JRN 589 - The Myth of Amateurism

Critical Issues in Sports
JRN 589
The Myth of Amateurism
18th Century – 20th Century
Prof. Hanley

The modern American ideal of the
amateur is based on the British
model of the late 19th century.
The problem? That British model is a
fiction.
The truth about ancient Greek
athletes is far from the fictional
characterization by British historians.

The Greeks, of course, created
mythologies about their own
athletes.
Take Herakles (aka Hercules).

To free himself from slavery,
Herakles had to complete 12
grueling, near-impossible tasks.
Among them were killing a
monstrous lion bare-handed and
capturing a three-headed dog that
had a mane of snakes.

To celebrate his triumphs,
Herakles laid the track for a
footrace honoring Zeus and
planted a sacred olive tree to
provide leafy crowns for Olympic
victors. He also claims Omphale.
(And thus creates the foundation
for the 19th/20th century underdog
hero who wins the game and
lands his dream date)

The myth of Herakles and other
mythological heroes had a
profound impact on real athletes
in ancient Greece.
In the sixth, fifth, and fourth
centuries B.C, Herakles provided
the role model for athletes.

“… the ancient Greeks conceived
of Herakles as an "athlete" on a
more fundamental level of
competition, and his successes in
these contests were an important
part of the process by which he
achieved immorality,” wrote
scholar David Lunt in 2009.

“In addition to his "sportive"
athletic endeavors, Herakles and
his adventures represented a
broader conception of athleticism,
based on ancient Greek notions of
contests, ‘labors,’ and prizes,
(italics added for emphasis here),”
Lunt wrote.
Prizes = cash

The prizes, of course, included the
idea of immortality enjoyed by the
mythological Herakles.
Communities commissioned
statues, works of art and poems
to connect the athlete to the
mythological past.
But they were also paid.

It should not be lost on us that an
incentive for cheating existed,
given that the prize went to only
one person per event.
(Even the gods cheated. In The
Iliad, gods help their favorites win
chariot races. Everything is always
rigged).
Wrestlers commonly bribed
opponents and umpires.

The glory and valor of the
individual – arete – served as the
center of Greek sport.
Thus, athletes competed as
individuals and, as such were
selfish, narcissistic and seeking
arete – excellence – along with
the status of something even
higher.

Athletes wanted to achieve the
same status as mythological
heroes.
The lyric poet Pindar (c. 518-438
B.C.) composed victory odes to
athletes but warned them to be
wary of asserting the status of the
gods by seeking immoral status.

Pindar wrote his odes for the
victors of the Olympic events.
The games were spread over five
days, with 13 events including a
foot race, long jump, discus,
javelin, boxing, wrestling and
chariot races. There were two
divisions: one for men, the other
for boys.

So, in short, Greek athletes
competed for themselves,
demanded pay for training and
cash prizes and sought
immortality.
And Pindar – who shows up
seemingly everywhere in the story
of amateur athletics – helped by
composing odes to their greatness
for money.

That’s not exactly what the British
wanted from their sports heroes of
the 19th century.
As Andy Carter points out in his work
‘At home at Oxbridge’: British views
of ancient Greek sport 1749–1974,
historians asserted that amateur
athletics had Hellenic roots despite
the reality of the ancient Greek
athlete.

Victorian & Edwardian values –
based in the inseparable ethos of
class and education among the
wealthy – played a key role.
Historians did not deliberately
misrepresent the past, Carter
concluded. Instead, they
“misinterpreted it by looking
through the lens of their own
beliefs and experiences.”

The process began in 1749 when
Gilbert West published an
appendix to his dissertation, a
translation of the Odes of Pindar.
“The point of the Dissertation was
to show that Pindar was not
merely a paid hagiographer of
prize-fighters and jockeys, but a
man of importance and breeding,
writing about others of similar
station,” wrote Carter.

West’s work appeared during a
time when gambling dominated
sports and only a small circle of
professors discussed Greek
history.
The Dissertation launched a slow-
motion re-branding of ancient
Greek athletes, and West’s
contributions to the concept of
the amateur should not be
minimized.

“He approved of the awarding of
wreaths rather than valuable
prizes as it promoted the idea that
competition was not for reward
but for honor and glory,” Carter
added.

West wrote in his conclusion that
the concept of Greek athletics
could be applied as a remedy to
what he described as a
“debauched and luxurious age.”
He believed that the ancient
Olympics promoted peace but
avoided the reality that Greek
athletes were hardly in it for the
exercise unless it was running to
the bank or to listen to an ode
written to celebrate their brand.

“West’s ideas later contributed to
the Victorian view of Greek
amateurism,” Carter wrote.
In short, West’s ideas stuck while
the reality dissolved in the minds
of elite British historians who,
with their German counterparts,
continued to echo West’s
conclusions about Greek athletic
amateurism.

Some 108 years after West’s
Dissertation appeared, Thomas
Hughes published Tom Brown’s
Schooldays.
The 1857 work is the birth of
what’s known as muscular
Christianity, a mens sana in
corpore sano (healthy mind in a
healthy body) ethos that emerged
in the mid 19th century Church of
England.

The book launched the first wave
of manly athleticism – a
combination of physical courage
and moral strength - in English
public schools in the second half
of the 19th century.
It focuses on the years the
fictional Tom Brown spent at the
Rugby School under headmaster
Thomas Arnold.

