight-team Ivy League.8

iVy league SuggeSTionS: STudenTS, newSPaPerS, and The PreSidenTS’ agreemenT Once Princeton and Harvard had mended their relationship, an agreement to form an Ivy League could move forward. Initiated by the editor of the Daily Princetonian, the editors of the Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale school newspapers simultaneously published an editorial favoring the creation of an Ivy League for football, with Brown University being left out. The editors in 1936 concluded, “The Ivy League exists already in the minds of a good many of those connected with football.”9 Within two weeks, the athletic directors of the seven institutions met, and even though the same schools were in both basketball and baseball leagues, Yale refused to join the all-important one in football. Yale’s athletic director, Malcolm Farmer, believed that the entrance requirements and eligibility rules differed in the seven institutions to the disadvantage of Yale, and he desired to keep Yale’s autonomy in scheduling as many home games as possible in its large, seventy-thousand-seat stadium.10 As James Conant, president of Harvard, later said, “If Yale is not interested, the scheme is out the window.”11 Even though athletic directors and presidents of the proposed Ivy League were not in full agreement to form a football league, the sports editors of the seven schools voted Cornell as the first Ivy League champion for 1938 football.12

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As the Great Depression was ending, the presidents of the Big Three signed an agreement to ban the payment of recruiting expenses of athletes and to forbid the recruiting of athletes in preparatory schools, something these eastern schools had been doing for well over a half century. The prestigious Big Three institutions were not anxious to bring about an Ivy League but did want the other four (or five with Brown) to follow the rules of the Big Three. When World War II engulfed much of Europe and Asia, the presidents of the Big Three continued to discuss the place of athletics that would follow the war.13 As the defeat of Germany and Japan approached, the eight Ivy League presidents (including Brown) signed the Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement. The new Ivy League, for what the presidents said were amateur athletics, required financial aid to come only from personal or family resources or academic scholarships awarded through regular academic channels.14 Despite the 1945 Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement, it was not an Ivy League for football in generally accepted terms. There was no required number of contests to be played by members and no round-robin schedule requiring a school to play against other members of the league on a regular basis. It was more like the Sanity Code before the NCAA voted for it. The presidents of the new Ivy League could claim “purity” before the NCAA voted on the purified Sanity Code in 1948. Like other university presidents throughout the United States who were opposed to recruiting and paying athletes, the Ivy presidents wanted amateur rules primarily for the other institutions, not for themselves. An NCAA faculty representative from the University of North Carolina, Professor Allen W. Hobbs, stated shortly after the Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement was passed, “There are plenty of people all over the United States who think that subsidization goes on in the Ivy League to about the same extent as in other sections, but it is done with more finesse.”15 Hobbs was correct. The Ivy League institutions were more hypocritical than footballplaying institutions in the Southeastern Conference, for while the SEC institutions openly paid for their players’ educations based on their athletic talent, the Ivies were more subtle in their payments. National rankings of Ivy football teams from World War II to the mid-1950s indicate that the teams were still heavily recruited with players who were paid in numerous ways. Included among the top twenty ranked teams, the records show that Cornell (1948, 1949, 1950), Pennsylvania (1945), Princeton (1949, 1950), and Yale (1956) were among the elite football playing schools.16 In short, the Ivies were still recruiting and paying their players even after they formally became the Ivy League on November 20, 1945,

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when the presidents agreed that athletes “shall be truly representative of the student body,” not special students.17 The University of Pennsylvania was one of the Ivy schools with questionable payment of athletes into the 1950s. The Sanity Code of 1948 limited aid to tuition and fees based on need.18 According to material filed in President Harold E. Stassen’s office, the fifty-two Penn football players in 1950 were being paid: twelve with tuition plus $600 stipends; twelve with State Senate of Pennsylvania Senatorial Scholarships; nine with tuition, fees, and work opportunities for room and board; nine with tuition and fees; one with tuition and $300 stipend; and one with tuition only. There were seventeen players on the team with no scholarships.19 It is not known how this differed from other Ivy League schools, but for some of the Penn athletes, the pay might have been competitive with that of Southeastern Conference athletes. Nevertheless, as Princeton was the dominant football team among Ivy institutions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it is likely that Princeton was financing its athletes as well as or better than the University of Pennsylvania. In comparison to two institutions outside the Ivy League, there were seventy athletic scholarships for football players at the University of Oklahoma that provided tuition and fifty-five dollars per month, while the state of Ohio was offering “jobs” at one hundred dollars per month in the state government for Ohio State players.20 Three years after the 1945 formal agreement among the Ivies, the University of Pennsylvania became the first institution to outwardly violate the presidents’ agreement. In 1948, Harold Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota, was elected president of the Philadelphia institution. Stassen had just been defeated for the Republican presidential nomination by New York’s Thomas E. Dewey. He began leadership of Penn at a time in which Penn had been telecasting its football games for the past eight years, nearly as long as commercial television had existed in America.21 The University of Pennsylvania had been supporting its football team with a number of scholarships, including those given to it by the Pennsylvania State Senate. These senatorial scholarships consisted of tuition waivers and stipends, stretching the limits of the new 1948 NCAA Sanity Code.22 When Stassen came to Penn from Minnesota, he brought the Big Ten mentality of Big-Time athletics with him. He called his vision of athletics “Victory with Honor.” While the presidential Ivy League agreement was to deemphasize football, Stassen was increasing the emphasis on football by scheduling games with such institutions as Notre Dame, Army, and California. In addition, he independently contracted for the 1951 telecasting of its football games for $175,000. In comparison, 116

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the nationally prominent University of Oklahoma football team under coach Bud Wilkinson’s Sooners was receiving $3,000 for TV rights.23 Harold Stassen’s go-it-alone “Victory with Honor” football program with financially large television rights threatened its new standing in the Ivy League.24 While the other seven Ivy League institutions were playing most of their games against other “deemphasized” Ivy teams, they did not want to contest an institution playing the likes of the national power Notre Dame. Neither did they want to play against an institution that had the largest football TV contract in the nation, one that would likely take paying customers from the Ivy schools on Saturday afternoons, when people would stay home to watch Penn football games rather than come to other Ivy stadiums. The University of Pennsylvania had a strategic decision to make to save the educational status that it received by being associated with schools such as Harvard and Yale. Penn and Stassen were forced into either deemphasizing football by following Ivy League rules or leaving the prestige of the Ivies to play Big-Time football. The threat of a boycott by fellow Ivy institutions and the pressure from his own governing board forced Stassen’s hand.25 He quickly deemphasized football to remain in the Ivy League, and he soon left Penn to work in the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidency.

The iVy league agreemenT of 1952 A crisis for the Ivy League, as well as the nation, was at hand when the Ivy presidents met at the end of the 1951 football season. America was in the midst of fighting the Chinese and North Korean Communists in the stalemated Korean War. College athletics were at the lowest point in athletic integrity since the creation of the NCAA in the 1905–1906 football crisis. This included the recent failure of upholding the NCAA Sanity Code: for example, a major basketball point-shaving scandal involving New York City teams and Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky five, the expulsion of nearly the entire US Military Academy football team for academic cheating, an academic scandal in basketball and football at William and Mary, and a nationally exposed racial incident by an Oklahoma A&M football player.26 The Ivy League agreement of 1945 was in near collapse, with the Big Three threatening to withdraw from the group unless tighter amateur rules were accepted by its less prominent members. The Big Three warning was likely the push needed to amend the 1945 presidential agreement of the eight Ivies and create a real Ivy League. The product of the December Ivy presidential meeting was the 117

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Ivy Group Agreement of 1952. The result was an even stronger deemphasis resulting in the tightening of eligibility requirements and raising of recruiting and subsidization standards, including a ban on subsidies to athletes by alumni and others not closely related to the athletes’ families. In addition, postseason or bowl games were prohibited, and spring football practice was eliminated.27 The Ivy Group Agreement of May 1952 emphasized the amateur ideal, including that “the players themselves shall be truly representative of the student body and not composed of a group of specially recruited athletes.” In addition, the presidents called for intercollegiate competition to “be kept in harmony with the essential educational purposes of the institution.”28 It was exactly what amateur reformers had been preaching since the late nineteenth century and what presidents often called for across the nation. A major difference was that the presidents of the Ivy League appeared to have taken collective action, which most presidents among the major university conferences failed to do when their own institutions were breaking amateur rules. Nationally, presidents from most institutions were as leery of taking any actions to correct athletic abuses in the 1950s as they had been in the early 1900s and would be in the twenty-first century. Their positions were at stake, and most presidents did not want to jeopardize the well-paying and prestigious positions they had striven for and risen to during their careers. Ivy League presidents, on the other hand, appeared to be taking decisive action. Not everyone, however, believed that the Ivy League presidents were dealing effectively with recruitment and the paying of college athletes with their 1952 Ivy Group Agreement. One was the Harvard dean of admissions and financial aid, who complained about the pressure to recruit athletes at Harvard. He wanted a public announcement charging that Ivy presidents wouldn’t do anything relative to recruiting. “It would be a great pleasure,” he stated, “to put some of these hypocritical presidents on the spot publicly.”29 Even with a new agreement among Ivy League presidents, the Harvard admissions office knew that athletes were still getting special treatment when being admitted to Harvard, just as they would receive favorable consideration well into the twenty-first century.30 In the mid-1950s, President William Stevenson of Oberlin College gave a talk called “Amateurism in Athletics” at an Amateur Athletic Union awards dinner in New York City. He criticized Ivy League payment to its athletes. He recounted a high school football player who received a dozen offers from colleges but “accepted an Ivy League bid because it [was] the most substantial one of all.” He condemned presidents, calling 118

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them hypocrites who “adopt a code of high-sounding principles and then remain ignorant or wink at surreptitious abuses.” The president of Brown University, Barnaby C. Keeney, responded to Stevenson. He remarked that there had been violations, generally by alumni or groups of alumni, in Ivy institutions and that a number of scholarships were awarded by stipulation of the donor based not on need but on ability—presumably athletic ability.31 At this time, the Ivies wanted to exempt alumni associations from recruiting as the NCAA legislation demanded, because such recruitment was not for athletic purposes. There was some thought by Ivies of withdrawing from the NCAA because of this, but that would have placed the Ivy League in a bad light from an academic standpoint and hurt its image.32

were The iVieS whaT They Said They were? When the Ivies declared that their institutions did not offer athletic scholarships, it allowed them to proclaim that the Ivy League institutions placed great emphasis on academics while maintaining a large and varied intercollegiate athletic program. Amateurism is what the Ivy League became known for and what was often emphasized by sportswriters and sport broadcasters. Yet the presidents’ agreements in the 1940s and 1950s slowly lost much of their emphasis on amateur sport, which stands for far more than just paying for an athlete’s education. The idealized formation of the Ivy League began to deteriorate by the 1960s on several fronts. From then until the end of the century, it became clearer that the Ivy League was conducting athletics in ways very similar to those of the Big-Time institutions, except that the Ivies claimed they were not giving out athletic scholarships. But they were certainly giving out scholarships to athletes, often based more on athletic ability than on academic accomplishments or financial need. As Jerimiah Ford, the reformist athletic director at the University of Pennsylvania, stated, eastern schools were “ignoring the need factor in the grants of financial aid.”33 Despite the rhetoric of brainy Ivy League athletes (and many were), schools were recruiting athletes who were academically inferior to their nonathlete peers, and they performed academically below them during their college careers. This was borne out by a study headed by a former president of Princeton University, William G. Bowen. Not only an Ohio high school champion in tennis in the 1950s, well after earning a PhD in economics Bowen studied collegiate admission policy while serving as 119

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president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1988–2006). Bowen’s book with Sarah Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (2003), documents “a persistent and widening split between academics and athletics at selective colleges and universities that offer no athletic scholarships . . . and presumably exemplify the ‘amateur’ ideal.”34 Every Ivy League institution was studied, showing that men’s ice hockey, basketball, and football athletes’ SAT scores were well below the average scores of students at those institutions. This was due to the system at all Ivy schools in which men and women “athletes on coaches’ lists are given substantial preference in admissions.” Since women’s admittance into Ivy Schools and the 1972 Title IX Congressional Act, the recruited women athletes, particularly in ice hockey, basketball, softball, and field hockey, showed major deficits in SAT scores.35 The recruitment and financial inducements to attract men and women athletes was a mark against amateur ideals at all Ivy League institutions, another indication of fig-leafed professionals. What President Bowen showed was sobering, but what happened after 1960 in the Ivy League in other areas of increased commercialization and professionalization is just as weighty. The efforts of the presidents to move toward the amateur ideal had little impact on reforming athletics throughout the nation, for by the 1950s the Ivy League had been overtaken athletically, if not educationally. The ideals of the presidents even deteriorated within the Ivy League. While the Ivy “model” was often praised for uplifting amateur sport, the Ivies quietly returned to many activities that had been reformed in the 1940s and 1950s. A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale in the 1980s and later commissioner of Major League Baseball, claimed that the Ivy League was “drifting away” from its principles.36 One of those principles was forbidding freshmen from participating in varsity sports so that they could concentrate on academics the first year. Following the NCAA rule to allow freshmen to compete in 1968 in all sports except football and basketball, the Ivies soon succumbed. Because they needed freshman eligibility for recruiting purposes, they too capitulated to the incentive of immediate varsity competition. The Ivy League allowed freshmen to compete in all sports in 1971, except football, basketball, baseball, rowing, soccer, and hockey. The league then allowed it in lacrosse, rowing, and soccer in 1974; hockey in 1975; basketball in 1977; and finally football in 1991.37 The Ivies increased the number of football games played to ten in 1977, further commercializing their most important sport. They removed the ban on commercial bowl games in 1990, when the Epson Ivy Bowl in 120

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Yokohama, Japan, was first played, and they allowed postseason games in other sports.38 In 1991, the elite academic league once again allowed spring practice in football. The league even signed a football television contract in 1984, but the Neilson Ratings were so low that they could not be accurately measured.39 This attempt at commercialism failed. Other commercial measures were more successful. Institutions hired marketing directors, named athletic facilities after commercial concerns, and attached commercial logos to athletic clothing. Commercialism, anathema to amateurism, was alive and well in the Ivy League. One Ivy League decision was a remarkable paradox if not an academic hypocrisy. It occurred while Columbia University was losing fortyfour straight football games between 1983 and 1988. The Ivy League was embarrassed that Columbia could rarely win a game from the late 1970s until well into the 1980s. From mid-season 1983, when Columbia squeaked out a victory over Yale, until the 1988 season, the Columbia team failed to win a game. Then, in the first contest in sixteen years that Columbia players did not fumble, they beat Princeton. To attempt to help Columbia, and the entire Ivy League, due to this embarrassment of continual losing, the league agreed to drop its academic standards and allow academically unqualified football players to be recruited and admitted into Columbia to win a few games.40 The Ivy League had a formula for admitting recruited athletes called the academic index (AI), created in 1985. The AI was an academic formula using high school grade point averages and standardized test scores for athletes to ensure that admitted athletes would not be more than a statistical standard deviation below the average of students in the entire university.41 From that standpoint, the Ivy League schools were similar to almost every institution of higher education in America in that athletes’ grade point averages and test scores were below that of the regular students’ when they entered college. It was very evident in football and a couple other sports. Columbia had fallen below the minimum academic standards set for the rest of the league, and the football team eventually won several games. One can justify the Columbia Ivy League decision, but not on academic grounds. By the 1980s and 1990s, the Ivy League looked much like other major conferences with the exception that the league did not allow outright athletic scholarship. Far from the norms of true amateur sport, the institutions recruited with intensity, lowering the schools’ academic standards to allow athletes to attend. They allowed certain teams, such as rowing, to practice the entire year while restricting the more visible football team. It is easy to argue that rowing is a much more physically exhausting sport 121

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than football, but placing restrictions on spring football practice was done more for the public relations impact than looking out for the best interest of athletes and their education. While banning spring practice was a fine PR move, the fact that the Ivy schools fired coaches for not winning indicated they were not greatly different from the other athletic powers. The firing of Joe Yukica at Dartmouth in 1985 is a prime example. He coached the Dartmouth football team for eight years, winning three Ivy League titles. He then had a losing record for two years and was fired by the athletic director. Because he was fired without being given sufficient notice, he appealed for breach of contract by Dartmouth. A judge agreed and issued an injunction after Joe Paterno, a former Ivy player at Brown and coach at Penn State, and others testified on Yukica’s behalf. Yukica was allowed another year of coaching and was then dismissed.42 The significance of winning was manifest in the Ivy League as in other institutions of higher education and was far more important than upholding amateur ideals. Ivy League teams did win on the national level, but primarily in what many would consider elite sports or eastern sports. The three most common national championships were men’s squash, fencing, and rowing. They also won rare championships in ice hockey and lacrosse. When women began competing and winning national championships in the 1970s, they occurred in squash, fencing, lacrosse, and cross country.43 Generally, the national championships were won in sports that the children of wealthy parents participated in and for which athletic scholarships would not be needed to support the athletes through school. As has been shown historically, the concept of athletic amateurism and limitation of commercialism and professionalism came from the elites of society. As the Ivy League schools became known as the elite educational institutions in America, the necessity for providing athletic scholarships was less than in other institutions, especially state universities, where athletes needed more financial help to attend institutions of higher education. Nevertheless, the Ivy League did most everything the other athletic powers were doing, except to offer outright athletic scholarships. The Ivy League mirrored much of the commercialism and professionalism of college sport, while the NCAA claimed erroneously that it was carrying out amateur sport nationally as it moved to allow institutions to pay athletes’ way through college.

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ch a PTer Ten

Recruiting, Full Scholarships, and the Big Ten Succumbs The procurement or recruiting of prospective athletes—and I said prospective athletes, not prospective students—is the most difficult job in intercollegiate athletics. bernie h. moore, 1956

The only thing that makes a college scholarship athlete not a professional is simply by declaring him not to be so. Track & field conSulTing grouP, 1976

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hile The iVy league wenT To a full fooTball round-robin schedule and no athletic scholarships, the NCAA soon voted to allow full grants to athletes, including tuition, room, board, fees, books, and fifteen dollars per month in what was euphemistically called laundry money. What the Southeastern Conference had been doing financially for athletes since the mid-1930s, the NCAA accepted as its own policy in 1957. For a century, colleges in America favored the term amateurism, which to many meant that the institutions would not allow outright payment for athletic services in the many sports played across the nation. Nevertheless, directly after the failure of the Sanity Code in 1950, Big-Time athletic conferences from East to West generally voted to provide full scholarships or, to make it appear to be amateur, paid only tuition and fees for those in financial need. The competitive imbalance became apparent when many of the best athletes were drawn to institutions that paid the best, that is, fullscholarship schools. This put pressure on institutions that paid tuition

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only, such as the Big Ten members, who were having difficulty attracting a share of the best athletes to compete on a national level. It was a painful process for some individuals, institutions, and conferences to agree to financially grant full athletic scholarships, when tradition opposed the payment of athletes.

onward To full aThleTic ScholarShiPS It was a short time from the defeat of the Sanity Code in 1950 to the NCAA capitulating to full grants in 1957. The NCAA’s attempt to allow tuition-only athletic scholarships based on need had failed, with the result of an unlevel playing field in both the paying of players and the recruiting of them. Whether on a regional (conference) level or at the national level, most legislation was created to bring about greater balance in competition—to level the playing field. For instance, the freshman ineligibility rule needed to have all conference members agree to it, or none, to allow for greater fairness in both recruiting and participating. Similarly, the transfer rule for athletes needed to be uniform for all participating teams, or else one school would recruit athletes from other schools and gain a competitive advantage. Correspondingly, the amount of payment to athletes needed to be regulated to allow for more equal competition on a national level. As more conferences, especially in the South, were giving full athletic scholarships, other conferences would need to do the same thing or fall back competitively. A major problem occurred for institutions and conferences that wanted to retain a semblance of amateurism, such as the Big Ten and Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic conferences. The Ivy League had already succumbed to something less than Big Time. Thus, a dilemma—if there were no athletic scholarships, teams would regularly lose; if there were full scholarships, it would appear to be closer to professional sports and a loss of something akin to amateurism. The claiming of amateurism as a positive image still had meaning in the 1950s. Any nod to amateurism, however, was for most not worth the price of losing intercollegiate contests as it related to the payment of players. So, what Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed historian of the frontier theory in American history, had stated exactly a half century before came true. Turner, at the time of the football crisis of 1905–1906, complained of hiring gladiators who specialized in football in an “excessive desire to win.”1 The NCAA decided in 1957 that it must allow the “hiring” of

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“gladiators,” in the historian’s terms, to level the playing field nationally. Though it was not a unanimous decision, for the first time athletes in Big-Time institutions would have most of their educational costs paid— tuition, fees, room, board, books, and fifteen dollars per month in laundry money. A leader of the NCAA stated with some justification that without this aid the athlete “is unable to spend time working for a living that he now devotes to athletics.”2 In the mid-1950s, the NCAA debated the two most difficult problems it had to face, the payment of players and recruiting. Recruiting was the first debated. Many NCAA representatives agreed with the statement made by Southeastern Conference commissioner and former football coach Bernie Moore that “the procurement or recruiting of prospective athletes . . . is the most difficult job in intercollegiate athletics.”3 It was the major focus of the NCAA annual meeting in 1956, revolving around separate discussions of recruiting by athletic directors, coaches, and faculty representatives. Even a special meeting of small colleges took up the issue.4 Setting aside the question of full athletic scholarships, specific recommendations concerning recruiting were presented by the ad hoc NCAA Special Committee on Recruiting. After lengthy deliberations, this committee came to what turned out to be an unfortunate conclusion: each institution’s athletic department should stay out of the recruiting process and allow the alumni to do so. The 1956 motion to amend the bylaws read, “No member of an athletic staff or other official representative of athletic interests shall solicit the attendance at his institution of any prospective student with the offer or equivalent inducements except such as are permitted by this Association.”5 After the home rule motion to withdraw the NCAA from any legislation on recruiting, made by the athletic director of Georgia Tech, Colonel Blake Van Leer, was ruled out of order, the convention by a voice vote carried the NCAA bylaws amendment.6 The alumni, who previously were prominent in the recruiting business, were thrust into an even more essential role. The unfortunate decision to leave recruiting in the hands of the alumni essentially took the control of a major element of university athletics out of the hands of the institution and placed it outside of institutional and educational control. Any individual alumnus, or friend of the institution, could pay for the cost of bringing high school athletes to his college and provide entertainment, but the school could not do so. In the recruiting process, the NCAA specifically allowed the payment of “the transportation costs incurred by relatives or friends of a

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prospective student-athlete to visit its campus.”7 Recruiting by alumni is what colleges, especially the wealthy colleges of the East, had been doing for decades. If alumni did the recruiting and paying for athlete’s college expenses, it was difficult to determine if illegal pay was occurring, especially to the star athletes. In addition, placing recruiting in the hands of the alumni gave an advantage to the richest schools with the wealthiest alumni, such as the Ivy League, as well as northern and West Coast institutions with the largest universities and active alumni organizations. Paradoxically, these were the same institutions that favored need-based scholarships or no athletic scholarships at all. There was major confusion and plenty of violations in both recruiting and payment of players across America.

The big Ten, PreSidenT hannah, and The ace The Big Ten administrators had been leaders in trying to preserve what they considered amateurism and limited payment of players since the formation of the conference by university presidents in the mid-1890s. When the Big Ten was founded in 1895, the original seven university presidents set “rules to curb practices which are detrimental to amateur sport.” Therefore, the collegiate leaders of Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin agreed that “no person shall be admitted to any intercollegiate contest who receives any gifts, remuneration or pay for his services on the college team.” Each school was required to give control of athletics to faculty—not students, not coaches, not athletic directors, and not alumni. By the next decade, rules required a year of residence before participation (freshman rule), undergraduate-only participation, and elimination of the training table.8 The Big Ten, from the 1890s until the 1950s, was the leading conference attempting to preserve amateurism, but it had its own historical problems. The University of Michigan left the conference in 1907 over the status of the professional coach Fielding H. Yost, who was not a member of the faculty as required by the Big Ten. The most highly criticized action in intercollegiate history was the signing of Illinois’s “amateur” Harold “Red” Grange to a professional football contract in 1925. The University of Iowa was banned from the Big Ten for a short period in 1929 for payment of athletes. The University of Chicago left the Big Ten in 1939 when it would not pay its football players, like other Big Ten teams were doing, to remain competitive.9 In practice, the Big Ten was hardly

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amateur by the mid-1950s, but it had been looked to as a model for the past six decades. When the NCAA allowed full athletic scholarships in 1957, the Big Ten had to decide whether it would stem the tide of paying the cost of education or continue its policy of payment of tuition based upon financial need. As the NCAA was about to allow full athletic scholarships in 1956, the Big Ten was discussing whether it would continue tuition-only aid based on need. The Big Ten Report of a Special Committee in the summer of 1956 described its recruiting and subsidization predicament: either pay more for recruits or lose out athletically to full-scholarship institutions. The report noted that there is “competitive pressure in recruiting from other schools [that] offer full maintenance assistance to athletes.”10 At the time, a starting tackle on the University of Wisconsin football team was receiving three scholarship awards as he pursued a degree in history. Stephen Ambrose, a future star military historian, was receiving $600 in scholarships in 1956 when a full athletic scholarship would have cost about $900.11 Because Ambrose was in the Reserve Officers Training Corp at Wisconsin, the entire cost of his education may have been covered, relieving his medical doctor father from any university expenses. Institutions in the Big Ten may not have given out athletic scholarships, but they gave many scholarships to athletes, something akin to what Ivy League universities were doing at the same time and would do well into the future. At the time Stephen Ambrose was playing his way through school, the presidents of the Big Ten were trying to figure out what athletic scholarship policy the conference should follow. Probably the two leading figures were John Hannah from Michigan State and Virgil Hancher from the University of Iowa. President Hannah (1941–1969), likely the most important leader of Michigan State in its history, used the promotion of winning athletics when it grew from six thousand students to forty thousand during his tenure and became a nationally recognized research institution. Still, even before becoming president, Hannah was involved in giving out illegal athletic scholarships—Jenison Awards—and he continued to allow them until Michigan State joined the Big Ten in 1949. Jenison Awards went to “deserving students . . . who ha[d] demonstrated mental ability and physical strength.”12 The University of Michigan’s athletic director, Fritz Crisler, stated that Michigan State’s “paid-player basis” was conducted “much the same as some institutions in the South.”13 The Michigan State faculty athletic representative, Harold Tukey, later revealed that Hannah knew of grade fixing and allowing outlawed

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payments to athletes well before Michigan State was admitted into the Big Ten. A few years later Michigan State was punished by the NCAA for its illegal activity.14 John Hannah, like most college presidents, was a cheerleader for athletics, yet he hypocritically led a national reform movement only shortly after giving out the illegal Jenison Awards that had allowed his Michigan State Spartans to become a national power in football. Football was supreme at Michigan’s land grant institution before Michigan State was voted into the Big Ten in 1949. The Spartans became even better as coach Clarence “Biggie” Munn’s teams accomplished thirty-five wins and two losses from 1950 to 1953. This was during the time that President Hannah was chosen to chair a committee of the American Council of Education to reform athletics. The ACE was formed of university presidents during World War I to help influence national educational policy. It was determined to reform college athletics after the defeat of the Sanity Code in 1950 and a series of athletic disgraces exposed in 1951, including the infamous basketball point shaving scandal. In the fall of 1951, the ACE announced a reform committee of eleven college presidents to right the wrongs of college athletics. Its members came mostly from major institutions such as Mississippi, Nebraska, Notre Dame, and Yale, and, unfortunately on ethical grounds, Michigan State’s John Hannah served as chair. President Hannah opened the first ACE committee session with his own statement: “Subsidization has been necessary to produce winning teams and satisfy the demands of the alumni. We must eliminate those factors which give undue emphasis to winning.”15 Winning, however, was the number-one priority for Hannah and his Michigan State Spartans football team, which had just finished the first of two undefeated seasons. Hannah was also opposed to the Big Ten policy of tuition-only payments to athletics based upon need. Hannah was breaking this Big Ten rule until his university gave up the Jenison Awards to gain admittance into the Big Ten. What took the place of Jenison scholarships were grants from a newly formed Spartan Foundation, which was alumni-run.16 At the same time that the ACE Hannah-chaired committee was pressing for athletic reform, the Big Ten was meeting to address charges that Michigan State was offering financial aid to unqualified athletes. The result was negative to Michigan State. Hannah was compelled to insist that future funds from the Spartan Foundation would be turned over to the institution’s scholarship committee, and the Big Ten eventually chose to censure Michigan State with probation. Just before the Big Ten condemnation of Michigan State, President Hannah released the findings of the ACE reform committee.17 128

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The American Council of Education committee recommended two dozen policy changes, including mandating that recruited athletes have the same admission standards as other students, bringing athletics under control of university administrations, and eliminating outside alumni control, as had often existed. More important, Hannah got what he wanted with the recommendation that athletic scholarships not be limited to tuition; full scholarships would be allowed, though grants to athletes would not require athletic participation.18 As the ACE recommendations held no directive power, the NCAA or conferences would have to incorporate the proposals into their own policy decisions. President Hannah presented his ACE committee’s reform report to the 1952 NCAA convention, and the NCAA overwhelmingly supported the general principles but carried out few of the specific proposals.

Virgil hancher and a big Ten full ScholarShiP ProPoSal While John Hannah could be considered a hypocrite in college athletics by raising his institution’s prestige with a winning football team while breaking Big Ten limitations on athletic scholarships to do so, the president of the University of Iowa provided the rationale for providing full athletic scholarships. Iowa’s president, Virgil Hancher, registered a “no” in the Big Ten’s 6–4 vote to continue only need-based tuition grants just before the NCAA allowed full athletic scholarships. He then tried to get his fellow presidents to follow the NCAA action allowing full athletic scholarships.19 Hancher, a lawyer by trade before becoming Iowa’s president, was a graduate of both the University of Iowa and Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. He wrote a brilliant six-page letter to President Hannah and the other Big Ten presidents outlining his proposal for full athletic scholarships based on merit, not based on need. One would have guessed that the Oxford Rhodes scholar would have favored the English amateur model for athletics. Hancher wrote, “Oxford University [is] as close to the academic ideal as any university in the world.” But, unlike many American lovers of the English amateur system, he stated, “Oxford and Cambridge have never been duplicated elsewhere, even in the British Isles, and they will not be duplicated in the United States.” His prescient remarks continued:20 Both our past and present project us into a quite different social order. Yet in athletics we have consciously or unconsciously 129

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attempted to carry into the American way of life much of the British distinction between the gentleman [amateur] and the professional in the field of sport. As a result, we are acting hypocritically and making hypocrites of our athletes all the way from the high schools to the Olympic games.

Hancher argued with keen insight that need-based athletic scholarships were at war with what was going on elsewhere in American universities. Hancher felt that a Big Ten need-based athletic scholarship failed because it attempted “to keep alive a distinction which is not realistic in our American setting.” Need was not generally used as a criterion, he wrote, for aid to “band men, debaters, actors, members of choruses and orchestras.” Why, Hancher asked, “should we take a different attitude toward talent in any activity, such as intercollegiate athletics?” Besides, most need-based decisions were subjective calls and were “subject to attack as unfair or inequitable—and every case of unfairness or inequity is a temptation to break the rules.” What the Big Ten needed, Hancher argued, was a plan that “reduce[d] potential violations to the minimum, a plan which reduce[d] the risk of lawlessness.” He even questioned the Ivy League plan of not granting athletic scholarships, as scholarships were still being given to favored athletes in the eastern elite institutions. Hancher’s solution was to grant full athletic scholarships, for they are “as good a basis as it is possible to be as long as big-time intercollegiate athletics continue to exist.” Reduce the temptation to cheat as much as possible by offering “direct, above-board provision for room, board, tuition, books . . . and perhaps a small allowance for incidental expenses.” Concluding with the background of law within him, he advised, “If you want obedience to the law the first step is to make the law as clear and simple and understandable as possible.” As he speculated, “the Big Ten continue[d] the path to needs-based scholarships[,] subjecting [them] selves to the intervening agony.”21 The Big Ten went for agony. The Big Ten in 1957 voted six to four for need-based athletic scholarships, with Michigan State’s Hannah voting in the majority, a surprising vote for someone who favored full athletic scholarships.22 Had Michigan State not been punished for illegal recruiting and paying players a few years before, Hannah would likely have voted no. Hannah was politically astute if nothing else, and he replied to Hancher’s letter, My answer to your very well written and logical statement is that I favor the present plan, not because it is perfect, but because this is the first time the Conference has come even close to adopting an 130

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above-the-table aid program. If time demonstrates that all you fear will happen does happen, the plan will have to have further consideration. It may well be that in the end the correct answer will be the one you now propose.23

Meanwhile, Iowa’s Hancher, who could see the future better than most leaders in the Big Ten, lamented the Big Ten’s vote for “need.” He concluded that the Big Ten should “either return to amateur athletics or be honest with the professional model.” He recognized that the present Big Ten football and basketball programs were “indistinguishable from professional football and professional basketball” and took “a very sanctimonious line toward the athletes who make our gate receipts possible.”24 It sounded much like similar arguments that would be made decades later in the twenty-first century.

The big Ten JoinS The oTher fig- leafed ProfeSSional- amaTeurS The Big Ten, which had strongly backed the lost-cause Sanity Code and voted for need-based athletic scholarships, lost the athlete recruiting battle to the pay-for-play conferences after the NCAA decision in 1957 to allow full athletic scholarships.25 It took four agonizing years for the Big Ten to realize that if it desired to remain in a leadership role in athletics, it would need to join the others who paid their players to perform, just as President Hancher had predicted. At the time, the Big Ten had much to protect. This was especially true for the football programs, where the average stadium capacity was well over sixty thousand and average attendance was about fifty-six thousand. This was far more than attendance for the Pacific Coast Conference, the next most dominant conference, and approaching double the attendance at Southeastern Conference games.26 Big Ten presidents in 1956 announced that they would “abolish sports programs before [a full athletic scholarship] corrupts education.”27 The corruption of education in the Big Ten and other conferences in the period from the mid-1950s until 1961, when full scholarships were voted in, was apparent. Dishonest recruiting in athletic programs and the payment of players existed throughout the Big Ten when tuitiononly athletic scholarships were based on financial need. If Big Ten presidents wanted to abolish sports for corruption, they should have done it when the limited tuition scholarships were based on financial need, 131

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for there was plenty of corruption among Big Ten institutions. Michigan State did not start the corruption, but the Jenison Awards violated Big Ten standards of amateurism just before Michigan State was voted into the Big Ten to replace the University of Chicago. When Michigan State was finally voted in, despite the University of Michigan’s attempt to undermine its in-state rival, within a few years the Big Ten punished the Spartans for handing out illegal aid through two alumni-dominated foundations.28 Other Big Ten institutions were also found guilty of breaking the conference regulations, but not before Michigan State was caught with players selling tickets for a profit. It was probably not the only Big Ten institution giving football players game tickets that they then sold. The captain of Michigan State’s undefeated national championship football team, Don McAuliffe, said that he was robbed of sixteen game tickets for the 1952 Notre Dame game. When this was revealed, the NCAA Committee on Infractions responded. It stated that “by granting this number of tickets to an athlete for a sell-out football game, a college could circumvent regulations governing financial aid and provide substantial rewards to capable athletes.” Nine years later, the NCAA legislated a limit to the number of free game tickets for any player, at four.29 Game ticket sales for profit was a minor violation of Big Ten and NCAA legislation. As the faculty representative from the University of Iowa complained in the mid-1950s, “improper recruiting and subsidization of athletes remain chief problems. . . . The inevitable demand for a ‘winner’ remains as high as ever.”30 At the same time, Woody Hayes and the Ohio State football program were charged with giving “loans” to football players and granting full scholarships when only tuition based on need was allowed. Football players were given soft jobs with little work in the state capitol, earning a hundred dollars per month. As punishment, Ohio State was prohibited from playing in the Rose Bowl and in any national tournament for a year.31 Along with Ohio State, Ron Kramer, a three-sport Michigan star (football, basketball, and track and field) and later all-league Green Bay Packers end, violated Big Ten rules. In Look magazine’s “Football Scandal Hits the Big Ten” article, Kramer was charged with receiving an illegal University of Michigan grant because his scholastic standing was too deficient to obtain one.32 The same year, Indiana’s new football coach, Phil Dickens, was paying some players fifty dollars per month with no work required. Dickens was suspended for one year for his blatant paying of his players.33 By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread breaking of Big Ten recruiting rules and handing out of need-based financial aid. Faculty 132

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representatives were ready to turn to what President Hancher of Iowa had pleaded for a half-decade before—full athletic scholarships not based on financial need. But it was not only because “need” was interpreted differently depending upon how much a star high school athlete was needed. The Big Ten was losing athletes, principally football players, to other conferences who paid better. George Young, faculty representative from Wisconsin, stated, “[The Big Ten] couldn’t field the caliber of teams which we think our institutions and our supporters demand . . . and the rules we had, simply didn’t permit us to provide the financial assistance that is needed to get that caliber of team.”34 Young might have said, “The Big Ten doesn’t pay enough to elite athletes.” Young and the Big Ten would have to wait until the early 1960s to catch up with the rest of the nation in paying their athletes. The Big Ten finally joined the other major conferences in paying athletes the major costs of education when it voted for full grants in May 1961.35 The conference could not long complain, “We can’t keep our boys at home. What are they offering?” After nearly a half decade, the Big Ten had finally joined the other major conferences in paying athletes the major costs of education for participation with the possibility of attaining a four-year degree. Still, few conferences, including the Big Ten, set any kind of academic entrance requirements to predict if the athletes had the ability to do college work. When it was reported that the Big Ten joined other conferences in giving full grants to athletes, one Big Ten administrator suggested that the NCAA consider legislation to provide “minimum criteria for awarding grants-in-aid to athletes.”36 Hence the NCAA would grapple with the question of high school grade point averages and national testing results as the lower limit under which no athlete might fall in order to have his college expenses paid. The result was the 1.600 rule to attempt to bring about something akin to a level playing field for admission of the fig-leafed professionals.

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ch a PTer ele V en

Academic Standards, the 1.600 Rule, and Their Demise Let’s end the hassling, the embarrassment, the inequities, the unfairness and administrative complexities which relate to the [1.600] rule. roberT behrman, 1973

If we vote out the 1.600 legislation, we are left without anything. JeSS hill, 1973

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hen The big Ten in 1962 Joined The oTher major conferences in permitting full athletic scholarships, the NCAA had already determined that the scholarships were for four years, not one-year grants.1 The so-called level playing field was fixed nationally for the grants, but did athletes need any level of academic success in high school to receive one of them? Or could an athlete who read at a third-grade level, who scored in the lower twenty-fifth percentile of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), be eligible for college and an athletic scholarship? In addition, would it be acceptable to NCAA institutions for the same athlete to play out his athletic eligibility with little hope of graduating? The decisions on scholarships and academic credentials during the period of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s would lead to some of the darkest hours of college athletics.

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naTional legiSlaTion including meeTing academic requiremenTS With the defeat of traditional home rule, the NCAA began to legislate nationally on recruiting and financial aid shortly after World War II. Conference and individual institutions no longer set limits on the payment to amateurs. After allowing full athletic scholarships in 1957, the NCAA set up the Special Committee on Recruiting and Financial Aid, which reported to the annual conference in 1960. Included among many recommendations was a need for a national letter of intent for each athlete to commit in writing to attend a certain institution as well as the limiting of the number of athletic scholarships for various sports. As significant as was the letter of intent, the committee, led by Drake University’s Frank Gardener, more importantly recommended creating minimum high school academic standards to receive athletic scholarships.2 Would that mean a certain high school grade point average or ranking in classwork to be eligible? Would scholastic tests, such as the SAT or the American College Testing (ACT) test, be part of the equation? Would the number of high school Carnegie units (hours) earned, representing the number of half-year or full-year courses in academic subjects, such as fourteen credits in language arts, math, and sciences, be included? To address these questions, the NCAA organized a round table discussion at its 1959 convention in which the director of admissions at Stanford spoke. Rixford Snyder opposed the double academic standard often found in colleges and universities, one for regular students and one for athletes. To Snyder, this had been made manifest when the Soviet Union sent the earth-orbiting satellite Sputnik into space, just over one year before. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was impacting college athletics. He said, “Sputnik and Atlas [the United States’ 1950s rocket] may turn out to be the two forces which will return intercollegiate athletics to the truly amateur stage.” Further, Snyder told the delegates with urgency, but not accuracy, “The age of rockets and of satellites, will not accept the free ride for an athlete of limited academic potential while the physicist with only moderate physical prowess goes unaided financially.” To better ensure that recruited athletes were prepared for college, Snyder believed that admission criteria should first use the high school grade point average or rank in class to predict success in college. The second most valid criterion, Snyder suggested, was the most used standardized test, the SAT, and “particularly the verbal score in English.” He believed that using the two together, GPA and test scores, would be the best predictor. To this he added fifteen or more Carnegie units in college preparatory subjects for 135

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entrance into college, not just a high school degree.3 Snyder’s advice was to become NCAA policy, but not for years. Within several months, one conference began using the SAT score as a minimal requirement for receiving an athletic scholarship. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), first formed in 1953 because its institutions wanted to preserve freshman ineligibility, legislated another reform measure in the spring of 1960. They set a 750 SAT (out of a possible 1600) score as a minimum for an athlete to receive an athletic scholarship.4 One might now think that because the SAT test has long ago been proven to be culturally biased against minorities and inner-city students, the test might have been used by the southern ACC institutions to keep African American athletes out of their segregated schools. But in 1960 there were no desegregated football programs in the ACC. Desegregation didn’t occur in the ACC until Maryland allowed Darryl Hill on its football team in 1963. The major reason why the ACC legislated the 750 SAT score, according to the director of admissions at Clemson, K. N. Vickery, was to “insure that athletes were representative of the student bodies of their respective schools.”5 One example of an ACC football team’s SAT scores early in the requirement was Georgia Tech. Player scores ranged from 770 to 1213 on the SAT exam, averaging about 1000, with ten of the twenty-nine recruits earning above 500 on the verbal section and eleven earning above 500 on the math section.6 Feeling success in the ACC experiment, within four years the conference raised the minimum SAT score to 800.7 However, the ACC 800 criterion could not withstand the effect of the 1.600 rule.

acc and big Ten academic STandardS lead To The ncaa 1.600 rule By the time the ACC began using the 750 SAT score minimum, the Big Ten tried its own experiment in setting minimal academic standards for receiving an athletic scholarship. The Big Ten did a two-year study, beginning in 1959, to predict academic success based on scholastic tests and high school rankings or grade point averages. By the end of 1961, the conference approved a program using SAT/ACT tests and class rank to predict a minimal college grade point average of 1.7 on a 4.0 grade point scale at the end of the freshman year and a 1.8 at the end of the sophomore year to remain athletically eligible. One example of meeting that standard was achieving a score of 1000 on the SAT test and a 55th percentile ranking in one’s high school class. Combining the two would 136

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yield a predicted 1.7 grade point average in college for the freshman year. With that predicted GPA, Big Ten athletes were then academically eligible for an athletic scholarship in the experimental year of 1962, when full Big Ten athletic scholarships were first given.8 While the ACC and Big Ten were setting academic standards for receiving athletic scholarships, the institutions of the NCAA held a conference of conferences in the summer of 1962, where the need for a national policy was discussed. With a $5,000 NCAA grant, the Academic Testing Committee was formed for a two-year study. Thirteen conferences and ten independent institutions agreed to participate in the study, and sixty-four institutions submitted data to the committee. At another conference of conferences in the summer of 1964, the committee recommended a predicted 1.600 grade point average (a C- average) on a 4.0 scale as the lowest limit to receive an athletic scholarship, below both the ACC and Big Ten standards. In addition, the athlete needed to have at least a C- average at the end of his freshman year to keep his scholarship.9 The GPA requirement for freshmen would lead to institutions encouraging athletes to take a minimum load of easier courses during the freshman year.10 The penalty for violation of the 1.600 GPA was that the team on which he was playing would be ineligible in any NCAA-sponsored or -sanctioned event. The legislation passed overwhelmingly, forty-eight to six, at the conference of conferences and passed at the NCAA annual conference in January 1965 to take effect the next year.11 Walter Byers, the NCAA executive director, tried early on to place the 1.600 rule’s importance in historical context in a Sports Illustrated article: The solid majority of the colleges believe this rule in the long run will do as much as any rule the NCAA has ever passed to improve intercollegiate athletics. . . . It is based on the premise that if a college wishes to compete with its sister institutions for national championship honors, it should be willing to certify what its academic procedures and requirements are, confirm them to the other members and agree upon a minimum level of academic attainment for athletes.12

Still, there were some vocal detractors. Most of the early opposition to the 1.600 legislation came from the more educationally elite colleges and universities including the esteemed Ivy League.13 The old home rule policy argument was used to oppose the 1.600 rule by at least one NCAA delegate outside the Ivy League. Edmund Cameron, the athletic director of Duke University, believed 137

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that NCAA legislation should be done on the local level or in conferences. However, his position was likely taken because he felt that the 1.600 GPA rule hurt students at elite institutions, such as Duke, where grades were more difficult to achieve than at lesser academic universities.14 Cameron agreed with the entire Ivy League, whose leaders protested that the 1.600 rule “ironically, works most severely against students in institutions which have the highest admissions and academic standards.”15 Similar opposition came from smaller and elite eastern colleges such as Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Haverford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Swarthmore, and Tufts.16

race and The 1.600 rule The argument that was eventually used most forcefully against the 1.600 legislation was only an afterthought to the home rule argument that individual institutions, rather than the NCAA, should set academic standards. At the 1966 NCAA conference, there were lengthy discussions about the difficulties in implementing the 1.600 rule, but there was no discussion on the biggest issue it would face, the question of race.17 Nevertheless, soon President Robert Goheen of Princeton argued against the 1.600 rule. He claimed that its eligibility standard hurt “late bloomers” and Blacks, which Goheen called the disadvantaged “lad from the slum school.”18 Race became the clarion call protesting the 1.600 rule. With the importance of SAT scores in predicting a 1.600 grade point average, it became clear that African Americans, on the average, scored far below whites on the test. The president of Clemson, Robert Edwards, received the results of South Carolina SAT scores in 1965: 93 percent of Black students scored below 800, and 82 percent below 700, on the SAT test, while 32 percent of whites scored below 800 and only 14 percent below 700.19 The disparity between white and Black students became the dominant argument for the unfairness of using standardized tests in determining eligibility for athletic scholarships.20 President Edwards also knew that Clemson would have difficulty recruiting Blacks to his university with the ACC’s 800 SAT requirement for entrance. He knew that the National Office for Civil Rights officials wanted to remedy the lack of African Americans at Clemson. Referring to the ACC 800 SAT requirement, Edwards responded, “It will be physically impossible for Clemson University and other ACC member institutions to have the number of black student athletes that we would like to have, or you would expect us to have.”21 Edwards may 138

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not have been nearly as biased racially as a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. In a Science periodical editorial, Lloyd Humphreys claimed that “minorities had an intelligence and readiness to do college work that was one standard deviation below the Caucasian levels.” He wrote, “The deficit is not readily overcome” and will result in “lowering of academic admission standards.”22 The idea that African Americans lacked intellectual capacity had a long history from well before Humphreys was born. Here it continued. There were seven years of rancor over the 1.600 GPA rule before it died a slow death and left the NCAA with essentially no national academic requirements for scholarship athletes. It did not die from home rule advocates, though there was that element, but from the racial and cultural bias of national academic tests such as the SAT. The death came at a time when civil rights strife had peaked, the promoters for enrollments and affirmative action in institutions of higher learning had strengthened, and the anti–Vietnam War movement was at its strongest. The 1.600 rule came to symbolize for college sport the racist nature of America, although discussion of racism and college sport was seldom brought up at NCAA conferences. Mack Green, the athletic director at Central State College of Wilberforce, Ohio, a historically black college, asked the NCAA Executive Committee in the mid-1950s to study racial discrimination in college athletics. Green wanted a statement from the NCAA to encourage members not to practice discrimination. He said it was both “undemocratic and un-American” to evade the issue. Silence. Green’s suggestion went unanswered by NCAA officials.23 By the 1960s, following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision opposing segregation in schools and the Civil Right legislation in the mid-1960s, there was no way to ignore racism in college athletics or anywhere in America. The 1.600 rule came to symbolize the racist nature of college sport and the way institutions of higher learning admitted or rejected college athletes. When the Atlantic Coast Conference first inaugurated standardized SAT minimum scores to determine if an athlete could successfully do college work, there was no thought that the SAT discriminated against African Americans. There were no Black students participating in any segregated white institution in the ACC or any southern state. By the 1960s, desegregation was beginning to change the nature of southern universities. When the NCAA’s 1.600 rule was passed in 1965, the major argument against the use of standardized scores to determine eligibility for athletic scholarships was that African Americans throughout America scored lower on the tests because the scholarly assessments were 139

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culturally biased against them. Black students, especially athletes, were becoming more prominent, especially in northern colleges and universities but also in some southern schools. For example, the year after the 1.600 rule was passed, a southwestern institution, Texas Western in El Paso, won the “March Madness” national championship in basketball with an all-Black starting five in a game against the most prominent basketball team in America, an all-white Kentucky team led by coach Adolph Rupp, often identified as a racist.24 Race was in the air, and it was central to the eventual defeat of the 1.600 rule. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, southern universities were beginning to recruit African Americans and at the same time were attempting to meet the requirements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That act banned segregation in places of public accommodation and outlawed discrimination by employers and labor unions. Under Title VI of the act, discrimination in programs receiving federal aid was specifically banned.25 This caught the attention of universities that received federal grants. It was especially evident when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) began challenging southern schools to desegregate their athletic programs and comply with Title VI. As examples, in 1966, the ACLU noted there were no African Americans among the 113 Louisiana State football players, nor were there any at the University of Georgia.26 If the courts found the 1.600 rule to be discriminatory to African Americans, there would be no effective national policy to prevent athletes with little academic potential from receiving athletic scholarships. With the growing open admissions and affirmative action policies spreading across America around 1970 and the new federal Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) for underprivileged students growing, there was a movement to remove academic barriers to those entering college. Open admissions generally meant anyone could enter college with a high school diploma.27 A national athletic organization raising academic standards while universities were lowering them at the same time was unexpected and unsettling. The NCAA 1.600 rule ran counter to increasing opportunities for minorities, especially Black players. Many of the smaller colleges of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC), a large athletic conference of about two hundred members, as well as the Ivy League, opposed the 1.600 rule because it was substituting national rules in what they perceived as an intrusion into academic policy. While the ECAC members remained in the NCAA, they debated the rule, recognizing that for many eastern colleges open admissions and EOP programs would be damaged if minorities could not participate in athletics after they had been admitted into college.28 Robert Tierney of 140

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Queens College, which had open admissions, told his NCAA colleagues in 1971 that “many colleges today find themselves in a position where this particular rule is not relevant,” and that because of “sociological changes taking place throughout the country, they cannot conform to the 1.600 rule and have open admissions.”29 The next year, the NCAA debated the issue again. This time Edwin Cady, a longtime faculty representative from Indiana University, quoted his Big Ten president: “There is not any possible way in which a man can be ineligible to compete in athletics in Indiana University because he is poor and black and government-aided.”30 There was growing pressure to vote the 1.600 rule out, but because of other NCAA legislation, there was a major concern that an academic standard was needed more than ever. The NCAA had voted in 1968 to allow freshmen to compete in most sports for the first time in about a half century (except in time of war, when there was a lack of men in college attendance). In 1972, the NCAA voted to allow freshmen participation in varsity athletics in the two most popular and money-making sports, football and men’s basketball. The next year the NCAA eroded the value of athletic scholarships by making them one-year grants rather than the promised four-year awards guaranteed in the 1950s.31 If the NCAA did away with the 1.600 rule with no other control for academic qualifications to participate, there might be academic chaos, with schools bringing in academically unprepared athletes solely to perform in the dominating sports and then dismissing athletes if they were no longer useful. John Larson of the University of Southern California was one of the NCAA representatives who saw the academic-athletic anarchy that would likely result. He told the delegates that it was “more urgent than ever that we have some measure of the prospective student-athlete’s ability to succeed at the university level.” Larson and those who favored the academic 1.600 rule were temporarily successful, as the vote to abolish the rule, which had also been defeated the year before, was again defeated, 186–125.32 The opposition to the culturally biased 1.600 rule would not die, especially after two Clemson athletes, a diver on the swimming team and a football player, went to federal court to challenge the ACC’s 800 SAT rule. US District Judge Robert Hemphill ruled that the ACC’s 800 rule was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. He declared that any student in an ACC institution was eligible to participate in athletics no matter what his SAT score was.33 Even though the ACC case did not directly affect the use of SAT scores in the 1.600 rule, the writing was on the wall. The next year, 1973, the question of throwing out the 1.600 rule came up again. NCAA’s faculty representative from 141

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City College of New York, Robert Behrman, summed up the opposition to national rule. For years, Behrman said, the 1.600 rule had been a “source of confusion, embarrassment, frustration and hostility for [an] ever-increasing number of member institutions. . . . It is discriminatory in every sense of the word.” He concluded, “Let’s end the hassling, the embarrassment, the inequities, the unfairness and administrative complexities which relate to the rule.”34 The vote to throw out the 1.600 rule was a close 204–187, despite the plea on the losing side, “We certainly cannot retreat from academic standards in this Association.”35 Yes, the NCAA could—and did. It became clearer than ever that more athletes would be recruited and paid to attend college merely for athletic purposes with no concern for academics at institutions of higher learning.

a decade of academic- aThleTic darkneSS After the 1.600 rule was voted out, the NCAA’s Walter Byers recalled, “Losing the 1.600 rule was one of the most painful experiences in the 22 years I had then served as executive director.” Byers was correct when he wrote his most revealing and critical view of the NCAA, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes. He commented that “the tyranny of the lowest common denominator would control” intercollegiate athletics.36 Shortly after the departure of the 1.600 rule, the delegates voted by an uncounted hand vote that eligibility for athletic scholarships be a 2.0 high school grade point average. More importantly, the grade point average would not necessarily be in academic subjects such as English, history, math, and science.37 In other words, there would essentially be no national control on who could receive an athletic scholarship. It left the determination to be based only on that the individual was a fine athlete, whether or not he could do collegiate academic work. And it was he, for women in 1973 were forbidden to have athletic scholarships by the newly formed Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, women’s athletics not then being under NCAA control.38 Women would soon become part of the athletic scholarship equation, but not at the beginning of 1973. The future, though, for both men’s and women’s payments to attend and participate in college athletics had been shorn of individual academic achievement by the defeat of the 1.600 rule. Academic achievement for those on the sports fields became more chaotic as increased money was funneled into intercollegiate athletics with the growth of gate receipts, football bowls, basketball March Madness, and lucrative television contracts. The drive to recruit the best athletes, with 142

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few academic credentials, intensified while schools paid them to attend college. The fig-leafed male college professionals dominated. Nevertheless, soon truly amateur female athletes would more and more be seen covering up their professionalized “amateurism” with protective cover, as the biblical Eve had done for the sin of eating the forbidden apple. Women’s fig leaves would appear later. For the men, athletics dropped to the lowest abyss of academic authenticity following the demise of the 1.600 rule. The lack of both eligibility standards and a freshman rule contributed to painful eligibility transgressions across the nation. Byers’s “tyranny of the lowest common denominator” would control college athletics.39 In the 1970s and 1980s, some spectacular examples of violations of athleticacademic ethics and any thoughts of amateurism came to the fore. Three examples of what was going on among universities nationally point to the flagrant violation of what institutions of higher learning should be if they were to be considered educational institutions. Each of the three following examples indicates that the NCAA’s decision to do away with any meaningful academic requirements would lead to grist for cynics of Big-Time athletics for years to come. Dexter Manley is a classic example of a fine athlete who should never have been admitted to any college or university because of his lack of academic preparation. Eventually an eleven-year star and an all-pro defensive end with the Washington Redskins of the National Football League, he was recruited by Oklahoma State University in the mid-1970s. Startlingly, he could read at only a second-grade elementary school level and scored so low on his ACT test of English, math, reading, and science that it hardly registered.40 Graduating from high school because he was polite and caused no trouble, he was recruited from his native Houston, Texas, to play football in Oklahoma. “When you’re a good football player,” Manley once said, “you don’t have to do too much of anything for yourself.”41 He went to class regularly at Oklahoma State, was given advising and tutoring help by the athletic department, and completed his athletic eligibility with soft courses though no degree. Being unable to read effectively, Manley later confessed he often carried a Wall Street Journal, pretending to read it while seated in the Oklahoma State locker room. Only through his revelations to the nation while testifying at the 1989 US Senate hearing on “eliminating illiteracy” in America did he tell his story. He told the senators that he learned to read and spell after age twenty-five by attending the Washington, DC, Lab School with tutoring help. He soon raised his reading score from second-grade level to high school level.42 After drug addiction, prison time, and a failed marriage, 143

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Manley eventually turned his life around with a full-time position as a marketing director of a construction firm near the US Capitol. The Kevin Ross case at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, was similar to that of Manley. Ross, like Manley, was functionally illiterate when in 1978 he entered Creighton to play basketball. On the ACT test, in which the average score was about twenty on a scale of thirty-six, Ross scored nine points. The Creighton student body averaged twentythree. He took courses such as the theory of basketball and marksmanship at Creighton. The athletic department hired a secretary to do his homework, and he received help from some kind professors who asked that Ross merely fill in his name on tests that were already completed. The star high school basketball player was able to remain eligible to participate athletically. The Ross case was similar to what happened at the University of North Carolina, on a much larger scale of academic fraud, a couple of decades later. Upon completing his eligibility, with no degree, Creighton paid Ross to enter the Chicago Westside Preparatory School to learn to read. Sitting with second and third graders, he eventually jumped eleven grade levels in reading in about a year. Photos of Kevin Ross sitting with grade school children were published in the national press. Eventually, a Ross lawsuit for academic negligence and breach of contract against Creighton was settled out of court for $30,000.43 Ross told a National Urban League workshop, “I was illiterate, I couldn’t read, write, add, or subtract. How could I seriously think about getting a college degree?”44 The Ross case was held up as a red flag for years for the failure of institutions of higher education and the NCAA to have any meaningful academic requirements for an athletic scholarship. As for Kevin Ross, a couple of decades later the man the NCAA and Creighton had exploited was a night custodian at Coronado Middle School in Kansas City, wishing that he had a degree to teach children to read and write.45 Like Kevin Ross, Chris Washburn was a talented high school basketball player, and he was representative of the unsavory recruiting practices and insufficiencies of admissions of college athletes. This time it was an Atlantic Coast Conference institution that had had, a few years before, the toughest academic requirements to receive an athletic scholarship. Now, with no meaningful NCAA academic requirements, North Carolina State University under coach Jimmy Valvano could invite Chris Washburn to pursue his basketball trade without the need for achieving academically. Ironically, as Washburn was entering his high school freshman class, he received a letter from Dean Smith, the University of

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North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s outstanding coach, indicating that the Tar Heels were interested in him and his clear athletic abilities. At that time, the esteemed coach did not know that Washburn would score an abysmal 470 on his SAT exam, 200 (equating to zero) on his verbal and only 270 on the math. By his sophomore year, NC State’s Valvano aggressively recruited the star basketball player and wrote to him, “Chris . . . if you come to State you will be an All-American and a first-round choice” in the National Basketball Association. The six-foot, eleven-inch, 250pound center received from Valvano another 277 letters, postcards, and mailgrams, including 77 to Washburn’s mother, and the North Carolina State coach won the recruiting contest.46 North Carolina State University may not have been much worse than other Big-Time institutions of higher education the United States, with administrators who bent their own university rules in admitting those who never should have been in college. NC State provost Nash Winstead stretched the truth (or committed an outright lie) when he admitted, “We might occasionally take a risk on a blue-chip athlete” like Washburn. Nationally, administrators did it all the time in what have often been called “presidential admits.” Prior to arriving at NC State, Washburn had attended high school in Hickory, North Carolina, for two years earning mostly Ds and Fs. He then spent his junior and senior years at Fork Union (VA) Military Academy earning Cs, Ds, and Fs. The nongraduate then transferred to Laurinburg Institute, an African American prep school in North Carolina, which gave him high enough grades to reach the 2.0 grade point average needed for college athletics.47 Allowing academically inept athletes into North Carolina State was almost a given when it was shown that the coaches acted as “a separate admissions committee” and were “admitting some athletes even before they took their SATs.”48 Washburn was kept alive academically by admiring professors and changing of grades—if the charge by the head of the physical education department that grades had been changed so that Washburn could remain eligible was true. He remained eligible several years before the National Basketball Association drafted him. By then, muckraking journalist Pete Golenbock had published his Personal Fouls. It helped to lead to the resignation of Coach Valvano and then-chancellor Bruce Poulton, who had been charged with a cover-up of the grade changes.49 In the 1980s, with no 1.600 rule and essentially no academic requirements, Golenbock could hardly overstate the situation when he charged that Big-Time athletes often ended up with “no education, no degree, no skills, no money, no pro career, and no hope.”50 In Washburn’s case, it

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was only no education—he had no degree, but the several million dollars he earned from his short basketball career was soon expended in drug addiction before he was rehabilitated.51 The cases of Dexter Manley, Kevin Ross, and Chris Washburn are only a few of the hundreds of cases in which athletes lacking academic credentials ventured on to play their sports following the demise of the minimal 1.600 rule. The miserable era would eventually have an impact on the next attempt to bring minimum academic credentials to college athletes. Nevertheless, the NCAA would continue allowing the payment of athletes to attend college and calling its athletes “student-athletes.” Why? The leaders of the NCAA felt they must call them students as well as amateur athletes to protect the institutions of higher education from government legislation and taxes. To understand the NCAA’s fixation on amateurism and the national organization’s demand that athletes be called student-athletes, one must, strangely, understand workers’ compensation and the federal government’s history of tax policies.

