“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.” ...
“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”
Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”
Simply awful. Faustian bargains!
This is merely the beginning of a lengthy essay by Taylor Branch on "The Shame of College Sports" (ht.) Read it, pass it around, and talk about the essay even when you are watching the ball game on TV.
Branch writes:
Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”...
Dale Brown, the retired longtime basketball coach at LSU. “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids,” Brown once reflected. “We’re the whoremasters.”
A long time ago, at least it feels that way, I used to follow college football, primarily because of the school I attended. Through the years, I have slowly drifted out of it. To the level that when a few days ago, on game day, when I ran into two neighbors and one of them asked me whether I was stepping out because it was half-time, the other answered for me, "he doesn't follow football." I added "That is true. I couldn't care." A long-running joke about the business of college sports that another neighbor has is this: "Hey, until recently I didn't know that there is a university and a whole lot of buildings associated with the Oregon Ducks."
But, I do care--about the horrible business it has become, and which has led higher education far, far, away from its educational mission. Away from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of dollars on the backs of unpaid labor. So much so that even a small school like the one where I teach wants to emphasize athletics more than it wants to do anything about education and the long-term success of its students.
Branch concludes the essay with these comments:
“Scholarship athletes are already paid,” declared the Knight Commission members, “in the most meaningful way possible: with a free education.” This evasion by prominent educators severed my last reluctant, emotional tie with imposed amateurism. I found it worse than self-serving. It echoes masters who once claimed that heavenly salvation would outweigh earthly injustice to slaves. In the era when our college sports first arose, colonial powers were turning the whole world upside down to define their own interests as all-inclusive and benevolent. Just so, the NCAA calls it heinous exploitation to pay college athletes a fair portion of what they earn.
All the more the reasons for me to stay away from college football. Oh, and when I made a comment about how even my faculty colleagues, who normally spew socialist language, are college-sports crazy and even organize betting pools during March Madness, well, they went ballistic. These "leftist" rabid fans of college sports who defend the big business of college sports are the most hypocritical of them all. They are so ready to criticize, for instance, Wal-Mart, yet are so religiously faithful to college sports. Compared to the mercenary tyrannies in NCAA sports, Wal-Mart is a gazillion times better as an employer and as a provider of goods and services.
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