The book quickly became a best-
seller in England and shortly after
publication became popular in the
U.S., too.
The images of fighting and heroic
team games – and the iconic
image of Brown being carried aloft
by his cricket teammates –
influenced American boys.

Among the millions of American
boys who read it was Walter
Camp, who would later attend
Yale College.
Camp would be greatly influenced
by the book and its portrayal of
physical courage. And it would
form the rationale for a sport he
was formulating in New Haven.

A French aristocrat by the name of
the Baron Pierre de Coubertin also
read the book.

Meanwhile, British historians
became enchanted with the
fiction that English athleticism
made them “the true cultural
heirs of classical Athens.”
John Mahaffey claimed that most
Greek competitions were “purely
amateur” and that professional
athletic events held little interest
to the ancient Greeks.

Amateurism turned out to be a
modern invention born in Great
Britain stemming from the work of
these historians misinterpreting
ancient Greek athletics.
It would influence sport in Europe,
in British colonies and in American
for more than 100 years.

Amateurism, however, was less
about sport than about erecting a
fence for the elites around an
increasingly professionalized
sporting culture favored by the
working class.
It emerged more to protect the
economic status and culture of
wealthy men than anything else.

An informal collection of ideas,
beliefs and practices came to be
called amateurism, or “about
doing things for the love of them,
doing them without reward or
material gain or doing them
unprofessionally,” Carter wrote
“The amateur played the game for
the game’s sake, disavowed
gambling and professionalism, and
competed in a composed,
dignified manner,” he added.

Thus, amateurism emerged as an
element of class warfare, standing
opposed to the commercial
orientation and open
professionalism that characterized
19th century British sport.
Prior to the 1860s, prior to Tom
Brown’s Schooldays, the amateur-
professional dichotomy did not
exist. It certainly didn’t exist in
ancient Greece.

“The amateur stood modest in
victory, gracious in defeat,
honorable, courageous, not
fanatical or too partisan and
avoided elaborate training or
specialization,” according to the
scholar Carter.

“In practice, amateurism
functioned as both a legitimating
ideology for an elitist,
anticommercial sporting system,
as well as a broader philosophy of
moral and aesthetic improvement.
Amateurism not only dictated
who could play, but also how they
played,” Carter wrote.

Amateurism stood as an invented
convention, one not based on
traditional values that extended
back to ancient Greece.
It saw capitalistic spectator sports
as corrupt and favored instead a
new vision of sport.

Coubertin adopted Britain’s
amateur sporting traditions as the
cornerstone of his ideology,
derived entirely from Tom Brown’s
Schooldays.
He misinterpreted Hughes’s work
of fiction and the character
Thomas Arnold, the Rugby
headmaster, as the one who
brought sport to English public
schools.

On June 23, 1894, Coubertin steps
in the picture. He gathered 78
sporting dignitaries and
administrators from nine nations
in the Sorbonne University
auditorium in Paris.
The agenda of this meeting of the
International Athletic Congress?
To revive the Olympic Games of
classical Greek antiquity.

The administrators made
consistent references to ancient
Greece during the assembly.
And they voted to create the
International Olympic Committee
(IOC) as a permanent body.
Coubertin proposed games to be
staged quadrennially in rotating
cultural capitals of the world.

The first games would be held in
Athens, Greece, in 1896.
“After an absence of nearly fifteen
hundred years, the Olympic flame
would be rekindled in the
ancestral homeland of physical
culture,” Carter wrote.

After reading 19th century
historical accounts of ancient
Greek athletes in the context of
the 1896 modern Games, a New
York Times reporter could barely
contain his laughter, as the
excerpt to the left suggests.

Camp was born in 1859, two years
after the publication of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays in England.
Charles Darwin published Origin
of Species in 1859, too.
Both works would be deployed by
Camp to formulate football.

Camp’s father, Leverett, was a
proponent of Muscular
Christianity, a phrase originated by
clergyman and novelist Charles
Kingsley to promote physical
development of males within the
Church of England.
English boys had become
effeminate, Kingsley believed.

Camp first saw a primitive game of
football in 1875 when Harvard
played Yale in New Haven in a
game that mixed association
football – kicking and dribbling
but no tackling – and the Boston
game – tackling permitted.
He was among 1,200 who
watched.

During that period, intercollegiate
competition grew, starting with
the Yale-Harvard regatta in 1852.
Ironically, the rowers were paid to
compete by the promoter of the
race in New Hampshire.
From the start, collegiate sports
were professional.

Camp competed in baseball, track,
crew, rugby and, eventually,
football at Yale.
He saw moral lessons in
competition.
“Be each, pray God, a gentleman,”
Camp would write about athletes.

That meant Camp was adhering to
the concept of athletic
amateurism as expressed at
Oxford and Cambridge in England
and popularized in Tom Brown’s
Schooldays.
The English, after all, reflected the
ideals of ancient Greece.

“Camp embraced this myth as
timeless truth. Sanctimoniously,
he held that gentlemen played for
glory, not compensation,” wrote
the scholar Julie Des Jardins in her
biography of Camp. “He
articulated his gentleman’s code
in everything he went on to write,
including the Book of College
Sports in 1893.”