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ch a PTer TwelVe

Taxation, Workers’ Compensation, and the “Student-Athlete” We crafted the term student-athlete . . . as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes. walTer byerS, ca. 1955

The federal tax code has indeed replaced amateurism as the rationale for the current rule book. walTer byerS, 1995

A

T The Time when The iVy league waS moVing in the direction of amateurism by not paying its athletes, the rest of the Big-Time universities began compensating athletes through full athletic scholarships. The NCAA began using a well-planned and useful euphemism, student-athlete. It was a financial and political decision, not an educational one, in the mid-twentieth century. Euphemisms such as student-athlete are important to many institutions and individuals as they try to put a positive face on something that may be perceived negatively by others: for example, pass away for die, pre-owned for used, enhanced interrogation for torture, downsizing for firing, and sanitation engineer for garbage man are all used in everyday life. The NCAA got in the euphemistic habit early by using the positive term home rule for forbidding national legislation. However, nothing was more important legally and financially to the NCAA and individual institutions participating in athletics than the use of the term student-athlete. Some writers, like this one, will never use the term student-athlete unless they are quoting, because the term relating to college athletics is misleading and insincere on a couple of levels. First, the term was 147

not created to honor athletes interested in education. Second, one has almost never referred to a student-cheerleader, student-musician, student-thespian, student-artist, or even student-chemist. Why, then, student-athlete? One can read the NCAA convention proceedings from 1906 to the mid-1950s and likely not encounter the term student-athlete.1 The synthetic, but useful, term came about shortly after World War II following the hiring of NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers, who held the office from 1951 to 1987. It was a term attempting to tie athletics to education for legal and financial reasons. The term was required in all NCAA literature from 1956 on and became used more commonly than passed on is chosen for died.

TaxaTion and college aThleTicS The use of student-athlete was tied to US taxing policy and was financially significant. College sports as extracurricular events historically have had great difficulties staying within budgets, often losing money until someone or some institution came to the rescue. In the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, college athletics were most often saved financially by interested alumni.2 In the Great Depression, athletics and institutions themselves were often on the edge of bankruptcy. But so was the national government after the stock market crashed in 1929, helping to pull America into financial straits never experienced. The federal government looked to various methods to raise money, one being to tax institutions that had not previously been taxed. Why not tax educational institutions and their most visible source of entertainment and paying customers—athletics, specifically football gate receipts? Taxation of college sports began under the administration of Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Great Depression hit. This was the first foray by the federal government into taxing intercollegiate athletics in such areas as gate receipts, athletic scholarships, and later radio and TV income. By 1932, the nation was mired in the depths of the Depression, and the government was in great need of money to attempt to balance the national budget. The college football admissions excise tax of 1932 came along with the highest increase ever in personal income taxes in nonwar years. Excise taxes may be levied on a variety of activities, including college athletic gate receipts. Thus, for individual states financially supporting colleges and universities, the federal government was taxing those nonprofit state entities and their only significant profit-making area, football. Major Philip Fleming, a leader of eastern football from the 148

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US Military Academy, opposed the tax. “Football is the only game in college programs from which any substantial revenue is derived,” Fleming emphasized, “and with which the institutions may hope to balance their athletic budgets.”3 It was questionable whether the federal government could tax a state and its public educational institutions, or, were that possible, whether the federal government could force the state to collect taxes for the federal government. The legality of the gate receipt tax was challenged. The first important case was that of the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, which argued that the federal tax on football gate receipts was illegal when applied to governmental activities of the state of Georgia. Why? Because, Georgia argued, intercollegiate athletic contests were an “integral part of an educational program,” and college athletes were related to education in that they were involved in the “development of one’s physical faculties.”4 On the other hand, among other arguments, the federal government claimed that football “was a business and the men were hired specifically to play football.”5 Or in a more humorous vein, a member of the US Attorney General’s office stated, “We hazard the statement that the members of the [original US] Constitutional Convention would doubt that twenty-two men playing a game with a ball constitute an essential government [university] function.”6 In a lengthy litigation, Georgia lost the case at the local level, but won in the circuit court of appeals, then lost again in US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s split decision (6–2) agreed with both then President Franklin Roosevelt and the US Congress, which had declared, “No suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court.”7 All three divisions of government— legislative, executive, and judicial—were in favor of the tax. In this case it was a 10 percent excise tax (later raised to 20 percent) on football game admissions. Two institutional members of the NCAA, the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, had lost an important argument for athletics nationally, for the federal courts would determine what would “be considered as genuinely educational in a program of State education.”8 Football was not considered to be educational, though in his dissent from the majority, Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler claimed, “The holding of the athletic contests in question is an integral part of that program [of public education] and does not cease to be such because it produces income.”9 Individual institutions, the NCAA, and states would have to await federal legislation to determine if intercollegiate athletics were deemed educational and therefore exempt from federal taxes. 149

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The subject of athletics being considered educational would be contentious for the rest of the century and into the next. Federal arguments about the nature of “amateur” and “educational” sport in universities came early, as was seen in the Georgia gate receipt tax case. Legal decisions about the “professional” nature of college athletics would continue, particularly in football. In the years ahead, major tax questions were raised about radio broadcasts, telecasting of football games, payment of workers’ compensation for athletic injuries, control of coaching salaries, and payment of athletic scholarships. It would appear it was valuable to the NCAA and college athletics to have athletes called student-athletes. The intercollegiate gate receipts tax would remain after the high school tax on athletics was removed with the Revenue Act of 1951. That act clearly mandated the removal of all taxes on “religious, charitable, and educational organizations,” but the tax remained on college sport admissions.10 Two years later, near the close of the Korean War, nine out of ten athletic programs were losing money, and the NCAA sought relief from the federal government on the excise tax on college gate receipts. The NCAA had formed a special committee in the summer of 1953 to secure relief from the so-called Federal Admissions Tax. The NCAA special committee may have been influential in the passage of the bill, at least according to Tulane’s athletic director and chairman of the special committee, Dick Brumbach. “The power of our organization in all of the states,” Brumbach stated, “really influenced the key men in the Senate” to pass the bill.11 Colleges and universities, after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill, were exempt from the admissions tax. It is not known why, prior to Eisenhower signing a bill, high school athletics were considered educational and athletics in higher education were not. It may have been that so little tax money was received from the lower schools, or the commercialized/professionalized college athletic programs may have convinced Congress that athletics had little to do with education. For the next few generations, there was an opaqueness as to whether collegiate athletics would be considered educational. The NCAA soon decided to call athletes “student-athletes” and tie them to education.

radio and The queSTion of federal TaxaTion The next federal action on whether or not college athletics were amateur and educational came with the rapid growth of radio broadcasting football games in the 1930s. This followed radio’s advance in the 1920s with the broadcasts of professional baseball and boxing and the important 150

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college football games, such as the Rose Bowl and mid-decade intersectional games. The colleges themselves made a commercial decision in the 1930s that college football was noneducational and that football games should not be broadcast principally by educational radio stations. By the early 1920s there were over seventy licensed stations out of five hundred that were owned and operated by institutions of higher education.12 If, as athletic officials and university administrators often claimed, college athletics were an integral part of higher education, then the universities might well have broadcast their games on educational stations. The promotion and publicity capitalizing on the wide interest in football would have directly come from those institutions’ educational radio stations and not from commercial radio. It would have helped to reinforce the idea for the Internal Revenue Service and the courts that athletics were part of higher education, not separate from it. Collegiate radio policy did not help NCAA members to show the educational nature of competitive sports. Educational leaders initially distanced themselves from the broadcasting of athletics because athletics did not meet their educational objectives, while educational radio broadcasts of weather forecasting for farmers, homemaking shows, or chapter-a-day book reading did. Commercial radio soon filled the vacuum, not for the purposes of education but for money. A member of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927 commented, “Commercialism is the heart of broadcasting in the United States. What,” he asked, “has education contributed to broadcasting in the United States?” Harold Lafount, a Utah manufacturer, continued: “What has education contributed to radio? Not one thing. What has commercialism contributed? Everything.”13 No wonder that government officials with taxing responsibilities would think that university revenues resulting from commercial radio broadcasts should be taxed as gate admissions were taxed in the 1930s. However, radio from early on was producing little of commercial worth to either broadcasters or to the athletic coffers. The reason came from the policy of athletic departments to allow radio broadcasters to produce the games for free on what were termed sustaining broadcasts. That is, the commercial radio stations put the games on the air at no charge to the colleges and agreed not to advertise products on their broadcasts. This differed from what was becoming more common, sponsored broadcasts. The “sponsored” radio broadcasters would pay the college for the rights to broadcast, and the radio stations or networks would collect money from the sponsoring advertisers, further commercializing college sport.14 As the Depression of the 1930s deepened and gate receipts decreased, income from untaxed radio broadcasts on a “sponsored” basis became more 151

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popular. In the Big Ten, Michigan was the first university to sell its football radio rights for a significant sum, $20,000, in 1934. The sponsor money came from Chevrolet.15 Radio listeners of University of Iowa football heard young Ronald Reagan announce the games while the Maytag Washing Machine Company supplied the commercial backing.16 In the Ivy League, Yale was the first to effectively go the sponsored route when in 1936 it signed a $20,000 deal coming from an oil advertiser, the Atlantic Refining Company.17 One of the university administrators who opposed sponsored contests was the president of Princeton, Harold Dodds. “I view the sale of radio broadcasts,” Dodds stated, “as further surrender to the commercial atmosphere” of college football.18 Both President Dodds and Harvard’s president, James Conant, eventually lost the battle over money from commercially sponsored broadcasts. They eventually took the money. Ironically, at about the same time, President Dodds was invited to an exhibition of a new form of communication, television, which would be a dominant factor in further commercializing intercollegiate athletics. Dodds replied to the invitation, “I am looking forward to the television demonstration.”19 The new medium would dramatically increase the commercial and professional impact on college sport within a decade, eventually bringing in revenue to institutions to further commercialize and professionalize amateur sport. While radio would never become a financial force to prompt the US Congress or the Internal Revenue Service to force taxes on collegiate athletics, the commercial aspect of television would be a motivating force to inquire whether college football and men’s basketball were truly educational and thus immune from federal taxation. Nevertheless, radio was a taxing concern even before the University of Georgia Supreme Court case. Administrators at a private institution in the Big Ten, Northwestern, were worried that a Big Ten Conference radio broadcasting policy might be impacted by the federal tax authorities.20 If gate receipts were taxable, did that place radio broadcast revenues, and eventually television revenues, in the same category? Radio, though, did not become an important factor, and prior to TV’s influence on professionalizing college “amateur” sport, the federal government passed important tax legislation impacting the direction taken by college athletics.

The unrelaTed buSineSS income Tax and The 1950S 501(c)(3) Two federal legislative acts of the 1950s, the Unrelated Business Income Tax and the nonprofit 501(c)(3) ruling, impacted strongly on 152

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actions taken by NCAA administrators and college athletic officials. The two caused NCAA administrators to attempt to tie athletes more strongly to the academic nature of institutions of higher education by using the amateur term student-athlete. First, the US Congress created the Unrelated Business Income Tax rooted in the Revenue Act of 1950. The Unrelated Business Income Tax was aimed at tax-free units, such as religious organizations and colleges and universities. The idea was to thwart unfair competition, preventing tax-exempt organizations from competing unfairly with commercial businesses whose earnings were being taxed. For instance, it did not seem fair that New York University Law School in the late 1940s could purchase the largest pasta manufacturing concern in the United States, C. F. Mueller Company, to support NYU financially and not pay taxes, while business competitors were required to do so. NYU’s Law School acquired the Mueller “noodle” factory in 1947, prior to the 1950 act. The purchase poured tax-free money into the university until challenged by the Internal Revenue Service under the Unrelated Business Income Tax law. NYU lost initially, but the New York court of appeals reversed the decision because NYU, exempt under the 1947 law, stated that Congress had not changed the tax-exempt law in 1947. This case and other unfair competition deals like it caused Congress to pass the 1950 Unrelated Business Income Tax, which eventually led to the IRS disallowing the NYU tax deductions.21 This case has often been cited in the literature, probably because production of noodles emphasized the noneducational aspect of the NYU Law School. Yet, its significance to college athletics had to do with the question whether college athletics, like noodle factories, were a significant aspect of higher education. If not, they could be taxed. However, congress in the Revenue Act of 1950 attempted to make it clear that “athletic activities of schools are substantially related to their educational functions,” while noodle factories were not.22 A university athletic program might not own noodle factories to support its athletic program, but would a multimillion-dollar football bowl game or advertising in the NCAA basketball tournament program be tax deductible? Court cases would eventually decide that these athletic commercial activities were part of the educational function of institutions of higher education.23 Were other areas of college athletics taxable? If, for instance, an athlete signed a letter of intent to attend a university to participate in athletics, was the athletic scholarship a no-strings-attached educational grant, or was it a quid pro quo taxable arrangement? In other words, was the “amateur” athlete being paid to be an athlete for the benefit of the university (a quid pro quo) or to get an education? In 1969, the Bingler v. 153

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Johnson court case determined whether athletes qualified for nontaxable athletic scholarships. In that case, to qualify for nontaxable scholarships, the awards were required to be in the nature of “relatively disinterested, ‘no strings’ educational grants, with no requirement of any substantial quid pro quo from the recipients.”24 This was one reason why the NCAA would no longer use the term athletic scholarship; rather, it would use the term grant-in-aid. It sounded more educational, less prone to governmental or court action. Since then, athletic scholarship recipients have wallowed in the murky waters of athletes getting paid for their “amateur” sport participation while principally being students. The murky waters remained murky. The Unrelated Business Income Tax has been interpreted liberally in favor of college athletics by decisions of the Internal Revenue Service and by members of Congress. A legal tax authority who did not favor college athletics being exempted from the Unrelated Business Income Tax, John Colombo, admitted the same. “The IRS,” Colombo has asserted, “has consistently ruled over many decades that college athletics are, in fact, functionally related to educational programs of universities.” He, though, claimed that profit-making football and men’s basketball “programs are not functionally related to the educational mission of universities or the promotion of amateur athletics by the NCAA.”25 Athletes generally believe that their athletic scholarships are granted primarily for participation in athletics and secondly to pay for the education they may receive. Athletic scholarships are the antithesis of amateurism, except for the fact that the NCAA constitution says that payment for athletic participation and an education is an amateur act. Since 1954, charitable organizations have been legislatively tax free as 501(c)(3) creations; this includes institutions of higher learning. Educational institutions, nevertheless, have been exempted from taxes since 1894 when the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act’s first-ever federal income tax exemption included the phrase educational purposes. Since then, numerous tax reform acts have included the same educational purposes language. The Internal Revenue Code of 1954 included the important section 117, which stated that scholarships in educational institutions for degree candidates were “not regarded as part-time employment” and thus tax free.26 Institutions of the NCAA wanted to make sure that athletic scholarships were truly scholarships, not athletic awards to just participate in athletics. Up to this time, and even later, universities had been concerned that athletic scholarships would be taxed by the federal government. A couple years before, the Southeastern Conference presidents were apprehensive that the “IRS may tax athletic scholarships” and that athletics did 154

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not contribute to university educational objectives.27 At the University of Maryland, the Board of Regents justified the educational nature of athletics to Governor McKeldin by stating, with questionable genuineness, that “Maryland gives no scholarship to any athlete who does not qualify in every respect under the same standards that are required of non-athletes.”28 Other institutions were similarly concerned about taxes on athletic scholarships. Nevertheless, there was another, more important concern of a taxing nature and how athletic scholarships might be defined.

workerS’ comPenSaTion and aThleTic ScholarShiPS A major question arose in the 1950s: Were injured players medically covered under workers’ compensation rules, and if they were, were they considered employees of the university?29 This began a series of legal cases related to workers’ compensation for injuries or deaths in several states, all of which then had slightly different laws for determining workers’ compensation.30 An injury to a University of Denver football player during spring practice in April 1950 raised large financial concerns for the nation’s athletic departments, employment fears, and anxieties about the nature of amateur college athletics. The University of Denver’s Ernest Nemeth case and other injury-death litigations put institutions and the NCAA on high alert to the perception that scholarship athletes were something other than students in higher education; they might be employees of their universities. At the time of his injury, Nemeth was receiving fifty dollars a month for working in a tennis facility on campus as part of his athletic scholarship. He also worked for housing, caring for the furnace and cleaning the sidewalk. Following his injury, for financial reasons under workers’ compensation, Nemeth claimed that he was employed to play football at the University of Denver. The University challenged Nemeth’s claim. When taken to the Industrial Commission of Colorado, the commission found that Nemeth’s injuries “arose out of and in the course of employment.” Nemeth was granted employee status and a financial award. The ruling was then challenged in the district court, where it was overturned, but the Industrial Commission’s findings were then sustained by the Colorado Supreme Court in 1953. The Nemeth case alarmed NCAA officials who were concerned about athletes being considered workers and the negative effect on the status of amateur sports. The NCAA was also 155

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looking out for the financial impact on colleges for the cost of workers’ compensation insurance policies. The Nemeth case was important, but a second lawsuit may have been more important in prompting NCAA leaders, specifically Executive Director Walter Byers, to influence future legal action two years later. Ray Dennison, a twenty-six-year-old playing football for Fort Lewis A&M in Colorado against Trinidad Junior College, died of a tacklecaused head injury on September 24, 1955.31 The date appears to be significant, as the NCAA soon made constitutional changes to combat future legal actions in which athletes would be considered institutional workers. The NCAA changed the constitutional wording of “athlete” to “student-athlete.” Dennison’s death prompted the second college athlete workers’ compensation case when his wife, with three children, sought death benefits before the Colorado Industrial Commission. Like the Nemeth case, the commission approved the claim, and it was upheld in the district court. The case, nevertheless, reached the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled that “the evidence does not disclose any contractual obligation to play football” by Dennison. This was despite Dennison’s coach having asked him to come out for the team and to give up his filling station job to “play football with benefits.” Those financial benefits came from managing the student lounge and working on the college farm (receiving seventy cents per hour) so that he could obtain free tuition while receiving one free meal each day during the season. The court pronounced, “We cannot believe that the legislature, in creating the compensation fund, intended that it be in the nature of a pension fund for all student athletes attending our state educational institutions.”32 Three months after Dennison’s death, and two years before the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Dennison was not a worker for his institution, all NCAA documents and officers were using the euphemism student-athlete at the January 1956 NCAA convention. Athletes at NCAA institutions were no longer called athletes or players. Executive Director Walter Byers, quite clearly the individual behind the euphemism studentathlete, saw the danger to the concept of amateurism if athletes were considered paid employees. Byers was alarmed that athletes separated legally from education not only would lead to the federal government further taxing aspects of intercollegiate athletics, but would be costly to institutions contributing to workers’ compensation insurance. Later in Byers’s poignant 1995 exposé of the NCAA after more than three decades as its executive director, he recognized the importance of the Nemeth and Dennison cases in manufacturing the term student-athlete. “We crafted

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the term student-athlete,” Byers claimed, “. . . as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes.”33 Following the Nemeth decision deeming Nemeth a worker and prior to the Colorado overturn of Dennison as a worker, the NCAA was about to vote to allow the payment of full athletic scholarships at the annual convention in 1956. It looked as if workers’ compensation would likely be legalized for injured athletes as workers or to deceased athlete’s families. To help combat this possibility, Byers changed the NCAA constitution, without going through the proper protocol for amending it, to include the term student-athlete sixteen times in the first four pages of the ten-page constitution.34 Student-athlete previously had never been used in the constitution. This was the beginning of the NCAA’s campaign for everyone to use the term in place of athlete. Byers’s campaign to use student-athlete was nearly a complete success well into the twenty-first century. Even Judge Claudia Wilken, in the first and most dominant case for eliminating restrictions on athletes’ scholarships, the Edward O’Bannon case in 2014, used the term 253 times in her 99-page ruling, and it was used 115 times in the O’Bannon appeal case.35 The euphemism is used universally when American college athletes are discussed, but it is seldom related to its source, workers’ compensation and taxes on college athletics. Student-athlete is used to convince the public, legislators, and courts that athletics and athletes are intimately connected to the educational institution and amateurism. In the years after the Nemeth and Dennison workers’ compensation cases were settled, others arose with the possibility that they might have been decided with athletes receiving workers’ compensation. An important case opposing workers’ compensation was that of Edward Van Horn, who was killed in an airplane crash returning from a California State Poly football game in Ohio in October 1960.36 Death benefits to his widow were denied when the court reasoned, “The scholarship, when awarded, was for an entire year and was not dependent upon participating in sports.”37 However, before the case was settled, NCAA leaders were convinced that to avoid athletes coming under future workers’ compensation, colleges needed to ensure that “no employment relationship was created between the institution and the student-athlete involving a duty to participate in athletics.” The oral and written commitments, according to Walter Byers, “were perilously close to employment contracts.” The result was for colleges to use the following statement: “The award is made in accordance with the provisions of the constitution of the [NCAA] pertaining to the principles of amateurism, sound academic

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standards, and financial aid to student athletes.”38 Workers’ compensation was continuing to force the NCAA to try to reconcile the disparity between athletes as workers being paid to participate on the one hand, and athletes going to a university for an education on the other. The figleafing of the professional element for the benefit of “amateurism” continued in the term student-athlete. The quarter-century-long Alvis Kent Waldrep Jr. case from the 1970s added to the amateur-professional conflict. Waldrep, who had signed a letter of intent and received an athletic scholarship from Texas Christian University, was playing football there when he sustained a spinal cord injury in October 1974. He was paralyzed below the neck.39 Waldrep did not take his injury to claim workers’ compensation until 1991. The Texas Workers Compensation Commission then awarded him compensation that was challenged by the Texas Employers Insurance Association. The TEIA claimed the NCAA was an amateur organization and that athletics were integral to educational institutions. The sole question submitted to the jury asked, “At the time of his injury, was Alvis Kent Waldrep, Jr. an employee of Texas Christian University?” Waldrep had signed the official letter of intent contract to attend Texas Christian and a financial aid agreement. However, what the 1972 NCAA constitution dictated was the fundamental national policy by which the Waldrep jury abided. It was decided in 2000 “to maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body, and by so doing, retain a clear line of demarcation between college athletics and professional sport.”40 The Waldrep case made clear that the NCAA’s efforts from the 1950s to 2000 had been quite successful in claiming intercollegiate athletics to be amateur under the NCAA’s changing definitions. Importantly, the NCAA amended its rules “to put student first ahead of athlete and to emphasize that although they are getting a grant-in-aid, they have to be a student first and an athlete second.” Walter Byers, who was deposed in the 2000 Waldrep case, was asked if the term studentathlete was invented to stop workers’ compensation. Byers did not answer that question but admitted it allowed colleges to better “deal with” such claims.41 The Nemeth case aside, lawsuits afterward found that the athletes were not workers, rather students living under NCAA amateur rules. The Fred Rensing case was at first a problem for the NCAA because of mixed rulings. Playing football at Indiana State University, Rensing was rendered a quadriplegic from a football injury during spring practice in 1974. His workers’ compensation claim was rejected by the Indiana 158

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Industrial Board in 1979, but when Rensing appealed to the Indiana Court of Appeals, he claimed successfully that he was entitled to workers’ compensation benefits.42 It then went to the Indiana Supreme Court, where the court of appeals decision was overruled. “Student-athletes,” the Supreme Court stated, “are integral parts of the institution’s student body. The athlete receiving financial aid is still first and foremost a student.” The Indiana Supreme Court used NCAA policy to confirm “that intercollegiate sports are viewed as part of the educational system and are clearly distinguished from the professional sports business.” The Rensing lawsuit reinforced the concept that neither should college athletes’ payment be taxed nor should the scholarship contracts they signed be considered work agreements.43 By the twenty-first century, the issues of workers’ compensation, taxing of college athletics, and payment of athletes through scholarships had been reasonably well established in the courts. Nevertheless, the fear that the federal legislature might once again tax college athletics was never completely forgotten, as was noted in the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in the early twenty-first century. In its report in 2001, the Knight Foundation warned of the possibility of federal legislation attacking “college sports’ tax exempt status.”44 Indeed, future legislation or lawsuits to allow athletes to be paid more than their full scholarships, which could be worth up to a quarter of a million dollars or more for specific athletes, would place the state of amateur athletics, scholarships, and taxation in jeopardy.45 However, before those questions of the second and third decades of the twenty-first century would be debated by legislators and tested in the courts, the subject of Title IX in the 1970s and a dominating legal athletic scholarship case would determine how women athletes would be paid in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

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ch a PTer Th irTeen

Women’s Athletics, Title IX, and the Kellmeyer Lawsuit The AIAW is a governance organization, but it is also an idea. chriSTine granT, 1981

In American college athletics the AIAW represented not the future, but the past. Joan chandler, 1985

F

or nearly The firST cenTury of college women’s sport, there were no major concerns, if there were concerns at all, about maintaining amateurism, recruiting women athletes, granting athletic scholarships, taxing gate receipts, or applying for what was then called “workmen’s compensation.” Women in college sport were mostly cloistered in the mediocre gymnasiums and sport fields, often hand-me-downs from men’s facilities that existed for women in coeducational institutions.1 Unlike in men’s sport, there was no breaking of athletic relations in the 1880s as occurred over the payment of athletes by Harvard and Princeton. There were no professional trainers for the athletes, training tables for better food, or elaborate athletic dorms for housing women participating in college sports. There was no pay-forplay for women swimmers, tennis players, or golfers, and certainly no paid summer baseball or softball for women. There were no massive arenas built to house the most popular sport for women, basketball. There was no demand for a 1920s Carnegie Report condemning the professionalism and commercialism of sport for college women, for there was none. There was no need to fig-leaf “Eve’s professionalism,” as she played

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less-competitive games on college campuses, nor was there any commercialism. Much of this changed, and rather rapidly, after World War II and the postwar women’s movement.

college women and The hiSToric lack of comPeTiTion When Betty Friedan completed her influential feminist book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, organized athletics for women in most colleges did not exist. For instance, none existed at the University of Georgia, while the same institution was giving out 116 football and 22 men’s basketball scholarships.2 To compare women’s sport at many institutions of higher learning to those of men was like comparing "apples to oranges.” The Feminine Mystique, aimed principally at middle-class white women, was the antithesis of the attitude held by women returning from working in factories during World War II to be traditional homemakers and raise children. Friedan was a 1942 graduate of the all-women Smith College, the same institution that a half century before had supported the tradition of women participating in some sports but being disallowed to compete intensely. The physical education program was then led by Senda Berenson, the first physical educator at Smith College and the first to introduce basketball to women only months after its invention in 1891.3 Berenson changed the rules of basketball to make it more ladylike and preventing roughness. Berenson gave voice for many women at the turn of the nineteenth century when she wrote, “The great desire to win and the excitement of the game will make our women do sadly, unwomanly things.”4 This attitude against “unwomanly things” was carried on by women physical educators for the next half century. A comment was made in the 1920s that the “large majority” of women physical educators had been opposed to intercollegiate athletics “for years and are still opposed to it.”5 This attitude continued until after World War II, in the time of Betty Friedan, when the most popular type of school and college sport activity for girls and women was the “play day.”6 The play day consisted of gathering high school or college women together from a number of schools and dividing up the players who had never previously competed together in a variety of sports, from basketball and volleyball to tennis and swimming. With the prevalence of the play day idea, it is easy to see why intercollegiate sports were held back for generations of college women. Though there

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were highly competitive women’s athletics at some traditionally Black colleges from the 1920s until the 1960s, when Friedan wrote her bestselling book, competitive athletics for women elsewhere were rare indeed.7 Friedan was not addressing women of color, such as Wilma Rudolph, who attained three 1960 Olympic gold medals in track sprinting after obtaining “work-aid” from coach Ed Temple at Tennessee State University.8 The lack of attention to skilled women athletes was changing at a snail’s pace before the 1950s–1960s women’s movement. Nonetheless, there were some more progressive women physical education leaders who challenged the status quo and began to advocate for something more than the traditional play days, sports days, and intramural sports for women.9 Significantly, several women physical educators from Ohio State University, just before America’s involvement in World War II, decided to challenge their conservative peers and set up the first women’s national championship in collegiate history.10 The golf championship was conducted despite strong opposition by the National Association of Directors of Physical Education for College Women. The NADPECW’s resolution to “not approve national tournaments of any sort” and the women’s opposition to “any organization to increase competition” did not stop the Ohio State women physical educators.11 These same Ohio State women, however, were driven out of any future official capacity in their professional organizations by the NADPECW. The 1941 Ohio State tournament took place with a professional golfer from the University of Minnesota, Patty Berg, as the golfing official and its banquet speaker. Gladys Palmer, who organized the meet, wanted to emphasize “excellence of play” while showing no distinction between amateur and professional.12 (The NCAA would have applauded “excellence” but protested the “amateur-professional” comment.) The golf championship was in no way commercial. There were no travel expenses paid for the golfers, no radio broadcasts from the Columbus site, and no congressional hearings on whether future tournaments could become so commercialized that tax revenues might be sought. The first golf tournament with thirty participants made a profit of fourteen dollars.13 With one national championship event as a start, a few institutions, especially in the East, began playing a low budget and low level of intercollegiate competition. At the close of World War II, a survey showed that about a third of colleges in the East reported some intercollegiate competition.14 However, there was no recruiting, no athletic scholarships, and no hiring of professional coaches as the men had been doing since the nineteenth century. Surveys of women’s college sports in the 1940s 162

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and ’50s showed that play days, made up of teams formed randomly from all the schools participating, were the most popular form of competition.15 Few women followed in the athletic footsteps of Mildred “Babe” Didrikson two decades before. Didrikson is probably the greatest American woman athlete in a variety of sports, but she and other women, mostly noncollegians, who participated in competitive sport were highly criticized by college women physical educators in the 1930s and later. The slim but powerful five-foot-six athlete never went to college but was recruited athletically by the University of Southern California. Didrikson had helped the Dallas Employers’ Casualty Company win a national AAU championship in basketball, and she won track meets. She set AAU and international track and field records in the eighty meter hurdles (12.3 seconds), broad jump (17′ 11 1/2″), javelin (139′ 3″), shot put (39′ 6 1/4″) and baseball throw (296′). The baseball throw was truly amazing.16 Why Didrikson was offered an athletic scholarship at the University of Southern California is not clear. The offer may have been made for USC publicity purposes, as intercollegiate athletics had no national championships for women in the 1930s and only one championship (golf) until the late 1960s. Since she starred in the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, she was a celebrity in the city as well as the nation.17 What is known is that Avery Brundage, then president of the Amateur Athletic Union, objected to USC offering a scholarship to the “amateur” Didrikson. When the NCAA vice-president, Charles Kennedy of Princeton, responded to the Brundage letter, he wrote, “I am not in a position, of course, to pass judgment on the Didrikson case.” He stated that the traditional home rule of the NCAA left the question of scholarships and eligibility up to individual institutions and conferences.18 An athletic scholarship for a woman was nearly unheard of. A major exception was Wayland Baptist College in the 1950s. The small college with possibly five hundred undergraduates located in the panhandle of northern Texas, and its new energetic president, James W. “Bill” Marshall, decided to promote the institution. Whether or not it promoted his institution, Marshall was instrumental in desegregating Wayland Baptist. He led the first liberal arts school of the old Confederate South to desegregate three years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court vote in opposition to “separate but equal” school racial policies. He was also open-minded relative to women and women’s athletics. Marshall teamed up with a Wayland Baptist graduate and airplane enthusiast, Claude Hutcherson, and his wife, Wilda, in the late 1940s to sponsor a women’s basketball team. Hutcherson would fly the players around the country to compete with other women’s teams, 163

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most affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union.19 Hutcherson, in 1948, agreed to fly the women’s team to Mexico City in four of his four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza planes. Following the success of this venture, the Hutchersons agreed to dress the team in fancy clothing and to offer thirteen full athletic scholarships.20 Soon, high school athletes from such states as Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Iowa came to Wayland Baptist to try out for the team. The fortunate ones got a free education and a chance to participate in competitive basketball. The Wayland team gained a near monopoly of the best women basketball players of the 1950s, competing for nearly two decades under coach Harley Redin, a World War II heroic bomber pilot in the Pacific fighting. Redin came to coach in 1955 and continue a consecutive string of 131 wins by the “Hutcherson Flying Queens” of Wayland Baptist. This record has never been approached, even by the dominant University of Connecticut stars of the second decade of the twenty-first century. There were few women’s intercollegiate basketball teams, though Iowa Wesleyan was an exception in the Midwest. The Flying Queens competed primarily against AAU teams, often composed of working-class players, with names such as the Denver Chevrolet, Omaha Haines Hosiery, and Nashville Business College.21 These AAU teams did not consist of college students but workers at the businesses where they were recruited to play basketball. The Wayland Baptist team was unquestionably a commercial venture, not to make money but to promote the small college and an airplane business. Wayland Baptist was also not concerned about an amateur image, unlike the administrators of men’s athletics. What the president of Wayland Baptist and the entrepreneur Claude Hutcherson were doing was open to public scrutiny with no need to figleaf the women who were paid to attend Wayland. The basketball players wore satin outfits, but there was no need to cover up the commercialprofessional activities they were conducting. If an athlete needed clothing or a few extra dollars, Hutcherson and his wife would provide what was needed.22 In the process, the Hutcherson Air Service in Wayland Baptist’s hometown of Plainview created a terrific advertisement for Wayland Baptist as well as his own airplane business. This had similarities to the nature of the very first men’s intercollegiate contest a century before, when a railroad magnate gave the Harvard and Yale crews an eight-day vacation on Lake Winnipesaukee to entice passengers on his new railroad line to vacation at New Hampshire’s largest lake. Wayland Baptist’s highly commercialized-professionalized basketball program was a major exception to the model favored by the controlling college women

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physical educators, which promoted low-level competition in an amateur, noncommercial atmosphere. Indeed, most college women physical educators, but not all, from the late 1800s until the 1950s condemned any high-level athletic performance.23 In the 1920s and ’30s, they opposed Gertrude Ederle swimming the English Channel; Helen Wills, the Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of California, playing professional tennis; and any woman participating in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.24 They also strongly contested the golf tournament in 1941 by the women physical educators at Ohio State.25 These attitudes of the professional leaders of college women sport participation continued with only a few dissenters. The malcontents, however, were becoming more prevalent during and following World War II.

before The aSSociaTion for inTercollegiaTe aThleTicS for women Phoebe Scott is a good example of a physical educator who, while in college, participated in play days and sports days, but who thought skilled women athletes should be given an opportunity to compete in colleges. Scott was a 1940 high school graduate from Fort Collins, Colorado, experiencing play days, sports days, and no real competition. Attending the University of Michigan during World War II and majoring in physical education, she again found no support for her desire to compete with other highly skilled players. She then got her master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she found out that “people in the East tended to [have] more sports for women and girls than . . . in the Midwest.”26 She then returned to the Midwest for her PhD from the University of Iowa, where she discovered that Iowa high school girls had had a highly competitive state basketball tournament since the 1920s.27 When she became head of the progressive physical education department at Illinois State University, the oldest state university in Illinois, in the town of Normal, she was in a position to push for more competitive sports for skilled women athletes. In the early 1960s, when the Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports (part of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation) was reticent to provide competitive athletics for girls and women, Phoebe Scott spoke out, telling the DGWS Executive Council, “Whether we like it or not, we have educated a whole generation

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of women to believe that somehow there was something slightly evil or immoral in competition for the highly skilled girl. . . . We cannot be bound by the traditions and thinking of the past.”28 Though criticized by the old-time physical education leaders, within four years the DGWS formed the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The CIAW by the mid-1960s set standards for competitive sports for college women and soon sponsored its first national tournaments by taking over the long-standing national golf tournament and adding badminton, basketball, gymnastics, softball, swimming-diving, track and field, and volleyball within the first three years. Nevertheless, while the controlling women physical educators were accepting national tournaments, they were pondering whether they should abandon six-player basketball to the faster AAU and international basketball five-player game not confined by traditional half-court positioning and limited dribbles.29 This contradicted the longtime belief held by the women leaders “that they must declare their independence [from men and men’s rules] and prove their equality.”30 That meant sports with their own game rules as well as the control of women’s sports by women. As more and more colleges were adding intercollegiate teams in the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of questions had not been answered as the women leaders attempted to retain the control of their sports, keeping the teams both amateur and in concert with educational policy.31 (Being amateur and educational differed greatly from the direction that men’s sport had taken almost from the beginning.) Questions included: Should organized conferences be formed to further the games? Should there be an effort to increase paying spectators to help pay for the competition? Should the hiring of women physical educators be based on the ability to coach the more specialized teams? Most important, should highly skilled high school girls be recruited and given financial aid to produce winners? All these questions would be answered within a decade. All would go in the direction of professional and commercial. Women athletes would begin getting paid to attend college, and sponsorship by businesses would bring the commercial element.

The aiaw: no recruiTing and no ScholarShiPS The Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women lasted only a few years, but it was the transition from the 1950s Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports in which women finally accepted some

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intercollegiate athletics to eventually provide national championships in a variety of sports. The CIAW included a few rules for participation, including that the athlete needed to be an amateur and a full-time student who maintained satisfactory grades for eligibility. Unlike the men, however, the leaders claimed, “There shall be no scholarship or financial assistance specifically designated for women athletes.” The women PE leaders were in turmoil when the DGWS moved to create the CIAW to control women’s intercollegiate athletics, fearing, with good reason, that women’s sport would have the same troubles as were seen in men’s athletics. In 1971, however, the CIAW transitioned to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). Marion Broer, one of the leaders, may have summed up the situation on high-level competition: “We cannot set the clock back.”32 But how could women’s collegiate sport move to highly skilled competition without going in the professionalized-commercialized direction already taken by men’s athletics under the National Collegiate Athletic Association for the first six decades of the twentieth century and, indeed, back into the nineteenth century? Two of the purposes of the new AIAW were to promote women’s intercollegiate athletics “consistent with the educational objectives of member schools” and to “encourage excellence in performance.” Being successful in keeping both “educational” and “excellence in performance” was to prove nearly as difficult for women as it had been for men. “Amateur status,” according to the first AIAW handbook, paradoxically allowed collegiate institutions to pay athletes for “housing, meals, and transportation.” Yet, strangely, the AIAW stipulated that “any student who receives an athletic scholarship, financial award, or other financial assistance specifically designated for athletes is ineligible to compete.”33 From the beginning, one had to be linguistically nimble to not consider having one’s room and meals provided being given financial assistance. The AIAW was adamant that it would not follow the NCAA in paying athletes through athletic scholarships. The AIAW and its parent organization, the CIAW, were consistent, at first, in ensuring that any organization of college women’s sport was run by women physical educators. This had been the case since 1899, when the first women’s basketball committee was created and chaired by Smith College’s Senda Berenson.34 Or as Agnes Wayman of Barnard College so ably stated in the mid-1920s about women’s sport organizations, “We are setting forth under our own sail with women at the helm and women manning the whole craft.”35 There was always the fear, and quite well

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justified, that men might take over and attempt to run the women physical educators’ sport programs, something men had done previously in the Amateur Athletic Union and the US Olympic Committee. If women of the CIAW and AIAW wanted women’s sports to be carried out in an educational model rather than the men’s model of commercialism, they would have to strongly maintain control. The AIAW was successful in remaining under 100 percent woman control; it soon hired a paid executive director, a small staff, and, significantly, a lawyer—all women. There was an executive board consisting of women physical educators, and after a few years, the AIAW even allowed one student to act as a representative.36 The student representative was a symbolic nod to the democratic process, something the men’s NCAA was reluctant to do for decades. The AIAW grew rapidly from 278 institutional charter members to a high of 970 before it collapsed after a decade of existence. It sponsored eight national championships when it took over from the CIAW and had grown that to nineteen when it concluded operations in 1982.37 The demise came after the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (mostly small colleges) and the NCAA began providing national championships for women. The NAIA first moved in that direction. The NAIA had grown out of a men’s national basketball tournament begun in 1937 and emphasized educationally based athletics, like the early AIAW. In 1980, however, the men’s NAIA decided to create a women’s division and offer a national championship in basketball. This was just prior to the NCAA’s involvement in the control of women’s sports. However, it must be remembered that the NCAA was attempting, unsuccessfully, to work with the AIAW to create a common set of rules, including how to treat recruiting and athletic scholarships. Those joint meetings in the 1970s were failures. The AIAW wanted athletics within an educational model with no athletic scholarships and women in control; the NCAA had a longtime commercial-professional model with scholarships and men in control. It led Edward Betz, a member of the NCAA Committee on Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics, in 1978 to frustratingly exclaim, “It may be that the only way we can reach a common set of rules is by [the NCAA] offering national championships” with NCAA rules.38 The beginning of championships by the NAIA, and the NCAA’s involvement in them, was the beginning of the downfall of the AIAW, although nearly every account of the demise of the AIAW is attributed to the much larger and wealthier NCAA and its dominant Big-Time athletic programs. The NAIA is seldom mentioned as a challenge to women’s

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control, which, of course, it was. In 1979, the year after the NAIA voted to sponsor a women’s tournament, the NCAA decided to sponsor its first foray into women’s tournaments with Division II and III championships rather than a more controversial Division I competition.39 The NCAA decided in a very close vote to conduct a Division I tournament for women and to pay the participant costs beginning in 1982.40 It was doomsday for the AIAW tourney when seventeen of the top twenty teams in basketball, the most important woman’s sport historically, chose to participate with the NCAA rather than the AIAW.41 The AIAW did not have the resources to fund tourney expenses, and the NCAA took advantage of its expanding wealth, coming principally from the NCAA basketball tourney. One of the reasons why the AIAW had little or no money to finance athletes participating in the various tournaments was that it had a lawyer on a retainer fee. She profited in a major way, leaving little income for other AIAW expenses. In 1974, attorney Margot Polivy received a retainer fee that in its first year accounted for 25 percent of the AIAW income. Polivy was a fighter for women’s rights, but she was also controversial almost from the beginning. She was soon perceived by the president of the AIAW, Laurie Mabry of Illinois State University, as not only giving advice to the AIAW but setting policy. The AIAW needed legal counsel, especially after the Kellmeyer case (described in the next section) affected the policy of no athletic scholarships. The impact of the Polivy retainer fee, though, was to nearly suffocate the AIAW financially and impact expenditures on operating championships, the dominating function of the AIAW. Despite leadership disputes among AIAW officers and Polivy, she remained the legal counsel until the demise of the AIAW. Never a wealthy organization, in Polivy’s eight years, the AIAW spent well over twice as much money on her legal expenses as it spent on the nineteen national tournaments it sponsored.42 A one-time president of the AIAW, Judy Holland, who turned against the AIAW, wrote, “AIAW does not devote its financial and other resources to national championships. This lack of attention directly and adversely affects women student-athletes.”43 Eventually, a lawsuit by the AIAW against the “monopolist” NCAA failed and the AIAW was left with a debt of over $400,000 owed to the Polivy law firm. The failed NCAA lawsuit was the “final nail in the coffin,” but the AIAW was essentially dead before the NCAA lawsuit. The earlier Kellmeyer lawsuit had crippled the AIAW and its educational model by sanctioning payment to women athletes through athletic scholarships.

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kellmeyer, TiTle ix, and ScholarShiPS for women Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 was vitally important to the growth of intercollegiate athletics for women, but a court case, not Title IX, determined the fate of the AIAW’s anti-athletic scholarship policy.44 The CIAW and the AIAW originally were officially opposed to athletic scholarships for women. This all changed because of a Florida-initiated lawsuit by several women tennis players and a coach who felt that women deserved athletic scholarships just as much as did men. A half year after the AIAW became operational, Fern Lee “Peachy” Kellmeyer, the director of physical education at Marymount College and tennis coach at both Marymount College and Broward Community College, along with eleven students with athletic scholarships, challenged the AIAW’s anti-scholarship policy after Kathy Kemper, an athletic scholarship player for Marymount’s tennis team, was denied by AIAW officials an opportunity to participate in the women’s AIAW tennis championship. The so-called Kellmeyer case challenged the anti-scholarship policy of the CIAW-AIAW that denied athletic scholarships to college women while men were receiving scholarships. This violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. “The Fourteenth Amendment,” according to legal authority and historian Sarah Fields, provided “the practical legal bite for the paper tiger that was Title IX.”45 The amendment, passed in 1868 to protect newly freed slaves from subjugation by states, was central to freeing women from another kind of oppression, that of women athletes by women physical education leaders of the AIAW.46 It was charged that the AIAW was discriminating against its own athletes by denying them equal opportunity for athletic scholarships. A leading woman athletic director, Linda Estes of the University of New Mexico, opposed the AIAW’s anti-scholarship rule. She campaigned against the AIAW policy in 1973, when she complained about “women who insist on discriminating against other women.”47 The structure upholding the amateur-educational model of the AIAW was collapsing almost immediately after the AIAW was created. The Kellmeyer case never went to trial because the AIAW finally conceded that its anti–athletic scholarship policy was violating the Fourteenth Amendment. It came about because the AIAW was under the auspices of educational organizations including the Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (AAHPER) and affiliated with the National 170

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Education Association. The NEA lawyers warned the AIAW about denying equal rights for its women athletes to the same opportunities afforded to male college athletes. The NEA told the AIAW that it would no longer be a defendant of the AIAW in the Kellmeyer suit unless it dropped its anti-scholarship policy. If the AIAW would change its discriminatory policy, the NEA would then be of assistance. The NEA met with officers of the AIAW, the AAHPER, and the DGWS. The three groups decided to remove the discriminatory rule.48 The result was the forsaking of the AIAW commitment to what it considered its educational ideal and not accepting the payment of women athletes. It thus conformed to the commercial-professional men’s model of paying athletes. The AIAW decision to allow athletic scholarships came about only three months after the initiation of the Kellmeyer lawsuit. The Kellmeyer case was dismissed, and the New York Times included a very short, hiddenaway article titled “Women Win the Right to Scholarships.”49 The Times should have run the article in capital letters with an analysis indicating that this likely would drastically change college women’s sports. Still, because it was women’s sports, it drew little attention in the prestigious newspaper. The Kellmeyer court case broke the bedrock anti-scholarship policy of the AIAW and began the movement for equality with men based on the commercial-professional male model. The Kellmeyer case was dismissed before trial, as the AIAW conceded its unlawful behavior in prohibiting athletic scholarships. Once the AIAW approved allowing athletic scholarships on an equal basis with men, other educationally based planks in the women’s model began eroding. This led the women’s organization to quickly accept male-model policies such as the recruiting of athletes (called talent assessment); placing restrictions on student transfers; hiring professional coaches, often replacing coaches from the physical education staff; negotiating with commercial broadcasters for telecast of events rather than telecasting through public educational TV; allowing the honoring of individuals as in All-American recognitions; seeking commercial sponsors for all-star contests; accepting commercial subsidies for AIAW championships; and agreeing to take alcohol advertising for sport events.50 These were all opposed earlier by leaders of women’s physical education as being part of the male model they so strongly opposed. The Kellmeyer lawsuit was a key to the eventual downfall of the AIAW, but the passage of Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 nearly ensured that women’s control of educational-athletics would soon be replaced altogether. Title IX, when first introduced in a US congressional bill, was originally never discussed as being important to women’s intercollegiate 171

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athletics, including athletic scholarships. The Act stated nothing about athletics, nor were athletic considerations included in debates before passage. It read, in one lengthy, thirty-seven-word sentence, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”51 The only differences between the wording of Title IX and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were that the words “on the basis of sex” replaced “race, color, or national origin” and that Title IX applied only to education, while Title VI was for any federal program, not just education.52 However, soon after passage, it was clear that women’s athletics received only about 1 percent of the funding that went to men’s athletics, and Title IX would be applied to women’s intercollegiate athletics more than any other unequitable aspect of education. In terms of funding for athletic scholarships, the amount that went to women athletes was far less than 1 percent, and if, at first, the AIAW had had any say in institutions offering athletic scholarships, there would have been zero dollars. Title IX had a great influence on promoting women’s athletics in funding more equitably men’s and women’s intercollegiate sports, but more importantly in affecting the two different models that men and women followed. To be equal under Title IX, the male commercial-professional model was used as a reference. Thus, equal athletic scholarships, equal funding for recruiting athletes, and equal professional coaching were among the many inequity challenges. Title IX, then, along with the Fourteenth Amendment for equal protection, sped up women’s participation in high-level competition. The gain for women’s participation and payment for it was great, but the change was most negative for women controlling women’s athletics. Within a few years came the collapse of women physical educators in control of women’s athletics in major intercollegiate athletic institutions.53

The cold war, women’S SPorTS, and ScholarShiPS As much as the women’s movement, Title IX, and the Kellmeyer case helped free women to have greater collegiate recruitment, payment, and participation at a high level, little has been noted about the impact of the Cold War on women’s participation. The battle for global supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II 172

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was fought on many fronts, and it had a major influence on women’s sport. When World War II concluded, Germany was divided up between the winners, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and three Western democracies, France, Great Britain, and the United States. As the communist Soviet Union wanted to expand its ideology and influence in Europe and elsewhere, the United States particularly was in a position as the world’s greatest power to prevent communism from expanding. Though the western allies did not come into a major conflict militarily in Europe, there was a “Cold War” to influence how people in countries in Western Europe reacted to the Soviet expansion. Part of the ideology and propaganda “war” was found in international sport, especially as it related to the Olympic Movement and the political importance of winning gold, silver, and bronze medals. Seven years after the close of World War II, the Soviet Union entered the Olympic Movement with a goal of dominating events in the Olympics. In the Soviets’ first 1952 Olympic participation, the USSR garnered seventy-one medals to the dominant United States’ seventy-six, with the US gaining forty golds to the Soviets’ twenty-two. At the 1956 Olympics, the USSR clearly won the medal count, and four years later it overwhelmed the United States with a total medal count of 103 to 71. From 1956 through 1980, the Soviets won the medal count in every Olympics in which both countries participated, except the 1968 Games held next door to the United States in Mexico City.54 A major cause for the United States falling behind the USSR was that women athletes from American colleges were woefully inferior to Russian women in the Summer Olympics—that is, except for African American track stars, such as Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus in the 1960s, mostly coached by Ed Temple at Tennessee State University. While the NCAA and men’s athletics were little interested in women sports, the poor showing of women in the Olympics was an embarrassment to many Americans, including those in institutions of higher education from which most male Olympians had competed. The failure of American women to medal significantly in the 1952 Olympics and their defeat by the Soviets in the 1956 and again in the 1960 Olympics could be attributed to the lack of women’s participation in competitive athletics at predominately white colleges. In the 1956 games, American women trailed the USSR women in medals fourteen to nineteen, but four years later the Soviets more than doubled the US women’s total, out-medaling the US women by twenty-eight to twelve. Navy Admiral Thomas Hamilton, a former football coach, athletic director, and then commissioner of what became the Pacific-8 Conference, warned those attending the NCAA conference in 1961, 173

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The United States must take a new and hard look at its Olympic movement and efforts. The cold war and the present international climate demands that we make the strongest showing possible to uphold the prestige of the United States. . . . We have fallen from our top position in world sports. . . . What are we colleges going to do to defeat the Russians and the Communists in this important battle area of the cold war?55

Admiral Hamilton had a number of proposals to further America’s Olympic hopes, but a major one was to vastly improve college women’s sports, where the United States was “out-scored badly in women’s sports events,” which would worsen unless women were given “more opportunities for participation and better training.” Specifically, he noted “a weakness in our system that these girl swim stars lose out because of the lack of training opportunity when they go to college.”56 Women were achieving some medals in the Summer Olympics principally due to African American collegians in institutions that were providing for them financially. The AIAW leaders were impeding success in America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, and it gave the NCAA the opportunity to become involved in women’s intercollegiate sport.

going big Time wiTh The ncaa The physical education leaders of college women’s sports did not seem nearly as concerned about the United States losing to the Soviet Union at the Olympics as did the leaders of men’s athletics. However, if there needed to be an excuse for men to become involved in women’s athletics, the Cold War Olympics issue was a strong one, and one that came well before Title IX and women’s athletics were even a concern for politicians. At the time, the NCAA was immersed in a major fight over control of amateur athletics with the Amateur Athletic Union. The AAU had control of eight of the major sports in the Olympics, including amateur track and field, basketball, wrestling, and gymnastics.57 To take control of amateur sports from the AAU, the NCAA needed to be involved in women’s sport. A half dozen years before the formation of the AIAW, the NCAA had formed a long-range planning committee to discuss the “need for encouraging opportunity for young women to compete in intercollegiate athletics.”58 Walter Byers, NCAA executive director and man often considered the chief antagonist of women’s sport, wrote in 1965, “The NCAA is in the process of organizing a 174

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committee to supervise development of women’s competition, and we want to obtain the names of as many women instructors as possible to have a good nucleus from which to build.”59 Showing a lack of knowledge about women’s sports, a year later Byers stated naively, “We don’t know who runs the intercollegiate golf tournament for women” that had been in existence for a quarter century.60 The threat of the NCAA becoming involved in women’s athletics may have been a motivating factor for organizing the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in 1966 to begin national championships. So while women physical educators were beginning to sponsor championships, the NCAA was first beginning to discuss “sponsoring a program of Women’s Sports” when the NCAA council met in 1967.61 A decade and a half before the NCAA wrested control of women’s sport away from the AIAW, the men were apparently more concerned about the control of amateur sport and the threat of the AAU dominating women’s sport and hurting the power of colleges to control amateur athletics. In some ways, the die was cast for the struggle for control of highly competitive women’s sports well before either the AIAW was made operational for national championships or Title IX passed in 1972. Following passage of Title IX, the NCAA first opposed applying it to athletics and then, failing at that tactic, decided to “work” with the AIAW to find mutually acceptable rules on such issues as recruiting, athletic scholarships, and eligibility rules.62 That was predictably unsuccessful, but national legislation and a federal court changed both control and participation. The irony of Title IX is that there was an assumption that the male model was the norm for equality. The Kellmeyer lawsuit of 1973, Title IX, and most feminists used the male model for women’s parity in sport.63 What was lost under NCAA control was women physical educators’ amateur-educational model, which had been adhered to since the nineteenth century. In exchange, there was much greater women’s athletic participation and a movement toward the commercialprofessional model accented by athletic scholarships for women. “The AIAW represented not the future,” historian Joan Chandler wrote in the 1980s, “but the past.”64 She was right. It took nearly a century, from the first women’s field day at the allfemale Vassar College in 1895 under all-women physical educators’ control to the 1980s, for women to lose most of their control over women’s athletic programs. It may not have been overly significant that the Vassar women’s records in track were compared to those of all-male Yale after that first field day in the 1890s.65 But one must realize that in making comparisons to men’s athletics, women looked at the men’s records and 175

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the men’s model as they constructed their own. Only when the law of the land, Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the outcome of the Kellmeyer case came about were women’s college athletics forced to consider equality in terms of men’s sport and the male model. The increase in women’s sport participation and the increased money associated with it occurred at nearly the same time as the demise of the AIAW and women’s control of athletics. Susan Cahn was correct when she wrote of the unintended consequences with “the simultaneous increase in participation and decrease in leadership . . . trading control over sport for greater access to sporting opportunities and resources.”66 “Separate but equal” in schools for African Americans was thrown out with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and “separate but equal” was extinguished when the AIAW lost its monopoly suit against the NCAA three decades later.67 Women’s athletics’ joining the NCAA only added to the decline of amateurism and the increase in the payment of women athletes. Meanwhile, television and even union attempts moved college athletics to a more prominent place in the professionalism and commercialism of college sports.

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ch a PTer fourTeen

Television, Unions, and the Collapse of Amateurism The NCAA plays a critical role in the maintenance of a revered tradition of amateurism in college sport. JuSTice John Paul STeVenS, 1984

Amateurism in college sports may be on life support, but it’s not dead yet. michael m c cann, 2019

H

iSTorian Joan chandler wroTe abouT The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in 1985: “When the AIAW died, the amateur tradition in college sport died with it.” Yet the concept of amateurism was considered alive by the NCAA as it took over most college women’s sports from the expired women’s organization. The NCAA constitution and bylaws clearly included the word amateur as it emphasized the made-up term student-athlete. The courts and national legislators agreed that both men and women college athletes were amateurs. Three years after the AIAW collapsed, Chandler concluded that “student athletes, male and female, would be less abused if we treated them as the professionals they undoubtedly are.”1 By then, television’s dominance had brought unprecedented wealth to the institutions and the NCAA, though not women’s sport. It also raised questions about why the athletes, who were performing in the wealthy, commercialized sports of men’s basketball and football, were not receiving a greater share of the wealth. The athletic scholarships didn’t even pay the full cost of four or five years of college athletic participation, especially after the NCAA in 1975 did away with

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the fifteen-dollar-per-month “laundry money” and course incidental fees as part of an athletic scholarship.2 The possibility existed that the athletes needed to form a union to force the institutions and their well-paid athletic administrators and coaches to deal more equitably (financially and otherwise) with the athletic workers. After all, many athletes were often spending forty or more hours a week working on their sports, far more than on their academic studies.

The financial imPacT of TeleViSion on amaTeuriSm Television was a boon to the NCAA and could possibly have been for the AIAW. Before the AIAW died, it attempted unsuccessfully to survive financially with television revenue from its basketball tournament, as basketball was the dominant women’s sport on most campuses for three-quarters of a century. At the same time, the NCAA was financially successful principally because of the telecasting of its basketball tourney and great interest in what became known as men’s March Madness.3 The difference between the AIAW women’s tournament revenue and the NCAA’s was enormous in the 1970s. The AIAW’s highest TV revenues, principally for basketball, were in 1980–1981 at less than a quarter of a million dollars, while TV revenue from the NCAA basketball tournament that year was $10 million. The AIAW was about to begin its final season, competing for the first time with the NCAA’s first Division I women’s basketball tourney. So many women’s teams fled to the NCAA tourney that NBC-TV dropped its contract with the AIAW. While the NCAA’s new TV contract with CBS was for $16 million a year, the AIAW failed as it lost over $8,000 on its 1981 Final Four.4 Television, obviously, had not been necessary to create commercialized-professionalized athletics for men, for they were Big Time well before both television and radio were in existence. Nevertheless, it was television and a national audience in both men’s basketball and football that made it possible for institutions of higher learning to pay football and basketball coaches far more than the salaries of the highest paid full professors and, in many cases, the institutions’ presidents. For instance, in 1982, when the AIAW died, Texas A&M paid its football coach, Jackie Sherrill, the highest salary ever for a college coach, $287,000. Television enabled institutions to not only pay coaches extraordinary salaries, but also erect luxurious housing for athletes, construct multimillion-dollar weight training facilities, and build athletic-academic 178

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counseling centers to help keep athletes academically eligible for athletic participation. Television also enabled institutions to finance luxurious, glassed-in seating arrangements and plush press boxes for sport broadcasters and sportswriters in stadiums. However, the money that athletes on scholarship were receiving in the profit-making sports of football and men’s basketball was less than they had been receiving before television dominated the sporting activities and before the NCAA took away the fifteen-dollar-per-month stipend in the mid-1970s. Dropping the compensation was done for financial reasons in the inflationary 1970s, but also in the name of keeping athletics “amateur.” The US Supreme Court could have questioned the concept of intercollegiate amateurism as it decided an antitrust television case in the 1980s, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. It did the opposite. This was a case to determine if the NCAA’s television contract with the football powers was an antitrust monopoly violation in which the NCAA was in restraint of trade in its telecasting of football contests. An organization called the College Football Association became the financial force in the Oklahoma suit. The CFA was formed in the 1970s principally to attempt to keep TV money for the powerful athletic institutions. Through its funding, the CFA allowed the Universities of Oklahoma and Georgia to take the NCAA to court for the restraint of trade prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.5 The CFA was formed of about sixty major college football universities including those from the Atlantic Coast, Big 8, Southeastern, Southwest, and Western Athletic Conferences as well as independent organizations, including the two most important, Notre Dame and Penn State. The CFA lacked the Big Ten and the PAC10 schools, whose leaders felt that the NCAA and its TV contract favored them; besides, the two conferences had the lucrative Rose Bowl game and TV revenue.6 The NCAA TV monopoly was broken up in 1984 when the question of college athletics being amateur did not seem central to the lawsuit outcome. However, both the majority and dissenting opinions noted the importance of amateurism in college athletics. When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, he favored collegiate amateurism. “The NCAA,” Stevens boldly penned for future legal decisions, “plays a critical role in the maintenance of a revered tradition of amateurism in college sports.” Writing the dissenting opinion in the 7–2 Supreme Court decision, Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, who had been an AllAmerican football player in the 1930s, was even more forceful, stating that the NCAA television plan had reflected “the NCAA’s fundamental 179

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policy of preserving amateurism and integrating athletics and education.”7 The Supreme Court had set a high bar to overcome college amateurism by those who saw college athletics as professional, especially the profit-making sports of football and men’s basketball. Challenges to amateurism would come principally from athletes or former athletes in the two men’s sports.

aThleTic “unionS” before TeleViSion money From the beginning of college athletics, there was no need for athletes to petition or strike to do what they wanted to do. There was no necessity to combine in a union to obtain their rights prior to alumni and institutional administrations taking control in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. For it was Walter Camp, the “father of American football,” who stated accurately in 1885, “Neither the faculties nor other critics assisted in building the structure of college athletics. It is a structure,” Camp wrote, “which students unaided have builded.”8 When Harvard and Yale crew members decided to accept an all-paid rowing vacation and compete against each other one summer nine years before the Civil War, the crew teams did not have to ask permission of authorities to do so. There was no need to organize to gain their right to do so. When Harvard’s baseball team decided to travel by train on a twentyfive-game western trip to play other colleges and professional baseball teams in 1869, the team did not ask permission from Harvard authorities to play games against such professional teams as the Cincinnati Red Stockings and Chicago White Stockings.9 Yet when faculties, presidents, and boards of trustees began to take control, athletes complained but generally conformed to their institutional superiors. Cornell University is a good example. When the student-controlled University of Michigan football team in 1873 invited Cornell University’s squad to travel to Cleveland to play a game halfway between the two institutions, both the faculty and the president reacted. Not only did the Cornell faculty turn down the request, but Cornell president Andrew  D. White made his famous statement, “I will not permit 30 men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.”10 The warm winds of student control over their own sports were turning into a cold breeze. Nevertheless, the Cornell team did not organize to resist its academic superiors. While professional baseball players organized the first sport union in the 1880s under John Montgomery Ward, a star on the New York Giants team,11 the first known group of college athletes to form something 180

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approximating a union did not occur until the football players for the University of Pittsburgh did so in 1937.12 Pitt was undefeated and ranked number one by the Associated Press at the end of the 1937 season under coach John Bain “Jock” Sutherland. The players then made demands following a bid to play for the second straight year in the prestigious Rose Bowl against the University of California, Berkeley. Undoubtedly, the recent success of the United Auto Workers of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations union was known by the Pittsburgh players. The forty-four-day, CIO sit-down strike in the Flint, Michigan, General Motors plant in early 1937 may have given the Pitt team confidence that they, as workers for the University of Pittsburgh, could make demands upon their university. In a close 17–16 vote, the players decided not to play in the Pasadena Rose Bowl game unless certain demands were met, even though the Pitt team had defeated the University of Washington in the Rose Bowl the previous year. The players insisted that all members of the team be taken to Pasadena, be given $200 spending money per player, and receive a two-week vacation. This was unusual, though with ninety thousand spectators at the Rose Bowl game, the demands could financially be met with ease. Coach Sutherland, who had paid the players himself the previous year, was in favor of the players’ demands, but the new athletic director and chancellor were opposed.13 The chancellor, John Bowman, was aware of the power of athletics. He knew, as did all heads of universities that dealt with athletics, that a negative approach to athletics might cost him his position. However, Bowman, who was probably the highest paid university leader at $35,000 in the midst of the Great Depression, had raised an enormous $10 million to construct what he believed was the tallest university building in the world. It was a forty-two-story, six-hundred-thousand-square-foot structure called the Cathedral of Learning. At the same time, the alums were pushing for the construction of a seventy-thousand-seat football stadium for what had been possibly the best football program in America during the previous two decades. The team had been coached by the famed Pop Warner until 1924, when he left to coach at Stanford for one of the highest coaching salaries in America. Jock Sutherland was an AllAmerican player under Warner and took over the University of Pittsburgh team, which was already paying its players outright corresponding to their worth to the team. In the mid-1920s the best players got up to one hundred dollars per month plus tuition and books. The payments were standardized at fifty dollars per month in 1928 and increased to sixtyfive dollars for several years. During the depths of the Depression, the monthly payments were reduced to forty-eight dollars, but the subsidies 181

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were significant, allowing a number of the team members to marry.14 As John Chickerno, one of Pitt’s players in the mid-1930s, wrote, “the ‘football scholarship’ consisted of tuition, books, fees, and $48 a month.” Team members were also given four to six tickets for each home game and could sell them “for $3 to $5/game.”15 They were absolutely not amateurs, having ventured far from the Oxbridge concept, but only a few cared.16 One who cared was Chancellor Bowman, who had had a long tenure as head of Pitt since 1921. Previously, Bowman had been secretary of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and creator of the famed 1929 reform document American College Athletics. Bowman was under pressure by the important Middle States Association accrediting agency that could threaten Pitt with loss of accreditation. That could happen because the professional football program at Pitt did not meet Middle States’ standards. In addition, the national honorary scholastic fraternity Phi Beta Kappa prohibited a chapter of its fraternity on campus because of the very inadequate Pitt library.17 Bowman was determined to clean up the athletic program if not the library. He disliked President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the idea of recognizing unions, including the Pitt player “union.” He decided to eliminate the payment of Pitt’s football players. In what was called Code Bowman, the chancellor got the Pitt Board of Trustees to both eliminate athletic scholarships and to raise academic requirements to remain athletically eligible. Bowman eliminated the alumni-controlled athletic council and replaced it with the university-controlled Faculty Committee on Athletic Policy. This resulted in fewer athletes being recruited and more athletes flunking out of school. Because sophomore athletes were required to work more for their tuition than upperclassmen were, the 1938 season began with a “strike” by the sophomore football players as Jock Sutherland entered his last season at Pitt before his resignation in early 1939 because of lack of administrative support.18

organiZing PlayerS before big money The Pittsburgh football “union” was undercut by management, just as many unions have lost out to the owners of industry. Pittsburgh was not the first university to have players revolt, if not forming unions. It certainly indicated that players had the capability of organizing and making demands. This was shown early in the twentieth century, when University of Michigan football players and their alumni agent made demands that were met for the first Rose Bowl game in 1902. This was 182

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certainly not a union, but players asked for and got superior treatment when they requested to participate in the first football contest at the Pasadena, California, Rose Bowl. After being invited, Michigan players and the Board of Athletic Control wanted first-class accommodations if they traveled several thousand miles for a season-ending game against Stanford University. In the lengthy negotiations, the Michigan Athletic Association responded to the head of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses, “Our boys would not object to travelling in a tourist car” rather than a more luxurious Pullman car. “However, we would expect to travel in the ordinary first-class style as regards meals, hotels, etc.”19 This was agreed to by the Rose Bowl Association, along with first class travel on the return trip that would take them out of the way to New Orleans. The $3,600 round-trip team travel expense, $57 per day for team food allowance, and free hotel and transportation in the Los Angeles area were similar to what any later union might have negotiated for the athletic workers who were taking a pleasure trip.20 A crowd of only eight thousand game spectators watching Michigan beat Stanford 49–0 almost seemed insignificant compared to the fifty thousand who attended the traditional Rose Parade that had been going on for several decades.21 Three decades later, as noted, the well-paid Pittsburgh team boycotted the Rose Bowl game as well as the parade. The University of Pittsburgh is likely the best example of a “union” before television brought greater wealth into the intercollegiate scene well after the University of Pennsylvania began regular telecasting of its home games in 1940. For instance, the University of Washington football team went on “strike” for two days, a week before their Thanksgiving Day game in 1916. The strike came after the Washington faculty banned a starting lineman for cheating on a test. Then came the firing of Washington Coach Gilmour Dobie for not developing sufficient character in his team during his nine-year tenure at the Seattle institution. Surprisingly, Dobie had the greatest record in intercollegiate football history, an unmatched forty-five wins, no losses, and three ties at Washington.22 If there were other “strikes,” they likely occurred in the dominating sport of football. However, in 1940, the Stanford University track team threatened to strike after Coach Bill Ellington was fired by the Board of Athletic Control.23 The strike never materialized. It took a generation after the 1930s Pittsburgh player “union” for athletes and former athletes to activate other union-like efforts. As in the Michigan and Pittsburgh cases, current and former elite athletes were at the forefront of advocating for athletes’ rights and the possibility of forming unions. In the early 1960s, an example of worker-athletes making 183

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a demand of athletic management occurred at Syracuse University after the end of the regular season of play, like at Pittsburgh a generation earlier. Two years before, Syracuse had been unbeaten and the dominant players had been consistently receiving twenty- or fifty-dollar bills following games, according to Dave Meggyesy in his book Out of Their League.24 Two years later, however, Syracuse had a mediocre season, for them (8–3), and they were invited to play in a mediocre bowl game, the Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia, against the University of Miami. Before Syracuse’s Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis and team members agreed to play in the game, they were discussing whether they wanted to practice for two more weeks before participating in an inferior bowl game. They did not vote to boycott the game as the University of Pittsburgh had done in the 1930s, but they made a demand upon university officials, including coach Ben Schwartzwalder, who had previously won a national championship. The team knew that players at the elite bowls, such as the Rose Bowl, received watches, and they told Schwartzwalder and the athletic director they would play against Miami only if they received watches before the game was played. The players got their watches.25 Though the players had not formed a union, it was union-like behavior.26

union Talk: care and deVenZio following TV money Potential union organization became more prominent following the wealth brought to intercollegiate programs from television riches. A former Notre Dame player from the 1960s was involved in a union effort a number of years following graduation. Allen Sack, who played on coach Ara Parseghian’s championship football team, realized that he had missed out on aspects of his undergraduate education because of the emphasis on football under Parseghian. Sack went on to earn a PhD in sociology at Penn State University before entering a lengthy career in advocating for athletes’ rights as a college professor. In the early 1980s, Sack organized the Center for Athletes Rights and Education (CARE), which pressed for athletes’ due process, legal assistance, and sharing the increased athletic revenue. That included the possibility of forming a union and bargaining collectively for athletes’ rights.27 Allen Sack’s Center for Athletes Rights and Education may have been forgotten in the next generation, but it was not historically overlooked. Some of what Sack advocated came true after CARE became visible with significant financing for his efforts by the US Department 184

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of Education and cosponsorship by the National Football League Players Association and the National Conference of Black Lawyers.28 The NCAA, run by university presidents, eventually and reluctantly offered specific benefits to college athletes that Sack had advocated with CARE. For instance, CARE’s bill of rights promoted multiyear athletic scholarships, changes in the letter-of-intent player contracts, more extensive medical treatment including a greater study of traumatic brain injury, and movement toward sharing revenue. They all eventually came true as reform moved very slowly for athletes’ rights.29 The fear of government regulations and the strength of lawsuits were major forces in the NCAA’s hesitant movement toward Allen Sack’s image of how college athletes should be treated. When CARE was first organized, Sack indicated that, like professional football, “it is just as appropriate for players to unionize.”30 The idea of a possible union was only that, an idea. It was evidently an idea before its time. While Sack was advocating for players’ rights and the right to unionize, an ex-basketball player and academic All-American at Duke University in the early 1970s, Dick DeVenzio, was advocating for his College Players Association union. DeVenzio’s book, Rip-Off U.: The Annual Theft and Exploitation of Revenue Producing Major College Student-Athletes, brought a certain amount of recognition to DeVenzio, but little support from athletes in the revenue-producing sports of men’s basketball and football. His influence was less than that of the University of Pittsburgh football team that boycotted the 1938 Rose Bowl game when he advocated in the mid-1980s for football players to refuse to play in bowl contests and basketball players to sit out NCAA playoff games.31 Like several individuals in the twenty-first century, DeVenzio believed that athletes should get a cut of the millions, vastly augmented by television, brought in by college football and men’s basketball.32 He even caught the attention of the University of Nebraska’s great football coach Tom Osborne, who complained quietly to the chancellor of the University of Nebraska, Martin Massengale, “There is no question that the players are the most important and least considered element of athletic competition as far as the NCAA is concerned.”33 A decade and a half later, another Duke basketball player was influenced by DeVenzio. Jay Bilas was a four-year starter and on Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s 1986 team that played for the national championship. When Bilas’s team was in the 1986 Final Four, he talked with DeVenzio, who asked him, “Have you guys ever thought about boycotting the Final Four?” At that time, Bilas was not interested, nor would most basketball players playing for the national championship be. He felt that a boycott 185

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was a nonstarter for him. Two decades later, he remembered his flippant reply to DeVenzio, “How about we do it next year?”34 As an undergraduate, Bilas knew something about how athletics were administered and how athletes did not benefit nearly as much from the hundreds of millions of dollars made by men’s basketball and football as did administrators and coaches. He was the athlete representative on the NCAA Long Range Planning Committee and could see the tension between millions of dollars in revenue and the concept of amateurism. Bilas knew that the NCAA placed much more emphasis on the dollars than on how the athletes benefited from those dollars. He may not have read DeVenzio’s Rip-Off U., but Bilas would likely have agreed with one athletic director who frequently attended NCAA conventions. “I have not heard any mention of the players,” the AD told DeVenzio, “nor have I felt any real concern for the players themselves in all of the years I have attended NCAA conventions.”35 Lack of attention to players’ needs and rights is clear to anyone who has read all or parts of the NCAA’s Proceedings from 1906 to the time of DeVenzio. Soon after getting his law degree from Duke, Jay Bilas became a vocal critic of the NCAA and its lack of concern for athletes and athletes’ rights. He likely had more visibility than DeVenzio, for he was employed by the ESPN cable network for a generation. “I wasn’t hired as a cheerleader,” Bilas stated. “I was hired to be a commentator.” To those who criticized Bilas for taking on the insincerity of the NCAA rules about amateurism and rules to control college athletes, he once remarked, “Why would I stay away from the contradictions and hypocrisy of the NCAA policy when it is constantly in our face?”36 College presidents, who have governed the NCAA for decades, have been nearly universally cheerleaders for athletics but not for athletes. Bilas, however, thought about, and opposed, the unfairness of the presidents favoring amateurism for the players and professionalism and commercialism for all others associated with college athletes. Bilas was on the side of athletes’ rights and the outright paying of athletes, specifically those who were the visible part of the billion-dollar football and men’s basketball business of Division I college athletics. Though there are strong arguments against paying college athletes, including those found in the decisions of the federal district courts and the Supreme Court of the United States, Bilas has argued that athletes are the only people with restricted earnings in the Division I commercial enterprise.37 He dismissed the argument that paying players will ruin the game, for he had seen that it did not ruin the Olympics, which legally paid its participants, after about a century of the so-called amateur 186

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Olympic Games. Nor had he seen nonprofit “minor” college sports going out of existence just because players might be paid for the profitproducing sports of football and men’s basketball. He claimed that the quality of teams would remain high and that paying the players would be incentive for the athletes to remain in school rather than turn pro early. Bilas advocated ending use of the term amateur, for he recognized that the definition of the word had changed every time the NCAA saw the need to do so.38 This could be graphically seen in the case of tennis players, who could by NCAA rules earn tens of thousands of dollars as professionals and then be eligible for NCAA-sanctioned collegiate competition.39 If athletes were paid similarly in college field hockey, volleyball, or basketball, they would immediately be banned from NCAA-sponsored intercollegiate competition. To lessen the hypocrisy under NCAA rules, Jay Bilas was a major advocate for a free market, not free labor, for athletes, especially where athletes could have direct compensation for sponsorship deals.40

ramogi huma, ScholarShiPS, and aThleTeS’ righTS The question of a free market for athletes’ compensation was brought to the forefront by Ramogi Huma, a former football player from the University of California, Los Angeles. For Huma and other athletes, there was nothing like the free agency found in the professional leagues. He couldn’t even transfer to another school for educational and athletic purposes without penalty. Huma did, though, come to see the exploitation of athletes at UCLA. While a freshman linebacker on the UCLA football team, Huma became upset when the NCAA suspended Donnie Edwards, an All-American senior linebacker, for accepting $150 in food money. He thought it was unfair for his fellow player to be punished because he didn’t have enough to eat and accepted a gift of food. That was in 1995. By the turn of the century, Huma had formed what he called the Collegiate Athletes Coalition (CAC) to help give a voice to athletes such as Edwards. Huma claimed early on that he personally, and the CAC, did not want players to be classified as employees, form a union, or go on strike. He stated that the organization was formed to increase the monetary value of scholarships, to upgrade health insurance, and to increase the death benefits, after three athletes had died in the fall of 2001.41 When Huma changed his mind about the value of a union for college athletes is not known, but his involvement in the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit 187

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may have been pivotal. Huma was involved in the recruitment of athletes as plaintiffs in the O’Bannon class action suit against the NCAA for antitrust violation of athletes’ rights to their own images and likenesses. Well before the O’Bannon case came to judgment in 2014, Huma, his newly named National College Players Association, and a sport management professor from Drexel University, Ellen Staurowski, conducted a study called “The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport.”42 While not advocating for a union, they found that athletes on “full scholarship” averaged a more than $3,000 a year shortfall on expenses while the NCAA was approaching an income of a billion dollars each year from men’s basketball and football. They favored the Olympic model with athlete access to a “commercial free market” and payment for activities such as endorsements and player autographs. They concluded that the institutions “could provide more equitable financial terms for their revenue-producing athletes without eliminating any non-revenue generating sports or reducing scholarships from athletes from non-revenue generating sports.”43 Three years before that study, the NCAA settled a class-action suit named for a Stanford University football player, Jason White, charging the NCAA for a violation of antitrust laws. Because the NCAA had illegally enforced a cap on the value of athletic scholarships, the NCAA in the White v. NCAA case settled by setting up a $10 million fund for Division I-A football and men’s basketball players to recoup the difference between their scholarships and the full cost of their educations.44 The movement toward a union to protect athletes from the dictates of the NCAA was already in motion to defend athletes such as Jason White. However, Ramogi Huma’s involvement in promoting a union for college athletes did not come until O’Bannon v. NCAA was initiated in 2009, and Huma met with a disgruntled Northwestern University quarterback, Kain Colter, in 2013. The Colter effort led to the first major attempt at a legal union for athletes’ rights in college sport history. The O’Bannon case became the most noted lawsuit in the attempt to gain athletes’ rights to some of the largesse that was ending up in the NCAA treasury and university coffers.

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ch a PTer fif Teen

Is NCAA “Amateurism” Alive? T h e o ’ bannon l awSui T im Pac T

Amateurism has an almost sacred meaning. aTTorney Jeffrey keSSler, 2016

Athletes must not be paid. JuSTice John Paul STeVenS, 1984

I

f iT iS True ThaT The uniTed STaTeS iS The moST litigious society in the world, it is not surprising that intercollegiate athletics would be a scene for increasing litigious activity.1 Legally, stare decisis would be important in the NCAA winning the increasing legal suits brought against its policies. Based on past precedent, decisions emphasizing stare decisis would favor future judgments based on NCAA’s rule to protect its policies supporting amateurism. The tradition of stare decisis dates to English law and the Magna Carta of Medieval times.2 One might then expect that the concept of traditional “amateurism” in the twenty-first century would be a dominating feature in college sport, as it has been upheld in previous cases dealing with NCAA activities. The importance of amateurism under NCAA guidelines has been a dominant feature of many lawsuits against the NCAA and its constitution and bylaws since the 1980s. If American intercollegiate athletes had truly been amateur before and after the NCAA was founded in 1905, rather than hypocritically developed as fig-leafed professionalism, it is likely that twenty-first century “amateurism” would not have been attacked so consistently. Past precedent, however, delayed changes in the law and the practice of intercollegiate amateurism.

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amaTeuriSm and The key 1984 oklAhomA v. ncAA caSe The first prominent case making note of the importance of amateurism to intercollegiate athletics was, strangely, a media antitrust lawsuit known as Oklahoma v. NCAA in 1984. The ultimate landmark Supreme Court decision challenged the NCAA monopoly over the telecasting of college football games. The two lead universities challenging the NCAA monopoly were Oklahoma and Georgia. However, the money to support the 1981 lawsuit came principally from the College Football Association, formally founded in 1976 to gain more money from TV for dominating football institutions. The CFA, long forgotten, was a dynamic group formed of five conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big 8, Southeastern, Southwest, and Western Athletic) and independents, including Notre Dame and Penn State.3 Notre Dame was the most important supporter, as it had been challenging the NCAA television monopoly since its beginning in 1951. The ultimate Oklahoma case outcome was to wrest the telecasting of football from NCAA control. This was the first time that the US Supreme Court ruled amateur sport to be in violation of antitrust laws.4 It was not, though, the first time the NCAA had been accused of antitrust violations relative to television or control of individuals in intercollegiate athletics. When the NCAA first passed legislation to control the telecasting of games in the early 1950s to protect gate receipts, Notre Dame’s and the University of Pennsylvania’s efforts to allow telecasting by any individual institution was shot down by a huge majority of NCAA members. The effort was not taken to court by either Notre Dame or Penn.5 Later, when the NCAA voted to limit the number of football and basketball coaches on a staff, the judge in the so-called Hennessey case sided with the NCAA. The NCAA argued successfully that its regulations were “to keep university athletics from becoming professionalized to the extent that profitmaking objectives would overshadow educational objectives.” The NCAA argument was confirmed. The judge in the Hennessey lawsuit stated, “Without regulation, the desire of member institutions to remain athletically competitive would lead them to engage in activities that deny amateurism to the public.”6 Limiting the number of coaches on a football team was somehow related to amateurism. That was quite different than the nineteenth-century amateur belief that any professional coach was a violation of amateur sport. More than a decade later, the NCAA attempted to limit the earnings of what were known as graduate assistant coaches in basketball. 190

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Whereas the Hennessey case addressed the number of coaches allowed, the restricted-earnings coaches legislation addressed how much they could be paid. The NCAA passed restricted-earnings coaches legislation to cap a fourth basketball coach’s salary at $16,000 per year. Previously, institutions had been paying up to $60,000 to get experienced coaches to take the graduate assistant coach position. When the NCAA salary limit was challenged by coaches in Law v. NCAA, the court showed that there was horizontal price-fixing by the NCAA. That is, all competing colleges across the nation under restricted-earnings coaches agreed to pay the same salary to all the classified coaches, which was thus illegal under antitrust laws. This lawsuit was decided under the “rule of reason” (generally fact-based analysis) rather than “per se” (inherently anticompetitive) ruling out of “respect for the NCAA’s historical role in the preservation and encouragement of intercollegiate amateur athletics.”7 Despite respect for the NCAA’s so-called amateurism, the district court and the court of appeals found that capping salaries at $16,000 was a restraint of trade violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The court was not overly influenced by the NCAA’s argument that limiting salaries was important to preserving intercollegiate amateurism as noted in the precedent-setting US Supreme Court decision of 1984. Because it was decided at the US Supreme Court level, the dominant case to preserve amateurism was NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1984. In the Supreme Court’s 7–2 decision, the justices emphasized that they wanted to protect amateur college sport. Both the majority and dissenting opinions, used to determine the antitrust violation in the NCAA television policy, mentioned the importance of maintaining amateurism.8 In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens added credence to the concept of amateurism when he wrote about the telecasting of football. “In order to preserve the character and quality of the ‘product,’ athletes must not be paid, and must be required to attend class, and the like.” Stevens stated that this television monopoly case was tried under a “rule of reason” that allows more leeway for interpreting a “restraint of trade ruling” in monopoly cases, rather than a “per se” rule, in which the antitrust behavior is inherently illegal. This was done in part because of the judicial “respect for the NCAA’s historic role in the preservation and encouragement of intercollegiate amateur athletics” mentioned previously.9 Writing the opinion for the two dissenting justices was Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, a former University of Colorado All-American football player. White placed pronounced emphasis on the need for amateurism in college sport. “Noneconomic values like the promotion of 191

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amateurism and fundamental educational objectives,” White emphasized, “could not save the television plan from condemnation under the Sherman Act.”10 The Oklahoma case and justices’ attitudes toward amateurism on both sides of the decision have been used to preserve “amateurism” despite the original meaning of the term being lost generations before. It has been difficult in later cases to do anything but let the decision stand (stare decisis) based on amateurism. Jeffrey Kessler, a twenty-firstcentury lawyer for athletes seeking additional payment for participation, stated that amateurism “has an almost sacred meaning.”11 So it does in the law and in many people’s minds.

lawSuiTS and The SacredneSS of aThleTic ScholarShiPS and amaTeuriSm The sacredness of amateurism and its relationship to athletic scholarships came to the fore in numerous lawsuits. The courts were very deferential to the NCAA from the earliest cases until the Ed O’Bannon case against the NCAA began in 2009.12 Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s 1984 ruling about the NCAA monopoly of television rights, which included that “athletes must not be paid,” was writ large in the O’Bannon legal action. Ed O’Bannon came to challenge the NCAA and its monopolistic control over the names, images, and likenesses (NIL) of unpaid athletes in video games. O’Bannon had been the most valuable player in the NCAA March Madness championship of 1995, when UCLA defeated Arkansas 89–78. Ed O’Bannon became a “star” in the video game developed from the film of the championship game in which he scored thirty points. There was a long road to the O’Bannon decision. When intercollegiate football and men’s basketball video games became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, three groups had merged efforts in the production of the profitable medium. The NCAA teamed up with its licensing company, Collegiate Licensing, and Electronic Arts, a dominating video games company. Electronic Arts was established in 1982 and produced its first video game the next year, Hard Hat Mac. By the late 1980s, the California company’s founder, William “Trip” Hawkins, hit a game-winning “touchdown” by teaming up with a successful Super Bowl professional coach and probably TV’s most acclaimed 1980s football color commentator and analyst, John Madden. John Madden Football was released in 1988, and it soon became the iconic sport video game and earned millions of dollars. Until the 1990s, Electronic Arts had stayed away from “amateur” college sport, but that changed when 192

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O’Bannon was featured in a video game. Electronic Arts moved into the billion-dollar collegiate football and men’s basketball video game industry in the late 1990s. College football came first in 1997, but it was followed by basketball the next year. Electronic Arts contracted through the NCAA to gain the rights to use the likenesses of college basketball players such as UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon. The game avatar, or representation of O’Bannon, used similar skin color, agility, height, weight, facial geometry, movement, and jersey number to his. Only his name was absent.13 Unfortunately for NCAA athletes, they had lost their rights to personal images or to “receive remuneration” by NCAA fiat in the 1950s, nearly a half century before. A year after the NCAA voted to allow paying players with athletic scholarships, the NCAA determined that a full athletic scholarship was enough pay—no more. The NCAA’s 1957 interpretation of its amateurism policy stated, “A student-athlete’s picture may not be associated with a commercial product in such a way as to imply endorsement, nor may he receive remuneration.”14 By the twenty-first century, all scholarship athletes in order to participate had to sign Form 88–3a (Student Athlete Statement) giving the NCAA rights to the athletes’ images, so-called “identity rights.”15 Soon, the increasingly litigious American society became prominent in contesting the NCAA’s “amateur” sport policy and control of athletes’ images.

The ed o’bannon — Sonny Vaccaro — ncaa connecTion The rights to athletes’ identities, including their NIL, became the focus of the O’Bannon lawsuit. O’Bannon’s book, Court Justice, opens with, “Ed, you’ve got to believe me, Spencer was playing you in this video game last night.”16 When Ed O’Bannon saw his image on a video game at the home of the son of his friend, he was flattered at first. It didn’t take long to see that O’Bannon had been exploited when thousands of the sixty-dollar game in which he was featured were being sold, and he received nothing. Within weeks, businessman Sonny Vaccaro made O’Bannon aware that he should have been paid for the NCAA and Electronic Arts making money from the use of his likeness in a video game. Vaccaro was the shoe-marketing expert who became known for paying off college coaches to dress their teams in Nike shoes, an effective way to advertise Nike Corporation. This occurred particularly through national television of football and basketball games, where the Nike swoosh logo was clearly seen. Vaccaro and Nike would eventually pay college coaches, 193

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such as Jerry Tarkanian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, hundreds of thousands of dollars to place Nike shoes on their players.17 Vaccaro knew that the athletes were the ones wearing Nike shoes, and that they should have benefited financially from wearing Nike equipment, not just the coaches. The involvement of Sonny Vaccaro is of interest because of the NCAA’s opposition to what Vaccaro was doing with the commercialized and professionalized development of boys’ basketball and the shoe industry. With the leadership of Vaccaro, Nike was conducting basketball camps for 120 of the best high school players, called Nike-ABCD (Academic Betterment and Career Development) Camp. O’Bannon attended and starred at one of them while in high school, and Vaccaro remembered the young basketball star. Nike subsidized ABCD and players such as O’Bannon with a quarter of a million dollars. Nike also funded summer basketball leagues at a cost of over $100,000. Additionally, Nike helped fund the Pittsburgh-based Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, run by Vaccaro since 1965.18 To undermine the influence of Vaccaro, the NCAA and the National Basketball Association came together in 2008 to form a nonprofit organization, iHoops, to run summer basketball programs. To NCAA leadership, this was done to “clean up” Vaccaro-run youth basketball. That it did not do so was clearly seen in the basketball recruiting scandal of 2017.19 More important historically, the NCAA’s involvement in youth basketball angered Vaccaro, who looked for ways to gain revenge. To Vaccaro, April 7, 2008, was “a date which will live in infamy” for the NCAA, as the attack on Pearl Harbor had been for Americans nearly seven decades before. That was the date the NCAA and the professional NBA came together to wage war on Vaccaro by forming iHoops (transformed into USA Basketball in 2012).20 On that infamous date, Vaccaro claimed that the leaders of the NCAA “made the biggest mistake in their life.” Vaccaro commented, “If there’s no iHoops, there’s no O’Bannon.”21 By then, the ex-Nike shoe marketer had for forty years been keeping a file of the many charges of NCAA injustices. It began with the Jerry Tarkanian basketball coaching case in which Tarkanian was persecuted in the mid-1970s by the NCAA without due process.22 Of all the cases, however, the creation of iHoops was foremost because it was a personal indictment of Vaccaro. He eventually went to Washington, DC, to discuss with antitrust committee senators the violation by the NCAA and NBA. He was also crusading and speaking out about athletes signing away their licensing rights to their names, images, and likenesses. On advice from a lawyer, he contacted the prestigious law firm of Michael Hausfeld, 194

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indicating that the time was right for an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA. To do this, Vaccaro needed some former college athletes to agree to sue the NCAA for signing away their NIL rights as seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Originally, only one ex-player responded positively, the former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon.23 O’Bannon, after a short tenure playing professional basketball, was a car salesman in Nevada, and he needed a great deal of help to be successful in a lawsuit against the NCAA. Ramogi Huma was one person who had been involved in the rights of athletes for a number of years. He was a freshman football player at UCLA the fall following O’Bannon’s outstanding basketball career ended there with a national championship. Huma was far more radical on the issue of players’ rights than was O’Bannon, and he became a leader in the O’Bannon case.

ramogi huma Prior To The o’bannon caSe Well before Ramogi Huma became intimately involved in the previously noted Northwestern University football players attempt to unionize in 2014, he was an important figure in challenging the legitimacy of the NCAA’s control over athletes’ names, images, and likenesses. He began his activist activity for athletes while an underclassman at UCLA in 1996 and continued following his graduation. After founding his Collegiate Athletes Coalition in 2001, Huma was involved in myriad activities to back rights of collegiate athletes. This was particularly visible in men’s basketball and football, the two sports that made money for most Big-Time collegiate institutions. Huma’s early goals were to bring about year-round medical coverage and death benefits for college athletes in addition to allowing athletes to earn more than the $2,000 limit set by the NCAA during the school year. Possibly more important, Huma and the new CAC wanted athletic scholarships to cover the cost of attendance, not just tuition, room, board, fees, and books.24 Beginning at his home institution, UCLA, Huma persuaded football players to join the CAC and then moved on to get most of the institutions of the PAC-10 on the West Coast to become involved in players’ rights. He was aided by the strength of the United Steelworkers of America union in the summer of 2001, when it backed the CAC. The link to the steelworkers union helped to move the CAC to a national level. Early on, Huma was not interested in having athletes classified as employees, start a union, or go on strike for better working conditions. He benefited from the strength of the United Steelworkers, who gave the CAC legal advice 195

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and helped with communications and expenses. Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff gave the CAC additional national visibility when he penned a fictitious memo to NCAA president Cedric Dempsey suggesting the possibility of the CAC turning into a union if the NCAA did not take action.25 That was not Huma’s intent, but it was certainly a possibility. The president of the United Steelworkers, Leo Gerard, also stirred the athletic pot. Gerard was evidently little concerned with athletic scholarships or the concept of amateurism, but he was bothered by the condition of athletes as workers in the lucrative areas of intercollegiate athletics. When the popular CBS show 60 Minutes conducted interviews for an early 2002 segment on Huma and his CAC, the United Steelworkers president stated that “the NCAA was no longer some poor little operation. . . . It’s bringing in billions and billions.” Moreover, the NCAA was, according to Gerard, an “athletic sweatshop” exploiting athletes. This was said just before Huma was to meet with NCAA president Dempsey to discuss improving the treatment of athletes. Dempsey, a former athletic director, considered the “sweatshop” statement a condemnation of the NCAA and canceled the CAC meeting with Huma. The NCAA president opposed the CAC–United Steelworkers “alliance,” stating that the NCAA already had student input with its NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.26 This was a committee formed over a decade before to, for the first time, give an inkling of the athletes’ voice in NCAA proceedings.27 The chosen Student-Athlete Advisory Committee athletes did meet, but they had no voice or vote in the conduct of college sport. “The StudentAthlete Advisory Committee of the NCAA is a sham,” Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff wrote. It is “a tiny oligarchy selected by the schools and the [NCAA] management council that can’t even introduce legislation, much less vote on it.”28 This was as true in the early twenty-first century regarding athletes as it was of faculty representatives and presidents when the NCAA a century before essentially dismissed early student leadership in forming athletic policy.29 While the NCAA was rejecting athletes’ concerns as they were being expressed through Ramogi Huma, the head of the CAC was obtaining more information on the condition and treatment of so-called amateur athletes. In the fall of 2001, three collegiate football players died, moving the CAC more rapidly to the forefront in promoting greater medical care and death benefits for athletes. In addition, cases such as Ohio University’s Jason Whitehead made an impact on Huma and the CAC. Whitehead was temporarily paralyzed with a football spine injury, and his family was told in the fall of 2000 that his medical expenses would not be paid for by Ohio University. While he recovered, he was unable to play football and 196

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in several months was told that his football scholarship would be cut in half. His football coach made the unfeeling but possibly accurate assessment for Ohio University that “in these times of state budget cuts, we need to make smarter consumer decisions.” As a consumer denied health care, injured athlete Whitehead retorted, “I just feel betrayed.” Ramogi Huma, aware of the case, responded, “There’s no excuse for a school to renege on a commitment made during the recruiting process. . . . Every athlete participating in NCAA sports is vulnerable.”30 In this case, the vulnerable were the athletes with one-year renewable grants. As a “cost-cutting measure” in 1973, the NCAA had passed, without discussion, a constitutional change for a one-year renewable scholarship measure to replace the four-year scholarship.31 Although it was considered cost-cutting legislation, what it was intended to do was better control athletes and eliminate scholarship athletes who were not producing athletically for the coach. Recruiting mistakes by coaches could now be eliminated to provide slots for other, supposedly better-performing athletes in the recruitment process. This is what John McKenna of Georgia Tech described in 1973 as the “one-year tryout.”32 Thirty years later, in the case of Jason Whitehead, it was not a recruiting mistake but an unfortunate injury that reduced his scholarship. Huma, who himself had been injured and had lost out on his senior year of starring for UCLA, wanted the NCAA to rectify the injustice of this NCAA rule. Other cases of major injuries and major costs to the athletes came to the fore in the early twenty-first century. One was that of Erin Knauer, a crew member from Colgate University, who injured her back on a rowing machine workout. With no NCAA insurance and a reluctant Colgate administration, Knauer ran up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills. She said, “I thought I would be covered,” just as Jason Whitehead believed that his school or the NCAA would cover his costs.33 The difference in the two cases was that Whitehead was on an athletic scholarship, while Knauer was not. Nevertheless, the NCAA was capable of easily paying for major medical expenses from the largesse of the NCAA March Madness millions, but injury costs and insurance policies were not high on the priority list of member schools and NCAA leadership. While athlete injuries and deaths were, from the start, major agenda items for Ramogi Huma’s Collegiate Athletes Coalition, they did not become the most prominent. The rising issue was athletes’ competing and creating billions from gate receipts and television dollars, yet not receiving enough in athletic scholarships to pay all their educational expenses. One who complained at the turn of the twenty-first century was a St. Joseph University basketball player, Frank Wilkins. “At the big-time 197

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schools, there is a lot of money being made off players’ names,” Wilkins complained, “and we’re not allowed to make a dime off of our own name.”34 It was more ammunition for Ramogi Huma. He soon became a consultant in a class-action antitrust lawsuit in 2006 against the NCAA raised by the Stanford University football player Jason White. Not to be confused with the Heisman Trophy winner from Oklahoma, Stanford’s Jason White sued the NCAA for limiting athlete-based aid that did not provide money to cover all educational costs that went beyond tuition, room, board, fees, and books. Placing caps on scholarships, White claimed, was an unreasonable restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Rather than risk losing the antitrust court case, the NCAA settled out of court by setting up the Former Student-Athlete Fund in 2008 worth $10 million. It would reimburse expenses above the NCAA athletic scholarship limits for Division I football players and men’s Division I basketball athletes from 2002 to 2008. In addition, the NCAA agreed to pay another $218 million to about twenty thousand athletes for the gap existing between regular athletic scholarships and the cost of attendance. The settlement was not financially favorable to the NCAA. However, the agreement included a statement that the NCAA was not guilty of any wrongdoing.35 Meanwhile, the pot was being stirred for greater payments to athletes in the early years of the twenty-first century, prior to the Ed O’Bannon case being placed front and center.

The ncaa loSeS on o’bannon’S “nameS, imageS, and likeneSSeS” With a push from Sonny Vaccaro, who had been thrown over by the NCAA, Ed O’Bannon lent his name for a dominant lawsuit. It was against Electronic Arts, the NCAA, and its licensing company to allow college athletes and ex-college athletes to be compensated for the NCAA’s use of their images. Vaccaro, the former Nike shoe agent, came to the aid of O’Bannon. Vaccaro knew that athletics in colleges were no longer amateur, if they had ever been. Revenge was not far away. Vaccaro would support a lawsuit to allow NCAA athletes to gain financially from their prominence and further discredit the already broken and hypocritical notion of amateurism in college sports. O’Bannon wanted trust funds from the proceeds of athletes’ NIL while they were in college, while Vaccaro intended the defeat of the NCAA in any attempt to prevent athletes from being paid. To Vaccaro, it was wrong that the athletes generated the 198

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millions of dollars from collegiate athletics while coaches and administrators gained the benefits.36 So while the presiding judge of the O’Bannon case, Claudia Wilken, denied Vaccaro the opportunity to testify in the case because his testimony would be “irrelevant,” Vaccaro was backing the case to defeat the NCAA’s opposition to athletes benefitting from the use of their NILs.37 Many college administrators and coaches were opposed to any decision favoring O’Bannon winning the antitrust case against the NCAA. One was longtime Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who threatened that the Big Ten would drop athletic scholarships if O’Bannon won.38 Most were not as foolish as Delany. Significantly, several prominent individuals, such as Walter Byers, were supporters of the athletes. The former head of the NCAA from 1951 to 1987 evidently had a road to Damascus conversion in opposing the tyranny of the NCAA. It was made clear in his book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, written after his executive directorship. The NCAA administrators, Byers wrote, were “firmly committed to the neoplantation belief that the enormous proceeds from college games belong to the overseers (the administrators) and supervisors (coaches). The plantation workers performing in the arena may receive only those benefits authorized by the overseers.”39 Byers, as NCAA executive director, had originally fought for amateur college sports and was even opposed to full athletic scholarships when introduced by the NCAA in 1956. Shortly after he retired from the NCAA, he concluded that the NCAA expanded its policies to “control the economics of college athletics . . . and to safeguard the college athlete from personal financial gain.” The NCAA did this by making a constitutional change to declare the “NCAA mission is to protect athletes ‘from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.’” Byers believed that colleges had “expanded their control of athletics in the name of amateurism—a modern day misnomer for economic tyranny.”40 The ex-president of the University of Michigan, who had presided over one of America’s great state universities, like Walter Byers, had tried to protect the institution and the NCAA when he was in a position of power. Nevertheless, James Duderstadt came to condemning athletics and their control once he retired from running his institution. Duderstadt presided over Michigan in the early 1990s, when the corrupt Michigan “Fab Five” basketball team contended for national titles. He changed course after retiring as president emeritus. Then he wrote a book, Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University, criticizing university presidents for not acting to prevent corruption of intercollegiate athletics. He eventually came to the side of the exploited athlete when the 199

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O’Bannon case was decided. “The NCAA’s objective is to preserve the brand,” Duderstadt commented, “so that it provides revenue primarily for a small number of people who get very, very rich on the exploitation of young students . . . [and] not to protect the student athletes.”41 This is what O’Bannon, Huma, Vaccaro, and the O’Bannon lawyers were arguing, and they ended up winning on the issue of NCAA exploitation and violation of antitrust law. In the O’Bannon case, Judge Claudia Wilken was not persuaded by NCAA testimony that athletes should not be paid. She listened to testimony from the public, who, by more than a two-thirds majority, opposed paying college athletes more than an athletic scholarship.42 She also considered but did not agree with Justice John Paul Stevens and the 1984 Supreme Court case in which he ruled that college “athletes must not be paid.” That was a difficult proposition. Seldom, if ever, do lower courts overrule the US Supreme Court, and Judge Wilken apparently did not use legal “gymnastics” to reject the statement that “athletes must not be paid.” She basically ignored it, when the NCAA brought it up, because she stated that not paying athletes lacked any factual findings. The judge wrote, “The historical record that the NCAA cites as evidence of its longstanding commitment to amateurism is unpersuasive. This history documents how malleable the NCAA’s definition of amateurism has been since its founding.” To Judge Wilken, amateur rules needed to be proven, not presumed, as in the 1984 Supreme Court case. After a two-week bench, not jury, trial, District Judge Wilken concluded that the NCAA rules prohibiting athletes from receiving names, images, or likenesses compensation violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 as a restraint of trade.43 Judge Wilken then made a strange decision about paying athletes. Wilken was hearing testimony from former CBS executive Neal Pilson when she asked him whether his opinion about college amateurism depended on the level of money paid to athletes. After hemming and hawing about a response, Pilson eventually said, “I tell you that a million dollars would trouble me and $5,000 wouldn’t.”44 It appears that Judge Wilken was listening carefully, and her remedy for violating the Sherman Act was set at $5,000 per year per athlete as a reasonable remedy. She ruled in August 2014 that the NCAA had no “core principles” relative to amateurism and that athletes could earn up to $5,000 per year in deferred compensation.45 Like the 1984 Oklahoma TV case in which the NCAA was found guilty for the first time of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 in restraining trade, the Wilken decision three decades later declared that the NCAA’s amateur rules had violated antitrust laws. 200

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“The NCAA may not prohibit athletes from receiving compensation,” the judge ruled, “for the use of their names, images, and likenesses.”46 O’Bannon’s call for athletes to be able to profit from the use of their NILs was now legal, as was a $5,000 limit on deferred compensation. The $5,000 rule had defeated the NCAA’s amateur policy. Or so it seemed. The NCAA appealed Judge Wilken’s decision to the US Court of Appeals, the three-member appellate board, claiming that athletes must not be paid to preserve the amateur nature of intercollegiate athletics. Courts of appeals have a great deal of power, and the Ninth Circuit covers the West Coast, about 20 percent of the US population. As circuit court decisions can move up to the US Supreme Court but do so in less than 2 percent of all cases, the O’Bannon case was not likely to go beyond the Ninth Circuit. The court of appeals agreed with the district court of Judge Wilken on most issues, including opposition to the NCAA’s insistence that it was upholding amateurism in its scholarship requirements.47 The NCAA athletic scholarship policy, the appeals court agreed, was a conspiracy in restraint of trade that the Sherman Act had prohibited 125 years before. Before the case went to the appeals court and before reaching a judgment, Judge Wilken offered two alternatives to the NCAA to redress antitrust violations. First, she suggested holding in trust athletes’ funds for the use of names, images, and likenesses. Second, Wilken brought up awarding athletic scholarships for the full cost of attendance.48 Neither suggestion was satisfactory to President Mark Emmert of the NCAA or its legal counsel. NCAA counsel Donald Remy, who had imperiously rejected any change in NCAA policy while the suit was in the district court, stated, “The U.S. Supreme Court and numerous lower courts have determined that the NCAA’s amateurism rules are fully consistent with the nation’s antitrust laws.” The 1984 Supreme Court case and the justices’ stance on amateurism were again brought to the court’s attention.49 The US Court of Appeals confirmed the lower court’s antitrust determination but rejected one important part of Judge Wilken’s ruling: “The district court clearly erred in finding it a viable alternative to allow students to receive NIL cash payments untethered to their education expenses.” Paying an athlete deferred compensation of up to $5,000 per year was vacated by the higher court. The three-person tribunal concluded, “Not paying student-athletes is precisely what makes them amateurs.”50 The court had succumbed to the commonly held myth that college athletes were then, and had always been, non-paid amateurs. The principal feature the NCAA had working for it was the tradition of “amateurism” and, in addition, over half a billion dollars of excess 201

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March Madness funds. The NCAA riches could be used to fight a losing proposition that amateur college athletes were anything but a camouflage for fig-leafed professionalism. The O’Bannon case, rejected by the US Supreme Court when appealed, foreshadowed future cases challenging the flawed concept of amateurism and financial caps on athletic scholarships.51 With that came the possibility of a free market for athletes’ services.

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ch a PTer Six Teen

The Alston and Jenkins Lawsuits, and NCAA Fig-Leafed Professionalism The NCAA’s claim of the need to promote amateurism is merely a pretense. hArvArd lAw review, 1992

[The athletic scholarship is an illegal] horizontal agreement among competitors to cap the amount of remuneration schools may provide athletes. marTin JenkinS, 2014

T

he naTional collegiaTe aThleTic aSSociaTion for well over a century tried to bring about amateurism— for men for the first eight decades and then for women following the NCAA takeover of women’s collegiate athletics in the 1980s. Never were the men and women athletes asked what they wanted on any issue including amateurism, that is, from the time that faculty representatives to the NCAA made recommendations beginning in 1905.1 Later, when presidents of NCAA institutions took over control of the NCAA in the 1990s, the faux noblesse oblige leaders of colleges and universities continued the policy of “knowing” what was best for those who participated in the intercollegiate contests. The “knowing” was that amateurism was only for the competitors, and professionalism was for everyone else, including the NCAA and all the institutions. Along the way there had been a few protests by athletes, such as the University of Pittsburgh football players’ “union” in the 1930s and the attempt in the 2010s by Northwestern University football players to unionize. Women athletes, however, were the first to legally demand being paid through athletic scholarships when,

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in the early 1970s, the Kellmeyer lawsuit brought about the legalization of athletic scholarships for women, something that had existed in conferences for male athletes since the Great Depression. At no time had athletes demanded an open financial market for their services. This would change in the twenty-first century.

The changing “legal” definiTion of AmAteur By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, men and women athletes were being paid officially to participate in intercollegiate sports. But more importantly, the men had been paid unofficially for well over a century in a variety of ways. When Judge Claudia Wilken in the O’Bannon ruling stated that the “NCAA does not necessarily adhere to a single definition of amateurism,” she was reflecting about a century of amateur waffling.2 The first definition by the NCAA of amateurism in 1906 made clear that there were to be no “inducements to players to enter Colleges or Universities because of the athletic abilities and of supporting or maintaining players.”3 The unenforceable rule recommendation by the NCAA was broken with impunity and may have affected the academic quality of institutions of higher education. Rev. Endicott Peabody, English-educated headmaster of Massachusetts’s Groton School, wrote a few years later, “As a rule our scholars are not athletes, and our athletes are not scholars.”4 But they were often paid in one form or another. Trying to place the amateur athletes in a positive light, the NCAA, a decade after being created, defined an amateur as one “who engages in sports solely for the physical, mental or social benefits he derives therefrom.”5 The definition was seldom followed, and the famed Carnegie Report on American College Athletics in 1929 reported that athletes desired “to retain the prestige that amateurism confers and at the same time to reap the monetary or material rewards of professionalism.”6 This was emphasized in the preface to the Carnegie Report, which stated that a university “wants students, it wants popularity, but above all it wants money and always more money.”7 Money and amateurism mixed poorly, not only for athletes but for the institutions, individually and collectively. The Great Depression did not appreciably slow the payment of athletes, and one major conference, the Southeastern Conference, decided in 1935 to be transparent and pay athletes with free tuition, room, board, and books—the creation of the legal “athletic scholarship.” Other institutions were doing this, but undercover, including the University of Southern California, which, three years before, even offered a woman, Babe 204

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Didrikson, an athletic scholarship.8 From the beginning of transparent conference athletic scholarships in the 1930s to the NCAA officially offering them nationally in the 1950s, the payment of athletes has continued and thus made them professionals under the original NCAA definition. Thus, the broad definition of amateurism had changed even from before the NCAA was formed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, true amateur college athletes could neither be recruited nor paid in any form, coaches could not be paid, gate receipts could not be collected, training tables could not be furnished for athletes, tutors for athletes could not be free, and competitions could not be for prizes or against professionals.9 What remained of those amateur negatives after the NCAA was formed was the concept that amateur athletes could not be paid in any form. That was the case on the national level until after World War II, when tuition could be offered an athlete, and within a few years it was expanded to a scholarship of tuition, room, board, fees, books, and a fifteen-dollar-per-month stipend. The stipend was ended as a cost-cutting measure in the 1970s. Eventually, two major amateur changes for the benefit of athletes occurred in the early twenty-first century. First, the NCAA allowed the payment of athletes’ scholarships to cover the entire cost of education. Second, the NCAA reluctantly conceded that athletes’ names, images, and likenesses and their sale belonged to the athletes. Essentially the term amateur for college athletes had lost all, or almost all, of its meaning. In addition to the full athletic scholarship, athletes have been paid in a variety of ways. Some were direct payments to athletes who were military veterans, such as the federal government’s GI Bill of Rights grants and the widespread Pell Grants for financially needy students. This legislation was passed by the federal government in the two decades following the closing years of World War II and was not specifically intended for athletes. There were those in the NCAA who wanted to take the GI Bill funding away from athletes who were getting full athletic scholarships following World War II. Some argued a year after full grants were legalized by the NCAA in 1956 that money coming to military veterans for fighting in World War II and the Korean War should be taken away from athletes but no other academic recipients. Maintaining what was considered amateurism to some in the NCAA Council appeared to be more important than fighting for one’s country.10 Trying to preserve amateurism by denying war veterans their just due appeared to be unjust if not hypocritical. When Pell Grants (Educational Opportunity Grants) began in the mid-1960s, excess grant money was confiscated from the athletes and 205

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retained by athletic departments to preserve the athletes’ amateur status. The track coach at the University of Kansas believed that this was “Robin Hood in reverse,” taking from the poor to give to the rich.11 After 1995, the Pell Grant exploitation of athletes was dropped by the NCAA, allowing athletes to receive more money than their full athletic scholarships. The longtime president of the University of Washington William Gerberding commented, “Amateurism is surrounded by myth, selfdelusion, and hypocrisy.” The flawed ideal of amateurism, Gerberding believed, was “neither fair nor democratic, nor is it consistent with free market principles.”12 Later, during the O’Bannon appeals case in 2015, the appeals tribunal ruled that Pell Grants awarded above the cost of attendance “have not eroded the NCAA’s culture of amateurism.”13 Amateurism, however, had been eroded for years, having been worn away well before the NCAA-sanctioned payment of athletic scholarships in the 1950s or later payments such as the Pell Grants above the scholarship limit. The acceptance of Pell Grants added to an athlete’s income was just one more instance of Americans rejecting the class-based notion of amateurism borrowed generations before from the socially elite sportsmen from Britain. The British influence on amateurism in the modern Olympics had an impact on NCAA amateurism from the beginning. Once the Olympic Movement allowed professional participation in 1986, the International Olympic Committee eliminated the term amateur from its charter. The NCAA did not eliminate the designation, and it eventually and grudgingly allowed professional Olympians to participate in intercollegiate athletics. Following the professionalization of the Olympics in the 1980s, athletes at the Olympics and other international competitions were awarded financial bonuses for winning medals at such games. These payments became acceptable under NCAA rules so that a few great and paid athletes could attend NCAA colleges and participate athletically as amateurs. The non-meaning of the term amateur to the NCAA was clearly seen when American swimmer Katie Ledecky received $355,000 for her five medal swimming performances in the 2016 Rio Olympics and was then allowed to compete collegiately. These medal bonuses from the United States Olympic Committee and the American swimming governing body were allowed by the NCAA when she chose to attend Stanford University, but because of NCAA rules, she could not accept a waffle maker for participating on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. An even greater award was given to swimmer Joseph Schooling, whose native country, Singapore, awarded him $740,000 for winning the one-hundred-meter butterfly over twenty-three-gold-medal-winning Olympian Michael 206

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Phelps. Nevertheless, the professional Schooling joined the swim team at the University of Texas at Austin.14 The Ledecky and Schooling professional payments did not fit well within the NCAA bylaws, which stated, “A professional athlete is one who receives any kind of payment, directly or indirectly.”15 That is, unless the NCAA permits the payment. The decades-long opposition to NCAA amateur rules found in the Harvard Law Review in 1992 was never more clear: “The NCAA’s claim of the need to promote amateurism is merely a pretense.”16 Even the International Olympic Committee eliminated the term amateur from its charter, but not the NCAA. Instead, the NCAA has used the 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling in nearly every case questioning restrictions on athletes’ payments as antitrust violations. In order to preserve the character and quality of NCAA athletics, Stevens wrote, “athletes must not be paid.”17 Yet, athletes have been paid in many other ways than outright payments for athletic performance such as the ones Ledecky and Schooling received. For instance, tennis players are given an exception, as professional tennis participation does not inhibit attending a college to play tennis.18 There is, though, a limit of $10,000 prize money per year to be considered an amateur before beginning an intercollegiate career. The amount $10,001 would be a violation. Not only tennis players, but golfers, two-person beach volleyball participants, and two-person synchronized diving teams could also be professionals and then join the NCAA amateur ranks.19 NCAA athletes can also be paid well above the education cost of athletic scholarships. Two funds were created: the 2016 Academic Enhancement Fund (AEF) and the 1999 Student Assistance Fund (SAF). Although administered differently, both met financial needs of athletes from funds with well over $100 million spent annually. The money came almost entirely from financial surpluses of the NCAA-run March Madness basketball tournament. Individual athletes could claim money from the two funds for almost any sport-related expense, such as tutoring, educational supplies, insurance premiums, medical charges, clothing, travel outlays, and personal or family expenses. The NCAA pointedly indicated that only 2 percent of the AEF went to “personal or family expenses,” revealing that athletes were receiving little of the money personally or for family members.20 Significantly, the funds were made available after such litigants as O’Bannon, Alston, and Jenkins threatened the entire concepts of amateurism and scholarship caps, and that money was going principally toward educational expenses under the NCAA “amateur” model. 207

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Numerous athletes were given other nondirect payments worth thousands of dollars each year that were not generally considered payments— but they were financial rewards nevertheless. Of the payments that were made for well over a century were those for free tutors for athletes. This had been formalized since the late twentieth century as part of nearly all Big-Time institutions’ practices and known as athletic-academic counseling services. Generally conducted in multimillion dollar facilities, their main purpose was to help keep athletes academically eligible for athletic participation. In addition, food, once restricted under NCAA rules, became abundant especially after the O’Bannon lawsuit, triggered in part by Ramogi Huma’s Collegiate Athletes Coalition and charges by athletes of a lack of food.21 Most of the Big-Time universities hired nutritionists to aid athletes, and some employed chefs who were trained to meet the athletes’ needs, especially where dorms with kitchen facilities had been built with athletic funds for housing athletes. Elite housing was often offered to athletes by some of the wealthier universities. There were other bonuses given to athletes, especially in profitmaking football and men’s basketball. Football tickets given to athletes could be sold for several times the ticket price when important games were on the schedule. In addition, when about half of the Big-Time teams went to bowl games, commercial businesses such as Adidas, Best Buy, and Amazon gave gifts that were capped by NCAA rules at $550 to each participant.22 Bowl athletes and basketball tournament players were also given per diem payments, and they seldom needed to spend any of the money because meals were generally paid for by the athletic administration. Presumably, these accoutrements would still be available if the cap had been removed from athletic scholarships under later lawsuits such as Jenkins v. NCAA. In the last decades of the twentieth century, athletes in football and men’s basketball became more cognizant of the amount of money they were generating. This was especially true after television generated millions and then billions for the NCAA, institutions, and certain individuals. When specific coaches and athletic administrators began signing million-dollar contracts, it was obvious to many athletes that the money was not being filtered down to them, as their athletic scholarship contracts were worth even less money than the ones for those who participated in the 1950s and ’60s. At that time, athletes were paid through grants-in-aid with additional laundry money and course-related supplies officially sanctioned by the NCAA, but that was taken away in 1975.23 Following the turn of the century, athlete-generated lawsuits came first and were followed by state and federal legislation to upend the concept of amateurism 208

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and the payment of athletes. The change led to greater justice for athletes, but not necessarily to the betterment of higher education in America. Major questions arose and were unanswered. Are athletes’ financial rewards to be “tethered to educational expenses”?24 Another question not answered adequately in the twenty-first century, nor more than a century before, was, Are college athletics educational? Would allowing athletes to be paid more than an athletic scholarship be more—or less—educational?