But there was an important
distinction between the English
amateur and the American
variant.
In England, how mattered more
than the result.
In the U.S., the outcome meant
everything.

Camp “envisioned a game played
by a more physically tuned
variation of the gentleman
athlete, one equally decorous to
his British counterpart but more
virile because he had more
poundage and physical force,”
wrote Julie Des Jardins.

Camp also wanted to privilege
speed and room to move to create
more sophisticated plays, and he
proposed reducing the number of
players from 15 per side to 11.
After years of debate, the IFA
finally agreed to at proposal in
1880.

What’s more, Camp wanted to
eliminate the rugby scrum.
In October 1880, Camp proposed
a line of scrimmage to turn
chaotic scrum play into a skilled
possession, giving the game a
sense of control.

The line of scrimmage permitted a
more tactical approach to the
team game.
Camp determined that the line
meant the need for a field general
he called a quarterback to put
plays in motion. The formation?
Seven men on the line, four in the
backfield.

Camp also invented the system of
downs for possession to eliminate
a team from simply holding on to
the ball for each half.
The football rules, Camp
concluded, should not “become a
refuge for weaklings.” And it
should be attractive to spectators.

Camp knew that working-class
men would masquerade as elites
when needed to produce victories
for the gentlemanly clubs that
competed.
“A gentleman never competes for
money, directly or indirectly,”
Camp wrote, knowing full well he
was participating in a charade.

Still, football became violent.
Camp’s solution to the growing
problem of lawlessness on the
field? Pay officials.
This violated the traditional
amateur code as formulated in
England, but Camp finessed the
issue: football was more technical
than rugby and required
specialization and expertise.

Camp and sports journalist Caspar
Whitney clashed in the late 19th
and early 20th century over the
definition of amateurism even
though they often worked
together, with Whitney as editor
for several magazines.

Whitney was an old-school
Anglophone who believed
profoundly in the version
promoted in England: a member
of the white aristocratic elite who
competed for honor and joy, not
money.
Camp, while agreeing to a point,
promoted a steely democratic
version where effort mattered.

Still, Camp held paid athletes in
disdain as he wrote in 1889.
“Make no mistake about this. No
matter how winding the road may
be that eventually brings the
sovereign into the pocket, it is the
price of what should be dearer to
you than anything else, - your
honor …

“… If a man comes to you and
endeavors to affect your choice of
college by offers of a pecuniary
nature, he does not take you for a
gentleman or a gentleman’s son,
you may be sure. Gentlemen
neither offer nor take bribes.”

After a series of deaths in 1905, a
series of meeting among football
rules committee members
prompted by President Theodore
Roosevelt and others connected
to the game changed rules to
make the game safer.
A formal body later became
known as the National Collegiate
Athletic Association (1910) was
formed to oversee college sports.

At the same time, Yale faculty
completed an investigation that
revealed that Yale athletics had a
huge $100,000 slush fund that
had been used to tutor athletes,
give expensive gifts to athletes,
purchase entertainment for
coaches, and pay for trips to the
Caribbean, according to historian
Ronald Smith.

Criticism persisted, particularly
over what seemed to be the
growing professionalism of college
football and the intrusion of the
“masses” on the game.
In January 1906, Frederick Jackson
Turner, a historian, was among the
critics who saw college football as
incompatible with collegiate life.

“The public has pushed its
influence inside the college walls,”
said Turner, thus “making it
impossible for faculties and for
the clean and healthy masses of
the students to keep athletics
honest and rightly related to a
sane university life.”

In November 1905, Collier’s
magazine published by reporter
Edward S. Jordan.
Under a headline a series “Buying
Football Victories,’ Jordan
asserted that Wisconsin’s football
team included professionals paid
to play.

The commercial nature of the
college game – tickets were sold
after all – eroded its purity,
reformers argued.
And that purity was threatened by
a move away from amateurism.

Still, the concept of amateurism,
rooted in a misinterpreted
account of ancient Greek athletes,
reinforced by an impulse to keep
immigrants at bay and the need to
reinforce elite economic and class
status, was at times too powerful
to overcome.

Jim Thorpe, described by Olympic
historian Bill Mallon as “the
greatest athlete of all time. Still.
To me, it’s not even a question,”
felt the power of that fictional
concept arguably more than any
other individual athlete.

When Thorpe (far right in stance)
played for the innovative coach
Pop Warner at Carlisle Indian
Industrial School in Pennsylvania,
he scored all of Carlisle’s points in
a stunning 18-15 victory at
Harvard in 1911.
In 1912, he led Carlisle to the
mythological national
championship, as calibrated by
the polls.

Camp named Thorpe to his 1911
All-America team, the only player
not from Army, Harvard, Navy,
Princeton or Yale to be selected.
Camp selected Thorpe again in
1912 after a season in which he
rushed for 1,869 yards on 191
attempts. That total doesn’t count
two games, meaning he probably
was the first 2,000-yard back.

That same year, Thorpe won
Olympic gold medals in the
pentathlon (five events) and
decathlon (10 events) at the
games held in Stockholm.
But the International Olympic
Committee stripped Thorpe of his
medals and records.

The IOC claimed that Thorp
violated his status as an amateur
by playing minor-league baseball
in 1909-10.