The alSTon caSe iS unreSolVed buT ProduceS oVer $200 million for aThleTeS Somewhat separate from the O’Bannon decision to allow athletes to gain financially from the commercial use of their names, images, and likenesses, several athletes took it another step forward for their financial well-being in challenging the NCAA’s “amateur” policies. The “free market” in paying college athletes was ripe for a judicial decision. Alston v. NCAA was a “free market” case. Shawne Alston graduated with honors from West Virginia University after playing four years as a running back from 2009 to 2012. In 2014, Alston challenged the NCAA for athletic scholarship antitrust violations two months after Northwestern football players called for a labor union to challenge NCAA rulings. Alston’s lawsuit was tendered a month before US Judge Claudia Wilken ruled that the O’Bannon class-action suit against the NCAA would go to trial. The NCAA was being attacked in O’Bannon’s NIL case, Northwestern’s union case, and Shawne Alston’s and Martin Jenkins’s free agency and elimination of scholarship caps cases. Shawne Alston sued not only the NCAA but five major conferences for antitrust violations that capped athletic scholarships at less than the cost of attendance. The lawsuit by Alston, who personally took out a $5,500 loan to finish the cost of his education, eventually called for all Division I football and men’s and women’s basketball players from 2010 forward to receive the difference between what the NCAA allowed and the full cost of education as one possibility, and free-market, unlimited cash payments as another.25 Well before a decision was made in the case under Judge Claudia Wilken, the two sides came to an agreement on the damages portion of the Alston case. Alston and the NCAA agreed that the NCAA would pay $208.7 million to nearly fifty thousand college athletes whose college expenses were thousands of dollars more than their athletic scholarships covered.26 The NCAA officials likely caved financially because they felt they would lose in a trial. The NCAA had already 209

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been beaten in the Jason White case in 2008, when, by settling out of court, the NCAA paid $10 million to about twelve thousand football and basketball players for bona fide educational expenses above their athletic scholarships from 2002 to 2008.27 The NCAA paid out more than twenty times that in the Alston case, but the antitrust aspect of the Alston case continued. Prior to the O’Bannon, Alston, Jenkins, and White cases, however, several cases were brought by athletes to challenge the NCAA’s hold over rights that might logically be under an athlete’s control. Jeremy Bloom in the previous decade became a symbol for athletes who would challenge the NCAA’s statute about amateurism and its rule to maintain the “clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports.” Bloom, as a teenage world champion freestyle mogul skier, was given an athletic scholarship in 2004 to participate with the University of Colorado football team. As Bloom began endorsing ski equipment and clothing because of his skiing success, he was banned by the NCAA from participating on the Colorado football team. When he asked the court for an injunction to allow him to play “amateur” college football, the court denied his request based on his being a professional skier. The concept of NCAA amateurism found in thirteen pages of amateur rules in its bylaws still held sway with the legal system for another decade.28 The NCAA would later change its rule and begin allowing professional athletes in one sport to participate in another sport. What was once clearly defined historically as professional was now defined as amateur. In a similar amateur-driven case unjustly created by NCAA legislation, Andrew Oliver was denied participation as a baseball pitcher for Oklahoma State University because a lawyer was present when Oliver, as a high school graduate, was offered a baseball contract by the Minnesota Twins worth nearly $400,000. Oliver turned down the offer, deciding to participate for Oklahoma State University. He had, though, violated NCAA Bylaw 12.3.2.1, which stated that “a lawyer may not be present during discussions of a contract offer with a professional organization.”29 Oliver went to court in his home state of Ohio requesting a permanent injunction against the NCAA ruling. Common Pleas Judge Tygh Tone must have felt that Oliver was denied ordinary due process rights in which access to legal counsel is common in democracies, but not under NCAA and it “capricious” bylaws. As the NCAA often does when it is about to lose a case, it surrendered just prior to an October 2009 trial and paid Oliver $750,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Oliver was the first athlete to “win” against the NCAA, setting a precedent for future challenges against unjust NCAA rules. As one lawyer wrote, the Oliver 210

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case exposed the “arbitrary NCAA regulations hidden behind the veil of amateurism.”30 The Oliver case confirmed what an exceptional Harvard Law Review article had noted nearly two decades before: Courts have wrongly deferred to the amateurism bylaws and to the NCAA definition. . . . The NCAA’s claim of the need to promote amateurism is merely a pretense; the NCAA bylaws themselves do not adhere to a pure notion of amateurism, and colleges and universities frequently violate the limited compensation bylaw. . . . [Athletes] are denied a fair share of the profits generated by their efforts and are inhibited from testing the professional players’ market.31

Over two decades later, future cases, especially those decided by Judge Claudia Wilken, would confirm the Harvard Law Review article, which was clearly stated and revelatory. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the NCAA was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay off athletes and legal fees to preserve its amateur rules. While the NCAA was withdrawing a portion of its huge reserve fund to pay athletes to save its holy grail of amateurism, the 2014 Alston lawsuit, Alston v. NCAA, dragged on, eventually into the next decade. The same judge, Claudia Wilken, who presided over the Ed O’Bannon NIL case was in charge of the Alston lawsuit. In the 2015 O’Bannon appellate court decision, the three members ruled that payments beyond athletes’ athletic scholarships must be “funds related to their education.” The appellate judges further stated that the difference between offering athletes “education-related compensation and offering them cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor; it is a quantum leap.”32 It was likely that any Wilken decision in the Alston case would have monetary awards tethered to the educational enterprise. A “free market” for athletes to earn their athletic worth seemed unlikely even though the idea of amateurism, whatever that meant over the years, was under intense scrutiny by the courts. It is difficult to distinguish the Alston v. NCAA case from the Jenkins v. NCAA case, for while the two lawsuits were not identical, they significantly overlapped. The Alston and Jenkins suits were consolidated for discovery purposes and placed with Judge Wilken.33 Both cases against the NCAA were argued in a different amateur athletic milieu than the Bloom and Oliver lawsuits because, until then, no athlete had ever successfully challenged NCAA amateur rules. Oliver’s Oklahoma State financial win was significant for the cases that followed, such as 211

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Alston and Jenkins. Future cases would use the arguments of the Harvard Law Review that the NCAA was violating US antitrust legislation with illegal restraint of trade when it placed controls over collegiate athletes. The Jenkins case appeared to be the dominant case.

marTin JenkinS and The free markeT caSe for aThleTeS The Martin Jenkins lawsuit was little noticed by the public in the mid-2010s while other issues in collegiate sport were more publicized. More prominent was the fact that the NCAA was receiving a billion dollars from the March Madness basketball tournament while not taking any action against the University of North Carolina and its decades-long sham coursework for athletes to keep them eligible. Nor did it take any official action in the Michigan State University predominately women’s gymnastics sex abuse scandal involving hundreds of gymnasts. The Jenkins v. NCAA case would likely have a greater influence on the direction taken in intercollegiate athletics than the obviously reprehensible North Carolina educational standards or Michigan State sex scandals. Indeed, it was much easier to understand athletes being given grades with no or little work or that a team physician was molesting young women while supposedly treating their physical ailments than to comprehend the legal issues in the Jenkins case. It was far more difficult to understand the complexities in Jenkins v. NCAA of combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, the marginal value between scholarships and money athletes might receive in the open market, awards tethered to education, or the case being tested using rule-of-reason rather than per se analysis. Martin Jenkins, a defensive back for Clemson University from 2010 to 2014, sued the NCAA over athletic scholarship limits. Less than three months before the Ed O’Bannon trial began to determine the legality of banning the rights of athletes to profit from the use of their NIL, Jenkins sued the NCAA to allow conferences or schools to be free to determine how much they should pay athletes.34 It is significant that Jeffrey Kessler was Jenkins’s counsel. Kessler was the lead attorney who had brought free agency to athletes in the National Football League and was internationally known in antitrust litigation. He was a force for athletes’ rights, and the NCAA was quite aware that Kessler was successful in cases involving athletes. While Kessler indicated that a settlement of some kind could result that would be to the financial benefit of athletes, he told the larger

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public that “the NCAA’s ability to maintain the [amateur] façade has been decreasing at an accelerating rate.”35 He was right on that score, and public sentiment was slowly moving in the direction of athletes’ rights and questioning the concept of amateurism. The major arguments for removing caps on athlete’s compensation beyond tuition, room, board, fees, and books had much to do with the rapid commercialization of college sports in the television era for football and men’s basketball. Intercollegiate athletics had increasingly become far more commercial than educational for the NCAA and hundreds of institutions, but not to the commercial benefit of the athletes. The lawsuit argued that instead of athletes being remunerated for their work-related athletic endeavors, the large profits in universities from those two sports were not used to reward athletes financially.36 Instead, universities used those excess funds to renovate stadiums and arenas, raise coaches’ earnings into the millions of dollars, build high-end dorms for athletes’ use with eating facilities, construct luxury locker rooms and training facilities, and secure specialized athlete tutoring centers. Obviously, athletes could benefit from facility upgrades, highly paid coaches, and academic help, but most athletes would not experience a direct financial benefit from the millions of dollars generated by football and men’s basketball. Like most important court cases, the Jenkins suit went on for years as the two sides tried to convince Judge Claudia Wilken of the legality of their positions. For the litigants, it was an attempt to prove that institutions and the NCAA conspired to cap athletic scholarships in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and its restraint of trade section. For the defendants, the NCAA used the traditional argument that athletics were educational and that amateur athletes being paid only academicrelated costs differentiated them from professionals. The NCAA continually argued that amateurism was “a key driver of college sports’ popularity with consumers and fans”—that maintaining amateurism was pro-competitive and not a violation of antitrust laws. Paying players, the NCAA contended with little evidence, would reduce interest and hurt college sport.37 The NCAA had precedent on its side, as of the more than thirty athlete cases against the NCAA from the mid-1970s to the mid2010s, only one was won outright on antitrust grounds, the Ed O’Bannon case that concluded in 2015.38 By 2018, Judge Wilken had been in charge of the Jenkins case for three years and broken with the 1984 Supreme Court decision that stated “athletes must not be paid . . . to preserve amateurism.” She told the two contending sides in 2018,

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The existence of a contract, combination or conspiracy that affects interstate commerce is undisputed in this case. NCAA regulations are subject to antitrust scrutiny under the Sherman Act and must be tested using a rule-of-reason analysis. Under that analysis, Plaintiffs [Jenkins] bear the initial burden of showing that the challenged restraints produce significant anticompetitive effects within a relevant market. If Plaintiffs meet this burden, Defendants [NCAA] must come forward with evidence of the restraints’ procompetitive effects. Plaintiffs must then show that any legitimate objectives can be achieved in a substantially less restrictive manner.39

The capping of athletic scholarships was shown to be a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. It was an illegal horizontal agreement with penalties handed out by the NCAA for violations by making athletes ineligible and boycotting institutions. Or as Judge Wilken wrote, the price-fixing athletic scholarship agreements, noted in the Alston case, “are ordinarily condemned as a matter of law under an ‘illegal per se’ approach.”40 The NCAA bylaws capped athletic scholarships and were an unreasonable restraint of trade, preventing a competitive market. “The NCAA has a history of violating federal antitrust law,” Jenkins’s lawyers emphasized, and the case was one more example dating back to the illegal antitrust suit that broke up the 1984 NCAA television monopoly.41 Statistical evidence was lacking to support the NCAA argument that fans would not come to collegiate athletic contests if they knew that athletes were being paid to perform. What Jenkins needed was to produce a study that refuted the purported link the NCAA claimed between the “no pay” rules and positive consumer demand for college sport. If this could be done, the antitrust case for a free market for athletes’ services would more likely prevail.42 Otherwise, knowing that the precedent was found in the O’Bannon lawsuit of a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, payment tied to the cost of education would likely prevail in Judge Wilken’s decision. The judge or a court of appeals could notably rule that any financial arrangement above an athletic scholarship would have to be tied to educational expenses. It was not clear, though, how educational expenses would be interpreted. A version of educational expenses could be the payment of such items as musical instruments for a music major, sport equipment for a variety of sports for a kinesiology major, an expensive computer for a technology major, farming equipment for an agriculture major, or the cost of a semester or year abroad for an international relations major.

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The NCAA argument that NCAA “amateur” rules help preserve college sports was partially dismissed by Judge Claudia Wilken when she set aside in early 2019 the NCAA challenge to athletes receiving any finances above a full athletic scholarship. “Non-cash education-related benefits,” Wilken wrote, have “not been proven to be necessary to preserving consumer demand for Division I basketball and FBS football as a product distinct from professional sports.”43 This was delivered prior to any appeal by the NCAA to the court of appeals. A higher court might reject any payment above the cost of education for an athletic scholarship. Jenkins’s counsel, Jeff Kessler, commented that the Wilken decision in the Jenkins case was not “a complete freeing of the market, . . . but [was] a dramatic difference.”44 So the ever-changing NCAA definition of amateur moved onward with less force, as did the meaning of an athletic scholarship.

Judge claudia wilken and The queSTion of amaTeuriSm The Alston and Jenkins lawsuits had been consolidated for taking depositions into one case under Judge Claudia Wilken well before she wrote the decision for the renamed Alston v. NCAA lawsuit. It was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation.45 Judge Wilken decided the case, in which a number of athletes were represented, including Jenkins and Alston, in March 2019. Wilken laid waste to the NCAA’s argument that spectators as consumers “value amateurism.” There is little evidence, noted Judge Wilken, that college athletic spectators stay away because they oppose the payment of amateur players. Dire predictions in sport, like that paying college athletes will drive away fans, are often proven unreliable.46 Wilken pointed out the many types of pay that the NCAA allowed in its scholarship policy and that were contained in its constitution and bylaws, seventeen in all. Included in the list were the $5,600 total cash that an athlete might receive if the team won a national championship and the tens of thousands of dollars that an athlete could receive from one or both the Student Assistance Fund and the Academic Enhancement Fund.47 Wilken maintained that the distinction the NCAA drew between college and professional sports was that most college athletes received payments related to education and that professionals received payments unrelated to education. Wilken claimed that “the distinction between

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college and professional sports arises because student-athletes do not receive unlimited payments unrelated to education, akin to salaries seen in professional sports leagues.”48 The difference was not because one was amateur and one paid its players, because both were paid in various ways. Members of the NCAA, Wilken emphasized, “nowhere define the nature of amateurism” either in the NCAA constitution and bylaws or in arguments in the lawsuit. Even during the litigation, Mike Slive, an attorney and commissioner of the wealthy and powerful Southeastern Conference, commented, “I’ve never been clear on what is meant . . . by amateurism.”49 The NCAA had never produced a workable definition of amateurism in a positive statement in more than a century, except for what it was not. Judge Wilken considered the three options for payment of athletes suggested by the plaintiffs. While the Alston plaintiffs offered three alternatives to the present scholarship plan, the NCAA had offered none during the late December 2018 closing arguments.50 The three suggested Alston alternatives were: Option 1: There would be no NCAA caps on scholarships. Individual conferences would set any limits. Option 2: Limit present NCAA compensation with the exceptions that (a) there would be no limits related to education, and (b) the seventeen benefits incidental to athletics already allowed by the NCAA, such as the Student Assistant Fund and Academic Enhancement Fund, could not be capped. Option 3: There would be no limits on education-related benefits, though conferences could do so.

Judge Wilken chose the third education-related option and amended it for a solution neither side desired. However, it was more favorable to athletes than to the notion favored by the NCAA of amateurism and limiting the amount to be paid through scholarships. It was far more advantageous to athletes than Wilken’s O’Bannon decision several years before, which provided only for payment of athletes’ name, images, and likenesses. She rejected the first option of no scholarship caps because it would “not preserve consumer demand” and likely had too many unintended consequences. She opposed the second option with the seventeen NCAA incidental benefits because there would be a free market with no limit to cash payments. Wilken chose a modified third option that maintained the limit on scholarships at not less than the cost of attendance, continuing to allow compensation only related to education. “The limit imposed by the NCAA,” Wilken wrote, “could not be less than its 216

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current or future caps on athletics participation awards.”51 Under the 104page Wilken decision, there would be no unlimited cash payments unrelated to education. Education was the key, not any major consideration of amateurism. Because the NCAA opposed Wilken’s judgment to uncap certain payments, the NCAA appealed to the US Court of Appeals two weeks after the Wilken decision. Not only did the NCAA state that the ruling was inconsistent with Wilken’s financial decision in the O’Bannon case, but it believed that the district judge “erred by giving itself authority to micromanage decisions about education-related support.”52 In order to win its appeal, the NCAA would have to prove in this antitrust case that its restrictions on the payment of players are pro-competitive because amateurism is a key part of the demand for college sports and that consumers of college sport value amateurism.53 The NCAA was unable to effectively show that consumers do, in fact, demand that athletes be amateurs. Because some athletes were paid thousands of dollars above the cost of their education at the time of the Judge Wilken decision, it was difficult to place the payment of athletes in the amateur category. The case for amateurism had deteriorated greatly since the US Supreme Court in 1984 ruled that college athletes should not receive pay. In that case, the appellate panel of judges had concluded their attack on NCAA policy by stating that “NCAA limits on education-related benefits do not ‘play by the Sherman Act’s rules.’”54 In early 2020, the three-member panel of appellate judges affirmed Judge Wilken’s decision in Alston v. NCAA, squashing the 1984 ruling of the US Supreme Court stating that the NCAA’s rules governing compensation were not “valid as a matter of law.”55 A half century of dramatic changes in intercollegiate athletic commercialism and professionalism had fashioned a new field of pay for play. While all three judges concurred, one of the judges went further and wrote a separate concurrence. In legal terms, Judge Milan Smith believed that the treatment of college athletic scholarship holders in Division I football and basketball “is the result of a cartel of buyers [universities] acting in concert to artificially depress the price that sellers [athletes] could otherwise receive for their services. Our antitrust laws,” Smith stated, “were originally meant to prohibit exactly this sort of distortion.”56 Judge Smith suggested that a future lawsuit should question how the rule of reason has been used to deprive athletics of a free market of services. If a free market were decided, athletes could receive additional compensation not tethered to educational costs. In the meantime, state legislatures and the federal government would begin legislating where once the NCAA had ruled. 217

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ch a PTer Se Ven Teen

State and Federal Legislative Pay-for-Play Action The only group to sign away their rights are athletes. goVernor gaVin newSom, 2019

It is time for Congress to intercede in order to maintain the integrity of college sports. reP. donna Shalala, 2019

A

fTer Two decadeS of The TwenTy- firST century had passed, the question of how college athletes would be paid was clearly being determined by state and federal legislatures and by judicial courts. The NCAA in the 1950s had taken the lead in paying athletes through the legalization of athletic scholarships. In the intervening years, the NCAA drastically increased commercialization to the financial benefit of institutions and administrators, but much less so to its athletes. The NCAA was instrumental in presiding over athletics in the decades following the riches of television, a time that saw coaches, athletic directors, and even presidents earning unrivaled salaries and providing extraordinary facilities built with profits of the two most televised sports, football and men’s basketball. Athletes of the major institutions had generally been left behind from receiving part of the billion-dollar industry earnings. It took courts and laws to better balance the equation between athletes and the rest of the collegiate sporting industry. The NCAA and Big-Time institutions were reluctant to take any kind of leadership until forced to do so, first by court action and then by legislation.

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The california law of 2019 The term amateurism was not used once in the 2019 California state law known as the Fair Pay to Play Act. Nor was it in the language of the first state to propose legislation to overthrow the policies of the NCAA. The state of Washington, not California, was the first to introduce legislation, but it lagged well behind California in passing a bill. Washington Rep. Drew Stokesbary (R-Auburn) first addressed the issue with his House Bill 1084 as the new year opened in 2019. “We have to acknowledge [amateurism] doesn’t exist now,” Stokesbary noted, “and maybe never existed.” He was right on both scores. Stokesbary’s bill was intended to allow athletes to earn compensation for their names, images, and likenesses while athletes’ agents could legally represent them, both of which were opposed by NCAA policies. Under his bill, neither the athletes nor the institutions could be penalized by the NCAA for allowing NIL use.1 The bill lay unacted upon. While Washington first proposed legislation, California was the first state to pass a bill. Under the leadership of California State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), it voted unanimously in both the assembly and senate that “compensation from the use of a student’s name, image, or likeness shall not affect the student’s scholarship eligibility.”2 Thus, the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fifth-largest economy was the first to nullify the NCAA’s bylaws on limiting athletic scholarship finances. The bill was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in a made-for-TV happening on basketball star LeBron James’s show, The Shop. On the show with James were Ed O’Bannon, the key to the O’Bannon case; Katelyn Ohashi, the UCLA gymnastic star with tens of millions of YouTube viewers; and several others looking on in a barber shop setting. Newsom signed Bill 206, jeopardizing whatever was left of “amateurism” in college sports. The California state law removed any restrictions on NILs found in the judges’ decision in the O’Bannon case of 2015.3 Though there was no opposition in the California state legislature, the question of amateurism and scholarships was raised elsewhere. When the bill was originally drafted in early 2019, the NCAA and President Mark Emmert tried to bully California state legislators into eliminating the bill. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post almost immediately wrote that Emmert’s effort at bullying California was ridiculous and that “California should call him out on it.”4 Bullying was not new to Emmert, as he was successful shortly after becoming NCAA president in intimidating Penn State into signing an illegal NCAA Consent

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Decree following the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal of 2011–2012.5 Seven years after threating Penn State with the death penalty, Emmert probably felt that he could frighten all California universities with the assertion that, if passed, the bill on NILs would “make it impossible to host fair national championships” by any major California institution.6 To Emmert, the California law was, as he said, “just a new form of professionalism and a different way of converting students into employees.”7 The California legislature and governor, unlike Penn State several years before, did not kowtow to Emmert and the NCAA with its billion-dollar institution located in the “amateur” capital of America, Indianapolis. As he was about to sign the history-making bill, Governor Newsom emphasized that California had “the interests, finally, of the athletes, on a par with the interests of institutions.” Until this history-making action, Newsom stated, college athletes were “the only group to sign away their rights” to their own names, images, and likenesses.8 That is what happened to O’Bannon, Katelyn Ohashi, and Diana Taurasi, all of whom attended the signing. Ohashi discussed her near-perfect performance and 10.0 score in a UCLA gymnastic floor exhibition, which went viral with viewers in the tens of millions but with no compensation. Diana Taurasi acknowledged that her University of Connecticut basketball jersey was still being sold more than a decade after her graduation without any personal income accruing to her. The law passed by the legislature would correct this, Newsom conjectured, because many other states would pass similar laws and force the NCAA to change its antiquated amateur rules. The governor, who had played collegiate baseball at the oldest university in California, Santa Clara University, had made his point with the stroke of a pen. Other states followed the lead of California.

STaTeS’ ruSh To nil legiSlaTion The rush of other states to match California’s law was on, but the use by players of their own names and images was certainly not new. What James Hogan had done in 1904 may not have been new then, but it was hard to top financially the payment of Yale’s football celebrity shortly before the NCAA was created. Hogan was a five-foot, ten-inch, 210-pound hulk at twenty-eight years of age when the three-time AllAmerican starred during his 1904 senior year. He, not Yale University, owned his own name and image, unlike he would have a century later, when, as journalist Sally Jenkins noted, “college athletes don’t have

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birthrights; they’re serfs.”9 Hogan was not a serf, a slave, or in any condition of servitude as Martin Jenkins, former Clemson football player, claimed were twenty-first century athletes. The Yale athlete was mature, two years older than his coach. He lived in the most luxurious dorm at Yale, had his tuition paid, was given free meals at the University Club, received a scholarship of one hundred dollars, collected the profits of selling scorecards at Yale’s popular baseball games, and received a tenday vacation in Cuba gratis from the Yale Athletic Association when the season was over. But to the point, Hogan’s NIL status was legal under Yale and intercollegiate athletic rules when he became an agent for selling American Tobacco Company cigarettes in New Haven. The so-called Hogan Cigarettes earned Hogan a commission for every pack sold in the town encompassing Yale University.10 It was legal. The Yale celebrity was rewarded for his name and image, and fans did not stop buying tickets to Yale games because he and Yale were no longer “amateur.” Had this occurred a half century or so later, the NCAA would have declared Hogan ineligible and likely “vacated” from the record all forty-three Yale victories for games in which Hogan played. By the second decade of the next century, states from New Jersey to Oregon were legislating to make legal what Hogan had done in the early twentieth century. The lead for legalizing athletes’ use of their NIL for their own profit often came from legislators who had participated, like Hogan, in intercollegiate athletics. Former athletes, such as State Rep. Chris Welch (D) of Illinois, Rep. Brandt Iden (R) of Michigan, and Rep. Jason Frierson (D) of Nevada, felt that they and other athletes had been denied the possibility of gaining financially from their expertise in athletics.11 Two of the more interesting state legislative efforts came from New York and South Carolina. Most states, including New York and South Carolina, proposed bills that included three items: allowing athletes to be paid for the NILs, licensing of agents to lower the possibility of sport managers exploiting athletes who were teenagers, and preventing the NCAA from punishing athletes and institutions. New York’s proposal differed from others in that it mandated two funds to be set up in which 15 percent of all gate receipts would go to help athletes. Onehalf of that amount would go into a fund for the payment of injured athletes, and the other half was to be divided as a wage fund for athletes at the end of each year. The South Carolina bill would provide up to $5,000 a year in addition to the athletic scholarships for football and basketball players. One South Carolina coach, Dabo Swinney, was strongly opposed. But it is not likely that the celebrated Clemson football coach, with a

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$10 million per year contract, would follow through with his reaction to “go do something else” if a player was paid something like one-tenth of 1 percent of his salary.12 Despite the rush to state pay-for-play plans, the likelihood of state laws becoming the final say in the paying of college athletes appeared to be slim. While thirty or more state laws would lead to chaos, the major argument against state laws was that their existence conflicted with the important interstate commerce clause of the original US Constitution. The key Article I, Section 8, enumerates the powers of the federal government not retained by the states. One of the few rights reserved for the federal government, but an important one, was the right to regulate commerce among the states. As a variety of state laws would unduly impact intercollegiate athletic commerce among the states, these laws providing for the payment of college athletes would likely be struck down by the courts. Past legal precedence (stare decisis) would also likely rule against a state’s law based on an early 1990s case won by the NCAA over University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. Nevada and Tarkanian in NCAA v. Miller fought the national NCAA’s bylaws’ lack of due process procedures in its investigation of coach Tarkanian.13 A Nevada state law to protect Tarkanian was passed and called for various NCAA due process procedures to favor Tarkanian. The question of the legality of a state law was negated and answered in the NCAA’s favor. No state can pass a state law that discriminates against interstate commerce controlled in the US Constitution. The court ruled that the purpose of the NCAA nationally was to “promote amateur intercollegiate athletics and to ensure that intercollegiate competition takes place on a level and fair playing field.”14 The relevance to state NIL laws was that interstate commerce would be disturbed involving intercollegiate interstate recruiting, travel, or telecasting of games. Rather than dealing with dissimilar state laws, the logical result would be national legislation.

The need for naTional legiSlaTion becomeS obViouS While the courts, including Judge Claudia Wilken of the US Ninth District, could dictate the payment of athletes in the Alston v. NCAA case, federal legislation, not judges’ decisions, would likely limit the impact of future court cases.15 One of the first US Congressmen to initiate national legislation was Mark Walker (R-NC). In March 2019, 222

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Walker introduced H. R. 104, the Student-Athlete Equity Act. It was intended to bring about equity for athletes and remedy the injustices found in the NCAA bylaws. Every American, including college athletes, Walker stated, should have “a free market.”16 If the NCAA failed to provide for athletes, the three-sport athlete from little Piedmont Baptist College would punish the NCAA by revoking its tax-exempt status.17 That is, by not allowing athletes to have financial benefits from the use of their names, images, and likenesses, the NCAA and its institutions could face federal income taxes. To Walker, the possibility of federal taxes would counter “the injustices that exist in the current NCAA model.”18 National legislation to remove the NCAA’s tax-exempt status would likely even catch the attention of NCAA president Mark Emmert. He appeared to place the financial welfare of athletes far below the financial welfare of the NCAA, or for that matter the multimillion-dollar contract given to him by the college presidents who ran the national, so-called amateur, institution.19 Keeping NCAA athletics amateur had always been the goal from its origin, but the original desire for amateurism was considered by many to be a moral issue, not an economic issue. That changed during the Great Depression, when money, not some made-up moral issue of amateurism, became supreme in the thinking of NCAA officials. Dating back to the 1930s, the NCAA had been concerned that institutions could be taxed on their athletic income. Thus, their tax-exempt status, such as no tax on gate receipts, might be taken away for the highly commercial, not educational, aspect of college sport. The threat was renewed in the twenty-first century by Representative Walker, and it was a major reason why the NCAA was adamant that the term amateur be included in nearly every document issued by the association. Amateurism, it was believed with abundant past evidence, had a captivating sound that would influence legislators and judges in making decisions about the billion-dollar commercial college sport business. Walker, and his legislation, was a major financial threat to the NCAA and institutions of higher education. Yet universities were always concerned about any kind of federal legislation that limited what institutions might do. Whereas the original US Constitution provided for control of interstate commerce, education was completely left out of the constitution. Higher education in America has traditionally been reserved primarily for states to control. The federal government historically has had a hands-off higher education policy, with some notable exceptions. One was the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave free lands to support what became known as land-grant universities, such as two of the earliest, Michigan State and Penn State. Another 223

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federal government action took place at the end of World War II. The federal government passed the GI Bill of Rights to support the education of military veterans. A couple of decades later, in the mid-1960s, the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 provided for economicopportunity Pell Grants to millions of college students. In less than a decade, the federal passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972 brought about greater equality in women’s education. Even with important legislation, there had always been a strong emphasis on states providing financially for higher education, rather than the federal government. The argument for keeping away from national legislation regarding intercollegiate pay for play was not to be discarded, certainly not by members of the NCAA—that is, unless federal legislation was needed to protect the NCAA from more deleterious state action, such as that of California. Representative Harris was not the only federal legislator to present a remedy for the imbalance of athletes’ rights regarding their NILs. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D) of California introduced S.2083, the Athletics Fair Pay Act of 2019, in July of that year.20 Feinstein’s bill, while not federally mandating NIL payments, was directed at the pay of amateur athletes. This legislation would require the NCAA to report yearly on the compensation of amateur athletes, including identification by gender and race. In addition, with three other senators, Feinstein introduced a bill called the Even Playing Field Act to ensure equal pay working conditions for women. The bill was triggered by the US Soccer Federation’s gender pay inequity and the poorly paid 2019 US women’s World Cup champion team.21 Another congresswoman addressing the payment of athletes from another angle was Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL), along with Rep. Ross Spano (R-FL). Shalala, the former secretary of health and human services under President Clinton and former head of the Universities of Miami and Wisconsin, was never intimidated by the NCAA. Upon introduction of her congressional bill, Shalala stated that the NCAA had “absolutely no clout” with her. Nevertheless, Shalala took a more cautious approach in her proposed law that would set up a Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.22 This was similar to the approach the private Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics had taken, but unlike the Knight Commission, it had some legal teeth, including the power to subpoena witnesses for testimony.23 While the Knight Commission, beginning in 1991, tried to reform athletics with no effective power, Shalala was proposing a two-year commission to look deeply into the whole gamut of questions about athletes and academics, recruiting policies, health and safety concerns, and the financing of athletics, including 224

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payment for NILs. The federal government would then act. “As profits, compensation for coaches, and spending on luxurious athletic facilities have ballooned,” she noted at the close of the year 2019, the NCAA “has repeatedly failed to address systemic problems with respect to the health and well-being of student athletes.”24 Shalala wanted federal action to protect the rights of athletes. Whereas Representative Shalala was concerned about getting the facts first, a group of bipartisan senators came together to discuss possible legislation on compensating college athletes. Several were former college athletes. Again, the California state law had stimulated the need for federal action. Some well-known senators included Cory Booker (D-NJ), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Mitt Romney (R-UT), David Perdue (R-GA), and Marco Rubio (R-FL).25 Booker, who had played football at Stanford, was running for the Democratic party nomination for president and had his own plans for combating the exploitation of college athletes. He had outlined his vision before combining with the group of five senators. Booker’s background spoke to the influence he might have in reforming the NCAA to give athletes greater rights. Born into a family of civil rights activists in the late 1960s, he was a star high school football player and was recruited to join Stanford’s football team. He was chosen president of the senior class at Stanford and became a Rhodes scholar before entering Yale’s prestigious law school. Becoming involved in the city politics of Newark, New Jersey, Booker was elected mayor and became known for making progress in reducing the crime rate in Newark. When elected senator for New Jersey in 2013, he particularly worked on attacking racism in America while attempting to unite the country. One of the ways was to attack what he considered the racism within the NCAA, for the NCAA was run principally by white college presidents, with mostly white athletic directors and coaches, while the players in the two profit-making sports, football and men’s basketball, were predominantly African American. Booker would support the antitrust cases against the NCAA and its flawed policy of amateurism. He said that he would establish a US Commission on Integrity in Sport if he became president.26 The other four members of the Group of Five had similar concerns. Following the passage of the California law, two of the senate members, Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Mitt Romney of Utah, met with NCAA president Mark Emmert to discuss how the federal government should deal with the question of payment for use of athletes’ NILs. Another member of Congress was more strident. Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina made his own legislative attack on the NCAA. He flew 225

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into a near rage, calling the Murphy-Romney meeting “an ignominious start” in dealing with Emmert, “the chief apologist for an exploitative system.”27 Emmert, on the losing side of the battle to prevent the payment of athletes and to save “amateurism,” was willing to meet not with Walker but with others in Congress to work out some type of agreement to preserve the NCAA’s nonprofit, nontaxable status. Emmert refused to meet with Walker because the representative from North Carolina had taken a strident stance with the NCAA by calling for Congress to take away its nonprofit status. Emmert rejected Walker but was ready to accept the help of other Congress members, such as Romney and Murphy, if the lawmakers would fix the payment of athletes while at the same time keep its traditional attachment to amateurism. Besides, working with Congress was a way to combat the dozens of state laws that would surely cause chaos for all members of the NCAA. Getting into the legislative action was another former athlete who was also a five-year National Football League veteran, Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH). The former Ohio State athlete was in his first year in Congress in 2019, but unlike Representative Shalala did not want to wait two years before acting to give athletes greater rights. Gonzalez indicated that he would propose national legislation ensuring that college athletes could benefit financially from their NILs.28 Before his legislation would be introduced, though, he wanted to await the results of the NCAA Working Group on NILs, cochaired by Gene Smith, the athletic director of his old school, Ohio State. Michael Drake was another Ohio State individual who was in the mix to find a solution to NILs. Drake was the president of the NCAA Board of Governors and president of Ohio State. It was politically expedient for the three Ohio individuals to work together on a solution to the payment of athletes. Along with other congressional leaders, Gonzalez believed that a national solution, rather than state actions, was needed in the campaign to remunerate athletes.

The ncaa working grouP and The board of goVernorS All three Ohio State individuals were either Latino or African American: the congressional representative and bill originator, Anthony Gonzalez, the athletic director and co-head of the NCAA Working Group on the NIL, Gene Smith, and the president of the institution and head of the NCAA Board of Governors, Michael Drake.29 Apparently athletes were top priorities for each, and President Drake teaching 226

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a course at Ohio State called Music of the Civil Rights Movement may have signaled a liberal approach to not only Black people in music but those in athletics. The three were an unusual combination looking out for the welfare of athletes, often Latino or African American, in the profit-making sports. Rather than the coaches, athletic administrators, and presidents financially benefitting most from the popularity and riches of athletics, athletes might profit from congressional action. The NCAA Working Group, formed in the spring of 2019, worked rapidly for the traditionally bureaucratic and slow-moving NCAA to present its report on how the association responded to its own retrogressive actions over the past generation or two. This included trying to preserve its outdated amateurism and scholarship policies even as they were being challenged successfully in a number of lawsuits, including O’Bannon, the California legislation, and the various other state actions taking place. Because the committee members of the working group knew that they were fighting both legal decisions and potential laws, they went about as far as anyone could foresee to accommodate athletes. The working group recommendations went much further than any NCAA committee or official had done in the past, including the regressive Mark Emmert, who continually fought for whatever was left of amateurism. When the NCAA Working Group report was released at the end of October 2019, the board of governors met and released what it considered NCAA principles and guidelines for any payment to athletes from commercial exploitation of their names, images, and likenesses. “We must embrace change” in all three divisions of the NCAA, commented the president of the NCAA Board of Directors, Ohio State’s Michael Drake, but the change needed to follow a number of guidelines—what the NCAA euphemistically called amateur “guardrails.” 1. Athletes must be treated similarly to nonathletes. 2. Education must be the top priority. 3. There must be a “distinction between collegiate and professional opportunities.” 4. There must be no compensation for athletic performance or participation. 5. Athletes must be considered students, not employees, of universities. 6. Universities must uphold the principle of diversity and gender equity.

7. The recruiting environment and inducements for attendance must be protected.30 227

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In short, the NCAA approved a policy that would “permit students participating in athletics the opportunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.” Without using the term amateur, the NCAA placed as much spin on the NIL and California legislation as it could in an effort to keep athlete payments under its damaged policy of amateurism.31 The NCAA leadership could only hope that its guidelines would be accepted by whatever national legislation would become law in the years following defeats in the O’Bannon case, the Alston and Jenkins lawsuits, and the California law. Some of the allure of amateurism might still exist among those in Congress who had themselves enjoyed intercollegiate athletics at their institutions. The allure did not exist for everyone, including a senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, who felt that the views of NCAA leadership were “as antiquated as leather helmets.”32 By 2020, though, amateurism did not exist and had not for generations. There was still the appeal of athletes competing for “the physical, mental, or social and educational benefits” derived from participating, the longtime dogma of the NCAA. Legislation and court decisions had exposed the fig-leafed professionalism for what it was—a cover-up of long-lost amateurism. In the spring of 2020, the NCAA Working Group presented its NIL recommendations for each of the three divisions of the NCAA to consider in their efforts to respond to state and federal legislation. The working group conceded that “there are better ways of preserving amateurism than current NCAA rules.” However, the group was adamant that there should be no NIL rules to “undermine, or fundamentally change, the NCAA’s overall model of amateur intercollegiate athletics.”33 The group did not indicate how athletes can be paid more than they already are and remain “amateur.” The NCAA was again trying to succeed in the contradictory efforts of paying athletes while keeping them nonprofessional by using the magical term amateur. Though the NCAA had been mostly unsuccessful under Judge Claudia Wilken in the Shawne Alston case, it still might be successful with federal legislators who were more emotionally attached to past collegiate experiences including participating in or observing athletic contests. Yet even the NCAA might have learned something about the use of the term amateurism. When it placed the more than 1,600 words of its “College Athlete Model” on the NCAA website following its working group recommendations, there was not one use of the word amateur in the entire document.34 It was possibly a first for the NCAA.

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Judge claudia wilken’S anTi- climacTic deciSion Judge Claudia Wilken had dealt with amateurism and with athletes calling for remuneration from their names, images, and likenesses. She had been doing this for a half dozen years when she would once again have to make judgments about a free market approach to athletes’ payments. What Wilken had ruled in the O’Bannon and Alston cases was significant in the history of intercollegiate amateurism and athletic scholarships, as it stimulated legislative action on the state and national levels. Legislative actions, especially on the national level, would dictate the direction of the payment of athletes in the future, no matter how the appeal of Judge Wilken’s Alston v. NCAA lawsuit (NCAA Athletic GrantIn-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation) turned out.35 Then there was still the Jenkins v. NCAA free market case to be tried separately, a decision to separate the Alston and Jenkins cases made by Judge Wilken several years before.36 Judge Wilken, then into her eighth decade, had a reputation for being evenhanded in court, and her background might have dictated that she would not rule completely on the NCAA’s side or in favor of the athlete, Martin Jenkins. She had a history of working out decisions in a type of compromise that neither side might originally favor, but from which each side could take something positive.37 In the O’Bannon case of 2015, the NCAA lost the antitrust battle but the NCAA bylaws on amateurism were not submerged. In the Alston case of 2019, again the NCAA was found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in its horizontal pricefixing violations of athletic scholarships. Nevertheless, to the advantage of the NCAA, athletes could not receive unlimited cash payments, and the in-kind payments, rather than cash, were tethered to educational expenses. Because the NCAA appealed the case, Judge Wilken’s influence on the Alston case was diminished. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on athlete compensation in early 2020. There, the NCAA’s sharp council, Seth Waxman, kept arguing for amateurism and harkening back to the 1984 Supreme Court case and the stare decisis importance of the statement “Athletes must not be paid.” On the Shawne Alston side, Attorney Steve Berman claimed that stare decisis and its past precedents were no longer germane and that athletic conferences, in competition with each other, should determine any limits on athlete’s pay. Jeff Kessler, the attorney most responsible for granting free agency for National Football League players, argued that the “wall” on payments to NCAA athletes

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had already been “breached.” This was clear with large NCAA Student Assistant Fund payments and payments to athletes during football bowl games. Kessler knew that the public demand for athletics grew as the wall was breached and that the NCAA Board of Governors had already agreed to some NIL payments. Kessler told the three-judge panel to let the competition between conferences determine how much athletes should be paid. This, he stated, is the free market approach. If the free market did not work satisfactorily, Kessler told the judges, then pass federal legislation.38 The NCAA and its policies of amateurism and payment of players were hanging by a thread. Judge Wilken’s decision being upheld by the appeals court appeared to be anticlimactic when the US Congress took up legislation to allow athletes to be paid for their names, images, and likenesses. The NCAA may be forced to remove a number of pages under the NCAA bylaws’ Article 12, titled “Amateurism and Athletics Eligibility.” For decades, the NCAA would have been much better off placing an emphasis on athletes’ education rather than athletes’ amateurism. As the University of Washington president William Gerberding had stated several decades before, “amateurism is surrounded by myth, self-delusion, and hypocrisy.”39 A year after Gerberding retired as president of Washington, Mark Emmert achieved Gerberding’s former position. Unfortunately for athletes’ rights, when he became president of the NCAA in 2010, Emmert did little to deal with its outdated use of the term amateurism. He could have, but he did not lead the NCAA away from the amateur myth. He could have done much more to treat athletes under his leadership with greater fairness in concert with the equal justice ideals of America. With sound federal legislation, there would be no need to call intercollegiate sport fig-leafed professionalism. One could refer to the participants as “college athletes,” men and women in institutions of higher learning who were there for the opportunity to get an education and participate in athletics.

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Afterword

[College sports are] already pro sports for everybody except the athlete. Jeffrey keSSler, 2014

C

harleS g. oSborne, a harVard STudenT from England in the early 1900s, was an all-around athlete like most of the amateur athletes at Oxford and Cambridge. Osborne’s athletic activities at Harvard included cricket, association football (soccer), tennis, and American football. He did not want to concentrate on what Harvard football coach Bill Reid Jr. “knew” was the most important American college sport, football. Osborne was an A student and weighed a solid 195 pounds, enough to be considered strong tackle material by Reid. Osborne and several other foreign students had introduced soccer to Harvard in 1904, and he was among those who played in the first modern intercollegiate soccer match when Haverford College played Harvard in the spring of 1905.1 Osborne’s problem, according to Reid, was that he had too much of an English amateur attitude, rather than that of an American. “One of his greatest handicaps,” Reid wrote in his 1905 diary, “is the fact that he was brought up under the English system of athletics.”2 Reid condemned Osborne’s desire to play cricket, soccer, and tennis in the spring rather than to participate in spring football practice. Osborne, as the star soccer goalie from Oxford University, wanted to continue playing various games, not concentrate solely on football. Football, as with other college sports, was already commercialized and professionalized, with a professional coach demanding all-out effort in his sport while his team played in the new Harvard stadium before tens of thousands of ticket-holding spectators. Coach Reid exemplified the 231

American professionalized standard at the expense of Osborne’s English amateur model. It would continue after the NCAA was formed, the same year Osborne challenged Reid’s form of professionalism. The NCAA tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a clear line between amateur college sport and professional sports. The leaders of the NCAA kept promoting the outdated amateur collegiate model into the next century. In 2003, Myles Brand, president of the NCAA and former president of the University of Indiana, addressed the National Symposium on Athletics Reform. Representing the world’s largest so-called amateur college organization, Brand boldly proclaimed, “There are two distinct models of athletics in America: The collegiate model and the professional model.”3 Brand, a former professor of philosophy, could have stated more accurately that there was one basic model for college and the professional leagues: the professional-commercial model.4 The major difference between the two was not that one was amateur and the other professional, but that one has always existed in institutions of higher learning and the other has not. Education, not amateurism, was the difference. The Brand professional model and the collegiate model were professional and commercial. Both college and professional sports operated by commercializing their product and paying those involved in a professional way. In institutions of higher learning, those associated with athletics have been generally well paid, including administrators, coaches, officials, and commercial concerns. The one exception has been the athletes. In the twenty-first century, athletes have been paid modestly when they received full or partial athletic scholarships. In one important respect, however, athletes were better paid in the 1950s when athletic scholarships became officially legal, because then, and for the next two decades, the “amateur” athletes received a cash payment called laundry money. That, however, was taken away in the mid-1970s by university faculty representatives to the NCAA. NCAA president Myles Brand knew well that his two proposed models, the collegiate and the professional, differed little in the early years of the twenty-first century. He told NCAA members, “There is a real threat that the collegiate model will be transformed into . . . the professional sports approach.”5 In reality, they had long been very similar. Brand probably knew that he was somewhat late in his warning. It had helped the NCAA’s amateur image to move its headquarters from near Kansas City to Indianapolis in 1998. Indianapolis, home of the Amateur Athletic Union, was called the “amateur sports capital of the world.” The amateur appearance boost from the location change couldn’t hurt the cause. Yet in the couple years before Brand’s “collegiate model” promotion, Ramogi 232

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Huma, the UCLA graduate, had already formed his Collegiate Athletic Coalition to battle for athletes’ rights that were clearly lacking. The NCAA had already placed professionalized and commercialized institutional needs well ahead of athletes’ concerns. Andrew Zimbalist made a similar observation in his book Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports. The NCAA advocated the subservience of athletes, the economist noted, rather than educational or amateur goals. Zimbalist listed the NCAA-mandated types of control over athletes’ lives, such as restricting athletes from holding jobs, limiting the size of athletic scholarships, confining scholarships to one-year renewable grants, and preventing immediate participation when transferring to other institutions.6 Then, too, with almost no academic eligibility requirements at the turn of the century, football bowl teams and the final sixteen in the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tourney were made up of athletes with graduation rates far less than 50 percent.7 The acclaimed book Reclaiming the Game by former university president William Bowen along with Sarah Levin noted the split between academics and athletics. That was true even among the elite academic institutions in America. They noted that academically, athletes and regular students were separate classes.8 The legislature of Nebraska also recognized a major difference, and the legislators even considered paying the hardworking football players at the University of Nebraska.9 By the twenty-first century, amateurism was still heavily written into the NCAA constitution and bylaws, but it had long been abandoned in practice. The NCAA restrictions on what was left of amateurism were about to be contested in the courts and would soon be followed by state and national legislation. This was long in the making, and it came, in part, from the first two pieces of mid-twentieth-century legislation breaking down home rule in NCAA policy. It is ironic that the cracks in the power of the NCAA to dictate how it would control the direction of intercollegiate athletics came with the passage of its first two nationally legislative rules. They were the Sanity Code rules on the payment and recruiting of athletes and the control on national football telecasting. The NCAA broke with the tradition of home rule as it gave itself national legislative and enforcement powers over payment of players and control of football telecasting. Both payment of athletes and control of telecasting would eventually be deemed violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The two NCAA legislative actions dealt directly or indirectly with amateurism and occurred shortly after World War II. The first was the legislation that broke with a half century of NCAA attempts to keep 233

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intercollegiate athletics amateur. The 1948 Sanity Code was the first national athletic scholarship policy that allowed for payment of athletes’ educational tuition and, soon after its failure, passage of full athletic scholarships. The second followed shortly, in 1951, when the institutions of the NCAA decided to nationally control the telecasting of football games. When the NCAA-controlled athletic scholarships and television policy were later struck down by court actions, the question of amateurism and the payment of players was of central concern. It took several decades, but the amateur base in both the payment of athletes and a monopoly in telecasting were crucial in court cases. The 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma television lawsuit did not need to have mentioned anything about amateurism to make clear that the NCAA’s complete horizontal control of college football telecasting was a monopolistic violation of the Sherman Act. Justice John Paul Stevens in his majority opinion, in an almost throwaway line, stated that “athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class, and the like.”10 It proved significant, although it seemed irrelevant that a Supreme Court judge felt the need to mention athletes going to class or paying them to participate to show that the complete control of the telecasting of football was a “naked restraint” of trade under antitrust legislation. Later, in the O’Bannon v. NCAA and Alston v. NCAA cases, the NCAA’s attempt to preserve amateurism was its primary focus as a defendant on the losing side. After well over 150 years of intercollegiate athletic history in America and over a century of NCAA involvement, the NCAA might well have been concerned about how intercollegiate athletics and athletes fit into the purpose of institutions of higher education and not whether an amateur code was maintained. The anachronistic notion of amateurism could have been officially cast off long before. Or as the attorney Dionne Koller’s statement before a 2020 US Senate hearing noted, “‘Amateurism,’ as self-servingly defined and re-defined by the NCAA, has become synonymous with a model that exploits athletes more than it educates.”11 The NCAA might better have pointed to academic integrity in athletics, not amateurism, and thus created significant academic requirements before athletes could compete. NCAA academic eligibility entrance requirements to participate in athletics were essentially dropped in the 1970s and again in the ’90s, but not the notion of amateurism.12 The concept of amateurism, however, was not accepted by those who participated in athletics when it was brought to America in the nineteenth century from the elitists in Britain. The British practice of ascribed status conflicted

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with the American belief in freedom and equality and an emphasis on achieved status. Even George Hanford, writing an athletic reform report for the American Council on Education in 1974, asked “whether amateurism, a privilege of the well-to-do, is consistent with the principle of equality of opportunity. . . . Amateurism in its purist form disappeared years ago.”13 So it had. Athletes have been interested in competing for their institutions ever since the first intercollegiate contest, a rowing match between Harvard and Yale in 1852. Athletes since then have been mostly unconcerned about their amateur status, except to meet for eligibility purposes the changing definitions of amateur. Athletes did not raise questions about their amateur status in the first years of student-controlled competition; they were interested only in whether they were students at their institutions.14 For instance, Yale questioned not whether the coxswain in its second contest with Harvard was an amateur but whether it was fair to bring back an athlete who had graduated to participate once again. The question was whether the athlete was a student, not whether he was an amateur. Involvement in education then, and later under the NCAA rules, is what college athletic administrators should have been interested in. Whether an athlete is a student should be the defining standard separating a college athlete from that of a professional. Professional athletes get paid, but college athletes also get paid in one form or another. An athlete’s payment of tuition in the tens of thousands of dollars or payment due to use of the athlete’s name, image, or likeness should not be a dominating factor in participation. But an athlete attaining an education in an institution of higher education should be a foremost concern. The athletes and the educational institutions they represent are what consumers primarily identify with, not the dollar amount of their athletic scholarship or other athletic payments. Unfortunately for the athlete, amateurism has much more to do with those who administer athletics and whether a scholarship might be taxed by the state and federal government, or whether the athlete might be considered a worker under workers’ compensation laws. Legislators and judges in the courts came to believe that amateurism was a historical relic and not relevant to the financial well-being of universities and the NCAA. Taxes on income from collegiate games and questions of athletes as workers should be determined by whether athletics are part of institutions of higher education, not whether the commercialized and professionalized intercollegiate athletics are deemed to be amateur. Athletes

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are considered by many as participants in education, just as are students writing for their school newspaper, acting in college plays, playing in the college symphony, or debating for their college teams. Legislators and judges could have paid attention to the first NCAA executive director, Walter Byers, decades ago. “Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue,” Byers proclaimed. “It is an economic camouflage for monopoly practice.”15 Judges, if they had listened to Byers, might have based part of their decisions on whether athletics were part of higher education, not whether they were considered amateur. As lawsuits dominated the question of NCAA violations of antitrust laws, the question of whether consumers would pay to watch only “amateur” athletics was an important factor. There was almost no evidence that if athletes were paid, as in the use of their names, images, and likenesses, people would not watch collegiate contests. There was no evidence that when college tennis players participated in professional tennis and earned thousands of dollars, they would be rejected by the public. In addition, if professional tennis players were allowed to compete in NCAA contests, then why wouldn’t women’s or men’s basketball players be allowed the same privilege? Under similar guidelines, basketball players who earned money playing basketball could still be considered “amateurs” if the NCAA stated in its bylaws that they were amateurs. The whole concept of NCAA amateurism was illogically conceived and conducted, and it should have been discarded well before legislators and judges became involved. The NCAA should have been concerned whether athletes were in educational institutions, not whether some were paid while others were not during the NCAA’s continually changing definitions of amateur. Had the NCAA and its administrators learned from their legal failures to preserve the term amateur by the third decade of the twenty-first century? Note the contrast between the 2019 appeal brief in the Alston court case and the stinging legal defeat less than a year later. The 2019 brief sounded the long-established “revered tradition of amateurism in college sports” throughout its history.16 The following spring, there was a different story when the NCAA lost the appeal for its pay-for-play prohibitions because it was “riddled with exceptions” and not playing by the Sherman Antitrust Act’s rules. Instead of repeating its mantra of “amateurism” relative to the importance of maintaining the “College Athlete Model,” the NCAA document was silent on amateurism.17 Not once in the more than 1,600-word text was the word amateurism used. Had the NCAA decided to drop the word amateur from its lexicon? Was it done for the same reason, public perception, that the NCAA had created and mandated the term student-athlete over a half century before? Or 236

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was it an abnormality in the NCAA’s quest to preserve what it considered its “college athlete model”? From its long history, the term amateurism emanating from the NCAA could have died with the lawsuit. There was little doubt that purging both the terms amateur and student-athlete would reduce the NCAA’s hypocrisy. When the NCAA was formed in 1905, there was opposition to any payment, to both athletes and coaches. At the time, true amateurism was favored by both the president of the NCAA, Palmer Pierce of the US Military Academy, and his boss, the commander in chief and president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.18 Both Captain Pierce and President Roosevelt were important in creating the NCAA, but neither would have given a thought that amateurism, the NCAA, and athletes’ rights would ever be prominent in trust-busting cases under the recently passed Sherman Antitrust Act. It is ironic that Teddy Roosevelt, known as the “trust busting” president, would have the NCAA become the victim of trust busting generations later. The first dominating use of antitrust legislation under Roosevelt’s presidency, the Northern Securities Case, came a year before the NCAA was created.19 In this case, the joining together of two competing railroads, the Great Northern and Northern Pacific, to reduce competition and increase profits was broken up by the Supreme Court. That was a monopoly case. The twenty-first century scholarshipamateur monopoly cases were monopsony lawsuits, that is, there was only one buyer, the NCAA, with monopolistic caps on scholarships, and many sellers, graduating high school athletes. Roosevelt’s trust busting Department of Justice broke up a railroad monopoly, while athletes a century later went to court to break up the NCAA monopoly on athletes’ compensation. In a historical sense, it is paradoxical that trust-busting President Roosevelt was involved in the creation of the NCAA, while about a century later the same NCAA was a monopoly trust violator. The other inconsistency is that Roosevelt, as trust buster, had his name attached to the most prestigious award given out by the NCAA, the Teddy Award. The award has been presented annually since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was first honored in 1967.20 It is awarded to an individual who participated in college athletics and has contributed substantially to society since then. It has been given to three other presidents, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Women recipients include Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics; Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut in space; and Madeleine Albright, the first woman secretary of state. Some former athletes or coaches who have received the Teddy Award include Jesse Owens, track; Arnold Palmer, golf; Jack 237

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Kemp, football; Rafer Johnson, track; Roger Staubach, football; and John Wooden, basketball player and coach. Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, the writer of the minority report in the 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma US Supreme Court case, who strongly favored amateurism, won the award in 1969.21 Every one of the Teddy Award winners was paid in one way or another while participating in intercollegiate athletics. Paid or unpaid, many athletes have succeeded in life following college, and, like any other students, some have failed in some way while many others have contributed in more ways than just in athletics. They have all been called student-athletes by leaders of the NCAA. But student-athlete is a questionable term. The term was a deceptive concept from its origin in the 1950s to ward off potential governmental and legal actions in workers’ compensation and taxes. Athletes should not have a hyphenated term attached to them as if they were suspect students, although some may well be. They should be called “skilled athletes going to college with the opportunity to get an education.” Whether they are commercially involved in their activities as athletes seems to be irrelevant in a free and open society, as it is for other students who might profit financially from their personal names, images, or likenesses. Claiming that athletes are amateurs when they have often not been is pure hypocrisy, a game the NCAA has played for its entire existence. The decision of the Olympics, which dropped the term amateur more than eight Olympiads ago, should be followed by leaders in intercollegiate athletics. No matter what the US Supreme Court declared decades ago and the NCAA constitution states in the twentyfirst century, Big-Time athletics in American institutions of higher education are not amateur—they never were.