“The IOC’s decision in 1912 to
strip Thorpe’s medals and strike
out his records was not just
intended to punish him for
violating the elitist Victorian codes
of amateurism. It was also
intended to obscure him—and to
a certain extent it succeeded,”
Sally Jenkins wrote in Smithsonian
Magazine in 2012.

Jenkins added: “Countless white
athletes abused the amateurism
rules and played minor-league ball
with impunity. What’s more, the
IOC did not follow its own rules
for disqualification: Any objection
to Thorpe’s status should have
been raised within 30 days of the
Games, and it was not.”

Ironically, Thorpe might have been
the truest amateur at the games
that year.
“I played with the heart of an
amateur—for the pure hell of it,”
he said.
The IOC reinstated his medals in
2022.

The Carnegie Report, formally
titled American College Athletics,
was released in 1929 after a
lengthy investigation into all
elements of collegiate sports.
The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching
sponsored the study, led by
Howard Savage.

Five researchers visited a total of
130 schools, colleges, and
universities and collected
academic data on athletes.
Researchers also either directly
interviewed or conducted
correspondence with hundreds of
people connected to higher
education and athletics.

“It is not the purpose of the
present study to add to the
considerable bulk of rumor and
scandal which darkens American
college athletics,” wrote Savage.
The foundation’s interest target
was the commercialization of
sports, particularly football, that
threatened higher education and
amateurism.

The report was framed around
two questions posed by
foundation president Henry
Pritchett.
Pritchett asked the questions
based on what he perceived an
observer from overseas would see
in American collegiate sports.

"What relation has this
astonishing athletic display to the
work of an intellectual agency like
a university?"
“How do students, devoted to
study, find either the time or the
money to stage so costly a
performance?”

New York University football
coach Chick Meehan told his team
before the report came out in
October 1929 that:
“I’ve already read it, and you’re
going to be shocked when you see
… how little you’re getting paid.”

That reflected the tone of what
Savage found in his investigation
and what the foundation
recommended in its conclusion.
In short, college sports,
particularly football, were
professional in all but name.
Amateurism had long since left
the building. Savage wanted the
British model to replace it.

The first paid college coach is
believed to be William Wood,
hired by Yale in the 1860s to lead
the crew team after it had been
beaten several times in a row by
Harvard.
But football coaches at the turn of
the century turned the job into a
full-time, lucrative appointment
because of rule changes and
astonishingly high spectator
interest.

Harvard’s coach Bill Reid, for
example, earned $7,000 a year in
the early 1900s, almost as much
as the salary of the college’s
president Charles W. Eliot.
By the 1920s, coaches such as
Knute Rockne earned as much as
$10,000 a year under long-term
contracts. Coaches jumped to the
highest bidder for their services.

In 1903, Harvard opened a
concrete-and-steel stadium – the
first of its kind - that held 35,000
spectators.

The power of alumni – especially
in this case, the Class of 1879,
who covered some of the cost - is
evident in the dedication plaque
that still graces a portal.
“To the Joy of Manly Contest,”
reads the top line of it.

Yale, meanwhile, played its home
games on a large field encircled
with wooden seats until 1914.

In 1914, Yale opened the Yale
Bowl, the largest stadium of its
kind in the world at the time with
room for more than 60,000
spectators.
Princeton likewise opened a new
concrete stadium, Palmer
Stadium.

Stadiums started to appear on
college campuses en masse across
the country in the 1920s.
These were large edifices, most
still in use today, designed to
reflect the size of the Yale Bowl.

University of Illinois President
David Kinley invoked ancient
Greece in his plans for a stadium,
which he said would “provide a
link between American culture
and the classical Greek civilization
upon which modern education
was based.”
He added: The stadium would
“bring a touch of Greek glory to
the prairie.”

Even before its investigation
began, the Carnegie Foundation
had already reached a conclusion:
it would expose the full
commercialization of college
athletics to convince schools to
dismantle football and other
revenue-producing sports and
install the British model of
amateurism.

Pritchett (left in photo) signaled
its intention: “Hitherto, athletics
has absorbed the college; it is
time for the college to absorb
athletics.”

In effect, the foundation decided
to do the work the NCAA was
formed in the first decades of the
20th century to do, and reformers
sought to install over that time.
After all, according to the NCAA’s
original constitution, it was to
provide “regulation and
supervision” of college athletics to
maintain the “dignity and high
purpose of education” with
athletics based on amateur play.

“The principles of amateur sport
in the bylaws demanded that each
member agree to prevent
inducements to athletes to enter
colleges for athletic purposes and
to prohibit all but bona fide
students in good academic
standing,” the scholar Smith wrote
in a study of the NCAA.

As Smith has shown, colleges had
tossed out British conceptions of
amateurism by the turn of the
20th century and pursued the
American model.
Schools competed against
professionals, sold tickets, paid for
athletes’ food and tutoring,
recruited athletes, and paid for
coaches and game officials.

When the U.S. entered the First
World War in 1917, the NCAA
produced a war-time resolution to
make sure colleges maintained
their athletic programs, but
reformers smuggled into the
document measures such as
freshmen ineligibility, pay cuts of
coaches, no pre-season practices
and no reduction in admission
standards, among other things.