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Acknowledgments

N

early Six decadeS ago, i waS forTunaTe To be attending the University of Wisconsin, completing a master’s degree in history and becoming a doctoral student in the physical education department. A National Defense Education Act Fellowship (a federal government act from the Cold War with the Soviet Union) was nearly dropped into my lap, allowing me to take coursework and complete the research and much of the writing of a dissertation on the history of an athletic conference. This led me into archival searches in each of the eight schools that made up what became the Wisconsin State University Conference. My dissertation project began a lifetime of research and writing primarily focusing on the history of intercollegiate athletics. I am indebted to the Wisconsin State Historical Association, on the university campus, for giving me a research desk and bringing in archival material from each of the universities I was researching. I arrived at Penn State University in 1968 to teach sport history; it was one of about four institutions in America then to emphasize the history of sport. I decided to pursue researching the history of college sport from the time of the introduction of intercollegiate sport in the mid-nineteenth century. I had taken the Penn State position held by Guy Lewis, the first individual to do intensive historical study of college sport. To understand the growth of intercollegiate athletics, I needed to do research where college sport began in America, in the institutions now known as the Ivy League. Researching intently in each of the eight institutions, beginning with Harvard and Yale, was the start of mining the holdings of over sixty archives across the nation, in addition to the institutions where college sport began, Oxford University and Cambridge University in England. I soon found that university archivists are some of the most accommodating individuals in academia. Because my undergraduate study at Northwestern in history was made possible by an academic scholarship (though I was on the baseball and basketball 239

teams), I have been interested in how athletes have been paid while attending college. In my eclectic nature of gathering primary documents in eastern colleges beginning in the 1970s, I began collecting materials on how college athletes were financed from the very first intercollegiate contests. Even though I had accumulated thousands of notes on the payment of athletes prior to thoughts of writing this book, I had not used most of the material in the five books that I have written on intercollegiate athletics. I wish to acknowledge the archivists at the many universities and other archives that have helped me in researching for this volume: Alabama, Atlantic Coast Conference, Brown, Clemson, California, Chicago, Colorado, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Eastern College Athletic Conference, Georgia, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Nebraska, North Carolina, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oxford City Library, Oxford University, Oxford University Boat Club, Penn State, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rutgers, Southern California, Stanford, Swarthmore, Syracuse, Tennessee, Tulane, US Naval Academy, Virginia, William and Mary, Wisconsin, and Yale. I have been fortunate to have many individuals read and make comments on chapters or the whole manuscript of this book. These include Cat Ariail, Robert Barney, Dick Crepeau, Joseph Crowley, Frank Deutsch, Bob Downs, Jackie Esposito, Sarah Fields, Art Glenn, Roy Greenfield, Elizabeth Hanley, Steven Hardy, Thomas Jable, Peter Jurs, John Loy, Scott McQuilkin, Dan Nathan, Joan Nessler, Piet van Ogtrop, Michael Oriard, Ken Pyle, Vic Russo, Roger Tamte, John Thelin, Stephen Wenn, and Ying Wushanley. However, the individual who has read and critiqued every chapter of every book of mine is my wife, Susan Catharine Bard McFarland Fernald Smith, and that includes my 1969 doctoral dissertation. I want to thank several individuals associated with the University of Texas Press who have added significantly to this volume. First, Jan Todd of the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport at the University of Texas, who suggested that I should consider publishing with UT Press several years ago. Second, to a quartet of professors dealing with sport history, and editors for the Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports—Sarah Fields, Tommy Hunt, Dan Nathan, and Patricia Vertinsky. Third, Robert Devens, director of the University of Texas Press, whose knowledge and personality make working with the press a pleasure. Fourth, Sarah Hudgens, for expert editing and a sharp eye for word usages and any irregularities. Fifth, Jeffrey Georgeson, for his careful proofreading. I hope that my volume will add to the already impressive list of books in the Physical Culture and Sports series of the University of Texas Press. I want to acknowledge several individuals whose research and writing relative to the history of intercollegiate sport have contributed greatly to our knowledge of the way intercollegiate sport has become an important aspect of American society. These include but are not limited to: Lincoln Allison, Brad Austin, Jan Beran, Mark Bernstein, Derek Bok, William Bowen, Walter Byers, Susan 240

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Cahn, John Carroll, Joan Chandler, Howard Chudacoff, Charles Clotfelter, Tony Collins, Joseph Crowley, Parke Davis, Andy Doyle, James Duderstadt, Gerald Early, Scott Etter, Jack Falla, Sarah Fields, Albert Figone, Arthur Fleisher, Brian Goff, Randy Grant, Greg Gubi, Allen Guttmann, Joan Hult, Brian Ingrassia, Kurt Kemper, Paul Lawrence, Robin Lester, Guy Lewis, Matthew Lindaman, Charles Martin, David Nelson, Murry Nelson, Michael Oriard, Roberta Park, Brian Porto, Allen Sack, Raymond Schmidt, Beth Shapiro, James Shulman, Winton Solberg, Murray Sperber, Ellen Staurowsky, Welch Suggs, Roger Tamte, John Thelin, Robert Tollison, Louise Mead Tricard, Joseph Turrini, Martha Verbrugge, John Watterson, Ying Wushanley, Mark Yost, David C. Young, David J. Young, David Zang, and Andrew Zimbalist.

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Timeline

auguST 3, 1852 The first US intercollegiate athletic contest, Harvard v. Yale in crew, gives the forty-one athletes an all-expense paid vacation to Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire—not a true unpaid amateur event. 1850S Student-run Harvard crews row for prizes worth up to $500 for winners. July 24, 1855 Harvard brings back a graduate of Harvard to row against Yale. July 1, 1859 Williams College charges Amherst with recruiting a blacksmith to pitch in colleges’ first baseball game. July 2, 1862 The Morrill Land Grant, instrumental in making state universities more stable and where Big-Time athletics eventually thrive, becomes law. July 29, 1864 The Yale crew hires its first professional coach. auguST 27, 1869 The Harvard crew races Oxford University on the River Thames in London before an estimated crowd of one million. ocTober 19, 1869 President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard calls for excellence in athletics at his inaugural address, setting a standard difficult for amateurs to meet. noVember 6, 1869 Rutgers plays three football players who are failing in algebra in the first intercollegiate football (soccer-like) game against Princeton. 1870S The British Rowing Association defines amateurism as one who has never been employed as a “mechanic, or labourer, or engaged in any menial duty.” July 7, 1873 Newspaperman James Gordon Bennett offers a trophy worth about $500 for a two-mile track race during an intercollegiate regatta. 1878 The Henley Regatta in England eliminates anyone who is engaged in manual labor. may 28, 1879 Pitcher Lee Richmond plays for the professional Worcester team and returns to play at Brown University.

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SePTember 11, 1882 Harvard president Eliot proposes the first interinstitutional effort in a move to oppose collegiate participation against professionals. June 18, 1883 A Princeton player says that he “had come to Princeton play football, not to study.” december 10, 1883 The Harvard Athletic Committee invites faculty of eastern colleges to meet to oppose professional coaches. Summer 1889 Some Princeton athletes receive board and twenty-five dollars per month for playing summer baseball at Camp May. december 20, 1889 A Princeton man offers a Harvard athlete an athletic scholarship for “board, tuition, etc., free.” laTe 1800S Most women physical educators favor “educational objectives for women, not athletic competition,” from the 1800s until after World War II. July 2, 1890 The Sherman Antitrust Act is enacted and eventually used in courts to show that the NCAA violates antitrust laws. January 1892 Senda Berenson of Smith College introduces women to basketball but soon rejects all offers by other schools to play intercollegiately. fall 1893 Seven members of the Michigan football team are not enrolled. auguST 27, 1894 The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act provides for an income tax but exempts nonprofit institutions such as colleges. ocTober 1894 Yale provides a training table for forty athletes. december 21, 1894 The Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association is formed to prevent remuneration of athletes and tramp athletes. January 11, 1895 The Big Ten is formed and prohibits athletic scholarships. 1896 University of Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg creates an athletic dorm. february 18, 1898 The faculty-controlled Brown Conference of “Ivy” League schools opposes athletic scholarships, training tables, and summer baseball for pay. July 31, 1900 The Penn State Board of Trustees offers the first athletic scholarships. december 11, 1901 Michigan players refuse to play in the first Rose Bowl unless all expenses are paid and they can return through New Orleans. ca. 1902 Yale gives sixty football players free tickets to games. January 6, 1903 A Harvard baseball player receives a prestigious George Emerson Lowell Scholarship despite having only a mediocre academic record. noVember 14, 1903 Harvard opens the first steel-reinforced stadium, seating about forty thousand. 1904 The Conference of Deans of Women in the Midwest votes to prohibit intercollegiate athletic contests for women.

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January 30, 1904 President William Harper of Chicago asks the alumni to organize and recruit athletes for Chicago’s football team. march 14, 1904 The trust-busting Northern Securities case sets the precedent for enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, important to the 1984 NCAA TV monopoly breakup. SPring 1904 Harvard’s Harry LeMoyne flunks out and is recruited in extraordinary ways in 1905 to reinstate him for athletic purposes. fall 1904 Yale’s James Hogan, star football player, is paid handsomely during his stay at Yale, including a two-week vacation to Cuba at the season’s end. december 28, 1905 The NCAA begins when sixty-eight institutions meet to reform football. march 9, 1906 The Big Ten bans athletic dorms and training tables. december 29, 1906 The first NCAA constitution leaves it up to each institution (home rule) to prevent violations of amateur sports. december 28, 1907 The NCAA states that summer baseball is anti-amateur. noVember 1909 The president of Princeton calls the extra-curriculum, especially sports, “side shows” that have “swallowed up the circus.” aPril 6, 1912 The Big Ten bans freshman participation in varsity athletics. december 28, 1916 The NCAA defines amateur as “one who participates in competitive physical sports only for pleasure, and the physical, mental, moral, and social benefits directly derived therefrom.” december 28, 1916 The NCAA adopts a resolution to petition a large foundation to study intercollegiate athletics and its violations of amateur sport. may 1, 1919 An NCAA leader complains that colleges must conduct sports along amateur lines but finance them commercially and professionally. June 19, 1921 The NCAA conducts its first national championship, in track and field, promoting recruitment for the sport. ocTober 13, 1921 Each Harvard football player receives ten complimentary tickets. aPril 7, 1923 The new Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation opposes intercollegiate athletics for women. January 1, 1926 The University of Alabama defeats the University of Washington in the Rose Bowl, helping to transform southern football. ocTober 24, 1929 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching publishes its American College Athletics, condemning commercialism and professionalism in college athletics, including athletic scholarships. february 3, 1931 President Thomas Gates of the University of Pennsylvania presents his plan to abolish athletic dorms and training tables, and create other reforms.

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december 1931 The Big Ten rules that no athlete shall lend his name to any form of commercial advertising. January 1932 Mildred “Babe” Didrikson is offered an athletic scholarship at the University of Southern California. SPring 1932 Officials of the Stanford Alumni Scholarship Fund ask Stanford for fifty special freshman admits for athletic “personal fitness.” June 6, 1932 President Hoover’s Revenue Act of 1932 places a 10 percent federal tax on collegiate football gate receipts. 1935 Georgia football players are given room, board, tuition, book, laundry money, and two dollars per month, plus football tickets to be sold if desired. noVember 5, 1935 President Frank Graham of North Carolina outlines his pure amateur plan for college athletics, including no financial aid to athletes. december 13, 1935 The Southeastern Conference votes 11–1 to openly offer full athletic scholarships. february 8, 1936 The Graham Plan for amateurism is adopted 6–4 by the Southern Conference. may 23, 1938 The US Supreme Court rules 6–2 that taxing college football gate receipts is constitutional. fall 1938 The University of Pittsburgh football players form a “union” and vote not to play in the Rose Bowl game unless conditions are met. march 27, 1939 The first NCAA basketball tourney is held at Northwestern University. december 21, 1939 The University of Chicago drops football, opposing player payments. december 29, 1939 Ohio State athletic director Lynn St. John probably speaks for many when he states that the NCAA cannot remain half professional (full scholarships) and half amateur (no athletic scholarships). december 29, 1939 The NCAA moves closer to a governing body (away from home rule) when its executive committee moves to establish amateur standards that institutions must abide by. december 30, 1939 The NCAA votes that aid to athletes should be awarded only on the basis of financial need. auguST 31, 1940 The Big Ten and Pacific Coast Conference meet to discuss a possible Rose Bowl contract to attract athletes to the two conferences and away from southern and eastern schools. fall 1940 The Southwest Conference offers athletic scholarships. fall 1940 The University of Pennsylvania becomes first to regularly telecast football.

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noVember 1, 1940 Gladys Palmer of Ohio State proposes a Women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association to attend to skilled women athletes. december 31, 1940 The NCAA seeks a grant to finance an investigative arm to enforce its code limiting the recruiting and subsidizing of athletes. SPring 1941 Gladys Palmer indicates that there will be no distinguishing between amateur and professional in her proposed Women’s NCAA. June 30, 1941 The first college women’s national championship, golf, is held at Ohio State with twenty-eight women from twenty-eight institutions competing. June 22, 1944 The GI Bill of Rights is passed to financially enable war veterans to attend college. noVember 20, 1945 The Ivy League is formed with eight schools agreeing that athletes “shall be truly representative of the student body.” July 23–24, 1946 The NCAA sponsors a conference of conferences to discuss amateur athletics, including the payment and recruiting of athletes. January 7, 1947 The NCAA passes the Sanity Code, limiting recruitment and payment of athletes, and awaits the 1948 vote to make it constitutional. 1948 Claude Hutcherson begins flying women basketball players from Wayland Baptist College to games. January 10, 1948 The NCAA unanimously passes the Sanity Code on recruiting and subsidizing. January 10, 1948 The NCAA opposes “promised pay in any form” and then allows payment of athletes’ tuition and fees. June 18, 1948 The NCAA Constitutional Compliance Committee is funded with $5,000. may 28, 1949 The Southeastern, Southern, and Southwest Conferences discuss possible withdrawal from the NCAA over opposition to the Sanity Code. January 14, 1950 The NCAA fails to terminate seven Sanity Code “sinners,” thus effectively ending its control of subsidizing athletes. may 23, 1950 The Revenue Act of 1950 contains the Unrelated Business Income Tax, which may impact commercialized college sport. march 31, 1951 Congress eliminates the excise tax on high school gate receipts but not on college gate receipts, continuing a 20 percent tax. January 8, 1953 The NCAA gives Kentucky the death penalty for illegal payment of basketball players. march 10, 1954 A bill to exempt college athletic tickets from a 20 percent excise tax is signed by President Dwight Eisenhower. may 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education declares that schools must “desegregate with all deliberate speed.”

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July 29, 1954 The Internal Revenue Code, section 117, exempts a tax on scholarships. SePTember 24, 1955 Ray Dennison, killed in a football game, is eventually denied workers’ compensation to his wife by the Colorado Supreme Court. 1956 Patsy Neal is given an athletic scholarship to attend Wayland Baptist. 1956 The NCAA, to appear more educational, uses the phrase grant-in-aid rather than athletic scholarship for the payment of athletes. January 7, 1956 The NCAA demands that athletes sign “letters-of-intent” contracts. January 11, 1956 The NCAA allows full athletic scholarships of tuition, room, board, books, fees, and fifteen dollars per month. aPril 30, 1956 The NCAA begins using the term student-athlete to counter workers’ compensation, making athletics appear to be educational, not work related. 1957 The NCAA’s Walter Byers is influential in making athletic scholarships four-year grants, helping to prevent athletes from claiming workers’ compensation and universities from having to pay for workers’ compensation insurance. 1958 Lacey O’Neal is offered a women’s track and field scholarship to attend Tennessee State as a fourteen-year-old. auguST 25, 1958 The NCAA changes its constitution “to maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body [to] retain a clear line of demarcation between college athletics and professional sports.” January 11, 1961 The NCAA recognizes “red-shirting” by allowing athletes five years to complete four years of participation. fall 1961 The Atlantic Coast Conference demands a 750 SAT score to obtain an athletic scholarship. december 8, 1961 The Big Ten finally allows full athletic scholarships not based on need. aPril 19, 1964 The NCAA Special Committee on Women’s Competition is set up. July 2, 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 helps African Americans gain athletic scholarships by forbidding discrimination in agencies that receive federal aid. december 21, 1964 Van Horn v. Industrial Accident Commission allows payment to an injured athlete as an “employee-employer” relationship. January 13, 1965 The NCAA passes 1.600 GPA legislation for athlete eligibility. march 1, 1965 The NCAA Long-Range Planning Committee discusses the need to encourage women to participate in intercollegiate athletics.

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noVember 8, 1965 Basic Economic Opportunity Grants (Pell Grants) are passed and will be used by colleges to pay athletes more than the full athletic scholarship. June 1966 In a move for women’s college sport to be more competitive, the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women is created to conduct national championships. January 8, 1968 The NCAA allows freshman eligibility for all but football and basketball. march 20, 1969 The first women’s National Invitational College Tournament in basketball is conducted. aPril 27, 1969 The Bingler v. Johnson case decision taxing scholarships is soon overturned by a court of appeals, giving precedent to not taxing athletic scholarships.. 1970 The NCAA Council appoints an amateurism committee to examine if amateurism in one sport applies to all sports. January 1971 NCAA legal counsel advises NCAA leaders to strongly consider providing championships for women. January 8, 1972 The NCAA passes freshman eligibility in football and basketball. June 23, 1972 Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 becomes law. July 1, 1972 The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women begins and is strongly opposed to athletic scholarships for women. July 25, 1972 Kathy Kemper, a Marymount College tennis player with an athletic scholarship, is denied participation in the AIAW women’s tennis championship, violating her constitutional equal rights. January 13, 1973 The NCAA votes out the 1.600 GPA rule, leaving it without any effective academic eligibility rule. January 13, 1973 The NCAA changes the four-year scholarship to a one-year renewable award. January 17, 1973 The Kellmeyer case over banned women’s athletic scholarships invalidates the AIAW’s policy of no athletic scholarships. aPril 1973 The AIAW votes to allow athletic scholarships after the Kellmeyer case. auguST 1973 The NCAA creates Division I-II-III, with no Division III athletic scholarships. January 1974 The NCAA allows a professional in one sport to participate in another sport. SPring 1974 Fred Rensing becomes a quadriplegic in spring football practice but is denied worker status and workers’ compensation by the Indiana Supreme Court.

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may 22, 1974 The George Hanford–authored American Council on Education study into the need for a national study of college sport states that the “distinction between amateurism and professionalism is disappearing.” ocTober 1974 Alvis Kent Waldrep is injured in football and files for workers’ compensation in 1991. He finally loses in a 2000 Texas Court of Appeals case. auguST 15, 1975 The NCAA eliminates the fifteen-dollar-per-month “laundry” money payment to athletes. ocTober 10, 1975 Representatives from seven major conferences meet to gain greater power in the NCAA and TV money, eventually leading to the creation of the College Football Association. June 15, 1977 The first annual meeting of the College Football Association is held. 1979 The male-dominated National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics sponsors a tournament for women, three years before the NCAA. december 11, 1979 The US Department of Health and Welfare issues its final interpretation of Title IX, including the three-prong test of compliance. 1980 Internal Revenue Rule 80–196 exempts college sport telecasting revenue from the Unrelated Business Income Tax. January 8, 1980 The NCAA votes down proposals of fifty dollars per month for scholarship athletes, and again in 1981, 1982, and 1985. January 14, 1981 The NCAA includes women’s athletics in its governance plan, leading soon to the downfall of the women’s AIAW. SePTember 26, 1981 Announcement of Professor Allen Sack’s Center for Athletes Rights and Education (CARE) includes the sharing of athletic revenues with athletes. January 12, 1982 Federal Pell Grants to athletes are deducted from full athletic scholarships. may 27, 1982 Electronic Arts, a creator of video games, is established by Trip Hawkins. 1983 Classicist David Young states that he finds no evidence that the ancient Greeks had a concept of amateurism. January 11, 1983 The NCAA passes Proposition 48, requiring a 2.0 high school GPA and a 700 SAT score for freshman eligibility. aPril 19, 1983 Willie Coleman of Western Michigan is not granted workers’ compensation, as he is found to not be a university employee. June 30, 1983 The AIAW ceases to exist. may 18, 1984 The AIAW v. NCAA monopoly case is decided in favor of the NCAA.

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June 27, 1984 Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens states, “In order to preserve the character and quality of [college athletics], athletes must not be paid.” June 27, 1984 The Supreme Court rules the NCAA football TV plan a monopoly, but it preserves amateurism in athletic scholarships. march 1986 Dick DeVenzio attempts to get Final Four players to boycott the NCAA basketball championship. January 1987 NCAA Proposition 48 becomes operational after passing in 1983. february 25, 1987 The NCAA gives Southern Methodist University the death penalty for the payment of athletes. march 22, 1988 Congress passes the Civil Rights Restoration Act, overriding the Grove City v. Bell decision, which removed most of athletics from under Title IX. december 12, 1988 The US Supreme Court rules that state universities are not state actors and do not come under the Fourteenth Amendment and due process requirements. SePTember 27, 1989 The Knight Foundation establishes the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics to study athletic reform, including athletic scholarships. January 8, 1991 The NCAA bans athletic dorms but allows 49 percent of dorm residents to be athletes. 1992 NCAA executive director Dick Schultz opposes athlete stipends because of possible taxes, workers’ compensation, and collective bargaining. february 3, 1992 Football coach Tom Osborne asks the NCAA to allow athletic scholarships to cover the cost of attendance, as opposed to then-current athletic scholarships. aPril 1992 A Harvard Law Review article points out that fixed athletic scholarship compensation violates the Sherman Antitrust Act. 1995 Walter Byers’s Unsportsmanlike Conduct criticizes the NCAA for exploiting athletes, including the one-year athletic scholarship. He argues that amateurism is not a moral issue, but a camouflage for monopoly practice. 1996 The NCAA allows the maximum Pell Grant to be retained by athletes who are on full athletic scholarships. January 11, 1998 The NCAA allows athletes to earn up to $2,000 during the sport season. february 1998 Electronic Arts releases the first NCAA March Madness video game; it is dropped for antitrust reasons by the NCAA in 2010. January 11, 1999 Division III votes 242–56 to allow “Leadership and Merit Awards” to athletes not based on need. ocTober 22, 1999 The Drake Group of university athletic reformers organizes in an attempt to give athletes a greater voice. 250

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January 11, 2001 Ramogi Huma organizes the Collegiate Athletes Coalition for athletes’ rights. february 17, 2006 White v. NCAA challenges the NCAA cap of athletic scholarships. June 2006 Andrew Oliver sues the NCAA for making him ineligible because he had an attorney-agent when discussing a professional baseball contract. ocTober 2, 2006 Rep. Bill Thomas asks the NCAA to justify its tax-exempt status. January 30, 2008 White v. NCAA is settled when the NCAA pays $10 million to former athletes for not receiving the full cost of college attendance. July 21, 2009 The O’Bannon v. NCAA lawsuit over athlete’s images in Electronic Arts video games begins. ocTober 27, 2011 The NCAA permits athletes to be given up to $2,000 per year toward the cost of attendance. february 17, 2012 The NCAA allows institutions to grant multiyear scholarships. aPril 26, 2012 The NCAA allows tennis players who have made $10,000 a year to be eligible for college competition. June 18, 2012 In Agnew v. NCAA, the appeals court dismisses the antitrust violation of the one-year scholarship rule to keep the “revered tradition of amateurism.” January 11, 2013 NCAA Council delays vote on its policy for transfers and NIL policy, awaiting antitrust concerns of the US Justice Department and NCAA v. Alston US Supreme Court pending decision. SPring 2013 Kain Colter, a Northwestern football player, contacts Ramogi Huma about the rights of athletes. January 2014 Northwestern University football players vote for a union. January 28, 2014 Ramogi Huma announces the formation of the College Athletes Players Association, an advocacy group supported by the United Steelworkers. march 5, 2014 The Alston v. NCAA lawsuit begins for overturning the cap on athletic scholarships. march 17, 2014 The Jenkins v. NCAA lawsuit questions caps on athletic scholarships. march 30, 2014 Electronic Arts and Collegiate Licensing agree to pay $40 million to football and men’s basketball players for the use of their likenesses. June 4, 2014 The Alston and Jenkins cases are consolidated for discovery purposes under Judge Claudia Wilken. June 9, 2014 O’Bannon v. NCAA begins under Judge Claudia Wilken. June 9, 2014 The NCAA agrees to pay $20 million to football and men’s basketball players for the use of their likenesses in Electronic Arts games. June 27, 2014 O’Bannon v. NCAA concludes with Judge Wilken ruling that athletes may receive up to $5,000 above a full scholarship. 251

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auguST 7, 2014 The NCAA agrees to allow major conferences to increase financial aid, athlete insurance loans, medical care, unlimited food, and travel expenses. auguST 10, 2014 Judge Wilken writes that there are no “core principles by NCAA for amateurism.” January 17, 2015 The NCAA allows scholarships to cover the full cost of attendance. auguST 17, 2015 The National Labor Relations Board blocks Northwestern’s union attempt. SePTember 30, 2015 The appeals court in O’Bannon v. NCAA blocks Judge Wilken’s allowance of payment of athletes up to $5,000 per year in deferred compensation. may 2016 The NCAA ignores the Knight Commission’s recommendation for athletes to be paid for their names, images, and likenesses. ocTober 27, 2016 The NCAA’s Academic Enhancement Fund is created to distribute money from the basketball championship to institutions based on academic achievement. february 4, 2017 The NCAA is to pay $208.7 million to football and men’s and women’s basketball players to cover differences for previous costs of education. aPril 25, 2017 In Dawson v. NCAA, Lamar Dawson is not granted minimum wage for his athletic participation. ocTober 11, 2017 The NCAA Independent Commission on College Basketball is created weeks after fraud and corruption charges are brought. auguST 24, 2018 Jenkins v. NCAA is stayed by Judge Wilken. SePTember 20, 2018 The Alston v. NCAA bench trial is concluded and awaits a final hearing before Judge Wilken. february 5, 2019 Senator Nancy Skinner introduces the Fair Pay to Play bill to allow NIL payments to California athletes. march 8, 2019 Judge Wilken rules that NCAA scholarship caps are a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The NCAA appeals in two weeks. march 14, 2019 Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina introduces the StudentAthlete Equity Act for athletes’ rights to their names, images, and likenesses. may 14, 2019 The NCAA creates a working group to consider NIL payments. June 17, 2019 The NCAA’s Mark Emmert tries to bully California legislators into dropping Bill 206, the Fair Pay to Play Act. July 10, 2019 Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduces the Athletics Fair Pay Act of 2019 to help ensure pay equity for amateur athletes. SePTember 11, 2019 The NCAA Board of Governors pressures California governor Gavin Newsom to veto Bill 206, allowing NILs. SePTember 30, 2019 Governor Newsom signs the Fair Pay to Play Act. 252

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ocTober 29, 2019 The NCAA Board of Governors directs each NCAA division to change its policy relative to NILs. noVember 5, 2019 Trey Johnson sues the NCAA for violation of minimum-wage laws for athletes. december 5, 2019 Five US senators discuss drafting federal legislation to compensate college athletes. december 18, 2019 Reps. Donna Shalala and Ross Spano introduce the Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics Act of 2019. January 6, 2020 A hearing panel on Judge Wilken’s 2019 ruling orders athletes and the NCAA to submit briefs on the impact of California’s Fair Pay to Play Act. february 11, 2020 The US Senate holds a hearing on the payment of college athletes. march 13, 2020 Florida’s legislature passes legislation to pay college athletes. may 18, 2020 The court of appeals upholds Judge Wilken’s 2019 Alston ruling to allow payments to athletes for education-related materials. auguST 11, 2020 The NCAA’s application for a stay in the Alston case is denied by US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. ocTober 15, 2020 The NCAA petitions the US Supreme Court to review the Alston case. december 15, 2020 The US Supreme Court will hear the Alston lawsuit appeal by the NCAA on the limits of athlete compensation and violation of antitrust law.

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Notes

inTroducTion 1. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984), No. 83–271, decided 27 June 1984. Emphasis added. 2. For a more thorough discussion of the 1984 Supreme Court decision, see Ronald A. Smith, Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 152–178. 3. One might consider how amateur participants in large commercial sports would be treated differently than those in small commercial activities such as band, debate, or theater. Yet, even before major commercialization of sports in the 1800s, only amateurism in extracurricular sport activities was considered important. There is little evidence that nineteenth-century college debaters needed to be amateurs, though the competition with other colleges was an important activity. 4. As an example, the National Debate Tournament has been held since 1947. My alma mater, Northwestern (NU), has won fifteen titles, eight more than second-place winners Harvard. NU gives out eight Hardy Scholarships paying expenses at NU, including all expenses for the many tournaments participated in. NU recruits debaters by hosting a high school debate tournament each year. They are not called amateurs and given amateur rules, nor are they titled “student-debaters” as athletes are called, disingenuously, “student-athletes.” 5. NCAA-sanctioned payment of athletes first occurred in 1948, when the NCAA passed the so-called Sanity Code allowing the payment of an athlete’s tuition. 6. Ronald A. Smith, “From Normal School to State University: A History of the Wisconsin State University Conference” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1969). 7. I first told this story in my Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time Athletic Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), x. 255

8. The other universities that have had no major NCAA penalties are Boston College, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. 9. Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 27–29. 10. The ancient Greeks had no term for amateur, as effectively shown by the Classicist David C. Young in his “Professionalism in Greek Athletics,” The Ancient World 7 (1983): 45–51; and The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics (Chicago: Ares Publishing, 1985), 7, 20. 11. Marc Edelman, “A Short Treatise on Amateurism and Antitrust Law: Why the NCAA No-Pay Rules Violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 645, no. 1 (2013): 61–99. 12. Paraphrased from Anton Chekhov, Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 27 October 1888, in Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, trans. Constance Garnett (Adelaide, Australia: University of Adelaide, 2014).

chaPTer one. amaTeuriSm Then and now 1. Frank  W. Nicolson, Wesleyan College; James  R. Angell, University of Chicago; and Thomas A. Story, City College of New York (Committee of the NCAA) to President Ray L. Wilbur, Stanford University, 1 May 1919, President Wilbur Papers, box 27, folder 4, Stanford University Archives. 2. H. W. Whicker, “Why Amateurs? North American Review 223, no. 4 (April 1933): 305. 3. Comparing America to the British, Samuel Crowther and Arthur Ruhl believe the pro coach “is bad for the sport and takes away from the amateur idea.” Crowther and Ruhl, Rowing and Track Athletics (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 221. The American journalist Caspar Whitney complains that “the professional coach has more to do with the present spirit in our universities of winning at any cost than any other single factor.” Whitney, “Who Is Responsible for the Commercialism in College Sport?” Outing 46 (July 1905): 485. 4. George Dohrmann, “Should College Athletes Be Paid?,” Medium, 6 October 2015, medium.com /@BlackWall20/should-college-athletes-be-paid -a1021bdd2a76. In the fifty states in 2015, the highest paid employees were football or basketball coaches in thirty-nine, medical school personal in five, university presidents in five, and a law school dean in one. 5. Women’s intercollegiate athletics has a much different history, and the amateur spirit changed to one of professionalism and commercialism only well after World War II. It will be dealt with separately in chapter 13. 6. David C. Young, The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics (Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1985), 20, 7. 7. Even a lover of amateurism in the twenty-first century, Lincoln Allison (Amateurism in Sports [London, England: Frank Cass, 2001], 36, 51, 71, and 163), believed the English upper class wanted to keep athletics in the hands 256

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of gentlemen. The elites, as administrators of amateur sport, were well “paid” with travel, clothes, whiskey, and subsidized social clubs, and Allison states that “sometimes honest commercialism is preferable to corrupt officialdom.” Amateurism, according to Allison, “was ‘classist’ in that it distinguished between social classes in favour of those already dominant.” He concludes, “Perhaps the twenty-first century will be a new golden age of amateurism.” Yet even this lover of amateurism writes, “The true amateur principle never really took root in the USA and certainly never crossed the Appalachians” (124). Allison should have written that amateurism never took root among the participants of sport in the United States on either side of the Appalachians. 8. Tony Collins, A Social History of English Rugby Union (Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2009), 35. Collins’s analysis of early amateurism in Britain is insightful in a chapter titled “The Amateur Game,” specifically the sub-section “The Invention of Amateurism” on pages 30–46. Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves, in “A Universal Dilemma: The British Sporting Life and the Complex, Contested, and Contradictory State of Amateurism,” Journal of Sport History 41, no. 1 (Spring 2014), point out that before the 1860s, no amateurprofessional dichotomy existed. 9. Herbert T. Steward, The Records of the Henley Regatta, 1839–1902 (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 229–230; Harold Harris, Sport in Britain (London: Stanley Paul, 1975), 86. 10. For instance, Jim Turrini notes that by the time of the first Olympic Games in the 1890s, “if an athlete competed in any sport for money, coached for money, or attempted to use his reputation as an athlete to benefit monetarily, like writing articles about his sporting exploits or allowing his image to be used in advertisements, the AAU banned him . . . for life from all AAU competitions.” Turrini, The End of Amateurism in American Track and Field (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 15. The Amateur Athletic Union (formed in 1888) ruled amateur sport in America before the NCAA came into existence. As late as the 1960s, the AAU had a regulation prohibiting any coach from participating in amateur sport. At that time, I was considered a professional basketball player and was banned from playing in a Wisconsin AAU basketball tournament because I coached a junior high school basketball team. 11. “Principle of Amateurism,” 2019–20 NCAA Division I Manual (Indianapolis: NCAA, 2019), 2.9. 12. New York Herald, 19 August 1852, 2; James Whiton, “The First HarvardYale Regatta (1852),” Outlook 68 (June 1901): 286–289; Charles  F. Livermore, “The First Harvard-Yale Boat Race,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 1 (December 1893): 226. 13. New York Clipper, 22 July 1871, 125, and 26 July 1873, 133; Harvard Advocate, 9 June 1876, 99; J. R. W. Hitchcock, “The Harvard Yale Races,” Outing 6 (July 1885): 401. 14. Alexander Agassiz, “Rowing Fifty Years Ago,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 15 (March 1907): 458; Charles W. Eliot, “In Praise of Rowing,” Harvard 257

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Notes to Pages 11–12

Graduates’ Magazine 15 (March 1907): 532; B. W. Crowningshield, “Boating,” in The Harvard Book, by F. O. Vaille and H. A. Clark (Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, 1875), 2:263. 15. Guy M. Lewis, “America’s First Intercollegiate Sport: The Regattas from 1852–1875,” Research Quarterly 38 (December 1967): 642. Yale did beat Harvard in 1859 in a dual match the day after Harvard won the college regatta. Harvard won the important regatta. 16. For more details, see Ronald  A. Smith, “The Rise of the Professional Coach,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 149–164. 17. Charles W. Eliot, “President Eliot’s Report,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 3 (March 1894): 376, as quoted in Ronald A. Smith, “The Lost Battle for Gentlemanly Sport, 1869–1909,” in The Rock, The Curse, and the HUB: A Random History of Boston Sports, ed. Randy Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 160–177, specifically 160. 18. For a discussion of the infusion of professionalism in American culture and higher education, see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). 19. Charles W. Eliot, “Inaugural Address, 19 October 1869,” Harvard University Archives, 22. 20. John Corbin, “English and American University Athletics,” Outing 39 (October 1901): 36. 21. Edwin  E. Slossen, quoted in Brooks  M. Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 331. 22. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 2:129. 23. Chris Bolsmann and Dilwyn Porter, “‘A Scratch Team with Gentlemanly Instincts’: The Corinthians and English Soccer in the Late Nineteenth Century,” English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game (London: Routledge, 2019), chapter 1. 24. Tocqueville states, “In America the aristocratic element has always been feeble. . . . America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:55. 25. Danielle S. Allen, “A Declaration of Freedom and Equality: Exploring the Arguments of Independence,” The Institute Letter (Summer 2014), Institute for Advanced Study, ias.edu/ideas/2014/allen-declaration. 26. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1778 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 43, 562; Roger Burlingame, The American Conscience (New York: Alfred  A. Knopf, 1960), 403; David Potter, Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 46; J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: 258

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Notes to Pages 13–16

University of California Press, 1978), 18. There is considerable controversy over the meaning of both freedom and equality and whether the two are compatible. Tocqueville did not think so and favored equality. 27. For a study of the athletic elite failure of Harvard and Yale, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Harvard-Yale Dual League Plan of the 1890s: A Failure of Elitism,” New England Quarterly 41 (June 1988): 201–213. 28. For a worthy discussion of amateurism and the heredity-ascribed versus talent-achieved status, see Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 484–491. For an early example of English upper-class arrogance favoring amateur over professional sport, see an article by an Oxford University don (professor): N. L. Jackson, “Professionalism and Sport,” Fortnightly Review 67 (January 1906): 156–161. For an integrative attempt to show the transformation of the traditional British aristocratic sportsman’s (amateur) attitude to a popular American gamesmanship in which social class dominates, see John Dizikes, Sportsmen and Gamesmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). For a strong argument that athletics naturally tend toward professionalism when excellence in performance is desired, see James W. Keating, “The Heart of the Problem of Amateur Athletics,” The Journal of General Education 16 (January 1965): 261–272. 29. Of the many opinions that the Oxford and Cambridge model of amateur sport was not suited for America was that of Yale president James Angell, at a 1930 NCAA meeting, when he stated, “The British sports tradition—highly individual, conceived for Oxford and Cambridge ‘gentlemen’ of wealth and leisure— is not suited to the American milieu nor adapted to the typical college community.” Quoted by Justin L. Morrill at the NCAA convention of 1939, NCAA, Proceedings, 30 December 1939, 109. 30. New York Times, 25 November 1951, 55. 31. The first US Supreme Court decision in American history negative to amateur sport, because of antitrust violations, is NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984). As will be seen, the Oklahoma case broke up the NCAA TV monopoly, but the concept of amateurism was supported by both the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion. See chapter 15.

chaPTer Two. The harVard dilemma — amaTeur or ProfeSSional 1. Harvard Crimson, 20 December 1889, Harvard University Archives. 2. “A Reply to the Statement of December 18th by the Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports of Harvard University, by the Princeton Advisory Committee and Foot Ball Managers, 24 February 1890,” box 1, General Athletics, Princeton University Archives. 3. For the transformation of rugby football into American football, see 259

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Notes to Pages 17–20

Ronald A. Smith, “The Americanization of Rugby Football: Mass Plays, Brutality, and Masculinity,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 83–98. 4. Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 59, 80; Henry James, Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869–1909 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), ii, 61–67. 5. James F. Muirhead, The Land of Contrasts: A Briton’s View of His American Kin (Boston: Lamson, Wolfe, 1898), 107. 6. Endicott Peabody, “The Ideals of Sport in England and America,” American Physical Education Review 19 (1914): 277–282. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840; repr., New York: Vintage, 1945), 2:108. 8. Louis Hartz argues in his The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955) that America was never a country governed by aristocrats that needed to be overthrown to develop a democracy. This has been challenged by other historians, but his theme has stood the test of time. 9. Charles  E. Norton, quoted in Boston Post, 25 November 1889, HUD 10889.2, folder “1889 Football Controversy,” Harvard University Archives. 10. Albert B. Hart, a Harvard history professor and member of the Harvard Athletic Committee, commented in 1895 that there is “no Oxford and Cambridge in America,” something similar to the comment by the Oxford Rhodes scholar and president of the University of Iowa, Virgil Hancher, more than a half century later. See Hart, “Harvard’s Athletic Policy,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 4 (December 1895): 212. See chapter 10 for Hancher’s comments. 11. John W. White, W. S. Chaplin, and Albert Bushnell Hart, “Harvard College Report on the Committee Appointed to Consider the Subject of College Athletes and to Report Thereon to the Faculty,” 12 June 1885, HUD 8388, Harvard University Archives. 12. Harvard Crimson, 11 January 1884, 1. 13. Newspaper clippings, ca. 1886, Moses Taylor Pyne Scrapbook 8:74, Princeton University Archives. 14. Frank Presbrey and James Moffatt, Athletics at Princeton (New York: Frank Presbrey, 1901), 167. 15. “Overseer Athletic Abuses Committee Report,” ca. April 1888, HUD 8388.5, Harvard University Archives. 16. Walter Camp, “Not Out of the Race: The Football Outlook at Yale 1889,” newspaper clipping, reel 41, Walter Camp Papers, Yale University Archives. 17. William H. “Pa” Corbin, Fishkill Landings, New York, telegram to Walter Camp, 4 November 1889, Walter Camp Papers, box 7, folder 204, Yale University Archives. 18. Letter from Knowlton  L. Ames, undated and released by the Harvard Athletic Committee, Boston Post, clipping, 20 December 1889, HUD 10889.2, folder “1889 FB Controversy,” Harvard University Archives.

260

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Notes to Pages 20–24

19. Princetonian, 15 November 1889, 1. 20. Princetonian, 11 November 1889, 1; New York Times, 20 November 1889, 5, and 6 November 1889, 2. 21. Caspar Whitney, “The Sportsman’s View-Point,” Outing 42 (August 1903): 630. 22. Caspar Whitney, A Sporting Pilgrimage: Riding to Hounds, Golf, Rowing, Football, Club and University Athletics. Studies in English Sport, Past and Present (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895), 28. 23. Article clipping, Harvard Bulletin, 1 July 1903, 4, Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 110, folder 144, Harvard University Archives. 24. Charles Whitney, “The Oxford-Yale Athletic Meeting,” Outing 24 (August 1894): 115. 25. Harvard Advocate, 31 October 1879, 38. 26. The best example I have seen of a president rejecting a large sum of money was that of Joseph Swain of Swarthmore College in 1907. Under the condition of Swarthmore dropping athletics, Anna T. Jeanes left in her will an amount of money greater than the worth of Swarthmore. After receiving advice from the president of the University of Minnesota and two dozen other college presidents, Swain decided to turn down the money to preserve the freedom to act in the future. Minnesota’s President Northrop, however, advised, “Money talks, as it always does, and I for my part would accept it.” The Last Will and Codicils of Anna T. Jeanes Deceased (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1907), “Anna T. Jeanes, 1822–1907” file, Swarthmore College Library. See also Ronald A. Smith, “The Swarthmore Case: An Addendum on Freedom,” in his Sports and Freedom, 209–212. 27. “President Eliot’s Report,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 9 (March 1901): 452. 28. T. S. Woolsey to Walter Camp, 23 December 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 22, folder “Cutts”; H. W. Raymond to Walter Camp, 12 June 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 20, folder 569; Philip  R. Allen to Walter Camp, 30 April, 14 May, and 21 May 1903, Walter Camp Papers, box 1, folder 17; George P. Sawyer to Walter Camp, Walter Camp Papers, 2 December 1905, Yale University Archives. Bill Reid Jr. to Christine Reid, 15 July 1904, Thomas Stetson Personal Collection; H. S. White, Chairman of the Harvard Athletic Committee, to Dr. Nichols, 11 June 1904, Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 13 June 1904, Harvard University Archives; Caspar Whitney, “The Sportsman’s View-Point, Outing 38 (June 1901): 339. 29. “Clarkson a Professional,” Harvard Bulletin, 15 June 1904, 2, Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 201, folder “Athletics—Newspaper Clippings,” Harvard University Archives. 30. Ira N. Hollis to Charles W. Eliot, 16 January 1903, Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 110, folder 243—“Hollis Letters,” Harvard University Archives. 31. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 15 January 1903, Harvard University Archives. 32. Ronald  A. Smith, ed., Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of

261

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Notes to Pages 24–27

Coach Bill Reid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), xv; Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 7 February 1905, Harvard University Archives; Archibald C. Coolidge, “Professional Coaches,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 14 (March 1906): 392–395. 33. Coolidge, “Professional Coaches,” 395. 34. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 15 December 1999, 11 November 1889, 16 June 1890, 15 and 18 December 1890, and 16 January 1892, Harvard University Archives. 35. H. A. Bellows, “Athletics,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 13 (March 1905): 473. 36. William Blaikie to Charles Eliot, 4 March 1904, Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 203, folder “Blaikie,” Harvard University Archives. 37. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 6 December 1907, Harvard University Archives. 38. L. B. R. Briggs to Charles  W. Eliot, 27 January 1902, Charles  W. Eliot Papers, box 102, folder “Briggs,” Harvard University Archives. 39. Charles W. Eliot to Dr. William Everett, 8 December 1908, Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 202, folder “Athletics,” Harvard University Archives.

chaPTer Three. “ScholarShiPS” 1. College of William and Mary Faculty Minutes, 1893–1903, 28 February 1898, William and Mary Archives. 2. William Galpin, Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1952), 1:151–152. 3. “Teaching in American Colleges,” Nation 335 (30 November 1882): 458. 4. A. M. F. Davis, “College Athletics,” Atlantic Monthly 51 (May 1883): 677–684. 5. Harvard Advocate, 17 December 1880, 77. 6. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1946–1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), 329. 7. Frank Presbrey and James Moffatt, Athletics at Princeton (New York: Frank Presbrey, 1901), 135. 8. Walter L. Munro, The Old Back Campus at Brown (Providence, RI: Haley & Sykes, 1929), 42. 9. The Cornell Era, 16 May 1884, 290; 23 May 1884, 302; and 30 May 1884, 317. Four years before, an officer in the military department of Cornell wrote a letter to the editor concerned about hired players. The Cornell Era clipping, ca. 4 June 1880, Major James Brattle Burbank Papers, 33/2/m.735, Cornell University Archives. 10. The best account of the transformation of rugby to American football is Roger Tamte, Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 55–67. 262

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Notes to Pages 27–33

11. W. R. Warren, New York City, to Charles W. Eliot, 30 November 1894, President Eliot Papers, box 110, folder 144, “Athletics,” Harvard University Archives. 12. Henry B. Needham, “The College Athlete,” McClure’s Magazine 25 (June 1905): 121. 13. “Report to the Advisory Committee of the Columbia University Athletic Association,” ca. February 1900, file “Athletics,” Columbia University Central Files. 14. “Columbia Beats Yale at Football,” New York Times, 29 October 1899, 1. Yale lost only two games in 1899, the other to Princeton, 11–10. 15. President Butler later said that he abolished football at Columbia because the team was loaded “with ringers and professionals.” The team of 1899 had only three Columbia College undergrads, with the rest graduate students who had played football elsewhere. Andrew O’Connell to President Charles L. O’Donnell, 30 March 1929, Vice-President M. A. Mulcaire Records, UVMU, box 2, folder “ICAA,” University of Notre Dame Archives; Horace Coon, Columbia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 301. 16. “Football in Danger,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 March 1895, 11. 17. “Sanitary Report of Naval Academy, January 1894,” box 1, folder “History, Army-Navy Football,” US Naval Academy Archives. 18. “Will Not Hurt Football Here,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 December 1894, 2. 19. I will use the common name Big Ten, though the conference has been called several names, including the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives when Indiana and Iowa joined in 1899. 20. “Going to the Coast,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 December 1894, 11. Chicago received a $1,000 guarantee and 75 percent of the gate receipts. 21. “Boys Must Not Slug: College Presidents Interested in Football Rules,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 January 1895, 3. The presidents included William R. Harper, Chicago; A. S. Draper, Illinois; Cyrus  K. Northrup, Minnesota; Henry  W. Rogers, Northwestern; James  H. Smart, Purdue; and Charles  K. Adams, Wisconsin. James Angell of Michigan did not appear. 22. Princeton and Harvard were the first two institutions to create controlling athletic committees with faculty control. Princeton University Faculty Minutes, 2 June 1822 and 13 October 1882, Princeton University Archives and Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 15 June 1882 and 17 October 1882, Harvard University Archives. 23. “Boys Must Not Slug,” 3; Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 February 1895, 11; New York Times, 13 January 1895, 6; Howard Roberts, “The Conference Is Born,” in his The Big Nine: The Story of Football in the Western Conference (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1948), 14–19. Roberts believed, wrongly, that Lake Forest College was at the meeting. 24. Herbert J. Barton, professor of Latin and literature at the University of Illinois and faculty representative to the Big Ten beginning in 1899, wrote a 263

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Notes to Pages 34–37

history of the conference: “The College Conference of the Middle West,” Educational Review 27 (January 1904): 42–52. In it he complains that too many believed “that if a man is a bona fide student, amateur standing is a mere aristocratic furbelow [an ornament].” In the West, Barton writes, it was felt that “if good material was not at hand, it was sought” and “what are we here for except to win?” He and many faculty fought that trend. 25. Minutes, 11 January 1895, Proceedings: Intercollegiate Conference Faculty Representatives (Minneapolis: The University Press, 1901), 8. The same wording existed in 1901. 26. Barton, “College Conference of the Middle West,” 52. 27. Winton U. Solberg, Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 28. New York Herald, 24 July 1855, 3. 29. Ronald A. Smith, “A Failure of Elitism: The Harvard-Yale Dual League Plan of the 1890s,” New England Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 1988): 201–213. 30. The chair of the Harvard Athletic Committee explained the importance of the Spraker situation in a ten-page letter to Harvard’s President Eliot. Ira N. Hollis to President C. W. Eliot, 23 January 1902, President Eliot Papers, box 143, folder “Hollis,” Harvard University Archives. 31. William M. Irvine, Mercersburg Academy, to Walter Camp, 17 January 1902, Walter Camp Papers, box 22, folder “Cutts,” Yale University Archives. 32. Tamte, Walter Camp, calls Camp the Yale athletic director, which in a way he was as a paid head of the Financial Union of Yale University Athletics created in the early 1890s. Tamte goes into no details of the Glass and Cutts cases. 33. Walter Camp to President Arthur  T. Hanley, 28 October 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 11, folder 313, Yale University Archives. 34. Alfred L. Ripley, Andover, MA, to Walter Camp, 10 November 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 22, folder “Cutts,” Yale University Archives. Ripley stated that Glass had been at Yale for only two months and that because he had attended another college previously, he needed to be enrolled at Yale for one calendar year before participation. 35. Samuel J. Elder to Walter Camp, 9 November 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 10, folder 264, Yale University Archives. 36. George T. Adee to Walter Camp, 9 November 1901, Walter Camp Papers, box 1, folder 10, Yale University Archives. 37. Attached Yale statement to letter from George T. Adee to Camp. 38. William James Jr., “Sport or Business?” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 12 (December 1903): 225–229. 39. C. W. Eliot, “President Eliot’s Report,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 3 (March 1894): 376. 40. Charles Grossman’s letter, 21 November 1901, in Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 November 1901, 6. 41. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, vol. 1 (1882–1908), 22 November 1901 and 23 November 1901, Harvard University Archives. 264

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Notes to Pages 37–41

42. John A. Blanchard, ed., The H Book of Harvard Athletics, 1852–1922 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Varsity Club, 1923), 414; Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 November 1901, 17. 43. Irving R. Fisher, Check for $15 to Oliver Cutts, 23 May 1899, and Receipt of Irving  R. Fisher, Walter Camp Papers, box 11, folder 313, Yale University Archives. 44. New York Times, 22 January 1902, 10, and 19 February 1902, 2. 45. Brown Daily Herald, 18 February 1898, 1; 19 February 1898, 1; and newspaper clippings, 19 February 1898, Brown University College Scrapbook, 1897– 1904, Brown University Archives. 46. President Charles W. Eliot Papers, box 117, folder 260. Camp’s memorandum after meeting with Harvard’s Hollis outlines the conflict between the two schools. “Memorandum of Meeting with Hollis on Harvard’s Invitation,” 14 February 1902, Walter Camp Papers, box 22, folder “Cutts,” Yale University Archives. 47. New York Times, 11 December 1902, 6. 48. Harvard Bulletin, 18 March 1903, 1. 49. R. B. Merriman, “The Football Outlook: New Eligibility Rules,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 15 (September 1906): 52; H. A. Bellow, “New Eligibility Rules,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 14 (June 1906): 694; “Tentative Rules Agreed upon by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for Eligibility,” ca. February 1906, Walter Camp Papers, box 8, folder 178, Yale University Archives; Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, vol. 1 (1882–1908), 14 February 1906, Harvard University Archives.

chaPTer four. Training, Training TableS, and aThleTic dormS 1. New York Herald, 27 July 1859, 1; Lyman Bagg, Four Years at Yale (New York: Henry Holt, 1871), 371–373; A History of American College Regattas (Boston: Wilson, 1875), 9. 2. James Whiton, “The First Harvard-Yale Regatta (1852),” Outlook 68 (June 1901): 287. 3. R. M. Hurd, “The Yale Stroke,” Outing 15 (December 1889): 230. 4. Henry James, Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 1:80–81; Charles W. Eliot, “How I Kept My Health,” in his A Late Harvest (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1924), 7. 5. The first multi-school regatta was organized for 23 July 1858, but the stroke of the Yale four-oared crew, George Dunham, drowned, and the regatta was called off. New York Herald, 27 July 1859, 1. 6. George L. Meylan, “Athletic Training,” American Physical Education Review 18 (April 1913): 221. 7. Bagg, Four Years at Yale, 373. 265

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Notes to Pages 41–47

8. New York Clipper, 6 August 1864, 130; Hurd, “Yale Stroke,” 230–231. 9. New York Clipper, 1 August 1868, 130; Yale University Faculty Minutes, 19 September 1868, Yale University Archives. 10. “Boat Racing,” Gentleman’s Magazine (January 1869): 174–175; “Oxford University Boat Club Miscellaneous Papers, 1848–1934,” G. A. Oxon C 257, Oxford University Library; J. C. Tinné, “International Training, 1869,” Oxford City Library pamphlet. Tinné was captain of the OUBC. 11. William Blaikie, “The International Rowing-Match, 1869,” Harper’s Monthly 40 (December 1870): 55–56. 12. New York Clipper, 4 August 1860, 133; Edward  F. Blake, “Shall I Join a College Boat Club?,” University Quarterly 1 (July 1860): 105–106; William Blaikie, “Ten Years Among Rowing Men,” Harper’s Monthly 47 (August 1873): 408; Clarence Deming, “College Boating in the Sixties,” Outing 44 (June 1904): 416; newspaper clipping, 17 August 1906, in “Harvard vs. Oxford in 1869, Boat Race, 1883– 1914,” Scrapbook, Oxford University Boat Club, Oxford University Library. 13. Blaikie, “Ten Years Among Rowing Men,” 408. 14. “Speech on the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty, in Executive Session of the Senate, April 13, 1869,” in Charles Sumner: His Complete Works (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1900), 17:53, 90. 15. The Congressional Globe, 19 April 1869, 729; Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), 73–102. 16. New York Clipper, 4 September 1869, 170. 17. “The International Boat Race,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated 29 (11 September 1869): 409. 18. New York Clipper, 26 July 1873, 133; J. R. W. Hitchcock, “The Harvard-Yale Races,” Outing 6 (July 1885): 401. 19. Harvard Advocate, 15 January 1875, 121; Frank Presbrey and James H. Moffatt, Athletics at Princeton (New York: Frank Presbrey, 1901), 511. 20. Spirit of the Times, 28 April 1877, 314. Yale had dropped out of the Saratoga Regatta. 21. John  N. Ostrom to Andrew  D. White, 17 November 1875, Andrew  D. White Papers, Cornell University Archives; Waterman T. Hewett, Cornell University (New York: University Publication Society, 1905), 3:152. 22. B. W. Dwight, “Intercollegiate Regattas, Hurdle-Races and Prize Contests,” New Englander 25 (April 1876): 255; Hewett, Cornell University, 3:167. 23. Harvard Advocate, 22 October 1875, 31. 24. Albert B. Hart, “Harvard’s Athletic Policy,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 4 (December 1895): 212. 25. Ronald A. Smith, “Walter Chauncey Camp,” in Biographical Dictionary of American Sports, ed. David L. Porter (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 85–86. The most complete description is by Roger R. Tamte, Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 55–67. 26. For further elaboration, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Development of the Thanksgiving Day Game” and “The Americanization of Rugby Football,” in his 266

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Notes to Pages 47–52

Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78–82 and 83–98. 27. Harvard Advocate, 17 October 1879, 32; John A. Blanchard, The H Book of Harvard Athletics, 1852–1922 (Cambridge: Harvard Varsity Club, 1923), 382. 28. Boston Post clipping, 20 December 1889, HUD 109869.2, folder “1889 Football Controversy,” Harvard University Archives. 29. “Princeton Football Financial Statements, 1882–1893,” Walter Camp Papers, box 20, folder 564, Yale University Archives. 30. Garrett Cochran, Princeton football captain, to Francis Lane, 20 August 1896, Scrap Book of Francis Adnoijah Lane ’97, Princeton University Archives. 31. Presbrey and Moffatt, Athletics at Princeton, 356. 32. Camp’s six years on the football team included his undergraduate years and two years of medical school, before he dropped out to pursue an entrepreneurial career in watchmaking. 33. E. L. Richards, “The Football Situation,” Popular Science Monthly 45 (October 1894): 724; Clarence Deming, “The Money Power in College Athletics,” Outlook 80 (1 July 1905): 571–572. 34. Eugene L. Richards, “Intercollegiate Athletics and Faculty Control,” Outing 26 (July 1895): 326. 35. Dale  A. Summers, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans: 1850–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 264. 36. Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 53–54. 37. Northwestern University President’s Annual Report, 1904–05, 17, Northwestern University Archives. 38. James Gray, The University of Minnesota, 1851–1951 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 543. 39. New York Post, 22 January 1906, newspaper clipping, Columbia University Football Scrapbook, Columbia University Archives; John  S. Watterson, College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 91. One of the reasons that the University of Michigan dropped out of the Big Ten shortly afterward is that it would not drop the training table in addition to shortening football seasons and not allowing freshmen to participate. Phil Pack, “One Hundred Years of Athletics: The University of Michigan,” ca. 1937, University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. 40. J. Pearce Mitchell, Board of Athletic Control, to President R. L. Wilbur, Stanford, 24 June 1922, President Wilbur Papers, box 51, folder 14, Stanford University Special Collection. 41. Allen R. Powers, M.D., to President Robert G. Sproul, University of California, 7 January 1931, President Correspondence and Papers, 1931, folder 79, University of California Archives. 42. Howard J. Savage et al., American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929). 43. “A Statement by Thomas S. Gates, 3 February 1931,” Papers of the Office of 267