Now, the Carnegie Foundation
would carry that reform banner,
but it would find resistance when
trying to turn college athletics into
a 20th century reflection of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays’ moral lessons
applied to America.

The 350-page American College
Athletics was finished in July 1929
and released on October 23, 1929,
during the football season.
It generated massive press
coverage - the New York Times
centered the story at the top of
the page - that focused on
recruiting and paying athletes.

The report found that one in
seven college athletes received
some level of subsidy, ranging
from scholarships to loans.
Yale was the only school of the Big
Three – Harvard and Princeton are
the other two – that was free of
scandal. West and Cornell also
were noted as free of subsidies.

The report pointed to
commercialism, which it described
as the “darkest blot” on college
athletics.

“The Development of the Modern
Amateur Status” chapter blames
America’s short history for
misunderstanding the Greeks.
“Unfortunately, the history of such
older conceptions has had little
bearing upon the American
amateur convention; we are too
young a nation to listen to the
ancients,” he wrote.

Confusion over how to define an
amateur also played a role in
America veering from the
traditional definition, citing the
following mid-19th century
example:

“An amateur is any person who
has never competed in an open
contest, or for a stake, or for
public money, or for gate money,
or under a false name; or with a
professional for a prize, or where
gate money is charged; nor has
ever at any period of his life
taught or pursued athletic
exercises as a means of
livelihood.”

That definition, adopted by the
National Association of Amateur
Athletes of America in 1879,
revealed a “legalistic attitude of
mind and shown by its
prohibitions how to ‘beat the
rules.’”
Savage preferred the simpler
definition used in the 1920s:

“An amateur sportsman is one
who engages in sport solely for
the pleasure and physical, mental,
or social benefits he derives
therefrom, and to whom sport is
nothing more than an avocation.”

In 1916, the NCAA landed on the
following definition:
“An amateur athlete is defined as
one who participates in
competitive physical sport only for
the pleasure, and the physical,
mental, moral, and social benefits
derived therefrom."

In 1921, the NCAA expanded its
amateur principles to include the
following:
“In the opinion of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association the
spirit of amateurism carries with it
all that is included in the
definition of an amateur and
much more.

“It stands for a high sense of
honor, honesty, fair play, and
courtesy. It stoops to no petty
technicalities and refuses to twist
or avoid the rules of play or to
take unfair advantage of
opponents.”

Savage supported non-
prescriptive definitions of
amateurism to the legalese,
prescriptive language embedded
in some definitions.
“With the rise of commercialism
in college athletics, its
temptations became in many
instances too strong to be resisted
…

“… The result has been a great
increase in the number of ways by
which, sometimes even under the
guise of philanthropy, the amateur
convention is set at naught.”
He concluded: “To the individual
conscience of the honorable
sportsman, there is no middle
ground between amateurism and
professionalism.”

Savage, however, was realistic. He
knew fine-grain distinctions in
definitions of amateurism would
cause problems.
“At no other point in the whole
field of college athletics is honesty
so severely tested as it is in
connection with the convention of
amateurism,” he wrote.

And he identified the core
tension.
“The root of all difficulties with
the amateur status touches the
desires of certain athletes to
retain the prestige that
amateurism confers and at the
same time to reap the monetary
or material rewards of
professionalism,” wrote Savage.

Colleges experienced that tension.
“We are told by the college
officials that we must conduct our
sports and play along amateur
lines, but we must finance them
along lines that are purely
commercial and professional,”
said F.W. Marvel, Brown
University's physical director.

While understanding the tension,
Savage came down hard on the
need for the purest definition of
amateurism to be followed in
college.
Otherwise, the institution would
be undermined in many aspects in
both intellectual and social agency
contexts. He wrote:

“Admitting unqualified students
because of their athletic prowess
would reduce academic
standards; lead to special
privileges for exams; and disunify
the student body, among other
things.
“No other force so completely
vitiates the intellectual aims of an
institution and its members.”

Savage concluded: “All this would
be true if professionalism were
practiced frankly and openly.
Where, however, its practice is
concealed, an even deadlier blow
is struck at spiritual values.”
In short, Savage believed that the
university would be destroyed by
an athletic department pretending
to be something it’s not.

As far as social agency goes,
Savage wrote that the “proposal
that the amateur convention in
college sport be abolished, is a
counsel of defeat” and “would
bring with it a new set of evils that
would be infinitely worse than any
that now obtain.”

Savage is clear in that he believed
college athletes to be an exploited
group because they brought
money to the university but were
not openly paid.
Commercialism has led to profits,
he wrote, that “have been gained
because colleges have permitted
the youths entrusted to their care
to be openly exploited.”

The report found that almost all
institutions with athletic
departments subsidized athletes
through scholarships,
questionable loans, jobs, alumni
gifts, training tables, free tutors,
and cash, among other things.
That made the case for college
athletics to be based on
amateurism difficult to defend.

“It is under this regime that
college sports have been
developed from games played by
boys for pleasure into systematic
professionalized athletic contests
for the glory, and too often, for
the financial profit of the college,”
Savage wrote.

Football transformed colleges
from centers of intellectual life to
the center of the entertainment
industry, the report stated.
The solution? Return college
football and other sports to their
rightful place as the pursuits of
amateurs.

“What ought to be done?” asked
Henry Pritchett in the report’s
preface?

“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 examinations…

“… - these ought to stop and the
inter-college and intramural sports
be brought back to a stage in
which they can be enjoyed by
large numbers of students and
where they do not involve an
expenditure of time and money
wholly at variance with any ideal
of honest study.”

Despite the widespread
dissemination of the report
among colleges and thorough
press coverage, the work had no
immediate impact.
College sports would continue to
be based on the American model.
The players would be perceived as
amateurs, with a knowing wink.

Seven years after the release of
The Carnegie Report, Stanford
basketball, led by Hank Luisetti,
beat Long Island University, 45-31,
in front of nearly 18,000
spectators at Madison Square
Garden.
The game set the stage for the
National Invitational Tournament
in 1938 and the NCAA tournament
the following year.

In 1936, the SEC permitted
schools to offer scholarships for
athletics, becoming the first
conference to openly do so.
The American amateur model was
thus born, based not on a
misinterpretation of amateurism ,
but to guarantee competitive
equally among schools.

In America, the joy of
participation – the amateur ideal -
had long been surpassed by the
necessity of victory.

In 1946, the NCAA sponsored the
Conference of Conferences of
twenty conferences to create
principles for college sports,
including the payment of athletes
to attend college and the control
of recruiting.

The Conference of Conferences
issues its principles in January
1947 to cover amateurism,
recruiting and other elements of
college sports.

On Jan. 10, 1948, during its annual
convention, the NCAA passed the
Sanity Code, its first regulatory
action.
The code required athletes to be
admitted to college on the same
basis as other students, but it
allowed scholarships to cover
tuition and fees as the SEC had
permitted a decade earlier.

In the Sanity Code, the NCAA
published its “Principles of
Amateurism” that stated “any
college athlete who takes or is
promised pay in any form for
participation in athletics does not
meet this definition of an
amateur” even though athletes
would be permitted to receive
scholarships.

“For the first time and in a nearly
unanimous vote, the NCAA was
given the power to enforce an
amateur code, but it allowed
payment of athletes, through
tuition and incidental fees, in
direct violation of the concept of
amateurism,” wrote Smith in Pay
for Play.

Amateurism, Smith noted in his
book, was “an outdated and
nonegalitarian concept, despite
being nearly universally accepted.
Historically, no society had ever
had a concept of amateurism in
sport, certainly not the ancient
Greeks, until it was invented by
the upper-class British in the
nineteenth century.”

Colleges also had another tactical
reason for sticking to the
outmoded definition.
By claiming its athletes to be
amateurs, colleges avoided state
and federal taxes and workers’
compensation payments to
injured players.

The Sanity Code faced problems
soon after ratification.
The Southern, Southeastern, and
Southwest Conferences concluded
in May 1949 that the code did not
work for them. Financial aid
should tuition and fees, as
permitted by the NCAA, but also
room, board, books, and laundry
expenses, as Smith pointed out.

In 1950, the NCAA enforcement
department sought to show its
muscle by bringing banishment
cases against seven schools –
Boston College, Maryland,
Virginia, The Citadel, Virginia
Military Institute, Virginia Tech,
and Villanova – for violating the
code.

NCAA rules required a two-thirds
convention vote to ban the
schools, but it failed in that
attempt even though a majority
voted in favor of it, 111-93.
The Sanity Code, unenforceable as
the vote revealed, was dead.

And then came a man named
Walter Byers, who in 1951
became the NCAA’s first full-time
employee as its executive director
at the age of 29.

Byers first had to survive the 1954
withdrawal (effective in 1956) of
the schools that had launched
college athletics and its amateur
code: Yale, Harvard, Princeton,
Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia,
Brown and Penn. They would form
the Ivy League and ban freshmen
from varsity play, allow only three
years of eligibility, eliminate
scholarships and require progress
toward a degree.

A year later in 1955, Byers faced a
more existential threat to college
sports.

Ray Dennison was an Army
veteran and father of three who
played for the Fort Lewis A&M
(now Fort Lewis College) football
team.
In September 1955, he tackled a
kick returner, but his head hit the
returner’s knee, fracturing his
skull. He died within two days.

His widow, Billie Dennison, sued
the school for workers’ comp
benefits because her husband had
been on scholarship.

If Billie Dennison won the case, it
would lead to a collapse of college
athletics, as it would be
impossible for most schools to
afford workers’ compensation
insurance and claims.

This was not the first workers’
compensation case filed by a
football player or his family.
In 1950, University of Denver
football player Ernest Nemeth
filed a workers’ comp claim,
following a spring practice injury.
He contended the university hired
him to play football.

Nemeth won the case, which was
upheld in 1953 by the Colorado
Supreme Court.
The court determined that
because Nemeth’s on-campus job
was linked to his ability to
maintain a roster spot on the
team, he was an employee.

After the Nemeth case, Byers and
the NCAA legal team required
schools to reference players as
"student-athletes” and add a
pledge of amateurism with every
scholarship letter.
That became the standard
defense in compensation claims
such as that filed by Dennison’s
family.

The plan worked. Billie Dennison
lost the lawsuit.
But in a speech delivered after the
publication of his memoir in 1995,
Byers said this:

"Each generation of young
persons come along and all they
ask is, 'Coach, give me a chance, I
can do it.' And it's a disservice to
these young people that the
management of intercollegiate
athletics stays in place committed
to an outmoded code of
amateurism.”