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Notes to Pages 52–55

the President, 1950–55, box 43, folder “Intercollegiate Athletic Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 44. New York Times, 18 January 1936, 17. 45. Casey Jones to Ridge Riley, 20 August 1973, Ridge H. Riley Papers, box 04.24, folder 20, Penn State University Archives. 46. William Tate to Dean D. J. Sorrells, 5 March 1964, President Aderhold Papers, series 4, box 1, folder “Athletic Association,” University of Georgia Archives; John E. Sims, “Memorandum,” 11 July 1947, folder “Athletic Association, 1945,” University of Georgia Archives; Tulane Board of Administrators [Trustees] Minutes, 11 March 1947, Tulane University Archives; R. R. Neyland to Dean R. F. Thomason, 24 November 1956, President Brehm Papers, box 1, folder “Meeting of the Athletic Board,” University of Tennessee Special Collections. 47. R. R. Neyland to R. F. Thomason, 24 November 1956, box 1, folder “Meeting of the Athletic Board”; John L. Neely Jr. to Coach Bowden Wyatt, box 2, folder “Sundry Correspondence; and box 1, folder “De-Emphasis of Football— Sundry,” President Brehm Papers, University of Tennessee Special Collections. 48. Hugh N. Montgomery to President O. C. Carmichael, University of Alabama, 18 April 1956; Dan Olsen to President Gordon Gray, University of North Carolina, 1 May 1952, President Gray Files, 2/2/3, box 10, folder “General, 1952,” University of North Carolina Archives. 49. L. B. R. Briggs to President C. W. Eliot, 2 October 1907, UAI.5.150, box 278, folder “Oct. 1907,” Harvard University Archives. 50. NCAA, Proceedings, 6 January 1960, 142. 51. For a lengthy discussion, see Ronald A. Smith, “The NCAA and the Sanity Code: A National Reform Gone Wrong,” in his Pay for Play: A History of BigTime College Athletic Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 88–99. 52. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 101. 53. Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 101–102. 54. “General Profile of Today’s College Football Players,” ca. February 1981, CFA Study, President Banowsky Papers, box 92, folder 13, University of Oklahoma Archives. The Big Ten and the PAC-10 conferences did not join the CFA. 55. George H. Hanford, An Inquiry into the Need for and Feasibility of a National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics: A Report to the American Council on Education (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1974). 56. George H. Hanford, “We Should Speak the ‘Awful Truth’ about College Sports,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 May 2003, chronicle.com/article/We -Should-Speak-the-Awful/15514. 57. Danny Robbins, “Invincible No More: Nigel Clay Planned to Be in the NFL, but Now He Is Playing for a Correctional Center,” Los Angeles Times, 2 February 1992, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-02-sp-2041-story.html; “Sooners’ Switzer Quits under Fire: Program Tainted by Probation, Players Arrests,” Los Angeles Times, 19 June 1989, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-06-19-sp-1932 -story.html. 268

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Notes to Pages 56–59

58. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1994, 69. 59. Alexander Wolff, “Upstairs Downstairs: Athletic Dorms Have Been Legislated Out of Existence,” Sports Illustrated, 14 October 1991, vault.si.com/vault /1991 /10/14 /upstairs-downstairs-athletic-dorms-have -been-legislated-out-of -existence-they-must-close-their-doors-by-1996-but-many-coaches-especially -in-the -south-believe -that-the -dorms-are -the -best-way-to -supervise -players -and-produce. 60. NCAA, Proceedings, 8 January 1991, 220 and A-32; 9 January 1992, 290. 61. Kyle Rowland, “Where Everything Is an Arms Race, College Athlete Housing Has Entered the Recruiting Discussion,” Eleven Warriors, 18 June 2014, elevenwarriors .com /college-basketball-recruiting /2014 /06/36633/where -everything-is-an-arms-race-college-athlete-housing-has-entered-the; Charles Goldberg, “Suite Life: Auburn Athletes Like New Residence Hall,” Auburn University Athletics, 1 August 2013, auburntigers .com /news/2013 /8/1 /Suite _life_Auburn_athletes_like_new_residence_hall.aspx; “cal xvid 002,” YouTube video, posted 13 November 2012 by cfbsectionhoops, youtube.com/watch?time _continue=9&v=NQc2O7A5zo0&feature=emb_logo; “Headington Hall/OU Athletics,” University of Oklahoma, accessed 22 December 2018, static.soonersports .com/custompages/microsites/facilities/brushed/headington.html. For similar expensive amenities for athletes, specifically weight training facilities, see Jason P. Shurley, Jan Todd, and Terry Todd, Strength Coaching in America: A History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 1–4.

chaPTer fiVe. The amaTeur challenge of Summer baSeball for Pay 1. See excerpt from Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) in “A History of the Fig Leaf,” Slate, 16 July 2013, slate .com /culture/2013 /07/the -fig-leaf-in-painting -and-sculpture-excerpt-from-anatomies-by-hugh-aldersey-williams.html. The fig leaf of religious statues and other art was pronounced after the 1563 Roman Catholic Council of Trent ruling. 2. Harvard Advocate, 23 May 1879, 89. 3. F. C. Bancroft telegram to J. Lee Richmond, 27 May 1879, John Lee Richmond Files, Brown University Archives. 4. Harvard Advocate, 6 June 1879, 97. 5. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 28 November 1889, Harvard University Archives. 6. George W. Orton, A History of Athletics at Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Athletic Association, University of Pennsylvania, 1896), 150. 7. Newspaper clipping, 19 January 1898, Brown University College Scrapbooks, 1897–1904, Brown University Archives. 269

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Notes to Pages 59–63

8. “Conference on Intercollegiate Athletics, 1898,” early draft, Brown University Archives. 9. “Brown Conference Report on Intercollegiate Sports,” HUD 8398.75, Harvard University Archives; newspaper clipping, 19 February 1898, Brown University College Scrapbook, 1897–1904, Brown University Archives. 10. Augustus Hemenway, Robert Bacon, and Theodore Roosevelt (Committee on Physical Training, Athletic Sports, and Sanitary Condition of Buildings), “Important Suggestions in Athletics,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 6 (December 1897): 195–196; quote in Caspar Whitney, “The Guiding Hand of Faculty in College Sports,” Outing 9 (July 1902): 497. 11. Caspar Whitney, “Amateur Sport,” Harper’s Weekly 43 (8 April 1899): 352. 12. Amos Alonzo Stagg to C. M. Hollister, Northwestern University, 21 June 1901; Albert C. Coon, Oswego, NY, to Stagg, 31 October 1902, A. A. Stagg Papers, box 78, folder 2, and box 77, folder 7, University of Chicago Archives. 13. Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 56. 14. Leroy Vernon, Chicago Daily News, to Amos Alonzo Stagg, 19 April 1904, A. A. Stagg Papers, box 77, folder 7, University of Chicago Archives. 15. Bruce Corrie, “A History of the Atlantic Coast Conference” (PED diss., Indiana University, 1970), 53. 16. Francis M. Foy, Georgetown, ’04, to the student body of Georgetown, 22 May 1905, Athletic Association, box 1, folder “Athletic Department 1900–1910,” Georgetown University Archives. 17. Henry B. Needham, “The College Athlete,” McClure’s Magazine 25 (June 1905): 263. 18. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 29 December 1906, 11, and 28 December 1907, 24. For a more detailed description of home rule, see Ronald A. Smith, “The NCAA: A Ruling Body Lacking Power and Prestige,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 206–208; and Ronald A. Smith, Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 52–59, 89–93. The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States changed its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910. 19. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 29 December 1906, 23. 20. “President’s Letter of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States,” 20 December 1906, Walter Camp Papers, box 1, folder 20, Yale University Archives. Sullivan was president of the AAU from 1906 to 1909. 21. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 29 December 1906, 24. 22. For a lengthy discussion of summer baseball during the Progressive Era, see Scott  A. McQuilkin, “Summer Baseball: The Second ‘Vexation,’” in his

270

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Notes to Pages 63–66

“A History of Intercollegiate Athletic Reform During the Progressive Era, 1890– 1920” (PhD diss., Penn State University, 1995), 148–207. 23. Lester, Stagg’s University, 9–10, 26. 24. Ellen W. Gerber, “Luther Halsey Gulick,” in her Innovators and Institutions in Physical Education (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1971), 348–362. 25. Luther H. Gulick, MD, “Amateurism,” Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 28 December 1907, 40–46. 26. Clark W. Hetherington, Chair, “Report of Committee on Summer Baseball,” Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 28 December 1907, 23–24. 27. Capt. Palmer E. Pierce, President, “The [Intercollegiate] Athletic Association of the United States: The Origin, Growth and Function,” Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 28 December 1907, 27–32. 28. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 28 December 1907, 10. 29. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, Proceedings, 26 December 1908, 55. 30. NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1910, 10. 31. NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1910, 9. 32. Prof. George  W. Ehler, Fourth District Report, NCAA, Proceedings, 30 December 2011, 16–17. 33. The Carlisle Indian School had an 11–1 record in 1911, with Thorpe making four field goals (of thirteen, forty-four, thirty-seven, and eighteen yards) and an extra point in its win over Harvard, a team that lost only two games, to Carlisle and Princeton, 8–6. The Boston American sub-headlined, “Four Scalps for Thorpe.” “1911 College Football National Championship,” TipTop25, accessed 10 June 2020, tiptop25.com/champ1911.html. 34. Don Jensen, “Jim Thorpe,” Society for American Baseball Research, accessed 18 January 2019, sabr.org/bioproj/person/5ce7670a#_edn5. 35. “The Amateur,” Outlook 103 (8 February 1913): 294. 36. Centre Daily Times [Pennsylvania], 12 April 1914, 7. The AAU was especially vigilant about amateur track and field participants earning money from overgenerous expense accounts, “broken-time” expenses, and under-the-table payments. See Joseph M. Turrini, The End of Amateurism in American Track and Field (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 24–25, 32, 39–40. 37. Athletic Board of Control Minutes, 1908–1960, 1914, University of Southern California Archives; Report of the Faculty Athletic Committee to President J. C. Branner, Stanford, 1 October 1915, President Wilbur Papers, box 27, folder 1, Stanford University Archives. 38. NCAA, Proceedings, 28 December 1915, 16. 39. John L. Griffith to A. A. Stagg, 16 May 1923, Amos Alonzo Stagg Papers, box 77, folder 1, University of Chicago Archives. 40. Fred Moore, Harvard Graduate Treasurer, to Henry Pennypacker, Harvard 271

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Notes to Pages 67–71

Athletic Committee, Chair, 4 March 1925; Sidney Curtis, New York City, to Henry Pennypacker, 10 June 1925, Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports, 1922–1926, folder “June 1925,” Harvard University Archives; “Report to the President and Fellows of Harvard University by the Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports, Statement of Policy,” 10 October 1925, President Lowell Papers, folder 72, Harvard University Archives; Charles W. Kennedy to Henry W. Pennypacker, 24 November 1925, Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports, 1922–1926, folder “Nov. 1925,” Harvard University Archives. 41. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1948, 158. 42. Darrell Shoemaker, “Basin League Had Memorable Run in S.D,” Rapid City Journal, 16 August 2003, rapidcityjournal .com /sports/local /basin-league -had -memorable -run-in-s-d /article _50ef1023-1dfc-5674-83a7 -9f6db49a1a56.html. I participated for a short time with Chamberlain, a team that failed financially in 1957. I played in one game, hitting a double off the scoreboard in my only time at bat, driving in two runs, and fielding 1.000 as a shortstop before being released the next morning because Chamberlain had too many players for its budget. 43. The NCAA council passed proposals for governing summer baseball on 8 January 1958. Art Bergstrom, “Unedited Draft NCAA Chronology,” ca. 1974, Ursula Walsh Files, NCAA Headquarters. Evidently, players were in violation of NCAA legislation in the Nova Scotia League in 1956. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1956, 143. 44. “N.C.A.A. Summer Baseball Requirements for 1966,” Walter Byers Papers, folder “Baseball,” NCAA Headquarters. Eight leagues were certified by the NCAA in 1966. 45. “The Top Summer League Teams,” 23 August 2018, Collegiate Summer Baseball, collegiatesummerbaseball.com /top-25-college-baseball. The highest number of leagues were in Massachusetts, California, and New York.

chaPTer Six. The 1929 carnegie rePorT 1. Howard J. Savage et al., American College Athletics, bulletin no. 23 (New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929). 2. Palmer E. Pierce to NCAA members, 14 August 1917, box 1, “General Athletics,” Princeton University Archives. 3. Palmer Pierce to NCAA members, 25 May 1917, President Wilbur Papers, box 3, folder 2, Stanford University Archives. 4. See more details in Ronald A. Smith, “Student Control and Faculty Resistance,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 118–133. 5. Woodrow Wilson, “What Is College For?,” Scribner’s Monthly 46 (November 1909): 576. 6. NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1922, 65–66. 7. NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1922, 66. 272

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Notes to Pages 71–75

8. Newspaper clipping, 14 January 1916, President Wilbur Papers, box 27, folder 3, Stanford University Archives. The General Education Board was founded in 1903 to support higher education and medical schools among other educational activities without distinction of race, sex, or creed, with some money from John D. Rockefeller. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie for teacher pensions and the improvement of education. The Russell Sage Foundation was founded in honor of the railroad magnate in 1907 to improve living conditions in the United States. 9. NCAA, Proceedings, 28 December 1916, 53; M. M. Fleischer, “History of the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference” (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959), 25. 10. Edgar Fauver, “The Place of Intercollegiate Athletics in Physical Education Programs,” American Physical Education Review 27 (June 1922): 4. 11. Howard Savage, Fruit of an Impulse: Forty-Five Years of the Carnegie Foundation, 1905–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 155–166. 12. Frank W. Nicolson, Wesleyan, James R. Angell, Chicago, and Thomas A. Storey, CCNY, to President Ray L. Wilbur, Stanford, 1 May 1919, President Wilbur Papers, box 27, folder 34, Stanford University Archives. 13. John Carroll, Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 77–96. 14. Only a few years before, ten University of Illinois football players were paid to play for Taylorville, Illinois, in a game against rival Carlinville, which had nine players from Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame team in the fall of 1921. Bob Braunwart and Bob Carroll, “The Taylorville Scandal,” Coffin Corner 2, no. 6 (1980), profootballresearchers.org/coffin-corner80s/02-06-034.pdf. 15. Steven L. Kanter et al., “Henry Pritchett and His Introduction to the Flexner Report of 1910,” Academic Medicine 85, no. 11 (November 2010): 1777–1783. 16. John  L. Griffith, “The Carnegie Report,” Journal of Higher Education 1 (June 1930): 325. Griffith stated that the report was to investigate defects and merits of college sport, “but little space is devoted to merits.” Ralph W. Aigler, lawyer and professor at the University of Michigan, agreed, claiming the Carnegie investigators had “no intention to be fair and accurate.” New York Times, 24 January 1930, 34. Howard Savage stole letters from the Michigan files and only returned photostatic copies of the originals. 17. New York Times, 30 March 1925, 6. 18. New York Times, 24 May 1926, 10. 19. New York Times, 24 May 1926, 10. 20. Savage, American College Athletics, xxi. 21. Daily Iowan, 25 October 1929, 1. 22. Savage, American College Athletics, 82, 83, 92, 94, 118, 237, 258, 263, 264. 23. Savage, American College Athletics, 265. 24. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the athletic reform leaders of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Arne Duncan and Carol Cartwright, announced that institutional presidents, rather than reform, 273

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Notes to Pages 75–79

“felt obligated to protect the interests of their conferences, institutions and powerful alumni associations.” Arne Duncan and Carol Cartwright, “The NCAA Is Too Far Gone for Incremental Reform,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 July 2018, chronicle.com/article/the-ncaa-is-too-far-gone-for-incremental-reform. 25. For a lengthy article on Eliot and his attempt to keep athletics gentlemanly and amateur, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Lost Battle for Gentlemanly Sports, 1869–1909,” in The Rock, The Curse, and the HUB: A Random History of Boston Sports, ed. Randy Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 160–177. 26. Charles W. Eliot, telegram to Henry M. MacCracken, 26 November 1905, quoted in New York Daily Tribune, 29 November 1905, 2. 27. Edwin  E. Slosson, Great American Universities (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 29. 28. “‘In’ Box,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 January 1989, A13. 29. Raymond Schmidt, Shaping College Football: The Transformation of an American Sport (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 229. 30. New York Times, 8 November 1930, 6; “A Statement by Thomas S. Gates, 3 February 1931,” Papers of the Office of the President, 1950–1955, box 53, folder “Intercollegiate Athletic Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 31. “Statement by Thomas S. Gates”; New York Times, 6 February 1931, 28. 32. President Robert G. Sproul, University of California, to Dean Thomas M. Putham, University of California, 12 February 1931, Presidents Correspondence and Papers, 1932, folder 415, University of California Archives. 33. New York Times, 18 January 1936, 17. 34. Pitt being the highest paid team was disputed by a star athlete at Pitt in 1930, Marshall Goldberg. He said that a number of other institutions paid their players more than did Pitt. Goldberg, Chicago, to Nancy Foley, State College, PA, 6 March 1987, Nancy Foley personal files. Nancy Foley, “Questionnaire: Football Policies at Pitt, Late 1930’s,” Exercise and Sport Science Class 444 paper, Penn State University, 27 April 1987. 35. Francis Wallace, “Test Case at Pitt: The Facts about College Football for Pay,” Saturday Evening Post 212 (October 28, 1939): 14–25, 47–49, 51–52; Saturday Evening Post 212 (4 November 1939): 20–21, 80, 82, 85–86. 36. Nancy C. Foley, “The Elimination of Athletic Subsidies at the University of Pittsburgh, 1936–1939,” Exercise and Sport Science Class 444 Paper, Penn State University, 27 April 1987, Penn State University Archives. 37. New York Times, 29 December 1938, 22. 38. Robert C. Alberts, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787–1987 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), 179. 39. Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (1930, repr., New York: Teachers College Press, 1967), 69, 190. 40. Warren Ashby, Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1980), 131–132. 41. Frank P. Graham to President W. P. Few, Duke University, 25 November 274

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Notes to Pages 79–84

1935, Frank P. Graham Files, 1/1/4, box 3, folder “November 1935,” University of North Carolina Archives. 42. “Montgomery County Alumni Association of UNC Resolution,” 28 January 1936, President Graham Files, 1/1/4, box 3, folder “January 1936,” University of North Carolina Archives. 43. James  R. Angell to Frank  P. Graham, 29 January 1936, President Graham Files, 1/1/4, box 3, folder “January 1936,” University of North Carolina Archives. 44. Frank P. Graham to Prof. Guy A. Cardwell, Tulane University, 25 November 1940, President Graham Files, 2/2/3, box 120, folder “General 1939–47,” University of North Carolina Archives. 45. For a superb book on the University of Chicago, Stagg, and athletics, see Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-time Football at Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 46. Milton Mayer’s Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 137–138, indicates Hutchins’s knowledge of the Carnegie Report but not that it influenced him. 47. Robert M. Hutchins, “Gate Receipts and Glory,” Saturday Evening Post 211 (3 December 1938): 73. 48. The Drake Group, an athletic reform group formed in 1999 by professor and provost at Drake University Jon Erickson, created the Robert Maynard Hutchins Award in 2004 to honor a college faculty or staff member for his/her “courageous stand to defend academic integrity in response to institutional pressure related to special treatment of athletes.” “Hutchins Award,” Drake Group, last modified 4 December 2012, thedrakegroup.org/2012/12/04/52. 49. Report of the Special Committee on the Athletic Policy of the American Council on Education, 16 February 1952 (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1952); George H. Hanford, An Inquiry into the Need for and Feasibility of a National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics: A Report to the American Council on Education (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1974); Report of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Keeping Faith with the Student-Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics (Miami, FL: Knight Foundation, 1991). 50. Charles W. Eliot, telegram to Chancellor Henry MacCracken, New York University, quoted in Boston Globe, 29 November 1905, 3. 51. Savage, American College Athletics, 265.

chaPTer SeVen. The SouTheaSTern conference and aThleTic ScholarShiPS 1. “Teaching in American Colleges,” Nation 35 (30 November 1882): 458. 2. Newspaper clipping, Boston Post, 20 December 1889, in “1889 Football Controversy,” HUD 10889.2, Harvard University Archives. 275

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Notes to Pages 84–88

3. College of William and Mary Faculty Minutes, 24 February 1895, College of William and Mary Archives. 4. Clifford S. Griffin, The University of Kansas: A History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974), 650–651. 5. Walter Camp, “Undergraduate Limitation in College Sports,” Harper’s Weekly 37 (11 February 1893): 1443. 6. See Peter  N. Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 96–112. Stearns emphasizes the loss of individuality both in the workplace and in property, the rise of feminism, and the decline of patriarchal authority in the home—all signs of the validity of manhood. See also Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 102. 7. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Law of Civilization and Decay,” in his American Ideals (New York: G. P. Putnam‘s Sons, 1897), 371. For understanding the question of manhood at Harvard, see Kim Townsend, “Teaching Men Manhood at Harvard,” in her Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 80–158. 8. Andrew Doyle, “Turning the Tide: College Football and Southern Progressivism,” Southern Cultures 3, no. 3 (1997): 28–51. When Alabama beat the University of Washington in a 1926 Rose Bowl upset 20–19, it let other southern schools believe that they, too, could win. 9. Karen Taylor, “The Price of Eternal Honor: Independent White Christian Manhood in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South Since Reconstruction, ed. Craig T. Friend (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 25–45. 10. “Statement and Resignation of President John  W. Abercrombie of the University of Alabama, 1911,” University of Alabama Archives; Suzanne Rau Wolfe, The University of Alabama: A Pictorial History (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1983), 127. 11. “‘Roses of Crimson’—1926 Rose Bowl Documentary,” YouTube video, posted 21 April 2016 by Bama Rewind, youtube .com /watch ?v= CsyGmqp WBlc. 12. Wikipedia, s.v., “Sewanee: The University of the South,” last modified 7 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewanee:_The_University_of_the_South. 13. George H. Pritchard, Intercollegiate Athletics: From the Viewpoint of College and University Presidents and Deans (Cape Giradeau, MO: State Teachers Colleges, ca. 1928), 20, in President Newcomb Papers, box 4, folder “Athletics, 1934–36,” University of Virginia Archives. 14. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 52. 15. “John J. Tigert,” University of Florida, Office of the President, president .ufl.edu/about/past-presidents/john-j-tigert, accessed 30 March 2019. 16. Newspaper clipping, Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 December 1935, Michigan University Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, box 21, folder “Papers 276

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Notes to Pages 88–92

1935 December 1,” Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library; Warren Ashby, Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Publisher, 1980), 136. Only Vanderbilt opposed athletic scholarships. Laundry was later used euphemistically to refer to a method of paying athletes in cash. 17. NCAA, Proceedings, 27 December 1934, 101–107. 18. NCAA, Proceedings, 27 December 1934, 77–78. 19. NCAA, Proceedings, 27 December 1934, 115. 20. Frank W. Nicolson, NCAA Secretary, to University Presidents, 28 October 1935, President Newcomb Papers, box 4, folder “Athletics,” University of Virginia Archives. 21. NCAA News Bulletin 4 (January 1936): 12. 22. This was noted later by the football coach at LSU in the 1930s and future SEC commissioner Bernie Moore, when he stated in 1956 that athletic scholarships were “not a plan for ‘buying’ athletes. . . . It was an economic necessity.” NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1956, 157. 23. New York Times, 14 December 1935, 20; Washington Post clipping, 18 December 1935, President Newcomb Papers II, box 4, folder “Athletics,” University of Virginia Archives. 24. University of Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 13 January 1935, University of Virginia Archives. 25. Frank P. Graham to Dean A. W. Hobbs, North Carolina Athletic Committee, 27 January 1935, President Graham Files, 2/2/3, box 20, folder “Boxing, 1934–46,” University of North Carolina Archives. 26. As told by Forrest Towns in Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, eds., Tales of Gold (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987), 169. 27. As quoted by the Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 December 1935, Michigan University Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, box 21, folder “Paper 1935 December 1,” Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library. 28. “Athletic Scholarship Holders for 1936,” President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 2, folder “Athletic Scholarships 1939–40,” Tulane University Archives. 29. Bruce Corrie, “A History of the Atlantic Coast Conference” (PED diss., Indiana University, 1970), 98. Seven other institutions joined the Southern Conference in 1936: Davidson, Citadel, Furman, George Washington, Richmond, Wake Forest, and William and Mary. 30. “Second District Report,” NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1939, 34–35. St. John probably borrowed the half-professional and half-amateur aphorism from Professor Ralph Aigler, who spoke at the 1938 NCAA meeting. 31. NCAA, Proceedings, 30 December 1939, 119. 32. NCAA, Proceedings, 30 December 1939, 99–104, 121. Professor W. B. Owens of Stanford in his Presidential Address noted the middle course (100). 33. C. L. Eckel, Chair, Senate Committee on Athletics, to Colorado President Robert L. Stearns, President’s Office, series I, box 29, folder “Athletics 1927–53,” University of Colorado at Boulder Archives. 277

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Notes to Pages 92–95

34. NCAA, Proceedings, 29 December 1939, 101. 35. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1946, 86. 36. “Army Specialized Training Program,” revolvy.com /topic /Army %20 Specialized%Training; “V-12 Navy College Training Program,” revolvy .com /page/V%2521D12-Navy- College -Training, accessed 5 April 2019. Sites discontinued. 37. “Ole Miss Great Barney Poole Passes Away,” Ole Miss, 12 April 2005, olemisssports .com /news /2005 /4 /12 /Ole _Miss _Great _Barney_Poole _Passes _Away.aspx. 38. The 1941 poll results were published in the NCAA, Proceedings, 5 January 1944, 47. See also NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1946, 76. 39. NCAA, Proceedings, 5 January 1944, 24, 35. 40. See, for instance, the paper by Dean A. W. Hobbs of the University of North Carolina in the NCAA, Proceedings, 12 January 1945, 144. The last legislation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the 22 June 1944 so-called socialistic GI Bill of Rights, federal legislation to offer World War II veterans fifty dollars a month (seventy-five for married vets), with over two million taking advantage of the free education. It greatly increased college enrollment, and higher education became more democratic and less elitist. “G. I. Bill,” University of Ontario, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, accessed 9 March 2008, oise.utoronto.ca/research/edu20/moments/1944gibill.html. Page discontinued.

chaPTer eighT. naTional aThleTic ScholarShiP failure 1. The movement toward NCAA legislating occurred one week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The NCAA asked college presidents, “Should the NCAA become a legislative body and set up the necessary machinery to enforce the rules adopted by it, or do you consider it a wiser policy to proceed as we have in the past” and preserve home rule? George L. Rider, Miami University of Ohio representing NCAA Fourth District, to President Rufus C. Harris, Tulane, 13 December 1941, President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 2. NCAA, Proceedings, 8 January 1947, 162–168. 3. NCAA, Proceedings, 173–175. 4. New York Times, 8 January 1947, 30. 5. New York Times, 21 January 1947, 19. 6. “Conference Heads Scan Purity Code,” New York Times, 19 April 1947, 19. 7. Bernie Moore to President Rufus  C. Harris, 6 August 1947, President Rufus  C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 8. Fred C. Frey to Rufus C. Harris, 4 August 1947, President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 278

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Notes to Pages 95–101

9. H. L. Donavan to Rufus  C. Harris, Tulane, 6 August 1947, President Rufus  C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 10. C. M. Sarratt to President Rufus  C. Harris, 6 August 1947, President Rufus  C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 11. Ralph E. Adams to President Rufus C. Harris, Tulane, 31 July 1947, President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 12. J. D. Williams to President Rufus C. Harris, Tulane, 14 August 1947, President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “NCAA 1937–50,” Tulane University Archives. 13. “Dr. J. D. Williams, Who Guided the University of Mississippi . . .,” UPI, 30 May 1983, upi.com /Archives/1983/05/30/Dr-JD-Williams-who-guided-the -University-of-Mississippi/6928423115200. Several people were killed and thousands of military troops were involved in the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. 14. New York Times, 19 December 1947, 36. 15. Kenneth L. [Tug] Wilson, “Commissioner’s Report to the Joint Conference,” 6 December 1951, in “Athletics,” President E. B. Fred, General Correspondence Files, 1951–52, series 4/16/1, box 162, University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. 16. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1948, 94–95. 17. NCAA, Proceedings, 98–109. 18. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1948, 188–189. Emphasis added. 19. “Constitution and Bylaws,” Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States Convention Proceedings, 29 December 1906, 33. 20. Respected sport economist Andrew Zimbalist has argued that the Sanity Code was not an effort to hold back commercialism and professionalism, but rather “an insidious conspiracy to reduce costs and enlarge profits.” Andrew Zimbalist, Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 10. Primary sources from the historical record would indicate that this statement is false for the period when the Sanity Code was being discussed (1946–1948). Without historical evidence, one might make this statement because money to athletic coaches and administrators has skyrocketed while payments to athletes have not. The Sanity Code, however, was an attempt to level the playing field through similar payments for athletes’ tuition and incidental fees and to keep some semblance of amateurism, not an attempt to keep down the cost for paying athletes. 21. Once the vote was taken, Curly Byrd, the president of the University of Maryland, immediately moved for an investigation of all NCAA schools to be completed by the next NCAA convention and before the suspension of any violators of the Sanity Code (passed 87–71). The resolution was not found in the NCAA convention proceedings, for it was claimed by the NCAA leadership that 279

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Notes to Pages 101–103

the missing resolution was “due to mechanical difficulty” and the stenographer “was not able to record all the business that transpired.” Whether or not this was a conspiracy by the NCAA leaders has not been proven. Newspaper clipping, New York Herald Tribune, 15 January 1950, in N. W. Dougherty Collection, box 20, folder 3, University of Tennessee Archives; unidentified “Memo,” ca. January 1950, President’s Papers, box 3, folder “NCAA-1950,” University of Virginia Archives. The memo notes that Clarence Houston, chair of the NCAA Compliance Committee, rose to his feet and requested his name be removed from the committee he chaired, probably in opposition to Curly Byrd’s motion. 22. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1948, 212. 23. “Recommended NCAA Football Television Plan for 1968 and 1969,” Walter Byers Papers, vol. 48, folder “TV: General 8/67–9-67,” NCAA headquarters, Indianapolis. 24. See early discussions of this in NCAA, Proceedings, 29 July 1932, 18–32, and 27 December 1934, 68–69. 25. See chapter 12. 26. NCAA, Proceedings, 8 January 1949, 99. 27. “Joint Meeting of the Southern, Southeastern, and Southwest Conferences, May 28, 1949,” Unprocessed Athletic Department Papers, folder “Correspondence—President SEC,” University of Alabama Archives; President Blake R. Van Leer, Georgia Tech, to Presidents of the Southern, Southeastern, and Southwest Conferences, 25 January 1949, Records of the Office of the President, 1949– 66, box 66, folder “NCAA Regional Conference, May 28, 1949,” Georgia Tech University Archives. 28. The Virginia Board of Visitors voted to offer athletic scholarships through the alumni association by its unanimous vote. Board of Visitors Minutes, 9 July 1948, University of Virginia Archives. 29. University of Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 21 July 1940, University of Virginia Archives. New York Times, 29 May 1949, 6; 10 June 1949, 39; 7 July 1949, 32; and 25 December 1949, 51, 54. 30. Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 14 October 1949 and 2 December 1949, University of Virginia Archives. 31. New York Times, 14 December 1947, 4; 22 February 1948, 1; and 17 May 1948, 25. 32. Horace Renegar, Tulane Athletic Director, memo to President Rufus Harris, Tulane, 26 November 1949, President Rufus C. Harris Papers, box 1, folder “Athletics 1949–50,” Tulane University Archives. 33. NCAA Executive Committee Minutes, 16–18 June 1948, N. W. Dougherty Collection, box 20, folder 3, University of Tennessee Archives. Five thousand dollars was for investigations, the same amount of money the NCAA provided to study any negative effects of telecasting football games on attendance in stadiums. 34. President Cloide Brehm, “Meeting with Administrative Group,” 10 January 1955, President Brehm Papers, box 2, folder “Employment of Bowden 280

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Notes to Pages 103–105

Wyatt,” University of Tennessee Archives. This seventeen-page transcript of the Tennessee administrators’ meeting discusses the dilemma of President Brehm in trying to eliminate Neyland’s “slush fund.” “I am not so sure that you can get rid of [Neyland’s] ‘slush fund,’” Brehm said, “[but if members of the Board of Trustees found out about Neyland’s illegal practices] they may cut my throat.” 35. As quoted in Tim Cohane, “Let’s Take the Hypocrisy Out of College Football,” Look (December 1950): 61. 36. NCAA, Proceedings, 14 January 1950, 207; New York Times, 15 January 1950, 1, 3; New York Herald Tribune, 15 June 1950, clipping in the N. W. Dougherty Collection, box 20, folder 3, University of Tennessee Archives. 37. New York Times, 25 December 1949, 5. 38. New York Times, 18 January 1950, 37; N. W. Dougherty, NCAA Executive Committee, to Hugh C. Willett, 24 January 1950, N. W. Dougherty Collection, box 20, folder 3, University of Tennessee Archives; University of Virginia Board of Trustees Minutes, 10 February 1950, University of Virginia Archives. 39. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 68. 40. Cohane, “Let’s Take the Hypocrisy,” 62. 41. New York Times, 9 January 1951, 32. 42. Arthur Daley, “The Colleges and the Sanity Code,” New York Times, 17 January 1950, 33.

chaPTer nine. The cleanSing of The iVy league 1. For an unraveling of the flag-dipping saga, see Mark Dyreson, “The ‘Stars and Stripes’ at the Olympic Games,” in Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: Most Iconic Moments in American Sports, ed. Steven Gietschier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 10–17. 2. Myron Finkbeiner, From Harvard to Hagerman, An Incredible Journey of an Unknown Athlete: Harry LeMoyne (Boise, ID: Borderline Publishing, 2012), 1–21, 83. 3. Ronald  A. Smith, ed., The Diary of Coach Bill Reid: Big-Time Football at Harvard 1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 1–2. Reid, with an undergraduate and a master’s degree from Harvard, but with no editor, misspelled LeMoyne’s name as “LaMoyne.” 4. Smith, Diary of Coach Bill Reid, 11–12, 77–78. 5. Henry B. Needham, “The College Athlete,” McClure’s Magazine 25 (June 1905): 115–116, 124; New York Post, 18 January 1906, newspaper clipping in the Columbia University Football Scrapbook, Columbia University Archives; Albert B. Crawford, ed., Football Y Men 1872–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1962), 83. Roger Tamte, in Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 273–277, has a slightly different interpretation of the football trainer, Mike Murphy, and Hogan’s trip to Cuba. 281

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Notes to Pages 106–113

6. For more details of the Brown Conference, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Brown Conference of 1898,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 138–144. 7. Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 6 June 1916, Harvard University Archives; “Harvard-Yale-Princeton Athletic Agreement, Effective 1 January 1923,” President Lowell Papers, 1922–25, folder “6A,” Harvard University Archives. 8. Marcia G. Synnott, “The ‘Big Three’ and the Harvard-Princeton Break, 1926–1934,” Journal of Sport History 3 (Summer 1976): 188–202. 9. Harvard Crimson, 3 December 1936. 10. New York Times, 5 December 1936, 10, and 16 December 1936, 37. 11. James B. Conant to Ernest M. Hopkins, Dartmouth President, 23 November 1937, President Conant Papers, 1937–38, box 3, folder “Athletic Association,” Harvard University Archives. 12. New York Times, 1 December 1938, 30. 13. Mark F. Bernstein, Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 177–180. 14. “Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement, 20 November 1945,” Papers of the Office of the President, 1950–55, box 53, folder “Intercollegiate Athletics IV,” University of Pennsylvania Archives; “Regulations of the Faculty Committee on Athletic Eligibility,” box 1, “General Athletics,” Princeton University Archives. 15. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1946, 27. 16. James Quirk, The Ultimate Guide to College Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 17. “Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement, 20 November 1945.” 18. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1948, 190. 19. “Scholarships for Penn Football Players,” Papers of the Office of the President, 1950–55, box 53, folder “Intercollegiate Athletics IX,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 20. New York Times, 20 March 1951, 31, 39. 21. The first commercial sport telecast in the United States was a baseball game on 17 May 1939 by NBC between Columbia and Princeton Universities. The first football telecast was between Fordham University and Waynesburg College of Pennsylvania on 30 September 1939. Penn began telecasting football in 1940. For an extensive study of the influence of radio and TV on college sport, see Ronald A. Smith, Play-by-Play: Radio, Television and Big-Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 22. “A List of Penn Football Players on Scholarship,” Papers of the Office of the President, 1950–55, box 53, folder “Intercollegiate Athletics IX,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 23. Harold E. Stassen, telegram to Robert E. Kintner, ABC, New York City, 23 August 1950, Papers of the Office of the President, box 54, folder “Intercollegiate Athletics, TV-I,” University of Pennsylvania Archives; Smith, Play-by-Play, 68–70.

282

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Notes to Pages 114–117

24. For a fuller account, see Smith, Play-by-Play, 66–72. 25. University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees Minutes, 4 June 1951, University of Pennsylvania Archives. 26. Stanley Cohen, The Game They Played (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), 119–164; James Blackwell, On, Brave Old Army Team: The Cheating Scandal That Rocked the Nation: West Point, 1951 (Navato, CA: Presidio, 1996), 258–344; Ronald A. Smith, “The William and Mary Athletic Scandal of 1951: Governance and the Battle for Academic and Athletic Integrity,” Journal of Sport History 34 (Fall 2007): 353–373; John A. Lucas and Ronald A. Smith, Saga of American Sport (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1978), 392–393. 27. “Ivy Group Agreement,” 9 May 1952, box 1, General Athletics, Princeton University Archives. 28. “Ivy Group Agreement,” 9 May 1952; University of Pennsylvania Trustees Minutes, 2 June 1952, University of Pennsylvania Archives. 29. Dean of Admissions and Financial Aids to Dean W. J. Bender, Harvard, 31 March 1953, Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 6 April 1953, Harvard University Archives. 30. John R. Thelin, “Admissions, Athletics and Academic Index,” Inside Higher Education, 3 April 2019, insidehighered .com /views/2019/04/03/how-admissions -and-athletics-intertwine-ivy-league-colleges-opinion. Thelin is an educational historian and 1969 Brown University graduate who reported on Ivy League institutions offering “slots” for as many as thirty football players to enter Ivy League schools each year. Antonio Buchler tells how the academic index at Ivy League schools is used to maintain some academic standards for athletics, which are well below university academic standards. Buchler, “The Academic Index at Ivy League Schools,” Abrome, 1 October 2015, abrome.com/blog/academic-index. 31. President Barnaby C. Keeney to William E. Stevenson, 9 May 1957, Papers of the Office of the President, 1955–60, box 89, folder “Ivy Group Pres-II,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 32. DeLaney Kiphuth, Yale, memo to members of the IVY Group Committee on Admissions, 3 June 1957, Papers of the Office of the President, 1955–60, box 89, folder “Ivy Group Pres-II,” University of Pennsylvania Archives. 33. Eastern College Athletic Conference Minutes, 13 December 1963, 29. 34. William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2. 35. Bowen and Levin, Reclaiming the Game, 90–92. 36. Quoted in Jerrold K. Footlick, “The Ivy League, Where Athletics Don’t Endanger Academic Standards,” Columbia: The Magazine of Columbia University 6 (Spring 1981): 11. 37. “A History of Tradition,” Ivy League, accessed 10 August 2020, ivyleague .com/sports/2017/7/28/history-timeline-index.aspx. 38. By the twenty-first century, there was a ban on Ivy League bowl games and Division AA playoffs (or Football Championship Subdivision playoffs).

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Notes to Pages 117–121

All other sports were allowed to participate in NCAA national championships, including March Madness basketball. 39. “Old College Try,” New York Times, 10 September 1985, B13. 40. Bernstein, Football, 251–256. 41. William L. Wang, “Filings Show Athletes with High Academic Scores Have 83 Percent Acceptance Rate,” Harvard Crimson, 30 June 2018, the crimson .com/article/2018/6/30/athlete-admissions. 42. D. Keith Mano, “Hell No, He Won’t Go! Dartmouth’s Joe Yukica Fights for His Right to Coach Football,” People, 20 January 1986, people.com /archive /hell-no -he -wont- go -dartmouths -joe -yukica -fights -for-his -right-to -coach -football-vol-25-no-3; “Yukica Fired as Dartmouth Coach,” Washington Post, 30 November 1985, washingtonpost.com /archive/sports/1985/11 /30/yukica-fired -as-dartmouth-coach/9689afd9-b1b1-4ea8-8b1e-5d24cecd4c44. 43. “Ivy League NCAA Championships All-Time List,” The Ivy League, accessed 22 April 2019, ivyleague.com/sports/2018/7/11/history-championships -NCAA-all-time-list.aspx.

chaPTer Ten. recruiTing, full ScholarShiPS, and The big Ten SuccumbS 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Speech at Alumni Banquet,” 31 January 1906, Turner Papers, box 2, “Athletics,” Wis/Mss/AL, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Archives. 2. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1957, 293–298. 3. Bernie Moore, “Recruiting from Commissioner’s Viewpoint,” NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1956, 155. 4. NCAA, Proceedings, 9–11 January 1956, 46, 47, 49, 50–51, 54–55, 144, 146, 155–174, 175–194, 195–203, 220, 254, 261, 268–270. 5. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1956, 269. 6. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1956, 254, 268–269. 7. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1956, 196. The “Round Table” discussion was far clearer on the impact of the new legislation than were the actual business meeting and motions. Several years before, the NCAA had passed the “Dartmouth Amendment,” which allowed the alumni to dominate the recruiting process. The term “student-athlete” then began being used rather than “athlete” to make it appear that the athlete was a student first and any funds going to him were for educational purposes, not athletic. It had major tax and workers’ compensation implications that will be discussed later. This writer never uses the words “student-athlete” for the same reason he does not use “student-musician,” “student-journalist,” or “student-student.” 8. Howard Roberts, The Big Nine: The Story of Football in the Western Conference (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1948), 14–15, 17; Herbert I. Baron, “The

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Notes to Pages 121–126

College Conference of the Middle West,” Educational Review 27 (January 1904): 42–52. Iowa and Indiana joined the conference in 1899, and Ohio State joined in 1912. 9. “Actions of the Intercollegiate Conference, 3 December 1910,” A. A. Stagg Papers, box 8, University of Chicago Archives; John M. Carroll, “The Grand Debate,” in his Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 97–106; Winton U. Solberg, “The Big Ten Censures Iowa,” in his Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 172–198; Raymond Schmidt, “The 1929 Iowa Football Scandal: Paying Tribute to the Carnegie Report?” Journal of Sport History 334 (Fall 2007): 343–351; Robin Lester, “The Fall, 1939,” in his Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 164–186. 10. “Report of a Special Committee, 4 August 1956, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence Files, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. 11. “Athletic Scholarships, 27 September 1956,” President E. B. Fred General Correspondence Files, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Athletics,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. The scholarships included the Jack Hewitt Scholarship ($300), the Student Welfare Foundation of Madison Scholarship ($200), and the Allen J. Shafer Scholarship ($100). Among Ambrose’s twentyseven books are biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and the best-selling Undaunted Courage on the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Northwest. From a personal standpoint, I played football against Ambrose’s Whitewater (Wisconsin) High School, where I lost the physical battles to Ambrose, but my Delavan High School won the conference championship. 12. David J. Young, The Student and His Professor: John Hannah, Ralph Aigler and the Origin of the Michigan State-Michigan Rivalry (East Lancing, MI: DJY Publishing, 2015), 79. The Young book is the single best source for understanding Michigan State and President Hannah. 13. H. O. “Fritz” Crisler to Kenneth Little, Paul Blommers, and K. L. Wilson, Big Ten Investigating Committee of Michigan State, 30 March 1949, series 5/21/7, box 1, folder “Michigan State Report,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 14. Beth J. Shapiro, “John Hannah and the Growth of Big-Time Intercollegiate Athletics at Michigan State University,” Journal of Sport History 10 (Winter 1983): 26–40. Frank E. Richart, Big Ten Faculty Representatives, Chair, to Dean Lloyd C. Emmons, Michigan State College, 21 December 1948, series 5/21/7, box 1, folder “Michigan State”; Ralph W. Aigler, Michigan Faculty Representative, to Kenneth Little, Paul Bloomers, and K. L. Wilson, Big Ten Committee Investigation of MSC, 28 January 1949, 25 March 1949, and 30 March 1949, series 5/21/7, box 1, folder “Michigan State Report,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 15. New York Times, 21 November 1951, 17. 16. Young, Student and His Professor, 119. 17. For a lengthy discussion of the ACE reform endeavor, see Ronald  A.

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Notes to Pages 126–128

Smith, “Scandals and the ACE Reform Effort in the 1950s,” in his Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 109–120. 18. Report of the Special Committee on Athletic Policy of the American Council on Education (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 12 February 1952). 19. Minutes of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, 22 February 1957, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence File, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 20. Virgil M. Hancher to John A. Hannah, 13 February 1957, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence File, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 21. Virgil M. Hancher to John A. Hannah, 13 February 1957. 22. Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives Minutes, 22 February 1957. The Big Ten had voted 6–4 on 8 December 1956 for financial need scholarships and reconfirmed it in early 1957. Voting for “need” in 1957 were Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, and Wisconsin. In 1956, Northwestern voted yes and Indiana voted no. President E. B. Fred General Correspondence File, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 23. John A. Hannah to Virgil M. Hancher, 19 February 1957, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence File, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 24. Virgil  M. Hancher to President E. B. Fred, Wisconsin, 19 March 1957, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence File, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives. 25. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 106. 26. “Conference Attendance Comparison, 1959, 1969, 1979,” ca. October 1981, President Banowsky Papers, box 119, folder 33, University of Oklahoma Archives. 27. Leslie  W. Scott, “Report of Special Committee,” 4 August 1956, in Bruce R. Erickson, “History of Financial Aid to Athletes in the Big Ten, 1941– 1961” (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1970), 10–11. 28. NCAA, Proceedings, 7 January 1954, 125. 29. Committee on Infractions to the NCAA Council, “Report No. 2,” 29 April 1954, Unprocessed Athletic Department Papers, folder “Sub-Committee on Infractions,” University of Alabama Archives; NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1962, 116, 128. 30. Paul Blommers, quoted in NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1956, 49. 31. “Report of a Special Committee [of the Big Ten],” 4 August 1956, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence Files, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Ath. Scholarships,” University of Wisconsin Archives; New York Times, 31 July 1956, 18 August 1956, and 1 August 1956, 27; NCAA, Proceedings, January 10, 1957, 162–163. 32. New York Times, 1 August 1956, 27. 286

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Notes to Pages 129–132

33. Minutes of Faculty Representatives [Big Ten], 28 July 1957, President E. B. Fred General Correspondence Files, 1956–57, series 4/16/1, box 274, folder “Athletics-NCAA & Big 10,” University of Wisconsin Archives; New York Times, 29 July 1957, 23; NCAA, Proceedings, 14 October 1957, 130–131. 34. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1957, 201. 35. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1962, 64. 36. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1962, 67.

chaPTer eleVen. academic STandardS, The 1.600 rule, and Their demiSe 1. NCAA, Proceedings, 7 January 1959, 21. 2. NCAA, Proceedings, 7 January 1960, 186. It was a “blue ribbon” committee including Gardner, DeLaney Kiphuth of Yale, Fritz Crisler of Michigan, Rixford Snyder of Stanford, Jim Weaver of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Bud Wilkinson of Oklahoma, and Walter Byers of the NCAA. 3. NCAA, Proceedings, 7 January 1959, 156–159. 4. “Memo,” Robert C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 24, Clemson University Special Collections. 5. K. N. Vickery, “The NCAA 1.600 Rule,” ca. 1967, President Robert  C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 21, Clemson University Special Collections. 6. “1962 Entering Grant-in-Aid Students,” Records of the Office of the President, 1949–1966, box 9, folder “Athletic Association Correspondence, Sept. 1963–July 1964,” Georgia Tech Archives. 7. When the NCAA adopted the 1.600 GPA rule in 1965, the requirement for an athletic scholarship was much below the ACC’s 800 requirement. Coach Paul Dietzel of the University of South Carolina suggested that South Carolina, Clemson, and several other schools withdraw from the ACC if it did not lower the 800 SAT rule, as they could not compete with other southern schools for athletes. President Robert C. Edwards, Clemson, to Calhoun Lemon, Barnwell, South Carolina, 27 October 1970; Conference President R. R. Ritchie, ACC, to Walter Byers, 28 December 1970, President Robert C. Edwards Correspondence 1966–70, series 12, folders “23” and “24,” Clemson University Special Collections. 8. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1962, 190–201. 9. K. N. Vickery, “The NCAA 1.600 Rule,” President Robert  C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 21, Clemson University Special Collections; NCAA, Proceedings, 14 January 1962, 139, and 18 January 1965, 250. 10. Howard Grubbs, Southwest Athletic Conference Executive Secretary, to Collegiate Commissioners Association, 28 September 1965, Walter Byers Papers, folder “Long Range Planning,” NCAA Headquarters. 11. NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1965, 327. 12. Dan Jenkins, “It’s One Point Six Pick Up Sticks,” Sports Illustrated, 287

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Notes to Pages 132–137

21 March 1966, 33–34. Byers indicated that 84 percent of the NCAA membership (481 of 571 members) were conforming to the 1.600 legislation. “NCAA Report to Membership, 23 March 1966,” Walter Byers Papers, folder “NCAA Report to Members,” NCAA Headquarters. 13. Joseph N. Crowley, In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century (Indianapolis: NCAA, 2006), 94. 14. E. M. Cameron to Everett D. Barnes, Colgate College Athletic Director, 14 July 1965, E. M. Cameron Papers, box 3, folder “NCAA 1.600 Rule,” Duke University Archives. 15. Princeton President Robert F. Goheen, Chair, Ivy Group Policy Committee, to NCAA President Everett D. Barnes and NCAA Council, 13 April 1966, Robert C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 20, Clemson University Special Collections. 16. E. M. Cameron to President Douglas M. Knight, Duke University, 16 February 1966, E. M. Cameron Papers, box 3, folder “NCAA 1.600 Rule,” Duke University Archives. 17. NCAA, Proceedings, 10–12 January 1966, 233–244, 326–335. 18. Goheen to Barnes, 13 April 1966; President O. C. Aderhold Papers, series 4, box 1, folder “Athletic Association,” University of Georgia Archives. 19. “State Summary of SAT Scores in S. Carolina in 1965,” President Robert Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 23, Clemson University Special Collections. 20. There were three methods of determining a predicted 1.600 GPA. There were national tables used by most institutions, but to curry favor with certain institutions and conferences, conference tables and institutional tables could be developed. In 1967, 347 institutions used national tables, 112 institutional tables, and 91 conference tables. See Art Bergstrom, “Unedited Draft NCAA Chronology,” ca. 1974, Ursula Walsh Files, NCAA Headquarters. The eleven conferences that used their own tables (including the Big Eight, Big Ten, SEC, and Southwest) showed quite varying methods of determining a predicted 1.600 GPA. See NCAA Special Committee on Academic Testing and Requirements Minutes, 25 October 1967, Walter Byers Papers, folder “1.6 GPA,” NCAA Headquarters. After looking at the NCAA national table and the Big Ten and Big Eight tables, President Edwards of Clemson of the ACC concluded that the information “clearly support[ed] our earlier statement that the only reason for using a ‘demonstrable’ formula in lieu of the national table is to have access to a lower academic standard.” President Robert C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 21, Clemson University Special Collections. See also Bruce Corrie, “A History of the Atlantic Coast Conference” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970), 385. 21. President Robert  C. Edwards to Dewey  E. Dodds, Chief of Education Branch, Office for Civil Rights, Department of HEW, 21 May 1970, President Robert C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 23, Clemson University Special Collections. 22. Lloyd G. Humphreys, editorial, Science 166 (October 1969), in President 288

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Notes to Pages 137–139

Robert C. Edwards Correspondence, 1966–70, series 12, folder 21, Clemson University Special Collections. 23. NCAA, Proceedings, 7 February 1954, 108. 24. James D. Bolin, Adolph Rupp and the Rise of Kentucky Basketball (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 1–2 and the chapter “Rupp and Race,” 268–289. 25. “The Long Battle Toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” History.com, video, last modified 6 June 2019, history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights -act-of-1964. 26. Charles Morgan, Jr., ACLU Southern Regional Office, to Harold Howe, II, Commissioner of Education, Washington, DC, 12 May 1966, President O. C. Aderhold Papers, series 4, box 1, folder “Athletic Association,” University of Georgia Archives. 27. The EOP was created in the late 1960s in response to economic and social barriers preventing minorities and underrepresented students from having access to a college education. Similar to athletic teams being given enrollment priority, institutions of higher learning gave enrollment “slots” to minority students to attend college. A member of the prestigious American Council on Education questioned open admissions in an article in the periodical of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Alexander W. Astin, “Open Admissions: The Real Issue,” Science 172, no. 4003 (24 September 1971): 1197. To better understand open admissions in the 1970s and a generation later, see Amaka Okechukwu, To Fulfill Those Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). She argues for both race and class enrollment policies, but makes no mention of any relationship to college athletics (224). 28. Eastern College Athletic Conference Minutes, 22 September 1970, 43. 29. NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1971, 108. 30. NCAA, Proceedings, 8 January 1972, 172. 31. Walter Byers stated about the one-year athletic scholarship, “The oneyear freshman tryout has been legalized.” Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 164. 32. NCAA, Proceedings, 8 January 1972, 166–168. The NCAA allowing football and basketball freshman to compete passed with a mere show of hands with no debate. 33. “800 Ruling Coming,” High Point Enterprise (South Carolina), 4 August 1972, Newspaper Archive, accessed 13 June 2019, newspaperarchive .com /high -point-enterprise-aug-04-1972-p-14; “Report of the Faculty Committee on Athletics to the Faculty Council,” February 1973, Chancellor Taylor series, box 27, folder “Standing Committee Athletic, 1973–74,” University of North Carolina Archives. 34. NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1973, 146–147. 35. A statement of William Leckie of Colorado School of Mines, NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1973, 146. 36. Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 165, 167. 289

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Notes to Pages 139–142

37. NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1973, 149. 38. The AIAW was formed in 1971; a lawsuit in 1973, Kellmeyer et al. v. the National Education Association et al., won women the right to athletic scholarships based on the Fourteenth Amendment and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972. 39. Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 167. 40. Laura B. Randolph, “Dexter Manley’s Incredible Story,” Ebony, October 1989, accessed 15 September 2008, findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n12 _v44/ai_89010811. Page discontinued. 41. Sarah Kogod, “Cocaine, Illiteracy and Football Could Not Stop Dexter Manley,” SBNation, 12 June 2015, sbnation.com /2015/6/23/8713273/dexter -manley. 42. “Eliminating Illiteracy,” CIS-NO: 89-S541–47, Committee on Labor and Human Resources, US Senate, S. Hrg. 101–260, 18 May 1989, 164–171. 43. Kevin Ross v. Creighton University, 957 F.2d 410 (7th Cir. 1992), 2 March 1992; “Outside the Lines: Unable to Read,” transcript, ESPN, 17 March 2002, sports.espn.go.com/page2/tvlistings/show103transcript.html. 44. Luix Overbea, “NCAA Shotgun Marriage Weds Players and Grades,” Christian Science Monitor, 26 September 1983, csmonitor.com/1983/0926/092604.html. 45. Greg Hall, “Post Graduate: KCK’s Famed Illiterate Hoopster Cleans Up a School That Failed Him,” The Pitch, 11 April 2002, thepitchkc.com/post -graduate. 46. Bill Brubaker, “Dear Chris,” Sports Illustrated, 26 November 1984, 120–136. 47. United Press International, “N.C. St. Took Washburn Despite Low SAT Score,” Los Angeles Times, 9 February 1985, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-02 -09-sp-4192-story.html. 48. Peter Golenbock, Personal Fouls (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989), 42. Emphasis in original. 49. New York Times, 12 January 1989, D24; Golenbock, Personal Fouls, 35–41. 50. Golenbock, Personal Fouls, 5. 51. Brandon Robinson, “Golden State Warrior Player Goes from NBA to Crack House,” Heavy, last modified 31 March 2019, heavy.com /ports/2019/03 /golden-state.

chaPTer TwelVe. TaxaTion, workerS’ comPenSaTion, and The “STudenT- aThleTe” 1. The President of Colorado College, Thurston Davies, however, used the term student athlete a decade before it was mandated by the NCAA in 1955–1956. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1946, 119. 2. Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 119–120, 132–133.

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Notes to Pages 142–148

3. “Taking Football off the Air,” Literary Digest 114 (9 July 1932): 35; NCAA, Proceedings, 29 July 1932, 29. At the same time, eastern schools voted not to have radio broadcasts of football games for the 1932 season. 4. Page v. Regents of University System of Georgia, 93 F.2d 887 (5th Cir. 1937), No. 8466, “Brief for the Appellee,” Georgia Tech University Archives; “Argue Federal Tax on Football Receipts,” New York Times, 17 September 1936, 25. 5. “Review of Football Tax by Supreme Court Seen,” New York Times, 10 January 1937, 72. 6. “Tax Liability of College Football Is Argued as Georgia Fights Levy Before High Court,” New York Times, 29 April 1938, 16. 7. Allen v. Regents of the University System of Georgia, 304 U.S. 439 (1938), No. 882, decided 23 May 1938. Justice Cardozo was absent for the vote. 8. Page v. Regents of University System of Georgia. 9. “State Activities Taxable, Supreme Court Declares,” New York Times, 24 May 1938, 35. 10. Federal Excise Taxes, Project Note No. 40, June 1956 (New York: The Tax Foundation, 1956), 18. The Revenue Act of 1951 dropped the excise tax from 20 percent to 10 percent and excluded religious, charitable, and educational organizations. See also “Flash! Here’s a Tax Taken off by Government,” Chicago Tribune, 26 October 1951, C2. 11. R. O. Baumbach to H. O. Crisler, Michigan Athletic Director, 21 April 1954, Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, box 35, folder “Walter Byers 1952–54,” Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 12. Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 40. 13. Barnouw, Tower in Babel, 283. 14. For a more detailed account of sustaining and sponsored radio broadcasting of college games, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Radio Threat to College Football Attendance,” in his Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 28–34. 15. “Radio Broadcasts of 1937 Football Games at Ann Arbor,” Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, box 21, folder “Papers 1937 March 1,” Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 16. O. M. Solem, University of Iowa Athletic Director, to Richard R. Price, University of Minnesota, 10 June 1936, box 28, folder “Radio Football, 1934–36,” Minnesota University Comptroller Papers, University of Minnesota Archives. 17. “Radio Broadcasts of 1937 Football Games at Ann Arbor,” Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, box 21, folder “Papers 1937 March 1,” Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; “Refining Influence,” Time, 14 September 1936, 43. 18. Princeton Board of Trustees Minutes, 22 October 1936, Princeton University Archives.