It would take another generation
of legal action by college athletes,
however, to rid the nation of the
British model of amateurism that
had remained in the public
discourse.
An expression that Byers
developed as a legal ploy to get
around a lawsuit persisted to keep
hypocrisy alive.

While the NCAA struggled with
the definition of amateurism amid
the commercial nature of
collegiate sports, the American
Alliance for Health, Physical
Education, and Recreation’s
Division for Girls and Women’s
Sport (DGWS) moved decisively to
“resanctify intercollegiate
athletics” as March L. Krotee
wrote in a 1981 paper.

“… they did not want to follow the
men’s athletic trails or reach the
men’s athletic summit,” wrote
Joan S. Hult in her 1999 study of
the rise of women’s sports from
the 1950s to the 1990s.

Women’s intercollegiate sports
were limited to more recreational
rather than intercollegiate
contests for the first half of the
20th century, but groups such as
the DGWS had worked with the
AAU and the U.S. Olympic
Committee to support and
promote elite-level competitions
in women’s sports.

The Commission for
Intercollegiate Athletics for
Women (CIAW), an umbrella
group for several different
organizations that oversaw
women’s sports, held
championships in seven different
sports each year between 1965
and 1971.

In 1969, CIAW commissioners
voted to form the Association of
Intercollegiate Athletics for
Women (AIAW).
Unlike the NCAA, the AIAW would
be directly linked to the
educational mission of schools
through the American Alliance for
Health, Physical Education, and
Recreation (AAHPER), which, in
turn, was part of the National
Education Association.

“With links to the National
Education Association (NEA)
through AAHPER, the AIAW was,
and remains, the only national
intercollegiate sport-governing
body born out of an educational
association,” wrote Hult in her
“NAGWS and AIAW: The Strange
and Wondrous Journey to the
Athletic Summit, 1950–1990”
study.

The AIAW formulated uniform
rules and regulations regarding
the structure of sports, eligibility
and financial aid.
The alignment between women’s
sports and the educational
mission became evident in the
AIWA’s opposition to full-ride
scholarships for athletes.

“One must remember that the
AIAW leaders were educators first,
and they were trying to develop a
very different model to govern
athletics,” wrote Leotus Morrison,
a former AIAW president about
the founding of the organization.

That model differed sharply from
the NCAA’s commercial-based
enterprise.
Legal scholar Ellen J. Staurowsky
concluded that the AIAW wanted
to avoid the commercialization of
women’s sports to remain clear of
legal tangles over the definition of
amateurism.

“According to the worldview of
the AIAW, shaped as it had been
by watching the evolution of
men’s athletics over time,
sacrificing the health and well-
being of female students to a fan-
driven, commercial-seeking
enterprise was anathema to the
idea of an educational-based
college sport system,” she wrote
in a 2012 law review article.

That meant scholarships for
athletic merit per the NCAA model
would be perceived as “a
corrupting influence that distorted
relationships between students,
their coaches, and their
institutions.”

Former AIAW president, Bonnie
Slatton of the University of Iowa,
staunchly defended the rights of
students for the “freedom of
education” that would be
undermined by restrictions
imposed by collegiate athletic
authorities.

Compared to the NCAA’s ever-
growing prescriptive rules and
surveillance of athletes, the
AIAW’s approach amounted to a
full-blown athletics spring.
Off-campus recruiting was
banned, transfer rules were more
favorable to the athlete and
athlete representatives had a
voice in policy issues and a right to
vote.

Scholarships based solely on
athletic merit were effectively
banned by prohibiting students
who received free rides from
competing in AIAW
championships.

On July 1, 1972, the AIAW
officially became the organizing
group for women’s intercollegiate
athletics.
But it’s move toward creating an
alternative model to the NCAA
would be brief.

On June 23, 1972, the U.S.
Congress passed the Title IX of the
Education Amendments Act, a
federal law that AIAW vigorously
supported and helped to write.
It banned gender-based
discrimination in schools that
received federal aid (such as
federally backed student loans).

As Staurowsky pointed out in her
law review article, “the AIAW’s
model of college sport for women
would be challenged on several
fronts, starting with the rule
barring athletic scholarships” in
the aftermath of Title IX’s passage.

In January 1973, Fern Lee
Kellmeyer filed a lawsuit on behalf
of women tennis players
challenging the AIAW’s policy of
barring female athletes who
received athletic scholarships
from competing in AIAW
championships.

“Broadly conceived, the suit
alleged that the AIAW’s anti-
scholarship ban denied plaintiffs’
equal protection of the law under
the Fourteenth Amendment,
discriminated against them on the
basis of sex in an educational
setting receiving Federal financial
assistance under Title IX, and
violated their rights to equal
employment under Title VII,”
wrote Staurowsky.

The National Education
Association refused to support the
AIAW’s defense of the lawsuit, and
the group asked its member
institutions to vote on a proposal
to allow scholarships on the NCAA
model of full rides for athletic
merit.

Some 80 percent of AIAW
members voted in support of the
change, which effectively ended
the debate over whether women’s
sports could carve out its own
definition of amateurism.
Yet some expressed reservations
about the path they would now
follow.