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Notes to Pages 149–152

19. President H. W. Dodds to Lenox R. Lohr, NBC, 8 April 1938, President Conant Papers, 1937–38, box 3, folder “Athletic Association,” Harvard University Archives. 20. “Report of Committee on Radio Broadcasting of Athletic Events,” 25 February 1936, box 36, folder “Radio Broadcasting 1935,” Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 21. C. F. Mueller Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 190 F.2d 120 (3d Cir. 1951); C. F. Mueller Company, Appellant, v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 479 F.2d 678 (3d Cir. 1973), Nos. 71–1860, 71–1861; Joint Committee on Taxation, House Committee on Ways and Means, “Historical Development and Present Law of the Federal Tax Exemption for Charities and Other Tax Exempt Organizations,” 20 April 2005, 100–102. 22. “Historical Development and Present Law,” 145. 23. Gabriel  A. Morgan, “No More Playing Favorites: Reconsidering the Conclusive Congressional Presumption That Intercollegiate Athletics Are Substantially Related to Educational Purposes,” Southern California Law Review 81 (2007): 160. 24. As noted in John C. Weistart and Cym H. Lowell, The Law of Sports (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), 15. 25. John D. Colombo, “The NCAA, Tax Exemption, and College Athletics,” University of Illinois Law Review 1 (2010): 132. 26. Internal Revenue Code of 1954, Report of the Committee on Finance, United States Senate to Accompany H.R. 8300, a Bill to Revise the Internal Revenue Laws of the United States, 83d Congress, 2d Session, Rep. No. 1622 (18 June 1954). 27. Meeting of Presidents of Institutions of the Southeastern Conference, 18 November 1951, President Brehm Papers, box 1, folder “Meetings with College Presidents, November 18, 1951,” University of Tennessee Special Collections. 28. University of Maryland Board of Regents to Governor Theodore  R. McKeldin, Request of 20 November 1951, University of Maryland Board of Regents, 30 November 1951, University of Maryland Archives. Maryland, under coach Jim Tatum, had just finished its first undefeated, untied season (10–0) since 1893, and then defeated Robert Neyland’s number-one ranked Tennessee team, 28–13, in the Sugar Bowl. 29. A well-reasoned and twenty-first-century discussion of athlete injuries and the NCAA, as a rich nonprofit organization potentially losing its 501(c)(3) status because it lacked adequate athlete protection from injuries, is Nicole Kline, “Bridging the NCAA’s Accident Insurance Coverage Caps? A Deep Dive into the Uncertainties of Injury Coverage in College Contact Sports, and the Impact That Has on Athletes’ Future Physical and Financial Comfort,” Journal of Law and Health 31 (2018): 55–86. It notes the important Kent Waldrep case (59). 30. Alaska and Hawaii were granted statehood in 1959. 31. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann

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Notes to Pages 152–156

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 70–71; Chuck Slothower, “Fort Lewis’ First ‘Student-Athlete,’” Durango Herald, 25 September 2014, durangoherald.com/articles/79431. 32. State Compensation Insurance Fund v. Industrial Commission, 314 P.2d 288 (1957). The court noting “student athlete” is surprising, but it came one year after the NCAA began using student-athlete in all its publications. 33. Walter Byers, “Birth of the ‘Student-Athlete,’” in his Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 67–76, specifically 69. 34. “Constitution of the National Collegiate Athletic Association,” NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1956, 3–6. In the various meetings of the 1956 NCAA Council, student-athlete was used over three dozen times, when previously it had not been used. NCAA, Proceedings, 9 January 1957, 144–167. However, in district reports of 1956, prior to Byers’s dictates, athletes is used five times and studentathletes zero (46–58). In the round table discussions and business sessions of 1956, before the mandate to use student-athletes, the term was used thirty-three times, but athlete was used five times as often (155–285). The term student-athlete, just coming into mandated usage, was being used far more often by officers of the NCAA than by other delegates to the NCAA. 35. O’Bannon v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 802 F.3d 1049 (9th Cir. 2015); Slothower, “Fort Lewis’ First ‘Student-Athlete.’” 36. Allen L. Sack and Ellen J. Staurowsky argue the importance of the Van Horn case in their College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 80–82. 37. Van Horn v. Industrial Acc. Com., 219 Cal. App. 2d 457 (1963), 33 Cal. Rptr. 169, No. 27105, 21 August 1963. 38. Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 74–75. Emphasis added. 39. Kent Waldrep wrote a forward to Sack and Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire, ix-x, in which he stated that a court ruled that he was an employee of TCU. That was later overruled. No university or college until the 1990s had ever been covered by catastrophic injury insurance. 40. Waldrep v. Texas Employers Insurance Association, No. 03-98-00053-CV, 15 June 2000. 41. Waldrep v. Texas. 42. Fred Rensing v. Indiana State University Board of Trustees, Court of Appeals of Indiana, Fourth Dist., 437 N.E.2d 78 (1982), 16 June 1982. 43. Rensing v. Indiana State (1982); Fred Rensing v. Indiana State University Board of Trustees, 444 N.E.2d 1170 (1983), 9 February 1983; Taylor v. Wake Forest University, 191 S.E.2d (1972), 16 N.C. App. 117, Certiorari Denied, 8 November 1972. In the Taylor case, the football player, Gregg Taylor, quit the team and had his scholarship taken away because he “was not complying with his contractual obligations” to participate in athletics. The court agreed that the scholarship was a contract between the athlete and Wake Forest University. The Rensing case was similar to Willie Coleman’s 1974 football injury at Western Michigan University.

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Notes to Pages 156–159

The Appeals Court in Michigan rejected Coleman’s claim. Coleman v. Western Michigan University, 125 Mich. App. 35 (1983), 336 N.W.2d 224, decided 19 April 1983. The Rensing and Coleman cases are discussed in Sack and Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire, 85–90. 44. William C. Friday and Theodore M. Hesburgh, Report of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, June 2001, 31. 45. In 2016, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics recommended to the NCAA that support of the O’Bannon lawsuit decision of 2015 on the payment to athletes for the use of their names, images, and likenesses could be beneficial to the NCAA’s legal issues under antitrust, labor, and tax laws. Gabe Feldman, “The NCAA and ‘Non-Game Related’ Student Athlete Name, Image and Likeness Restrictions,” white paper, Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, May 2016. NCAA administrators were in opposition to NILs.

chaPTer ThirTeen. women’S aThleTicS, TiTle ix, and The kellmeyer lawSuiT 1. Historian Martha Verbrugge showed how inadequate sport and physical education facilities for college women existed in the second half of the twentieth century. “‘It’s Just the Gym’: Female Physical Educators, 1950–2005,” in her Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 175–200, specifically 184–185. 2. Howell T. Hollis, Georgia Athletic Business Manager, to President O. C. Aderhold, 16 December 1963, President Aderhold Papers, series 4, box 1, folder “Athletic Association,” University of Georgia Archives. 3. Ronald A. Smith, “Senda Berenson,” in Dictionary of American Biography, supp. 5, 1951–1955, ed. John  A. Garraty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 51–52. 4. Senda Berenson, Basket Ball for Women (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1901), 23. See also Amy Nutt, “Hullabaloo over Hoops: The First Women’s College Game Was Marked by ‘Unladylike’ Enthusiasm,” Sports Illustrated, 22 March 1993, vault.si.com /vault/1993/03/22/hullabaloo-over-hoops-the-first -womens-college-game-was-marked-by-unladylike-enthusiasm. 5. Mable Lee, “The Case for and against Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and the Situation as It Stands Today,” Mind and Body 30 (November 1923): 255. 6. Naomi L. Leyhe, “Attitudes of Women Members of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation toward Competition in Sports for Girls and Women” (DPE diss., Indiana University, 1955), 39, 41. 7. African American women participated in high school and college track and field from the 1920s throughout the twentieth century, being principal contributors to the US Olympic team after World War II. Jennifer  H. Lansbury, A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America 294

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Notes to Pages 159–162

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014), 46–47, passim. Ellen Staurowsky notes that her alma mater, Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, had a woman physical education teacher and coach, Eleanor Snell, with varsity teams at a “white” institution from the 1930s for several decades. See Allen L. Sack and Ellen J. Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), xiv–xv. 8. Ed Temple coached track and field at Tennessee State for forty-four years, with forty of his track stars participating in the Olympic Games. Tracy M. Salisbury, “First to the Finish Line: The Tennessee State Tigerbelles, 1944–1994” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina Greensboro, 2009), 77 and passim. I want to thank Cat Ariail for first pointing out to me that the Tigerbelles did not have true athletic scholarship, but rather “work-aid” for financial support. 9. For a good discussion of play days, sports days, and competitive sports for much of the twentieth century, see Susan K. Cahn, “Games of Strife: The Battle over Women’s Competitive Sport,” in her Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994), 55–82. 10. “Girls Athletics,” Unprocessed Women’s Athletics Papers, Acc. 84/94, 9/e5a/8, folder “Athletics: Girls: 1940s,” Ohio State University Archives; Ralph J. Sabock, “A History of Physical Education at The Ohio State University—Men’s and Women’s Division, 1895–1969” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1969), 200–215. 11. Gladys Palmer, “Concerning Competition: An Open Letter to Directors and Teachers of Physical Education for Women in Colleges and Universities,” ca. Spring 1941, folder “Director of Athletics,” 9/3–1/17, Ohio State University Archives. 12. Gladys E. Palmer, “Policies in Women’s Athletics,” Journal of Health and Physical Education 9 (November 1938): 565. 13. “Financial Statement: First Women’s National Collegiate Golf Tournament, June 30–July 3, 1941,” Unprocessed Women’s Athletics, 9/3–15/1/26, folder “Tournament Costs: 1941–51,” Ohio State University Archives. The tourney receipts were $168 with expenses of $154 for the thirty participants from such institutions as Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma Baptist, Michigan State, Purdue, Ohio State, and Skidmore. The low score was a 75 by Marjorie Row of Michigan State. 14. M. Gladys Scott, “Competition for Women in American Colleges,” Research Quarterly 16 (March 1945): 57, 67. 15. Leyhe, “Attitudes of Women,” 39, 41, 270; Scott, “Competition for Women,” 57, 67. 16. Loise Mead Tricard, American Women’s Track and Field: A History, 1895 through 1980 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 161–211. 17. For two popular biographies of Didrikson, see Russell Freedman, Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Don Van Natta Jr., Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). 18. Avery Brundage to Charles  W. Kennedy, 30 January 1932; Kennedy to 295

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Notes to Pages 162–163

Prof. W. B. Owens, Stanford University, 1 February 1932, President Wilbur Papers, box 77, folder “Bd. of Ath. Control,” Stanford University Archives. 19. “Claude Hutcherson,” Plainview, TX, Archive Center, accessed 3 August 2019, plainviewtx.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/item/316. 20. David Harrison, “Wayland Baptist University’s Flying Queens Women’s Basketball Team Is First Ever to Win 1,600 Games,” Cision PRWeb, 1 December 2017, prweb.com /releases/2017/12/prweb14974697.htm; Ava Wallace, “Before There Was U-Conn, the Wayland Baptist Queens Ruled the Basketball Court,” Washington Post, 27 March 2018, washingtonpost.com /sports/colleges/before -there -was-u-conn-the -wayland-baptist-queens-ruled-the -basketball-court /2018/03/27/ff12014a-31c3-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html. 21. Wallace, “Before There Was U-Conn.” 22. David Wharton, “Flying Queens’ Success Was a Game Changer for Women’s Basketball,” Los Angeles Times, 30 March 2018, latimes.com/sports/more/la -sp-wayland-flying-queens-20180331-story.html. 23. To understand how women physical educators controlled college women’s basketball, see Ronald A. Smith, “The Rise of Basketball for Women in Colleges,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 1 (December 1970): 18–36. For a critical look at women’s control to maintain power by PE leaders, see Ronald A. Smith, “Women’s Control of American College Sports: The Good of Those Who Played or an Exploitation by Those Who Controlled?,” Sport History Review 29 (May 1998): 103–120. 24. John A. Lucas and Ronald A. Smith, “Women’s Sport: A Trial of Equality,” in their Saga of American Sport (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1978), 342–372. 25. Gladys Palmer, “Diary, April 26–29, 1941” (College Director’s Convention, 1941), Unprocessed Women’s Athletics Papers, Acc. 84/94, 9/e-5a/8, Ohio State University Archives. 26. Ellyn Bartges, “Interview with Phoebe Scott,” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, 13 March 2005, www2.illinois.gov/alplm/library /collections/OralHistory/SportStories/girlsbasketball/Pages/ScottPhoebe.aspx. 27. Janice A. Beran, “Iowa, the Longtime ‘Hot Bed’ of Girls Basketball,” in A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four, ed. Joan S. Hult and Mariana Trekell (Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1991), 183. 28. Quoted in Joan S. Hult, “The Saga of Competition,” in Hult and Trekell, Century of Women’s Basketball, 230. 29. In the Spring of 1969, I attended an AAHPER convention and was the only male at a meeting of the DGWS on changes in women’s basketball rules. (I was writing a history of women’s college basketball as my first research at Penn State.) After the meeting, I talked with the chair of the basketball committee and asked, naively, if the women (who had just voted but the vote had not been released) had voted to return to men’s rules. She figuratively jumped high enough to dunk a basketball and shouted, “We are not returning to men’s rules,” something the women would “never” do. 296

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Notes to Pages 164–166

30. This had been stated a half century before but continued as a strong theme. John M. McBryde, “Womanly Education for Women,” Sewanee Review 15 (October 1907): 481. See also Margaret D. Greene, “The Growth of Physical Education for Women in the United States in the Early 19th Century” (Ed.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1950), 75. 31. See Katherine Ley, “Athletic Scholarships,” Journal of Health Physical Education and Recreation 40 (September 1969): 75; Charlotte Lambert, “The Pros and Cons of Intercollegiate Athletic Competition for Women,” Journal of Health Physical Education and Recreation 40 (May 1969): 75; Patsy Neal, “Intercollegiate Competition,” Journal of Health, Physical Education and Recreation 40 (September 1969): 75–76. 32. Phyllis Hill, The Way We Were: A History of the Purposes of the NAPECW, 1924–1974 (National Association for Physical Education of College Women, 1975), 37. 33. AIAW Handbook of Policies and Interim Operating Procedures, 1971–72 (Washington, DC: American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1971), 6, 10–11. 34. J. Parmly Paret, “Basket-Ball for Young Women,” Harper’s Bazaar 33 (20 October 1900): 1563–1567. The other basketball committee members were Alice Foster of Oberlin, Ethel Perrin of Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and Elizabeth Wright of Radcliffe. The National Women’s Basketball Rules Committee of 1899 was under the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, later retitled the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. The basketball committee became the Women’s Basketball Committee in 1905, the Committee on Women’s Athletics in 1917, the Section of Women’s Athletics in 1927, the National Section of Women’s Athletics in 1932, the National Section on Girls and Women’s Sports in 1953, the Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports in 1957, and the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport in 1974, under which the AIAW existed for most of its short history. See Hult and Trekell, “The Governance of Athletics for Girls and Women,” in their Century of Women’s Basketball, 53–82. 35. Agnes R. Wayman, “Women’s Athletics—All Uses—No Abuses,” American Physical Education Review 29 (November 1924): 517. 36. Joan  S. Hult, “The Legacy of AIAW,” in Hult and Trekell, Century of Women’s Basketball, 282–283. 37. The first championship was in 1968 with swimming-diving; it later added basketball, gymnastics, softball, track and field, badminton, volleyball, golf, cross country, field hockey, skiing, synchronized swimming, tennis, fencing, indoor track and field, lacrosse, slow-pitch softball, and finally rowing and soccer in 1982. 38. NCAA, Proceedings, 10 January 1979, 164–165. 39. Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Andrew Zimbalist, eds., Equal Play: Title IX and Social Change (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007), 29–30; Hult, “Legacy of AIAW,” 301–302. 297

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Notes to Pages 166–169

40. Joseph N. Crowley, In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century (Indianapolis, IN: NCAA, 2006), 194. 41. Phyllis Holmes, “National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics,” in Hult and Trekell, Century of Women’s Basketball, 391–392. 42. Ying Wu, “Margo Polivy, Legal Costs, and the Demise of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women,” Sport History Review 30, no. 2 (1999): 120–125. 43. Wu, “Margo Polivy,” 131. 44. For a different interpretation of women’s athletic scholarships, see “Athletic Scholarships for Women: The Complexities of Intercollegiate Athletic Equality,” in Sack and Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire, 111–126. 45. Lawyer Sarah Fields argues logically that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause was far more important legally than Title IX in granting equal rights to girls and women in the sporting arena. Sarah Fields, Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sports in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 15. For a solid understanding of Title IX, one should consult Welch Suggs, A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 46. As noted in Ying Wushanley, “The Kellmeyer Lawsuit,” in his Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle for Control of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960– 2000 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 62–75, specifically 63. 47. Linda Estes to Leotus Morrison, AIAW President-Elect, 11 December 1973, AIAW Papers, box 418, University of Maryland Archives, as noted by Ying Wu, “Introduction,” dissertation manuscript, Penn State University. 48. Wushanley, Playing Nice and Losing, 66–69. 49. New York Times, 20 April 1973, 66. 50. See, for instance, Fern Kellmeyer et al. v. National Education Association et al., US District Court, Southern District of Florida, No. 73, 21 Civ. NCR, 17 January 1973; Joan S. Hult, “The Story of Women’s Athletics: Manipulating a Dream, 1890–1985,” in Women and Sport: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed.  D. Margaret Costa and Sharon R. Guthrie (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994), 83–106; and Wushanley, “Kellmeyer Lawsuit,” 62–75. 51. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C.D., Sec. 1681, Sex, accessed 20 May 2020, justice.gov/crt/title-ix-education-amendments-1972; Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta, Title IX (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2005), 3. 52. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C., accessed 16 August 2019, justice.gov/crt/fcs/TitleVI-Overview. 53. Carpenter and Acosta, Title IX, 173–176. 54. Robert Wood, “Olympic Medal Tally,” Topend Sports, accessed 13 August 2019, topendsports.com/events/summer/medal-tally. 55. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1961, 253–254. 56. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1961, 251–255. See also Ying Wushanley,

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Notes to Pages 169–174

“The Cold War and U.S. Defeats in the Olympics,” in his Playing Nice and Losing, 23–25. 57. Walter Byers, Special Memorandum, to ECAC Executive Council, 28 September 1962, Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Minutes, ECAC Headquarters. The NCAA was setting up federations in individual sports, such as the US Track and Field Federation, to take power away from the AAU in the early 1960s. The conflict escalated to the point in the 1970s that the US Congress took power away from the AAU in the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. The result was that the AAU had nearly all its monopoly amateur control taken away. The NCAA had used the need to control women’s intercollegiate athletics to fight the AAU. 58. Long-Range Planning Committee Minutes, 1 March 1965, folder “Women’s Athletics,” Walter Byers Papers, NCAA Headquarters. 59. Walter Byers to Ella Corine Brown, University of Maine, Orono, 16 March 1965, folder “Women’s Athletics,” Walter Byers Papers, NCAA Headquarters. 60. Walter Byers to Joel Eaves, Athletic Director, University of Georgia, 7 February 1966, folder “Women’s Athletics,” Walter Byers Papers, NCAA Headquarters. 61. J. William Davis, NCAA Vice-President, to NCAA member institutions of District 6, ca. May 1967, folder “Council,” Walter Byers Papers, NCAA Headquarters. 62. See Susan Cahn’s final-chapter analysis of Title IX and hopeful advocacy for female athletics: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: A ‘Revolution’ in Women’s Sport?,” in her Coming on Strong, 246–279. 63. Hult, “Story of Women’s Athletics,” 99. 64. Joan  M. Chandler, “The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women: The End of Amateurism in U.S. Intercollegiate Sports,” in Women in Sport: Sociological and Historical Perspectives, ed. Amy L. Reeder and John R. Fuller (Atlanta: Darby Printing, 1985), 15. 65. S. Scoville, “Athletic Vassar,” Outlook 54 (4 July 1896): 18. For instance, the 100-yard dash for women at Vassar was 13 seconds to Yale’s 10 seconds; 220-yard dash, 33 seconds to 22 seconds; 120-yard hurdles, 21 seconds to 15 4/5 seconds; high jump 4’8” to 5’10”; and broad long jump 15’ to 23’. 66. Cahn, Coming on Strong, 261. 67. On 9 October 1981, the AIAW brought an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in an attempt to prevent the NCAA from conducting national championships in women’s sport. The judge ruled that the NCAA had not conspired to destroy the AIAW or to monopolize women’s intercollegiate athletics. The lengthy suit, which ran from October 1981 to May 1984, bankrupted the AIAW, but as Ying Wushanley’s study found, the AIAW had spent nearly three times as much on legal fees from 1974 to 1982 as it had on running AIAW championships. The AIAW was in severe financial trouble before the AIAW-NCAA lawsuit. See Wushanley, Playing Nice and Losing, 145–149.

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Notes to Pages 174–176

chaPTer fourTeen. TeleViSion, unionS, and The collaPSe of amaTeuriSm 1. Joan  M. Chandler, “The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women: The End of Amateurism in U.S. Intercollegiate Sport,” in Women in Sport: Sociological and Historical Perspectives, ed. Amy L. Reeder and John R. Fuller (Atlanta: Darby Printing, 1985), 15. 2. NCAA, Proceedings of the 2nd Special Convention, 15 August 1975, A-3. 3. The term March Madness was appropriated from the Illinois High School Athletic Association through questionable legal maneuvers according to Jopolony, “The NCAA Lawsuit,” Frontline, last modified 4 October 2011, pbs.org /wgbh /pages/frontline/money-and-march-madness/ncaa-lawsuit. Henry Porter, an Illinois teacher and coach, coined March Madness in 1939 with the phrase “March madness is on him.” The Illinois High School Association and the NCAA had a court case that was settled out of court with Illinois having control over high school March Madness and the NCAA over college. “March Madness History,” Illinois High School Association, accessed 20 September 2019, ihsa.org /SportsActivities/MarchMadness; Brendan Koerner, “Why Is It Called ‘March Madness’?,” Slate, 18 March 2004, slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/03/why-is-it -called-march-madness. 4. Gordon S. White Jr., “N.C.A.A. Title Basketball Sold to CBS for $48 Million,” New York Times, 5 March 1981, D19; Jill Hutchinson, “Women’s Intercollegiate Basketball: AIAW/NCAA,” in A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four, ed. Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell (Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1991), 327–328. 5. Ronald A. Smith, “TV Money, Robin Hood, and the Birth of the CFA,” in his Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 143–152. 6. For details, see Smith, Play-by-Play, 143–176. 7. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984). Justice John Paul Stevens stated in footnote 23, probably about amateurism, “Good motives will not validate an otherwise anticompetitive practice,” as in the NCAA TV contract. 8. Walter Camp, “College Athletics,” New Englander 44 (January 1885): 139. 9. James Whiton, “The First Harvard-Yale Regatta (1852),” Outlook 68 (June 1901): 289; F. O. Vaille and H. A. Clark, The Harvard Book (Cambridge, MA: Bigelow, 1875), 2:302–319, 340. 10. Howard W. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817–1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 77. 11. See Bryan Di Salvatore, A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); David Stevens, Baseball’s Radical for All Seasons: A Biography of John Montgomery Ward (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998).

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Notes to Pages 177–180

12. Unions, as described here, do not necessarily require collective bargaining, merely that the workers (athletes) are seeking better pay or working conditions. 13. Nancy C. Foley, “The Elimination of Athletic Subsidies at the University of Pittsburgh, 1936–1939,” Exercise and Sport Science Class 444 Paper, Penn State University, 27 April 1987, Penn State University Archives. 14. Francis Wallace, “Test Case at Pitt: The Facts about College Football for Pay,” Saturday Evening Post 212 (28 October 1939): 14–15, 47–49, 51–52. 15. John Chickerno, “Questionnaire: Football Policies at Pitt, Late 1930’s,” for Foley’s “Elimination of Athletic Subsidies.” Questionnaire in Nancy Foley’s personal file. 16. Marshall Goldberg, a star on the Pitt teams of 1936 and 1937, believed that Pitt players were underpaid relative to other big-time schools. He noted that University of Washington players were given new suits and one hundred dollars each spending money, as well as a watch for participation in the 1937 Rose Bowl, while Pitt players were given two dollars, a blanket, and a small gold football for winning the game over Washington. Marshall Goldberg, Chicago, to Nancy Foley, State College, PA, 6 March 1987, in Chickerno, “Questionnaire.” 17. Robert C. Alberts, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787–1987 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), 170–178. 18. New York Times, 18 December 1938, 22; 6 March 1939, 19; 7 March 1939, 29; 11 March 1939, 4. 19. James R. H. Wagner, President, Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association, to Charles Baird, Michigan Athletic Association, 13 November 1901; Baird to Wagner, 18 November 1901, Earl H. Rathbun Papers, folder “Correspondence 1901–02,” Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 20. James R. H. Wagner to Charles Baird, 11 December 1901, Earl H. Rathbun Papers, folder “Correspondence 1901–02,” Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Stanford received $300 for coming down to Pasadena from Palo Alto. 21. “Pasadena New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses Notes,” Earl H. Rathbun Papers, folder “Notes and Articles About Rose Bowl, 1902,” Michigan Historical Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 22. San Francisco Bulletin, 10 December 1916, 21; “Washington ‘U’ Kicks Over Football Traces,” newspaper clipping, ca. 25 November 2016, Hugo Bezdek Papers, box GSTA/A/02.33, scrapbook “Football Season, 1916,” Penn State University Archives. 23. Stanford Daily, 15 January 1941, 1. 24. Dave Meggyesy, Out of Their League (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1970), 64. 25. Meggyesy, Out of Their League, 88–89. By the end of the 1960s, a group of nine African American football players at Syracuse boycotted by refusing to play in the 1969 season for coach Ben Schwartzwalter. They opposed not hiring a black coach, not providing tutoring help, stacking black players in certain

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Notes to Pages 181–184

positions, and not providing adequate medical attention. See David Marc, Leveling the Playing Field: The Story of the Syracuse 8 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015). 26. There were other union-like efforts, including when a state legislator in Maryland, Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore), proposed a bill to correct the uneven balance between athlete and institution by allowing athletes to organize. Rick Maese, “Proposed Legislation Would Give Maryland College Athletes the Right to Unionize,” Washington Post, 8 February 2019, washingtonpost .com /sports /colleges/proposed-legislation-would-give-maryland-college-athletes-the-right -to-unionize/2019/02/07/d3f80368-2b0c-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html. 27. New York Times, 27 September 1981, S2; 29 September 1981, D25; 1 October 1981, B16. 28. New York Times, 31 August 1981, C2. 29. Dave Anderson, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, 1 October 1981, B16. 30. Allen Sack, “Players are Ignored in Big-Money Deals,” New York Times, 27 September 1981, 52. 31. Dick DeVenzio, Rip-Off U.: The Annual Theft and Exploitation of Revenue Producing Major College Student-Athletes (Charlotte, NC: Fool Court Press, 1986), 85. His chapter is subtitled, “A Union, A Strike, Whatever It Takes,” 81–85. 32. Steve Hummer, “Union Cry Doesn’t Get Flood of Support—Yet,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, 20 November 1986, accessed 30 August 2019, sun-sentinel .com/news/fl-xpm-1986–11–20–8603110539. Page discontinued. 33. Tom Osborne to Chancellor Martin Massengale, 17 November 1986, Chancellors’ Central Files, box 299, folder 20, University of Nebraska Archives. 34. Shawn Krest, “Jay Bilas Continues Dick DeVenzio’s Battle with the NCAA,” North State Journal (Raleigh, NC), 28 February 2018, nsjonline.com /article/2018/02/jay-bilas-continues-dick-devenzios-battle-with-ncaa. 35. DeVenzio, Rip-Off U., 187. 36. Matt Giles, “The Case of Jay Bilas vs. the NCAA Will Now Be Heard,” Atlantic, 23 November 2017, theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/the -case-of-jay-bilas-vs-the-ncaa-will-now-be-heard/546425. 37. Even the courts ruled it was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Law to limit compensation to entry-level coaches, exempting football, at $16,000 per year, known as “restricted earnings coaches,” effective in 1992. The rule was challenged in a basketball coaches’ class action suit, settled when the NCAA agreed to pay $54.5 million as damage to the coaches for lost wages. See Law v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 108 F. Supp. 2d 1193 (D. Kan. 2000). Matthew J. Mitten et  al., Sports Law and Regulation: Cases, Materials, and Problems, 3rd ed. (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2013), 238, 244–246. 38. Maurice Peebles, “7 Common Sense Reasons Why College Athletes Should Be Paid (According to Jay Bilas),” Complex, 3 December 2015, complex .com/sports/2015/12/jay-bilas-interview. 39. NCAA tennis players can make up to $10,000 a year participating in 302

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Notes to Pages 184–187

professional tennis, plus expenses, before they participate in college athletics. Joe Drape, “Foreign Pros in College Tennis: On Top and Under Scrutiny,” New York Times, 11 April 2006, D1, D3. 40. Marc Tracy, “The Most Righteous Man at ESPN,” New Republic, 19 March 2014, newrepublic .com /article/117079/espns-jay-bilas. Bilas points out the NCAA selling Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel’s football jersey and number while punishing Manziel for selling his autograph. 41. Sports Business News, 29 January 2002, 1. 42. Ellen Staurowsky and Allen Sack had previously written a book together, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). 43. National College Players Association and Drexel University, “Study: The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport,” NCPA, 13 September 2011, ncpanow .org/research/study-the-price-of-poverty-in-big-time-college-sport. 44. Mitten et al., Sports Law and Regulation, 255.

chaPTer fifTeen. iS ncaa “amaTeuriSm” aliVe? 1. Paul H. Rubin, “More Money into Bad Suits,” New York Times, 16 November 2010, nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11 /15/investing-in-someone-elses -lawsuit/more-money-into-bad-suits; J. Mark Ramseyer and Eric B. Rasmusen, “Comparative Litigation Rates,” Harvard Law School, 20 November 2010, law .harvard .edu /programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_681.pdf. Ramseyer and Rasmusen believe US litigation rates are little different from other wealthy democratic societies. 2. Rt. Hon. The Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, “Magna Carta: A Precedent for Recent Constitutional Change,” 15 June 2005, Magna Carta Trust, 13 October 2011, magnacarta800th .com /lectures/magna -carta-a-precedent-for-recent-constitutional-change. 3. For a lengthy discussion of NCAA football and antitrust action, see Ronald A. Smith, Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 134–176, specifically 164. 4. For a lengthy discussion of the 1984 Supreme Court decision and it historical impact, see Brian L. Porto, The Supreme Court and the NCAA (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 49–99. 5. Farabaugh, Chapleau & Roper, South Bend law firm, “Memorandum Brief,” to Notre Dame Vice President Hesburgh, 28 April 1951; Gale, Bernay, Falk and Eisner, New York City, to G. A. Farabaugh, South Bend, Indiana, 1 May 1951, Vice President Hesburgh Papers, UPHS, box 94, University of Notre Dame Archives. The vote for a national NCAA TV policy was 161–7. NCAA, Proceedings, January 12, 1951, 207. 6. “See Hennessey v NCAA 564 F.2d 1136 1153 ca5 1977,” Course Hero, accessed 19 October 2019, coursehero.com/file/p6a01cn/See-Hennessey-v-ncaa. 303

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Notes to Pages 187–190

7. Law v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 134 F.3d 1010 (10th Cir. 1998), No. 98–3034, decided 23 January 1998. 8. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984). 9. Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 reads, “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.” Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, 15 U.S.C. § 1–38. 10. NCAA v. Board of Regents. 11. Quoted in Kevin Trahan, “Can College Athletes Be Paid and Still Be Students?,” Vice, 15 February 2016, sports.vice.com /en _us/article/3dgn98/can -college-athletes. 12. Matthew  J. Mitten, “Why and How the Supreme Court Should Have Decided O’Bannon v. NCAA,” Antitrust Bulletin 62, no. 1 (2017): 62–90. The page number of the case reprinted in a Marquette Faculty Publication is 41. 13. Edward O’Bannon et al. v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, Electronic Arts Inc., and Collegiate Licensing Company, 7 F. Supp. 3d 955 (N.D. Cal. 2014), No. C 09–3329 CW., Document 291. Keller v. Electronic Arts, Inc., 724 F.3d 1268 (9th Cir. 2013), WL 3928293 (IC.A.9); “Video Game History,” History, last modified 10 June 2019, history.com /topics /inventions /history-of-video -games; “Electronic Arts,” Spong, accessed 13 October 2019, spong.com /company/446 /Electronic-Arts-Limited; Wikipedia, s.v. “EA Sports,” last modified 27 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA _Sports. 14. NCAA, Proceedings, 6 January 1958, 140. The NCAA interpretation came under Official Interpretation #9, Article II, Section 1, “Principle of Amateurism of the Constitution.” 15. Michael McCann, “NCAA Faces Unspecified Damages, Changes in Latest Anti-Trust Case,” Sports Illustrated, 21 July 2009, si.com/more-sports/2009/07/21 /ncaa. 16. Ed O’Bannon with Michael McCann, Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle against the NCAA (New York: Diversion Books, 2018), prologue. 17. Mike Jensen, “Coaches’ Shoe Contracts Evoke Concern,” Seattle Times, 5 August 1990, archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19900805&slug=1086162. 18. Jensen, “Coaches’ Shoe Contracts.” 19. Harry Lyles Jr., “The FBI’s Investigation of College Basketball Corruption, Explained,” SBNation, last modified 27 September 2017, sbnation.com /college-basketball /2017/9/27/16366056/college-basketball-scandal-corruption -fbi. Charges of bribery, fraud, and money laundering were brought against four assistant basketball coaches in recruiting All-American high school athletes. 20. USA Basketball was created on 12 October 1989 from the Amateur Basketball Association of the United States of America, originally formed in 1974. 21. Jon Solomon, “How Sonny Vaccaro Accidently Created the O’Bannon Case,” CBS Sports, 6 June 2014, cbssports.com /college-basketball /news/how -sonny-vaccaro-accidentally-created-the-ed-obannon-case. 304

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Notes to Pages 191–194

22. See Joseph N. Crowley, “State Actors and States’ Actions,” “Unfinished Business,” and “Past, Present, Future,” in his In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century (Indianapolis, IN: NCAA, 2006), 166–172. 23. Solomon, “How Sonny Vaccaro.” 24. Christina Teller, “Coalition Aims to Increase Athlete Rights,” UCLA Daily Bruin, 18 January 2001, dailybruin.com /2001 /01 /18/coalition-aims-to-increase -ath; Tom Farrey, “CAC Hopes to Give College Athletes a Voice,” ESPN, 30 April 2001, espn.com/gen/s/2001/0427/1187650.html. 25. Alexander Wolff, “Look for the Union Label? Ramogi Huma’s Collegiate Athletes Association Is Organizing Division I Players,” Sports Illustrated, 13 August 2001, vault.si .com /vault /2001 /08/13 /look-for-the -union-label-ramogi -humas-collegiate-athletes-association-is-organizing-division-1-players. 26. “60 Minutes: College ‘Sweatshops,” CBS News, 3 January 2002, cbsnews .com /news/60 -minutes-college -sweatshops; Sports Business News, 29 January 2002, 1; “Huma Says Group Not Deterred,” Los Angeles Times, 14 January 2002, latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-14-sp-ncaa14-story.html. 27. The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee was created in 1989 for athletes chosen by conferences to meet regularly to “solicit athlete’s response to proposed NCAA legislation.” However, the SAAC had no voice or vote in Division I meetings of the NCAA until 2019. See “How to Become a DI SAAC Member,” NCAA, accessed 25 October 2019, ncaa.org/governance/committees/how -become-di-saac-member. 28. Wolff, “Look for the Union Label?” 29. For the creation of the NCAA and faculty control, see Ronald A. Smith, “Brutality, Ethics, and the Creation of the NCAA,” in his Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 191–208. 30. Tom Farrey, “When Scholarship Athletes Are Taken for a Ride,” ESPN, last modified 26 September 2002, a .espncdn .com /ncaa /s/2002 /0925/1436922 .html. 31. NCAA, Proceedings, 13 January 1973, 123, A-20. 32. NCAA, Proceedings, 127; Allen Sack and Ellen Staurowsky, “Athletic Scholarships: From Gifts to Employment Contract,” in their College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 79–93, specifically the section “The Death of Four-Year Scholarships,” 82–84. 33. Kristina Peterson, “After Injuries, College Athletes Are Often Left to Pay the Bills,” New York Times, 16 July 2009, A1, B14. 34. Quoted in Howard Bloom, “Follow the Bouncing Basketball News,” Sport Business News, 26 October 2000, 4. 35. White v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, No. CV 060999 VBF (C.D. Cal., 4 August 2008); Daniel Laws, “Amateurism and the NCAA: How a Changing Market Has Turned Caps on Athletic Scholarships into an Antitrust Violation,” University of Richmond Law Review 51 (2017): 1213–1237; Jack Carey and 305

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Notes to Pages 194–198

Andy Gardiner, “NCAA Agrees to $10M Settlement in Antitrust Lawsuit,” USA Today, 30 January 2008, usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/2008. Page discontinued. Stanford economics professor Roger Noll was Jason White’s advisor at Stanford and later in 2019 favored the California law passed to provide athletes with name, image, and likeness financial rewards. The “no wrong doing” clause in the settlement was the same as the NCAA settling out of court in the 2017 Jake Corman v. NCAA lawsuit in which the NCAA rescinded all the sanctions against Penn State in the Jerry Sandusky case, not admitting that it broke the NCAA constitution and bylaws in its illegal punishments. See Ronald A. Smith, Nailed to the Crossbar: From the NCAA-Penn State Consent Decree to the Joe Paterno Family Lawsuit (Lemont, PA: Mt. Nittany Press, 2018), 93–103. 36. “Sonny Vaccaro | Hoop Dreams: How Sonny Vaccaro Revolutionized the Business of Basketball,” YouTube video, posted 3 December 2013 by Duke University School of Law, youtube.com/watch?v=cQU6mLJ7i8I. Vaccaro thought it was the height of hypocrisy that boosters were taken free to football bowl games and basketball March Madness games, but parents of players were not given free transportation and hotel rooms. 37. Solomon, “How Sonny Vaccaro.” 38. As quoted by Alex Kirshner, “No Conference Is College Sports’ Moral Guardian,” SBNation, 30 October 2018, sbnation.com/college-football/2018/8/14 /17671852/big-ten-scandals. The Delany quote was from 2013. 39. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 2–3. 40. Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 346–347. 41. James  J. Duderstadt, Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Tom Farrey, “Players, Game Makers Settle for $40M,” ESPN, 30 May 2014, espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/11010455/college-athletes-reach-40-million -settlement-ea-sports-ncaa-licensing-arm. 42. Jon Solomon, “NCAA Expert: 69 Percent of Public Opposes Paying College Players,” CBS Sports, 25 June 2014, cbssports .com /college-football /news /ncaa-expert-69 -percent-of-public-opposes-paying-college -players. In the 2013 survey of 2,455 individuals, only 14 had heard of NILs as a way of paying athletes. 43. O’Bannon v. NCAA; Mitten, “Why and How the Supreme Court.” 44. O’Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049, Nos. 14–16601, 14–17068 (9th Cir. 2015). 45. It could be that the Pell Grants given to millions of college students in the range of $5,000 each might have been a consideration of Judge Wilken. Pell Grants, raising the benefits to athletes well above the cost of education, still allowed athletes to remain “amateur.” In a similar way, military veterans benefited from the GI Bill of Rights, which was first offered at the close of World War II and continued for decades. 46. O’Bannon v. NCAA. 47. Judge Wilken broke with the 1984 Oklahoma ruling about amateurism 306

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Notes to Pages 199–201

when she noted that the NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma “guidance [w]as informative with respect to the procompetitive purposes served by the NCAA’s amateurism rules, but we will go no further than that. The amateurism rules’ validity must be proved, not presumed.” Emphasis added. O’Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049, Nos. 14–16601, 14–17068 (9th Cir. 2015). 48. O’Bannon v. NCAA. 49. “Student-Athlete Likeness Lawsuit Timeline,” press release, NCAA, 12 December 2013, ncaa .org /about /resources /media -center/press -releases /student-athlete-likeness-lawsuit-timeline. 50. O’Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049, Nos. 14–16601, 14–17068 (9th Cir. 2015). 51. The US Supreme Court refused to review the court of appeals’ decision on 3 October 2016.

chaPTer SixTeen. The alSTon and JenkinS lawSuiTS, and ncaa fig- leafed ProfeSSionaliSm 1. No athlete representation was similar to that of the Amateur Athletic Union from its beginning in 1888 to the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, when the control of all but one sport under the AAU was taken away by federal legislation. Joseph M. Turrini, The End of Amateurism in American Track and Field (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 147, 169–170. 2. Jon Solomon, “The History behind the Debate over Paying NCAA Athletes,” Aspen Institute, 23 April 2018, aspeninstitute .org /blog-posts /history -behind-debate-paying-ncaa-athletes. 3. Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States [NCAA], Proceedings, “Constitution and Bylaws,” 29 December 1906, 33. 4. Rev. Endicott Peabody, “The Ideals of Sport in England and America,” NCAA, Proceedings, 30 December 1913, 55–56. 5. NCAA, Proceedings, 28 December 1916, 53. 6. Howard J. Savage et al., American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929), 301. 7. Savage, American College Athletics, xvi. 8. Charles  W. Kennedy, NCAA Vice-President from Princeton, to Prof. W. B. Owens, Stanford, 1 February 1932; Avery Brundage, American Olympic Association, to Kennedy, 30 January 1932, President Wilbur Papers, box 77, folder “Bd. Of Ath. Control,” Stanford University Archives. 9. For a listing of the difference between professionals and amateurs in the nineteenth century, see Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 168. 10. NCAA, Proceedings, 11 January 1957, 294–295. 11. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 238. 307

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Notes to Pages 201–206

12. William Gerberding, “Historical Perspective on Amateurism,” Journal of College and University Law 22, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 11–19. 13. O’Bannon v. NCAA, 802 F.3d 1049, Nos. 14–16601, 14–17068 (9th Cir. 2015). 14. Christine Brennan and Steve Berkowitz, “Katie Ledecky Earned $355,000 in Medal Bonuses from Rio Olympics Performance,” USA Today, last modified 12 September 2016, usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/rio-2016/2016/09 /09/katie -ledecky-ncaa-rio -olympic-medal-bonus/90142834; Andrew Joseph, “Katie Ledecky Just Accidentally Proved Why the NCAA Rules Are So Ridiculous,” USA Today, 14 September 2016, ftw.usatoday.com /2016/09/ncaa-rules -katie-ledecky; Taylor Branch, “Why Telling the NCAA to Pay Players Is the Wrong Way to Help College Athletes,” Time, 27 March 2019, time.com/5558498 /ncaa-march-madness-pay-athletes. 15. Bylaw 12.02.1, NCAA 2019–20 Division I Manual (Indianapolis, IN: NCAA, July 2019). 16. “Sherman Act Invalidation of the NCAA Amateurism Rules,” Harvard Law Review 105 (April 1992): 1318. 17. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984), No. 83–2671. 18. Joe Drape, “Foreign Pros in College Tennis: On Top and Under Scrutiny,” New York Times, 11 April 2006, D1, D3. 19. Bylaws 12.1.2.4.2.1, 12.2.3.2, and 12.1.3, NCAA 2019–20 Division I Manual. 20. “2019 Division I Revenue Distribution Plan,” NCAA, accessed 6 December 2019, ncaa org .s3 .amazon aws .com /ncaa /finance/d1 /2019 D1 Fin _Revenue DistributionPlan.pdf. 21. Sports Business News, 29 January 2002, 1. 22. National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, 375 F. Supp. 3d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2019), No. 14-md-02541 CW, decided 8 March 2019. 23. NCAA, Proceedings, 15 August 1975, A-3. 24. O’Bannon v. NCAA. 25. Alston v. National Collegiate Athletic Association et al., Case 3:2014cv01011EDL (N.D. Cal. 2014), decided 5 March 2014. 26. Michael McCann, “How Tentative Grant-in-Aid Class Action Settlement Affects NCAA Student-Athletes,” Sports Illustrated, 4 February 2017, si .com /college /2017/02 /05 /shawne -alston-grant-aid-class-action-lawsuit-ncaa -settlement. 27. This class-action suit was filed in February 2006 and settled out of court two years later, after which the NCAA caved in and soon allowed a minimum expense allowance of $2,000 added to athletic scholarships. White v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, No. CV 060999 VBF (C.D. Cal., 4 August 2008). Jason White was the advisee of Stanford economist Roger Noll, who opposed the NCAA cap on athletic scholarships. See Drew  N. Goodwin, “Not Quite

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Notes to Pages 206–210

Filling the Gap: Why the Miscellaneous Expense Allowance Leaves the NCAA Vulnerable to Antitrust Litigation,” Boston College Law Review 54, no. 3 (2013): 1277–1315, which shows how the NCAA was engaging in horizontal price-fixing, that the October 2011 NCAA $2,000 cap for minimum expense allowances was artificial, and that the NCAA would be liable in the future for price-fixing and violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. 28. Article 12.1.1–12.3.1, 2003–04 NCAA Division 1 Manual (Indianapolis, IN: NCAA, 2003). See also Christopher A. Callahan, “Advice for the Next Jeremy Bloom: An Elite Athlete’s Guide to NCAA Amateurism Regulations,” in The Business of Sport, ed. Scott R. Rosner and Kenneth L. Shropshire, 2nd ed. (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2011), 658–661; Bloom v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 93 P.3d 621 (Colo. Ct. App. 2004). 29. T. Matthew Lockhart, “Oliver v. NCAA: Throwing a Contractual Curveball at the NCAA’s ‘Veil of Amateurism,’” University of Dayton Law Review 35, no. 2 (2010): 175–198; Article 12.3.2.1, 2008–09 NCAA Division 1 Manual (Indianapolis, IN: NCAA, 2008). 30. Lockhart, “Oliver v. NCAA,” 198. 31. “Sherman Act Invalidation of the NCAA Amateurism Rules,” Harvard Law Review 105 (April 1992): 1318. Emphasis added. 32. O’Bannon v. NCAA. Wilken’s earlier decision of permitting an athlete to earn $5,000 a year and place it in a trust fund was overturned by the court of appeals. The three-member panel of Jay Bybee, Gordon Quist, and Sidney Thomas upheld the Wilken antitrust finding, but voted 2–1 to eliminate the deferred compensation of up to $5,000 remedy. 33. US Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, “In Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation,” 24 F. Supp. 3d 1366 (2014), 4 June 2014. 34. The original 2014 court case is cited as Martin Jenkins et al. v. National Collegiate Athletic Association et al., United States District Court, District of New Jersey, Civil Action No. 14, Case 3:33-av-00001, Document 76666, filed 03/27/14, 48 pp. See also Solomon, “History Behind the Debate.” 35. As quoted by Doug Lederman, “College Sports’ Antitrust Vulnerability,” Inside Higher Ed, 16 April 2014, insidehighered .com /news/2014 /04 /16/sports -antitrust-lawyers-latest-target-ncaa-scholarship-limits. 36. The lawsuit stated that the NCAA rules are illegally “a horizontal agreement among competitors to cap the amount of remuneration schools may provide athletes for their services, despite how much money those athletes may generate for their institutions and Defendants.” Martin Jenkins et al. v. NCAA et al. 37. Daniel Laws, “Amateurism and the NCAA: How a Changing Market Has Turned Caps on Athletic Scholarships into an Antitrust Violation,” University of Richmond Law Review 51 (2017): 1213–1237. 38. Babette Boliek, “The Potential Reach of O’Bannon v. NCAA,” Mississippi Sports Law Review 5, no. 1 (2015): 28–42.

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Notes to Pages 210–213

39. Steve Silver, “NCAA Loses Summary Judgment, Must Now Defend Amateurism Scam at Trial in Monumental Antitrust Case,” Above the Law, 30 March 2018, abovethelaw.com/2018/03/ncaa-loses-summary-judgment. 40. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 41. Martin Jenkins et al. v. NCAA et al. Three key attorneys for Jenkins were David Greenspan, Jeff Kessler, and Tim Nevius, who had been associate director of NCAA enforcement prior to joining a law firm with Greenspan and Kessler. The Jenkins case specifically noted anti-competitive activity of the NCAA: the 1984 TV monopoly case, the lawsuit for illegally capping assistant basketball coaches’ salaries, the National Intercollegiate Basketball Association (NIT) monopoly case, and the White lawsuit for illegally capping an athlete’s scholarship. 42. This is effectively argued by attorney Mark Edelman in his “A Prelude to Jenkins v. NCAA: Amateurism, Antitrust Law, and the Role of Consumer Demand in a Proper Rule of Reason Analysis,” Louisiana Law Review 78, no. 1 (2018): 228–244. 43. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 44. As quoted by Will Hobson, “For Former Athletes Fighting NCAA Amateurism Rules, a Muted Victory,” Washington Post, 13 March 2019, washingtonpost .com /sports /colleges /for-former- athletes -fighting-ncaa - amateurism -rules - a -muted -victory/2019 /03 /12 /53ea96c0 -44fe -11e9 - aaf8 -4512a6fe3439 _story .html. 45. Even though Jenkins was deposed and testified at the Alston case (a.k.a. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation), Jenkins’s lawyers, including Jeff Kessler, fought successfully “to keep Jenkins separate from the consolidated class action” of Alston. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 46. Examples of dire predictions with opposite results include: 1) title IX will ruin men’s sports, especially football; 2) sanctioning college athletic scholarships in the 1950s will devastate college sport; 3) permitting the forward pass in 1906 will ruin football; 4) Black athletes are not skilled enough at certain positions, particularly quarterbacks; 5) allowing women to run the entire basketball court (prior to 1970) will impair women physically; and 6) regular telecasting of college football will nearly destroy gate receipts. 47. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 48. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 49. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 50. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 51. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation. 52. NCAA, “NCAA and Conferences File Notice of Appeal in Alston Case,” press release, 23 March 2019, ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/ncaa -and-conferences-file-notice-appeal-alston-case. 53. This was part of the argument in the three-member appeals court in 2020. See “19–15566 Shawne Alston v. NCAA,” YouTube video, posted 9 March 2020 by

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Notes to Pages 214–217

United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, youtube.com /watch?v =0IKs2zlM3gU. 54. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984); 104 S. Ct. 2948 (1984); 82 L. Ed. 2d 70 (1984). 55. NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, No. 19-15566 (9th Cir. 2020), D.C. No. 4:14-md-02541-CW, 18 May 2020, 15, 56. 56. Judge Milan Smith, “Separate Concurrence,” NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, 57.

chaPTer SeVenTeen. STaTe and federal legiSlaTiVe Pay- for- Play acTion 1. Drew Stokesbary, a Washington state legislator, introduced House Bill 1084 on 3 January 2019, a month before California. The bill was intended to give athletes “equal rights” to earn compensation from NILs, hire agents to represent athletes, and prohibit the NCAA from suspending athletes or punishing institutions. State of Washington House Bill 1084, 66th Leg. (2019), 3 January 2019. 2. California State Senate Bill 206, Chapter 383, Approved by Governor 30 September 2019. 3. Although not well known, the NCAA had allowed about two hundred appeals for the use of NILs from 2015 to 2019, including one from a lacrosse player from Ohio State who was allowed to “sell his original music on iTunes” as long as it had nothing to do with lacrosse. Emily Caldwell, “Change to Name, Image, Likeness Policy Will Ultimately Require New Federal Law,” Ohio State News, 3 December 2019, news.osu .edu /change-to-name-image-likeness-policy -will-ultimately-require-new-federal-law. 4. Sally Jenkins, “NCAA President Mark Emmert Is the Lord of a Feudal State That Knows Its Time Is Over,” Washington Post, 25 June 2019, washington post .com /sports /colleges /ncaa -president-mark- emmert-is -the -lord - of- a -feudal-state-who-knows-its-time-is-over/2019/06/25/4e1c840c-9746-11e9-8d0a -5edd7e2025b1_story.html. 5. For the NCAA and Sandusky scandal, see Ronald  A. Smith, Nailed to the Crossbar: From the NCAA-Penn State Consent Decree to the Joe Paterno Family Lawsuit (Lemont, PA: Eifrig Publishing, 2018); Smith, “From the Grand Jury to Beyond the NCAA Consent Decree,” in his Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky and the Crises in Penn State Athletics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 173–183. 6. Mark Emmert to Kasen Chu and Jose Medina, California State Assembly, 17 June 2019, quoted in “NCAA President Mark Emmert’s Letter to the California Assembly,” Washington Post, 25 June 2019, washingtonpost.com/context/ncaa -president-mark-emmert-s-letter-to -the -california-assembly/9189935d-3282 -4046-88f7-abee191f8d4c.

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Notes to Pages 217–220

7. Dana Hunsinger Benbow, “NCAA President Mark Emmert Says Fair Play to Pay Act Turns Student-Athletes into Employees,” Indianapolis Star, 3 October 2019, indystar.com /story/sports/college/2019/10/03 /ncaa-president-mark -emmert-responds-california-fair-play-pay-act/3850522002. 8. Conversation with King James, Mav Carter, Ed O’Bannon, Katelyn Ohashi, Diana Taurasi, and Rich Paul with Gavin Newsom signing #SB206, appearing on LeBron James’ The Shop, YouTube video, posted 30 September 2019. Page discontinued. 9. Jenkins, “NCAA President Mark Emmert.” Jenkins called Emmert “Lord Emmert, His High Grace of the Citadel of Amateurism.” 10. Henry B. Needham, “The College Athlete,” McClure’s Magazine 25 (June 1905): 124; New York Post, 18 January 1906, clipping in the Columbia University Football Scrapbook, Columbia University Archives; Albert  B. Crawford, ed., Football Y Men 1872–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1962). Roger R. Tamte, in his important Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 273–278, had an interesting interpretation. He exonerated Hogan and Yale for doing what other institutions were doing at that time, especially helping Hogan, who needed financial backing for attending Yale and was doing well academically. The same was true for Martin Jenkins at Clemson a century later. 11. Jamie Munks, “Illinois Legislator Introduces Bill to Let College Athletes Be Paid,” Chicago Tribune, 30 September 2019; MGOBLOG, “Michigan Lawmakers Introduce NIL Bill for College Athletes, 6 November 2019, mgoblog.com /comment/243624612; Colton Lochhead, “Nevada May Consider Letting College Athletes Get Paid,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 30 September 2019, reviewjournal .com /news /politics -and - government /nevada -may-consider-letting-college -athletes-get-paid-1860537. 12. New York Senate Bill S6722B, 16 September 2019 (in Senate Committee); Avery G. Wilks, “2 SC Lawmakers Will File Proposal to Pay College Athletes, Following California’s Lead,” The State, 13 September 2019, thestate.com/news /politics-government/article235015452.html. 13. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Miller, 795 F. Supp. 1476 (D. Nev. 1992), decided 5 June 1992. 14. NCAA v. Miller. 15. One of the clearest discussions of this question is by attorney Michael McCann, “California’s New Law Worries the NCAA, but a Federal Law Is What They Should Fear,” Sports Illustrated, 4 October 2019, si.com/college/2019/10/04 /ncaa-fair-pay-to-play-act-name-likeness-image-laws. 16. Student-Athlete Equity Act, H.R. 1804, 116th Congress (2019–2020); Mark Walker, “Walker Introduces Student-Athlete Equity Act to End NCAA Restrictions on Player’s Publicity Rights,” press release, 14 March 2019, walker.house .gov/media-center/press-releases/walker-introduces-student-athlete-equity-act -end-ncaa-restrictions.

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Notes to Pages 220–223

17. Representative Walker showed his athleticism when he was chosen to be the baseball pitcher for the Republican members of Congress in their annual game with the Democrats. Piedmont Baptist College in North Carolina, begun in 1945 as a Bible school, changed its name in 2012 to Piedmont International University. 18. Student-Athlete Equity Act; Kyle Jahner, “NCAA Tax Status Tied to Athletes’ Image Rights Under New Bill,” Bloomberg Law, 14 March 2019, news .bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/ncaa-tax-status-tied-to-athletes-image-rights-under -new-bill. 19. Mark Emmert’s NCAA salary in 2018 was $3.9 million, a 60 percent increase over that of 2017. Alaa Abdeldaiem, “Report: Mark Emmert Received 60% Raise in ’17, Made 3.9M Amid College Hoops Scandal,” Sports Illustrated, 24 May 2019, si .com /college/2019/05 /24 /mark-emmert-raise -salary-college -hoops-scandal. 20. “S. 2083: Athletics Fair Pay Act of 2019,” Govetrack, accessed 23 December 2019, govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s2083. 21. Dianne Feinstein, “Women Senators Introduce Bill Requiring Equal Pay, Resources for U.S. National Teams,” press release, 24 July 2019, feinstein .senate .gov/public/index .cfm /press-releases?ID =EB569BB6 -C2C3-4B01-8663 -6DFDC9F39934. The other senators were Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). 22. A Bill to Establish a Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics of 2019, 116th Congress, 1st Session, 18 December 2019. 23. The Knight Commission had produced a white paper on NILs in May 2016. See Gabe Feldman, “The NCAA and ‘Non-Game Related’ Student-Athlete Name, Image and Likeness Restrictions,” white paper, Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, May 2016. The white paper says that the NCAA should have a clearer definition of amateurism that would focus on education and that might “actually strengthen the NCAA’s legal protections.” 24. Brian Murphy, “Can Congress Remake College Athletics? Shalala Proposes 2-Year Commission on NCAA,” Miami Herald, 19 December 2019, news .yahoo.com/congress-remake-college-athletics-shalala-191123365.html. 25. Joseph M. Hanna, “An Unusual Coalition: Five U.S. Senators Spark Bipartisan Effort on Student-Athlete Compensation,” Sports Law Insider, 12 December 2019, sportslawinsider.com/ncaa/an-unusual-coalition-five-u-s-senators-spark -bipartisan-effort-on-student-athlete-compensation. 26. Travis Waldron, “Cory Booker Unveils Plan to Pay College Athletes and ‘End Exploitation in Sports,’” Huffpost, 10 October 2019, huffpost .com /entry /cory-booker-ncaa-pay-college-athletes_n_5d9e3791e4b087efdba75a2f. 27. Steve Berkowitz, “Two U.S. Senators Appear to Be Taking Aim at NCAA Even Beyond Image, Likeness Controversy,” USA Today, 17 December 2019, usatoday.com /story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/17/ncaas-mark-emmert-meets-mitt -romney-chris -murphy-reform /2675473001; Clyde McGrady, “Rep. Mark Walker Rips NCAA Chief for Meeting Romney, Murphy at Senate,” Roll Call,

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Notes to Pages 223–226

17 December 2019, rollcall.com/2019/12/17/rep-mark-walker-rips-ncaa-chief-for -meeting-with-romney-murphy-at-senate. 28. Greta Anderson, “The Push for Player Pay Goes National,” Inside Higher Ed, 4 October 2019, insidehighered .com /news /2019/10/04 /us-congressman -propose -college -athlete -payment-bill; Anthony Gonzalez, “Gonzalez Statement on NCAA Announcement of Support for New Name, Image and Likeness Regulations,” press release, 29 October 2019, anthonygonzalez.house.gov/news /documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID =142. 29. The cochair with Gene Smith of the NCAA Working Group was the commissioner of the Big East Conference, Val Ackerman. Ten of the committee of nineteen were from Big-Time schools, including the cochairs of the committee. 30. NCAA, “Board of Governors Starts Process to Enhance Name, Image and Likeness Opportunities,” press release, 29 October 2019, ncaa .org /about /resources/media-center/news/board-governors-starts-process-enhance-name -image-and-likeness-opportunities. 31. Gregg  E. Clifton and Nicholas  A. Plinio, “NCAA Board of Governors Approves Policy Permitting College Athletes to Benefit from Use of Name, Image, and Likeness,” Collegiate & Professional Sports Law Blog, Jackson Lewis, 29 October 2019, collegeandprosportslaw.com/uncatoregorized /ncaa-board-of -governors; Melody Gutierrez and Nathan Fenno, “California Would Allow College Athletes to Profit from Endorsements under Bill Sent to Newsom,” Los Angeles Times, 12 September 2019, latimes.com /california /story/2019-09-11 /california-college-athletes-endorsements-bill. 32. As quoted by Alan Blinder, “Senators Tell N.C.A.A. to Stop Lagging and Change College Sports,” New York Times, 11 February 2002, nytimes.com/2020/02 /11/sports/ncaa-athlete-pay.html. 33. “NCAA Board of Governors Federal and State Legislation Working Group Final Report and Recommendations,” NCAA, 17 April 2020, ncaaorg.s3 .amazon aws .com /committees/ncaa /wrkgrps/fslwg /Apr2020FSLWG _Report .pdf, 6, 29. 34. “Taking Action: Name, Image and Likeness,” Spring 2020, accessed 5 June 2020, ncaa.org/about/taking-action. 35. The appellate court decision against the NCAA was appealed by the NCAA to go to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court in August 2020 chose not to hear the case. 36. Judge Wilken wrote that the Jenkins v. NCAA case had “not been consolidated, but all pending motions were briefed together in the consolidated action and in Jenkins.” NCAA Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, No. 14-md-02541-CW and 14-cv-02758-CW, 28 March 2018. 37. John Branch, “Judge in N.C.A.A. Case Known as Evenhanded,” New York Times, 10 August 2014, nytimes.com /2014 /08/11 /sports/judge -in-n-c-a-a-case -known-as-fair-and-modest.html. 38. “19–15566 Shawne Alston v. NCAA.”

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Notes to Pages 226–230

39. William Gerberding, “Historical Perspective on Amateurism,” Journal of College and University Law 22, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 11–19.

afTerword 1. Boston Globe, 17 February 1905, 11. 2. Ronald  A. Smith, ed., Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 22. 3. Myles Brand, “Sustaining The Collegiate Model of Athletics,” luncheon keynote address, Tulane University National Symposium on Athletics Reform, 11 November 2003. 4. Brand majored in philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and obtained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Rochester. He taught philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Arizona, and University of Illinois at Chicago before becoming president of the Universities of Oregon and Indiana. He became president of the NCAA in 2002. Two years before, Brand had fired Bob Knight, the famed basketball coach at Indiana, and became a persona non grata at Indiana. 5. NCAA, “Opening Business Session,” Proceedings, 11 January 2004. 6. Andrew Zimbalist, Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in BigTime College Sports (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 18. 7. Sport Business News, 3 January 2002. 8. William Bowen and Sarah Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 9. Centre Daily Times, 13 February 2003, B2. 10. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 US 85 (1984). 11. “Exploring a Compensation Framework for Intercollegiate Athletes,” 1 July 2020, Statement of Dionne Koller, US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Hearing, video at commerce.senate.gov/2020/7/a -federal-framework-for-the-compensation-of-intercollegiate-athletes. 12. Ronald A. Smith, Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 151–164. 13. George H. Hanford, An Inquiry into the Need for and Feasibility of a National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics: A Report to the American Council on Education (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1974), 25–26. 14. A graduate of Harvard and coxswain of the 1852 crew, Joseph M. Brown was brought back to be coxswain in the next Harvard-Yale meet in 1855, which Harvard again won. New York Herald, 27 July 1855, 3. 15. Walter Byers, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995), 392. 16. NCAA Brief, National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 315

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Notes to Pages 230–236

No. 19-15566, 19-15662; Appeals from the US District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 4:14-md-02541, 16 August 2019. 17. “Taking Action: Name, Image and Likeness,” NCAA, accessed 5 June 2020, ncaa.org/about/taking-action. 18. Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, “‘Professionalism’ in Sports,” North American Review 151, no. 405 (August 1890): 187–191. More than a decade before Roosevelt became president, he stated his bias for amateurism: “The amateur, and not the professional, is the desirable citizen. . . . Professionalism is the curse of many an athletic sport.” 19. Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 US 197, No. 277, decided 14 March 1904. 20. In the NCAA vote for the first Teddy Award winner, Eisenhower gained forty-five points, Supreme Court Justice Whizzer White was second with thirtyone points, and World War II hero General Omar Bradley was third with seventeen points. White was given the award in 1969, and Bradley in 1973. The only individual having had the award revoked is Bill Cosby, who was found guilty of sexual assault in 2018. The award is given annually to a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment who had earned a varsity athletic award in college and who has a continuing interest in competitive sport and fitness. “Theodore Roosevelt Award Folder,” Walter Byers Papers, NCAA Headquarters. 21. For a list of Teddy Awards, see Wikipedia, s.v. “Theodore Roosevelt Award,” last modified 26 May 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt _Award.

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Notes to Pages 236–238

Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures.

Abercrombie, John, 90 Academic Betterment and Career Development (ABCD) Camp (Nike), 194 Academic Enhancement Fund, 207, 215, 252 academic standards: 1869 RutgersPrinceton football game and, 242; ACT scores, 136–137, 143–144; Carnegie units, 135–136; GPA, 135–142, 247, 248, 249; Manley case, 143–144; NCAA 1.600 rule, 136–142; NCAA round table on, 135–136; post-1.600rule “lowest common denominator,” 142–146; race and, 138–142; recruitment of academically unqualified athletes, 119–120, 121; Ross case, 144; SAT scores, 120, 135–139, 141, 247, 249; sham coursework, 212; Washburn case, 144–146 achieved vs. ascribed status, 17, 22–23, 234–235 Adams, Ralph, 101 Adee, George, 39 African American athletes: Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, 136, 140, 247; NCAA

317

1.600 rule and, 138–142; racism within NCAA and, 225; in women’s athletics, 162, 173, 174 Agnew v. NCAA, 251 AIAW v. NCAA, 249 Alabama Claims controversy, 49 Alaska League, 71 Albright, Madeleine, 237 Allen, Forrest “Phog,” 94 Alston, Shawne, 209 Alston v. NCAA, 209–212, 215–217, 229, 236, 245, 252, 253 alumni, recruiting by, 125–126, 244 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU): definition of an amateur, 75; Indianapolis and, 233; summer baseball and, 65, 70; Thorpe case, 69; women’s athletics and, 163–164, 174–175 amateurism: ancient, as myth, 11, 249; British/Oxbridge model, 11–12, 15–16, 29–30, 63, 76–77, 113–114, 129–130, 231–232; Byers on, 236, 250; definitions of, 11–12, 75, 187, 204–209, 215–216, 242, 244; domino theory, 69; freedom-of-opportunity

ideology vs., 14–17; Harvard Law Review on, 211–212; historical amateur-professional dilemma, 10–11; history of types of payments, 12–14; Koller on, 234; professionalcommercial model, 232; sacredness of, 192; in Supreme Court rulings, 191–192, 200–202; Toqueville and anti-amateur ideology, 14. See also specific institutions and topics Ambrose, Stephen, 127 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 140 American College Athletics. See Carnegie Report American College Baseball Association, 23 American Council on Education (ACE): Carnegie Report and, 86–87; Hanford report, 58, 235, 249; reform committee, 128–129; Sanity Code and, 102 American Football Coaches Association, 101, 104 Ames, Knowlton “Snake,” 19, 20, 24 Amherst College: academic standards, 138; accused of recruiting blacksmith, 242; football against Harvard, 111; Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; summer baseball and, 62, 63, 68–69 Andover School, 33–34 Angell, James R., 80, 84 antitrust and monopoly: AIAW v. NCAA, 249; Alston v. NCAA, 209–212, 215–217; Byers on, 236, 250; Jenkins v. NCAA, 208, 211–215; NCAA v. University of Oklahoma, 179–180, 190–192, 213–214, 217; Northern Securities Case, 237; O’Bannon v. NCAA, 157, 187–188, 192–195, 198–202, 213–214, 251, 252; Sherman Antitrust Act, 179, 191, 198, 200, 213–214, 217, 318

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Index

233–234, 236–237, 243, 244, 250; trustbusting, 237 Army Specialized Training Program, 96 Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), 142, 167–172, 175–178, 248, 249 Association of American Colleges (AAC), 55–56, 81–82 athletes’ rights. See rights of athletes athletic dorms. See training tables and athletic dorms athletic scholarships. See National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletics Fair Pay Act (2019), 224, 252 athletic training, 45–52, 60 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC): CFA and, 179, 190; desegregation in, 136; SAT-score requirement, 136, 138–139, 247 Auburn University, 57, 60, 91

Badger, Philip, 97 Baker, Newton D., 73 Bancroft, William A., 28 Barnard College, 167 Barnett, Ross, 101 baseball: early payments to players, 32; early rules, 33; first Amherst– Williams game (1859), 242; Harvard, 26–27, 28, 250; William and Mary, 31. See also coaches, professional; summer baseball; specific institutions basketball: athletic dorms and, 57–58, 60; Final Four boycott discussion (Duke, 1986), 185–186, 250; Hutcherson Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist, 163–165, 246; iHoops, 194; March Madness, 99, 140, 192, 197, 207, 233, 250; Michigan’s Fab Five, 199–200; NAIA women’s championship, 168; NCAA Academic Enhancement Fund and, 207, 252; NCAA Independent Commission

on College Basketball, 252; NCAA tourney, funds from, 99; pointshaving scandal, 58; USA Basketball, 194; women’s athletics and six-player vs. five-player, 166; women’s National Invitational College Tournament, 248 Bates College, 40, 138 Behrman, Robert, 142 Beloit College, 64 Bennett, James Gordon, 242 Berenson, Senda, 161, 167, 243 Berg, Patty, 162 Berman, Steve, 229 Bertelli, Angelo, 96 Betz, Edward, 168 Big 8 Conference, 179, 190 Big Ten Conference: academic standards, 136–137; advertising name ban, 245; average attendance, 131; CFA and, 179; Chicago wins, 85; corruption among institutions of, 132–133; formation of, 35–37, 243; faculty control and, 75; freshmen participation ban, 244; full athletic scholarships and, 124, 126–133, 247; O’Bannon case and, 199; Pitt losses, 83; Rose Bowl contract, 245; scholarships for financial need, 127, 129–132; summer baseball and, 70; training tables and athletic dorms banned by, 54, 244 Big Three: 1889 football conflict, 19–25; eligibility agreement, 43; Ivy League and, 117–118; rugby game, 33; Triple Agreement (1916), 114 Bilas, Jay, 185–186 Bingler v. Johnson, 153–154, 248 Blacks. See African Americans Blaikie, William, 28, 48 Bloom, Jeremy, 210 Boeheim, Jim, 194 Booker, Cory, 225 Boston College, 105 Bowdoin College, 138 319

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Index

Bowen, William, 119–120, 233 bowl games: commercial gifts at, 208; Cotton Bowl, 56; Epson Ivy Bowl (Japan), 120–121; Ivy League and, 120–121; Liberty, 184. See also Rose Bowl Bowman, John, 82–83, 181–182 boycotts: by athletes, 183–186, 250; of institutions, 92, 117, 214 Brand, Myles, 232 Briggs, LeBaron, 29, 57 British Amateur Rowing Association, 11, 242 British model, 11–12, 29–30, 63, 129–130, 231–232. See also Oxbridge model Broer, Marion, 167 Broward Community College, 170 Brown Conference (1898), 63, 113–114, 243 Brown University: Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; Ivy League and, 114, 119; players coming for athletics, 32; Protestant origins of, 109; reform conference proposed by, 42–43; summer baseball and Richmond case, 62–63, 242; training tables and athletic dorms, 47 Brown v. Board of Education, 139, 163, 176, 246 Brumbach, Dick, 150 Brundage, Avery, 163 Bush, George H. W., 237 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 35 Butler, Pierce, 149 Byers, Walter: on amateurism, 236, 250; on athletic dorms, 57–58; four-year grants and, 247; on NCAA 1.600 rule, 137, 142–143; on Sanity Code, 106; “student-athlete” euphemism and, 148; Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 199; on women’s athletics, 174–175; workers’ compensation and, 156–159 Byrd, Harry C. “Curly,” 106

Cady, Edwin, 141 Cahn, Susan, 176 California legislation, 219–220, 252, 253 California State Polytechnic, 157 Calipari, John, 60 Calvinism, 78, 109 Cambridge University, 15–16, 68, 76. See also Oxbridge model Cameron, Edmund, 137–138 Camp, Walter: Big Ten and, 36; Cutts case and, 41–43; Glass case and, 38–39; Harvard-Princeton crisis and, 23–24; Hogan and, 113; professional coaches and, 28; on student-built structure, 180; training table and, 53; transition from rugby to American football, 33, 52; warning about scholarships, 89 Canada, 49 Cape Cod League, 71–72 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 73, 75–77, 83, 93, 96, 182, 244 Carnegie Report: about, 73; accusations and responses, 78–79; Carnegie Foundation and, 75–77; college presidents and, 79–87; later reform efforts and, 86–87; on money, 204; origins of, 74–75; predestined conclusions of, 77–78; training tables and, 55 Carpenter, Scott, 96 Carroll College, 86 Center for Athletes Rights and Education (CARE), 184–185, 249 Central State College. See Wilberforce College Chandler, Joan, 175, 177 Chandler, Zachariah, 49 Chicago Bears, 76, 82 Chicago Westside Preparatory School, 144 Chicago White Stockings, 62, 180 Chickerno, John, 182 320

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Index

Cincinnati Red Stockings, 180 Citadel (Military College of South Carolina), 105 City College of New York, 142 Civil Rights Act (1964), 140, 172, 247 Civil Rights Restoration Act, 250 Civil War, 4, 47, 49, 89–90 Clarkson, John G., 28 Clarkson, Walter, 26 Clemson University: academic standards, 136, 138, 141; Graham Plan and, 84; Jenkins case, 212, 221; South Carolina state bill and, 221–222 Cleveland, Grover, 35 coaches, professional: early history of, 13, 28–29, 242; graduates hired as, 27–28, 48; Harvard, 27–29, 243; limits number and salary, 190–191; as paradox, 10; Sanford at Columbia, 34–35; women’s athletics and, 171, 172; Yale, 47. See also specific coaches by name Coastal Plain League, 72 Code Bowman, 83, 182 Cohane, Tim, 106–107 Colby College, 138 Cold War, 8, 49, 135, 172–174, 239 Coleman, Willie, 249 Colgate University, 197 “College Athlete Model,” 228, 236–237 College Athletes Coalition (CAC), 195 College Athletes Players Association, 245 College Baseball Association, 62 College Football Association (CFA), 58, 179, 190, 249 College of William and Mary, 31–32, 88, 117 College Regatta Association, 50 Collegiate Athletes Coalition (CAC), 187, 195–198, 208, 233, 251 Collegiate Licensing, 192, 251 Colombo, John, 154 Colter, Kain, 188, 251

Columbia University: first hiring of coach and players, 34–35; football losses in 1980s, 121; Ivy League and, 114; Protestant origins of, 109; training tables and athletic dorms, 47; women’s athletics, 165; Yale vs., 34–35 Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW), 166–168, 170, 175, 248 Conant, James, 114, 152 Conference of Deans of Women in the Midwest, 243 Conference on Conferences, 99–100, 246 Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 224–225, 253 Connecticut River, 50 Constitution, US: education left out of, 223; Fourteenth Amendment, 141, 170, 172, 176, 250; interstate commerce clause, 222 Coolidge, Archibald, 27 Coombs, Jack, 70 Cornell University, 17, 32, 114, 115, 180 court cases: Agnew v. NCAA, 251; AIAW v. NCAA, 249; Alston v. NCAA, 209–212, 215–217, 229, 236, 245, 252, 253; Bingler v. Johnson, 153–154, 248; Brown v. Board of Education, 139, 163, 176, 246; Dawson v. NCAA, 252; Grove City v. Bell, 250; Hennessee case, 190–191; Jenkins v. NCAA, 208, 211–215, 229–230, 245, 251, 252; Law v. NCAA, 191; NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 179–180, 190–192, 207, 213–214, 217, 234; NCAA v. Miller, 222; O’Bannon v. NCAA, 157, 187–188, 192–195, 198–202, 204, 211, 213–214, 251, 252; Northern Securities Case, 237, 244; per se rulings vs. rule of reason, 191, 212, 214; stare decisis principle, 189, 321

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Index

222, 229; Van Horn v. Industrial Accident Commission, 247; White v. NCAA, 188, 251 Creighton University, 144 crew. See rowing Crisler, Fritz, 100, 127 Curtiss, Julian, 41 Cutts, Oliver, 38, 40–44

Daley, Arthur, 107–108 Darden, Colgate, Jr., 104 Dartmouth College: Carnegie Report and, 79; football against Harvard, 111; Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; Ivy League and, 114; Protestant origins of, 109; summer baseball and, 62, 63, 71; training tables and athletic dorms, 47; Yukica, firing of, 122 Davis, Andrew M. F., 32 Davis, Ernie, 184 Dawson v. NCAA, 252 death benefits, 157, 196 death penalty: basketball, Kentucky, 58, 246; football, Southern Methodist, 3, 250; threat of (Penn State), 220 Declaration of Independence, 15–16 deferred compensation, 200–201, 252 Delany, Jim, 199 Dempsey, Cedric, 196 Dennison, Ray, 156–157 Denny, George, 90 desegregation: Brown v. Board of Education, 139, 163, 176, 246; University of Maryland, 136; Wayland Baptist College, 163. See also race DeVenzio, Dick, 185–186, 250 Dickens, Charles, 50 Dickens, Phil, 132 Didrikson, Mildred “Babe,” 163, 204–205, 245 Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports (DGWS), 165–167, 170–171

Dobie, Gilmour, 183 Dodds, Harold, 152 Dole, Bob, 96 Donovan, Herman, 101 dorms. See training tables and athletic dorms Drake, Michael, 226–227 Drake Group, 250 Drake University, 135 Drexel University, 188 Duderstadt, James, 199–200 Dudley, William L., 68 Duke University, 84, 137–138, 185–186

Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC), 140, 240 Eckersall, Walter, 64 Ederle, Gertrude, 165 Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), 140. See also Pell Grants Edwards, Donnie, 187 egalitarianism, American, 15–18, 22 Ehler, George W., 69 Eisenhower, Dwight, 150, 246 Elder, Samuel, 39 Electronic Arts, 192–193, 249, 250, 251 eligibility rules: completing eligibility with no degree, 143–144; Glass and Cutts cases (Yale and Harvard), 38–44; Harvard-Yale and Big Three agreements, 23, 42–43; Ivy League and, 114, 118; NILs and, 219; race, standardized scores, and, 138–140; Richmond case (Harvard), 62; three-year limit, 74; Title IX and, 175; transfer student eligibility, 38–40, 124, 171, 187. See also academic standards; freshman eligibility/ ineligibility Eliot, Charles W.: on college presidents and reform, 79–80, 87; first interinstitutional proposal, 243;

322

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Index

inaugural address (1869), 13, 20, 242; prep-school recruitment and, 33–34; professional coaches and, 27–30; rowing for Harvard, 12, 46; salary of, 111; stadium construction, opposition to, 25; winning and, 22 Ellington, Bill, 183 Emmert, Mark, 201, 219–220, 223, 225–227, 230, 252 English amateurism. See British model equality of opportunity, 14–17, 235 Estes, Linda, 170 Even Playing Field Act, 224 Exeter School, 33–34

Fair Pay to Play Act (CA, 2019), 219–220, 252, 253 Farmer, Malcolm, 114 Fauver, Edgar, 75–76 federal pay-for-play legislation. See pay-for-play legislative action, state and federal Feinstein, Dianne, 224, 252 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 161–162 fig-leafing, 4, 8; 1.600 rule and, 133; college presidents and, 87; defined, 4; Ivy League and, 113, 120; NCAA and, 85, 189, 202, 228–230; Purity Code and, 97; “student-athlete” language and, 158; summer baseball and, 61; women’s athletics and, 143, 160–161, 164 Final Four. See basketball Fisher, Irving R., 41 501(c)(3) status, 152, 154–155 fixed compensation, 250 Fleming, Philip, 148–149 Flexner, Abraham, 77, 83–84 food, controlled. See training tables and athletic dorms football, American: Big Ten, commencement of, 35–37; Big Three 1889 conflict, 19–25; flying wedge

and mass momentum plays, 35; Glass (Yale) and Cutts (Harvard) cases and eastern agreements, 38–44; growth of, 52; history of professional coaches, 13; payments beginning to dominate, 33–35; the South, manliness, and, 89–91; spring practice, restrictions on, 121, 122; Thanksgiving Day football game, New York, 52; training tables and athletic dorms, 52–54, 56–60; transition from rugby to, 33, 52. See also coaches, professional; recruiting; rugby football; scholarships; workers’ compensation and injury; specific colleges, conferences, and leagues Ford, Gerald, 237 Ford, Jerimiah, 119 Fork Union Military Academy, 145 Fort Lewis A&M College, 156 Fourteenth Amendment, 141, 170, 172, 176 Frantz, Orville “Home Run,” 26–27 freedom-of-opportunity ideology, 14–17, 235 free market approach, 187–188, 202, 209–212, 223, 229–230 freshman eligibility/ineligibility: Baker on, 73; Big Ten ban, 244; Graham plan, 84; Harvard-Yale rule, 43; Ivy League and, 120; NCAA rule, 74–75, 248; residence freshman rule, 126; World War II and, 96 Friedan, Betty, 161–162 Frierson, Jason, 221 Fulbright, William, 18

gambling-bribery scandal, 89 Gardener, Frank, 135 gate receipts: Harvard ban on, 25; in summer baseball, 70; taxation of, 148–150, 245, 246 Gates, Thomas, 55, 80–82

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Gates Plan, 55–56, 81–82, 244 General Education Board, 75 Georgetown University, 64 Georgia Tech University, 91, 93, 136, 149, 197 Gerard, Leo, 196 Gerberding, William, 206, 230 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 120 GI Bill of Rights, 205, 224, 246 Gibson, Bob, 71 Gladstone, William, 50 Glass, Edgar “Ned,” 38–40 Goheen, Robert, 138 Golden State League, 72 Golenbock, Pete, 145 golf, women’s, 162, 165, 166, 175, 246 Gonzalez, Anthony, 226–227 Gorman, Albert, 94 Gould, Charles, 39 grade point average (GPA). See academic standards graduate students: Harvard vs. Yale and, 19, 20, 24, 43, 242; NCAA ban on, 74–75 Graham, Frank, 83–85, 93 Graham Plan, 84–85, 92, 104, 245 Grange, Harold “Red,” 76, 126 Grant, Ulysses S., 13 grants-in-aid, 154, 158, 208, 247. See also scholarships Gray, Gordon, 107 Great Depression, 55, 56, 78, 82, 85, 93, 94, 115, 148, 151, 181–182, 204, 223 Greece, ancient, 11, 249 Green, Mack, 139 Green Bay Packers, 82, 132 Griffith, John L., 70, 77, 92 Grossman, Charles, 41 Groton School, 21, 33–34, 204 group of five, 190. See also specific conferences Grove City v. Bell, 250 Gulick, Luther Halsey, 67

Hadley, Arthur T., 38–39, 63 Hamilton, Thomas, 173–174 Hancher, Virgil, 127, 129–131, 133 Hanford, George, 58, 235 Hanford report, 58, 235, 249 Hannah, John, 127–131 Harman, Harvey, 104 Harper, William Rainey, 54, 244 Harvard Law Review, 207, 211–212, 250 Harvard University: 1875 Harvard-Tufts rugby game, 26; 1889 Big Three football conflict, 19–25; 1903 football season losses, 111; abandonment of amateur model, 26–28; achieved vs. ascribed status predicament, 22–23; Chicago loss to, 86; coaches, 27–29, 243; crew, 38, 51–52, 242; Eliot and amateurism, 13; Faculty Athletic Committee, 19, 22, 23, 26–29, 39, 41, 42, 43, 52, 60; first Harvard–Yale crew meet (1852), 4, 12, 46, 180, 235; football reform and, 79–80; freedom-of-opportunity ideology and, 17; free tickets given to football players, 244; Glass and Cutts cases, 38–44; Harvard Overseers, 23; Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; Ivy League and, 114; Joint Committee on the Regulations of Athletic Sports, 28; LeMoyne case, 110–112, 244; Lowell scholarship, 26, 243; as national leader, 20; Osborne, soccer, and English model, 231–232; Princeton, break in relations with (1920s to 1930s), 114; Protestant origins of, 109; radio revenue, 152; recruitment pressure, 118; reform agreements with Yale, 42–44; rugby football, 33; stadium construction (1903), 25–26, 243; summer baseball and, 62–63, 70; Thorpe and, 69; training tables and athletic dorms, 47, 52–53. See also Big Three

324

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Index

Haughton, Percy, 29 Hausfeld, Michael, 194–195 Haverford College, 138, 231 Haverford Preparatory School, 40–41 Hawkins, William “Trip,” 192, 249 Hayes, Woody, 132 Heisman, John, 13 Heisman Trophy, 96, 184, 198 Hemphill, Robert, 141 Henley Regatta, 13, 242 Hennessey case, 190–191 Hetherington, Clark H., 67 Higher Education Act (1965), 224 Hill, Darryl, 136 Hobart College, 32–33 Hobbs, Allen W., 115 Hogan, James, 111, 112–113, 220–221, 244 Holland, Judy, 169 Hollis, Ira, 26, 41–43 home rule, 64–65, 92, 94–95, 102, 124, 135, 139, 147, 163; in 1906 NCAA constitution, 244; academic standards argument, 137–138; NCAA’s decision to uphold, 74; Sanity Code and elimination of, 98, 233; summer baseball and, 65, 68 Hoover, Herbert, 148, 245 Houston, Clarence, 99 Howard, Frank, 71 Hughes, Thomas, 50 Huma, Ramogi, 187–188, 195–198, 208, 232–233, 251 Humphreys, Lloyd, 139 Hutcherson, Claude, 163–164, 246 Hutcherson, Wilda, 163–164 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 83, 85–86

Iden, Brandt, 221 iHoops, 194 Illinois State University, 165, 169 Illinois Wesleyan University, 86 image. See names, images, and likenesses

Indiana State University, 158–159 Indiana University, 42, 141 injury. See workers’ compensation and injury Intercollegiate Baseball Association, 33 Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives. See Big Ten Conference Intercollegiate Football Association, 20, 24 Internal Revenue Service (IRS). See taxation International Olympic Committee, 70, 206–207 Iowa Wesleyan University, 164 Ivy League: 1945 Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement, 114–117, 246; 1952 Ivy Group Agreement, 117–119; academic index (AI), 121; academic standards, 138, 140; amateur sins of future Ivies, 110–113; Brown Conference (1898), 63, 113–114, 243; deterioration of amateurism 1960s to 1990s, 119–122; elite sports, 122; full athletic scholarships and, 124; newspaper editorials proposing, 114; religious roots of schools in, 109

Jackson, Phil, 71 James, LeBron, 219 James, William, 40 Jayhawk League, 72 Jefferson, Thomas, 15 Jenkins, Martin, 203, 209, 212–215, 221, 229 Jenkins, Sally, 220–221 Jenkins v. NCAA, 208, 211–215, 229–230, 245, 251, 252 Jessup, Walter A., 83 “jock house,” 57. See also training tables and athletic dorms Johnson, Trey, 253

325

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Index

Kagan, Elena, 253 Keefe, Timothy J., 28 Keeney, Barnaby C., 119 Kellmeyer, Fern Lee “Peachy,” 170–171 Kemper, Kathy, 170, 248 Kennedy, Charles, 70–71, 163 Kennedy, Robert, 96 Kessler, Jeffrey, 192, 212–213, 215, 229–230 Kissinger, Henry, 96 Knauer, Erin, 197 Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 86–87, 159, 224, 250, 252 Koller, Dionne, 234 Kramer, Ron, 132 Krzyzewski, Mike, 185 Ku Klux Klan, 90

Lafount, Harold, 151 Lake Quinsigamond, 46–47 Lake Winnipesaukee, 4, 12, 46, 50 Larson, John, 141 laundry money, 94, 100, 123, 178, 208, 232, 245, 249 Laurinburg Institute, 145 Lawrenceville School, 33–34 lawsuits. See court cases Law v. NCAA, 191 Leadership and Merit Awards (Division III), 250 League, Basin, 71 Ledecky, Katie, 206–207 legislative action for pay-for-play. See pay-for-play legislative action, state and federal Leib, Karl, 99–106 LeMoyne, Harry, 110–112, 114, 244 letter-of-intent contracts, 135, 153, 158, 185, 247 level playing field, 44, 91–94, 107, 123–125, 133, 134

Levin, Sarah, 120, 233 likenesses. See names, images, and likenesses Lind, Jenny, 50 Louisiana State University, 91, 101, 105, 140

Mabry, Laurie, 169 MacCracken, Henry M., 80 Madden, John, 192 Major League Baseball, 26, 27, 62, 70, 71, 82, 130 Majors, Johnny, 59 Manley, Dexter, 143–144 manliness, 89–91 March Madness, 99, 140, 143, 178, 192, 197, 202, 207, 212, 233, 250 Marshall, James W. “Bill,” 163 Marymount College, 170, 248 Massachusetts Agricultural College, 17 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 76–77, 138 Massengale, Martin, 185 McCarter, Bill, 71 McCosh, James, 32 McCoy, Ernie, 3 McKenna, John, 197 Meggyesy, Dave, 184 Mercersburg Academy, 38–39 Meredith, James, 101 meritocracy, 17 Metzenthin, W. E., 93–94 Michigan State University, 127–128, 132, 212, 223 Middle States Association, 83, 182 military training programs, 96–97 Mill, John Stuart, 50 Miller, Ogdon, 99 minimum wage, 252 Mississippi State University, 91 Missouri Valley Conference, 67, 100–101, 105 Mitchell, William, 34 326

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Index

Monmouth College, 86 monopoly. See antitrust and monopoly Monro, Wilfred, 113 Moore, Bernie, 101, 125 Morrill Land Grant Act, 223, 242 Muirhead, John, 20 Munn, Clarence “Biggie,” 128 Munro, Wilfred, 63 Murphy, Chris, 225–226 muscular morality, 65–69

names, images, and likenesses (NILs), 221; Big Ten ban on advertising with, 245; Fair Pay to Play Act (CA), 219–220, 252, 253; federal bills on, 223–226; Jenkins v. NCAA free market case, 229–230; NCAA Form 88–3a (Student Athlete Statement), 193; NCAA policy change, 252; O’Bannon v. NCAA, 157, 187–188, 192–195, 198–202, 251, 252 National Amateur Athletic Federation, 244 National Association of Directors of Physical Education for College Women (NADPECW), 162 National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), 168–169, 249 National Association of State Universities (NASU), 83, 92 National Basketball Association, 145, 194 National College Players Association, 188 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA): $50-per-month proposals, 249; 1906 constitution, 244; 1958 constitution changes, 247; Academic Enhancement Fund (AEF), 207, 215–216, 252; amateurism, truth told about, 9; athletic dorms opposition and ban, 57–60, 250; CARE and, 185; College Athlete Model, 228, 236–237; Conference on Conferences, 99–100,

246; definition of amateur, 75, 187, 204–209, 215–216, 244; Division I-II-III, 248, 250; first basketball tourney, 245; first national championship (track and field, 1921), 244; formation of, 244; Former StudentAthlete Fund, 198; on freshman eligibility, 74–75, 248; full athletic scholarships and, 123, 127, 128, 247; funds from basketball tourney, 99; as governing body, move towards, 95–96, 97, 99, 101–102, 245; GPA rule (1.600), 135–142, 247, 248, 249; home rule and, 74, 94–95, 98, 233, 244; Independent Commission on College Basketball, 252; Indianapolis headquarters, 220, 232; investigative arm, financing for, 246; Ivy League and, 119; letter-of-intent contracts and, 135, 247; March Madness, 99, 140, 192, 197, 207, 233, 250; nine principles, 74–75; no “core principles” (n v. NCAA), 200, 251; Proposition 48, 249, 250; on recruiting, 125; on red-shirting, 247; restricted-earnings coaches legislation, 191; SEC scholarships, response to, 92–96; southern secession, discussion of, 100–101, 104–105, 246; stare decisis and, 189; Student Assistance Fund (SAF), 207, 215–216, 230; “student-athlete” euphemism, 147–148, 153, 156–158, 236–238, 247; summer baseball and, 64–69, 71–72; tax-exempt status of, 223, 251; TV revenue, 178–179; war resolution, 73; women’s athletics and, 168–169, 174–175, 248, 249; Working Group on NILs, 226–228. See also court cases; Sanity Code; scholarships —committees: Academic Testing Committee, 137; amateurism committee, 248; Committee on Infractions, 132; Committee on Women’s 327

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Index

Intercollegiate Athletics, 168; Compliance Committee, 104, 105, 246; Long-Range Planning Committee, 186, 247; Special Committee on Recruiting, 125; Special Committee on Recruiting and Financial Aid, 135; Special Committee on Women’s Competition, 174–175, 247; Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, 196 National Collegiate Athletic Association Athletic Grant-In-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation, 215–217. See also Alston v. NCAA National Education Association (NEA), 170–171 National Football League (NFL), 76, 82, 185, 212, 226 National Invitational College Tournament, 248 National Symposium on Athletics Reform, 232 Navy V-5 and V-12 programs, 96–97 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 179–180, 190–192, 207, 213–214, 217, 238 NCAA v. Miller, 222 Neal, Patsy, 247 Nemeth, Ernest, 155–156, 157 New Deal. See Roosevelt, Franklin D. Newsom, Gavin, 219–220, 252 New York Giants, 28, 180 New York University, 80, 97 New York University Law School, 153 Neyland, Robert, 57, 105–106 Nicolson, Frank, 69, 76 Nike Corporation, 192–193 NILs. See names, images, and likenesses normal schools, 2–3 North Carolina State University, 84; Washburn case, 144–146 Northern Securities Case, 237, 244 Northwestern University: Big Ten, 36–37, 126; Colter case, 251; first

NCAA basketball tourney, 245; summer baseball and, 64; taxation and, 152; training tables and athletic dorms, 54; union of football players, 188, 251, 252 Northwoods League, 72 Norton, Charles, 22 Notre Dame University, 79, 172, 184; ACE reform committee and, 128; Carnegie Report and, 79; CFA and, 179, 190; military training programs and, 96; Penn and, 116–117

Oakes, B. F., 92 O’Bannon, Ed, 192–195, 198–202, 219–220 O’Bannon v. NCAA, 157, 187–188, 192–195, 198–202, 204, 206, 208–212, 213–214, 216, 217, 219, 227–229, 234, 251, 252 Oberlin College, 118 Ohashi, Katelyn, 219–220 Ohio State University: athletic dorms, 60; censure of, 132; Chicago loss to, 86; first college national championship (golf), 162, 165, 246; NCAA Working Group and, 226–227; payments compared, 116; SEC scholarships and, 94–95, 245; women’s athletics, 162, 246 Ohio University, 196–197 Oklahoma A&M University, 117 Oklahoma State University, 143–144, 210–211 Oliver, Andrew, 210–211, 251 Olympics, 4, 110, 129; paying players, 186–187; professionalization of, 206– 207, 238; Soviet Union and, 173–174; Thorpe case, 69–70; women in, 163, 165, 173–174 1.600 rule. See academic standards O’Neal, Lacey, 247

328

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Index

Oregon State University, 79 Osborne, Charles G., 231 Osborne, Tom, 185, 250 Ostrom, John, 51 Owens, Jesse, 237 Oxbridge model, 15–16, 76, 77, 113–114, 129–130. See also British model Oxford University: Hancher at, 129; muscular morality and, 68; Osborne at, 231; Oxbridge model and, 15–16; Savage studying, 76; Thames River regatta, 47–50, 242; Tigert at, 91; training tables and athletic dorms, 47–50 Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC), 48

Pac-10 Conference (Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic conference), 124, 179, 195 Pacific Coast Conference, 131, 245 Palmer, Gladys, 162, 246 Palmer, Jim, 71 Parseghian, Ara, 184 Paterno, Joe, 3, 122 pay-for-play legislative action, state and federal: California Fair Pay to Play Act, 219–220, 252, 253; federal actions, 222–226; Jenkins v. NCAA appeal ruling and, 229–230; NCAA Working Group on NILs and, 226–228; states following California, 220–222; Stokesbary bill (WA), 219 Peabody, Endicott, 20–21, 204 Pell Grants (Basic Economic Opportunity Grants), 205–206, 224, 248, 249, 250 Pennsylvania State University, 3, 184; Carnegie Report and, 79; CFA and, 179, 190; first athletic scholarships, 243; Gray Stone Manor, 56; Ivy League and, 115–117; Morrill Act

and, 223; Sandusky sex abuse scandal and Consent Decree, 219–220; summer baseball and, 68 per diem payments, 208 Perdue, David, 225 per se rulings vs. rule of reason, 191, 212, 214, 217 Phelps, Michael, 206–207 Piedmont Baptist College, 223 Pierce, Franklin, 46, 50 Pierce, Palmer, 68, 73, 237 Pilson, Neal, 200 Playground Association of America, 67 Polivy, Margot, 169 Pollard, J. W. H., 90 Poole, Barney, 96–97 Poulton, Bruce, 145 prep-school recruitment, 33–34, 110, 115 presidents, college: 1945 Ivy Group Presidents’ Agreement and 1952 Ivy Group agreement, 114–117, 246; 1952 Ivy Group Agreement, 117–119; ACE and, 58, 128; Big Ten, formation of, 36–37, 126; Carnegie Report and, 79–87; as cheerleaders for athletics, not athletes, 79, 87, 95, 128, 186; Eliot on reform and, 79–80, 87; fig-leafing and, 87; home rule and, 95; Indiana conference of (1894), 36; manliness and, 89; NCAA and, 129, 196, 203, 223, 225; surveys of, 92–93, 97. See also specific institutions and conferences Princeton University: 1869 Rutgers football game, 242; 1889 Big Three football conflict, 19–25; Harvard, break in relations with, 114; Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; Ivy League and, 114, 115; NCAA 1.600 rule and, 138; payments compared, 116; players coming for athletics, 32, 243; Protestant origins of, 109; radio revenue, 152; scholarships, 88; sports as “side shows,” 74, 244;

329

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Index

summer baseball and, 62, 70–71, 243; Thanksgiving Day football game, 52; training tables and athletic dorms, 53, 243; Wilson at, 74; women’s athletics and, 163. See also Big Three Pritchett, Henry, 76–78, 81, 83 Pritchett, Norton, 105, 106 professional-commercial model, 232 Progressive Era, 65–69 Purdue University, 36–37, 126 Purity Code. See Sanity Code

Queens College, 140–141

race, 138–142, 225. See also African American athletes radio broadcasts, 150–152 Reagan, Ronald, 152, 237 recruiting, 3, 26, 68, 81, 197, 227; academically unqualified players, 119–120, 121; by alumni, 125–126, 244; Big Ten and, 127, 130–133; Big Three ban on expense payments, 115; Carnegie Report and, 55, 78–79; college presidents and, 87; earliest forms of, 32–33; freshman eligibility and, 120; Graham Plan and, 84, 92; Ivy League and, 110, 115, 118–121; meritocracy and, 17; NCAA and, 135; NCAA debate over, 124–125; NCAA vs. SEC and, 92–94; from other institutions, 23–24, 38, 39–40; from prep schools, 33–34, 110, 115; recruiting of Blacks, 138; Sanity Code and, 57, 85, 100–102; Title IX and recruiting of women, 120; training tables, athletic dorms, and, 52–53, 56, 58, 60; women’s athletics and, 160, 162, 168, 171, 172, 185 Redin, Harley, 164 red-shirting, 247

Reid, Bill, 27, 28, 41, 111–112, 231–232 Remy, Donald, 201 Rensing, Fred, 158–159, 248 restricted-earnings coaches legislation, 191 Revenue Act (1932), 245 Revenue Act (1950), 153, 246 Revenue Act (1951), 150 revenue sharing, 184–185, 249 Rhodes Scholar, 91, 129, 235 Richards, Eugene, 53 Richmond, Lee, 62, 242 rights of athletes: Alston v. NCAA and, 209–212, 215–217; Booker and, 225; College Football Association (CFA), 58, 179, 190, 249; Humi and, 195–198. See also pay-for-play legislative action, state and federal; workers’ compensation and injury Ripley, Alfred, 39 Rochester College, 32–33 Romney, Mitt, 225–226 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 92, 149, 182 Roosevelt, Theodore, 89, 237 Rose, Kevin, 144 Rose, Ralph, 110 Rose Bowl: Alabama upset over Washington, 90, 244; Michigan demand on expenses, 182–183, 243; Ohio State barred from, 132; Pitt football players union and, 181, 245 rowing (crew): Boston regatta, 12; British Amateur Rowing Association, 11; coaches, Harvard, 29; first intercollegiate contest, Lake Winnipesaukee (1852), 4, 12, 46, 50, 180, 235, 242; first professional coach (Yale), 13; Harvard-Yale meets, 38, 51–52; Henley Regatta, England, 13, 242; Ivy League, 121–122; Lake Quinsigamond meets, 46–47; payments at early regattas, 12; Saratoga Lake regatta, 50–51; Syracuse, 32; Thames River regatta, 47–50, 242; 330

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Index

training methods, 51; training tables and athletic dorms, 46–52 Rubio, Marco, 225 Rudolph, Wilma, 162, 173 rugby football, 20, 26, 33, 52, 54 Rupp, Adolph, 57–58, 117, 140 Rutgers University, 242

Sack, Allen, 184–185, 249 Sage Foundation, 75 Sandusky, Jerry, 220 Sanford, George Foster, 34–35 Sanity Code: about, 234, 246; athletic dorms and, 57; Carnegie Report and, 85; death of, 106–108; hypocrisy of, 102–103; Ivy League and, 116; “Principles for the Conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics,” 100; the seven sinners, 105–106, 246; southern secession, discussion of, 100–101, 104–105; starting as “Purity Code,” 98–101; voted into constitution (1948), 101–102; vote on banning violators, 103–106 Santa Clara University, 220 Saratoga Lake, 50–51 Sarratt, Charles, 101 Savage, Howard, 76, 78–79, 87 scholarships: academic, given to athlete at Harvard, 26, 243; Alston v. NCAA, 209–212, 215–217; caps on, 198, 202, 207–209, 213, 216–217, 237, 250, 251; competitive imbalance and level playing field, 123–125; cost of attendance, 201, 250, 251, 252; expenses falling short of, 188, 197–198, 209–210; for financial need only, 123, 124, 127, 131–133, 245; fixed compensation, 250; four-year grants, 93, 141, 197, 247; free-market issues, 187–188; full athletic, 53, 124–131, 133, 188, 205, 247, 249, 250; as “grantsin-aid,” 154, 158, 208, 247; Jenkins v.

NCAA, 208, 211–215, 251; laundry money, 105, 208, 232, 249; Leadership and Merit Awards (Division III), 250; NCAA Division I-II-III and, 248; O’Bannon v. NCAA, 157, 187–188, 192–195, 198–202, 204, 206, 251; Ohio senatorial, 116; one-year renewable awards, 197, 233, 248, 250, 251; open, as level playing field, 91–94; Pell grants, 205–206, 224, 248, 249, 250; Southeastern Conference vote to allow, 84, 87, 92, 93, 245; tax exemption, 247; White v. NCAA, 251; women’s, 163, 167–168, 170–171, 172, 245, 248. See also training tables and athletic dorms; specific teams and leagues Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, 120, 135–139, 141, 247, 249 Schooling, Joseph, 206–207 Schultz, Dick, 250 Schwartzwalder, Ben, 184 Scott, Phoebe, 165–166 Sewanee (University of the South), 91, 93, 94 Shalala, Donna, 80, 224–225, 253 Sherman Antitrust Act, 7, 179, 191, 198, 200, 213–214, 217, 229, 233–234, 236–237, 243, 244, 250 Skinner, Nancy, 219, 252 Slive, Mike, 216 Slosson, Edwin E., 80 Smart, James, 36 Smith, Gene, 226–227 Smith, Milan, 217 Smith College, 161, 167, 243 Snyder, Rixford, 57, 135–136 Southeastern Conference (SEC): athletic dorms and, 56–57; birth of, 91; CFA and, 179, 190; Graham Plan rejected by, 84, 92; home rule and NCAA response to SEC scholarships, 94–96; manliness of football and, 89–91; open scholarships as 331

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Index

level playing field, 91–94; Sanity Code and, 100–101, 105, 246; scholarships, vote to allow, 84, 87, 92, 93, 245; taxation and, 154–155 Southern Conference, 84, 104, 245, 246 Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, 64, 90, 91, 243 Southern Methodist University (SMU), 3, 79, 250 Southwest Conference: CFA and, 179, 190; Sanity Code and, 100–101, 105, 246; scholarships, 245 Soviet Union, 49, 135, 172–174 Spano, Ross, 224, 253 Spraker, John, 38 stadium construction, 25–26, 45, 54, 57, 75, 110, 114, 131, 179, 181, 213, 231, 243 Stagg, Amos Alonzo, 54, 64–67, 70, 75, 85, 243 Stanford University, 36, 181, 183, 225; athletic dorms controversy and, 57; football, 54–55; special freshman admits, 245; summer baseball and, 70; track team strike threat, 183; training tables and athletic dorms, 54–55; White case, 198; White v. NCAA, 188, 251 stare decisis, 189, 192, 222, 229 Stassen, Harold, 82, 116–117 state legislation. See pay-for-play legislative action, state and federal states’ rights, 59, 68, 92–93, 101, 222 Staurowski, Ellen, 188 Stevens, John Paul, 1, 180, 191, 192, 200, 207, 234, 250 Stevenson, William, 118–119 Stewart, James, 100 Stickney, Highland, 23, 88 St. John, Lynn, 94–95, 245 St. Joseph University, 197–198 Stokesbary, Drew, 219 Stone School, 110–111 strikes. See unions of players

Student Assistance Fund, 207, 215 Student-Athlete Equity Act, 223 “student-athlete” euphemism, 86, 126, 141, 147–148, 150, 153, 156–158, 159, 169, 177, 185, 193, 196, 198, 201, 216, 223, 236–238, 247 subsidization. See scholarships; training tables and athletic dorms Sullivan, James E., 65, 70 summer baseball: about, 61; Brown and beginnings of, 62–63; NCAA accommodation, 71–72; NCAA declaration against, 244; Progressive muscular morality and, 65–69; spread of, 64–65; Thorpe case, AAU, and lack of resolution, 69–71 Sumner, Charles, 49 Supreme Court, US. See court cases; US Supreme Court Sutherland, John Bain “Jock,” 82, 181, 182 Sutton, Don, 71 Swarthmore College, 138 Swinney, Dabo, 221–222 Switzer, Barry, 59 Syracuse University, 32, 38–39, 44, 184, 194

Tarkanian, Jerry, 6, 194, 222 Taurasi, Diana, 220 taxation, 147–169, 226, 235, 238, 243, 250, 251; 501(c)(3) status, 154–155; Federal Admissions Tax bill, 150; of gate receipts, 148–150, 245, 246; Internal Revenue Code, 154; NCAA, taxexempt status of, 223, 251; of radio revenue, 150–152; of scholarships, 247, 248; of telecasting revenue, 152, 249; tickets exempt from excise tax, 84, 103, 246; Unrelated Business Income Tax, 152–154, 246, 249 Teddy Award, 237–238

332

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Index

telecasts, contracts, and revenue: amateurism, impact on, 178–180; College Football Association and, 179, 190, 249; Ivy League, 121; monopoly and, 249; NCAA v. University of Oklahoma and, 179–180, 190–192, 234; Northern Securities case, 244; Oklahoma, 117; Penn, 116–117, 245; players’ rights and, 177–178; taxation and, 152, 249; women’s athletics and, 171 Temple, Ed, 162, 173 tennis: AIAW championship, Kemper excluded from, 248; Bowen and, 119; Kellmeyer case, 170–171; NCAA earnings rule, 187, 207, 236, 251; Nemeth case, 155–156; Wills, 165 Texas A&M University, 57 Texas Christian University, 158 Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. See University of Texas at El Paso Thiel, Nick, 3 Thomas, Bill, 251 Thorpe, Jim, 69–70 tickets, free, for players, 44, 132, 208, 243, 246 Tierney, Robert, 140–141 Tigert, John J., 91–92, 100 Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, 120, 159, 171–172, 175–176, 184, 224, 248–250 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 14, 21, 30 Tone, Tygh, 210 Towns, Forrest “Spec,” 93 track and field, 38, 93, 163, 242, 247 training tables and athletic dorms: crew and beginnings of, 46–47; crew expansion of, 50–52; football, spread to, 52–55; Gates Plan, 55–56, 244; NCAA ban on dorms, 59–60, 250; post-WWII arms race in, 56–59; Regatta on the Thames and, 47–50; sports complexes, 60

“tramp” athletes, 40, 43, 74 transfer student eligibility, 38–40, 124, 171, 187 Trinidad Junior College, 156 Trinity College, 47 trustbusting, 237. See also antitrust and monopoly Tufts College, 26, 99, 138 Tukey, Harold, 127–128 Tulane University, 53–54, 91, 93, 94, 150 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 124 tutoring, free, 10, 14, 34, 60, 112, 143, 205, 208, 213 Tyus, Wyomia, 173

Union College, 32–33 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 49, 135, 172–174 unions of players: Bilas and, 185–187; DeVenzio and, 185; free market and, 187–188; Michigan, 182–183, 243; Northwestern, 188, 251, 252; Pitt, 181–183, 245; Sack’s CARE and, 184–185; union-like efforts before big TV money, 180–184 United Auto Workers, 181 United Steelworkers of America, 195–196, 245, 251 University of Alabama: Abercrombie’s reform efforts and resignation, 90; athletic dorms, 57; Carnegie Report and, 79, 93; Rose Bowl against Washington, 90, 244; Sanity Code and, 101; Southeastern Conference and, 84; summer baseball and, 64 University of California, Berkeley, 54–55, 116 University of California, Los Angeles, 187, 192 University of Chicago: alumni recruitment, 244; athletic dorm, 243; Big Ten, 36–37, 126; Carnegie Report

333

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Index

and, 85–86; football dropped at, 85–86, 245; Hitchcock Hall, 54; summer baseball and, 64, 65, 70 University of Colorado, 95, 191–192, 210 University of Connecticut, 164, 220 University of Denver, 79, 155–156 University of Florida, 84, 91–92, 100 University of Georgia: athletic dorms, 57; Carnegie Report and, 93; NCAA v. University of Oklahoma and, 179, 190; payments to athletes, 245; race and, 140; SEC and, 91; SEC scholarships and, 93; Southeastern Conference and, 84; summer baseball and, 64; taxation and, 149; women’s athletics and, 161 University of Illinois: Big Ten, 36–37, 126; Carnegie Report and, 79; Chicago loss to, 86; Grange signing, 76, 126; race and, 139; summer baseball and, 64, 70 University of Indiana, 132, 232 University of Iowa: banned from Big Ten in 1929, 126; radio revenue, 152; Sanity Code and, 99; scholarship policy, 127, 129–131; on winner attitude, 132; women’s athletics, 165 University of Kansas, 60, 88–89, 206 University of Kentucky: basketball death penalty, 58, 246; race and, 140; SEC and, 91; sports complex, 60; Wildcat Lodge, 57–58, 60 University of Maine, 101–102 University of Maryland, 84, 105, 136, 155 University of Miami, 224 University of Michigan, 86, 180; attempt to block Michigan State into Big Ten, 132; Big Ten, 36–37, 126; Fab Five, 199–200; radio rights, 152; Rose Bowl expenses “strike,” 182–183, 243; Sanity Code and, 100; unenrolled

football players, 243; women’s athletics, 165 University of Minnesota, 36–37, 54, 126, 162 University of Mississippi, 91, 96–97, 101, 128 University of Missouri, 67 University of Montana, 92 University of Nebraska, 128, 185, 233 University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 194, 222 University of New Mexico, 170 University of North Carolina: academic fraud, 144; athletic dorms, 57; Carnegie Report and, 83–85, 93; Ivy League and, 115; Poole case, 96–97; Sanity Code and, 107; SEC and, 91; SEC scholarships and, 93; sham coursework, 212; University of Oklahoma: athletic dorms and felonies, 59; Headington Hall, 60; NCAA v. University of Oklahoma, 179–180, 190–192, 207, 213–214, 217, 234; payments compared, 116; TV rights, 117 University of Pennsylvania: Carnegie Report and, 79, 80–82; hiring of players, 33–34; Ivy League and, 114, 119; payments compared, 116; Protestant origins of, 109; Stassen’s Victory with Honor approach, 116–117; summer baseball and, 63; telecast football, 183, 190, 245; training tables and athletic dorms, 47, 53, 55 University of Pittsburgh, 82–83, 181–183, 245 University of South Carolina, 84, 138 University of Southern California: Carnegie Report and, 79; Didrikson scholarship, 163, 204–205, 245; NCAA 1.600 rule and, 141; Sanity Code and, 106; summer baseball and, 70 University of Tennessee: athletic dorms, 57, 59; Carnegie Report and, 93; Sanity Code and, 105–106; SEC and, 334

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91; Southeastern Conference and, 84; women’s athletics, 162 University of Texas, 93–94, 207 University of Texas at El Paso, 102–103, 140 University of Virginia, 93, 104–105 University of Washington, 90, 181, 183, 206, 230, 244 University of Wisconsin, 36–37, 69, 126, 127, 224 Unrelated Business Income Tax. See taxation Unsportsmanlike Conduct (Byers), 7, 142, 199, 250 USA Basketball, 194 US Military Academy, West Point, 68, 96–97, 117, 149, 237 US Soccer Federation, 224 US Supreme Court: on due process, 250; on gate receipts taxation, 149, 245; on monopoly, 179, 249; NCAA v. University of Oklahoma, 179–180, 190–192, 207, 213–214, 217, 234; stay denied in Alston case, 253. See also court cases

Vaccaro, Sonny, 192–195, 198–199 Valvano, Jimmy, 144–145 Vanderbilt University, 64, 68, 91, 93, 94, 101 Van Horn, Edward, 157 Van Horn v. Industrial Accident Commission, 157, 247 Vassar College, 175 Vickery, K. N., 136 Vietnam War, 134, 139 Villanova University, 105 Virginia Military Institute, 84, 105 Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 84, 105

Wagenhurst, E. O. Elwood “Woody,” 24 Walden, Jim, 59

Waldrep, Alvis, Jr., 158, 249 Walker, Mark, 222–223, 225–226 Ward, John Montgomery, 180 Warner, Glenn “Pop,” 69, 82, 181 Washburn, Chris, 144–146 Washington and Jefferson College, 79 Washington and Lee University, 84 Waxman, Seth, 229 Wayland Baptist College, 163–165, 246, 247 Wayman, Agnes, 167 Welch, Chris, 221 Welsh, Judson “J. P.,” 68 Wesleyan College, 17, 68–69 Wesleyan University, 74, 75–76 Western Athletic Conference, 179, 190 Western Michigan University, 249 West Point Military Academy, 68, 96–97, 117, 149, 237 West Virginia University, 209 White, Andrew D., 51, 180 White, Byron “Whizzer,” 179, 191–192, 238 White, Jason, 188, 198, 210 Whitehead, Jason, 196–197 White v. NCAA, 188, 251 Whitney, Caspar, 25, 63 Wieman, Elton “Tad,” 101–102 Wilberforce College, 139 Wilken, Claudia, 157, 199–201, 204, 209, 211, 213–217, 222, 228–230, 251, 252, 253 Wilkins, Frank, 197–198 Wilkinson, Bud, 59 Willett, Hugh, 106 William and Mary. See College of William and Mary Williams, John D., 101 Williams College, 63, 68–69, 242 Wills, Helen, 165 Wilson, Kenneth “Tug,” 106 Wilson, Woodrow, 74 Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act (1894), 154, 243 335

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winning: achieved vs. ascribed status, 22–23, 234–235; amateur ideal contrasted with desire for, 20–21; coaches fired for not winning, 122; Coolidge on, 27; football and, 33; Hannah and, 128; Haughton and, 29; Turner on, 124 Winslow, Bill, 62 Winstead, Nash, 145 Wolff, Alexander, 59, 196 women’s athletics, 1, 25, 66, 76, 120, 122, 143, 159, 178, 203, 204, 209, 212, 224, 230, 236, 237; Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), 142, 167–172, 175–178, 248, 249; Cold War, impact of, 172–174; Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW), 166–168, 170, 175, 248; compared to men’s, 160–161; competition, historic lack of, 161–165, 243, 244; control, by women, 168, 171–172, 175–176; Division for Girls’ and Women’s Sports (DGWS), 165–167, 170–171; “educational objectives” until after WWII, 243; first college national championship (golf), 162, 165, 246; Hutcherson Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist, 163–165, 246; Kellmeyer case and 14th Amendment, 170–171, 248; NAIA women’s division and tournament, 168–169, 249; National Invitational College Tournament in basketball, 248; NCAA Committee on Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics, 168–169; NCAA LongRange Planning Committee and, 247; NCAA Special Committee on Women’s Competition, 174–175, 247; Olympics and, 163, 165, 173–174; “play days,” 161, 163; SAT scores and, 120; scholarship prohibition, 142, 163, 167–168, 170–171, 245; Smith College basketball, 243; soccer pay

inequity, 224; Title IX, 120, 171–172, 175, 248–250; women of color, 162, 173, 174 women’s movement, 161, 162, 171, 172 Women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association (WNCAA), 246 Wood, William, 13, 47, 48 workers’ compensation and injury: Byers and, 247; Coleman case, 249; Dennison case, 156–157; Knauer case, 197; Nemeth case, 155–156; Rensing case, 158–159, 248; “student-athlete” language and, 156–158, 247; Van Horn case, 157; Van Horn v. Industrial Accident Commission, 247; Waldrep case, 158, 249; Whitehead case, 196–197 World War I, 9, 54, 55, 73, 75, 76, 114, 128 World War II, 55, 56, 65, 68, 71, 82, 85, 89, 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 115, 135, 148, 161, 162, 164, 165, 173, 205, 224, 233

Yale University: ACE reform committee and, 128; Big Three 1889 football conflict, 19–25; Carnegie Report and, 80; Columbia vs., 34–35; crew, 38, 50–52, 242; first Harvard–Yale crew

336

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meet (1852), 4, 12, 46, 180, 235; first professional rowing coach, 13, 242; football wins over Harvard (1903– 1904), 111; freedom-of-opportunity ideology and, 17; free tickets to football players, 243; Glass and Cutts cases, 38–44; Hogan case, 112–113, 220–221, 244; Intercollegiate Baseball Association and, 33; Ivy League and, 114, 115; Protestant origins of, 109; radio revenue, 152; reform agreements with Harvard, 42–44; Sanity Code and, 99; summer baseball and, 62, 70; Thanksgiving Day football game, 52; training tables and athletic dorms, 47, 53, 243; Vassar and, 175; warning about scholarships, 89. See also Big Three Yost, Fielding H., 13 Young, David, 249 Young, David C., 11 Young, George, 133 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 67 Yukica, Joe, 122

Zimbalist, Andrew, 233 Zook, George F., 102