“Do we want to move in the
direction this may lead,” asked
Roberta Howells of Western
Connecticut State College.
“Should we let the U.S. courts
define amateur and educational?”
Howells was ahead of her time.

The AIAW’s published interim
regulations for its members
regarding financial aid in April
1973.
“We wish it to be understood that
this practice is not recommended
but it is now permitted,” the AIAW
stated.

“ … AIAW leadership naively
believed that they could still
maintain AIAW’s educational focus
by controlling the non-scholarship
aspects of recruitment and
eligibility,” wrote Hult.

She added: “In retrospect,
however, scholarships forever
changed the terrain. Because of
the concept, male is the norm, in
Title IX, AIAW had to more nearly
mimic men’s rules and
regulations.”

The AIAW’s decision to permit
scholarships ended the debate on
whether college students could
receive pay – in the form of full
scholarships – for athletic merit.
Title IX opened vast opportunities
previously denied women in
collegiate sports who now could
receive scholarships equitable
with men under the law.

At any rate, the AIAW’s decision to
permit scholarships ended the
debate on whether all college
students could receive pay – in
the form of full or partial
scholarships – for athletic merit.
The group’s desire to remain
separate from the football-
dominated NCAA would also
prove to be unsuccessful.

From 1906 to 1980, the NCAA
sponsored programs only for
men's intercollegiate athletics.

In January 1981, the Special
Committee on Governance of the
NCAA proposed to bring women’s
athletics into the organization.
The NCAA, ironically, had fought
against Title IX, but now sought
full control all except the smallest
of colleges participating in
intercollegiate sports.

The NCAA added women’s
athletics on January 13, 1981.
holding its first national
championships that November.
For the full 1981-82 sports
season, the NCAA introduced
twenty-nine women's
championships in twelve
sports.

The AIAW closed its doors on July
1, 1982, after NBC decided against
broadcasting AIAW championships
and sponsors such as Kodak
withdrew financial support.
The AIAW had 961 member
schools and conducted 41
national championships in 19
different sports with almost
100,000 athletes at its peak.

The AIAW’s lasting influence goes
beyond its work on Title IX.
The organization played a key role
in 1978 when the U.S. Congress
passed an act seeking to define
amateurism to help the U.S.
secure the best athletes for the
Olympic Games.

The U.S. Congress sought to
delete the myth of amateurism to
reverse declining U.S. success in
the Olympic Games.
It stands as evidence of how so-
called amateur sports became
caught up in the Cold War,
requiring a change in how to
define the word amateur itself.

The act is a watershed in amateur
athletics in the U.S. as it gave the
federal government a seat at the
table.
From that position, the federal
government’s policy focused on
the development of elite athletes
for political rather than
commercial or participatory joy
outcomes.

In 1959, the first hint of federal
invention in sports rather than
just fitness emerged after a Soviet
Union basketball team defeated a
U.S. Air Force team in a
tournament in Chile.
New York Times columnist Arthur
Daley raged about amateurism
causing the defeat:

Daley wrote that the “old, Anglo-
Saxon principle of sports for
sports’ sake no longer is
operative.” (if it ever was that way
under the American model of
amateurism)
New Hampshire Senator Styles
Bridges agreed:

“The United States is in direct
competition with Russia in all
aspects and on all fronts. . . . Can
you imagine the fuss and furor
that would result if the United
States government sent a group of
college students down to Cape
Canaveral to take over the
important job of beating the
Russians in the race for space?”

But an obstacle stood in the way
of restructuring amateur sports:
the governing bodies themselves.
The NCAA and AAU had long
fought over which group ruled
amateur sports and players,
including U.S. Olympians.

In 1962, former General Douglas
MacArthur – yes, a World War II
hero – arbitrated the dispute in
time for the 1964 Summer
Olympic Games in Tokyo.

As it turned out, the U.S. won 36
gold medals at the Tokyo Games
while the Soviets won 30.
But problems with amateur sports
governance persisted.

In 1966, Vice President Hubert
Humphrey said the federal
government would not assert
control over amateur athletics,
but he insisted that the
administration gave “very serious
consideration right now to this
whole problem of amateur
sports,” which he compared to the
problem the nation encountered
when the Soviets launched
Sputnik.

In 1972, the NCAA withdrew
membership in the USOC and
formed what it called a Committee
for a Better Olympics.
University of Illinois athletic director
Cecil Coleman asked President
Richard Nixon after that to create “a
new superstructure to coordinate all
international competition, including
our Olympic problem.”

After the Soviet Union won 17
more medals than the U.S. at the
1972 Summer Games, Vice
President Gerald Ford wrote in
Sports Illustrated that if the U.S.
did not reorganize amateur
athletics, it would continue to fall
short of the Soviet Union.

He wrote that: “it is not enough to
just compete. Winning is very
important. Maybe more important
than ever. . . . It has been said . . .
that we are losing our competitive
spirit in this country, the thing
that made us great, the guts of
the free-enterprise system.”

In 1975, Ford, saying that “the
Government does have a role in
helping to promote United States
competition in international
sporting events. America’s best
amateur athletes can represent us
in the Olympics only if the
federally chartered [USOC] and
related organizations are
sufﬁciently organized to recruit,
screen, and develop the athletes
on our teams,” forwarded a plan.

The committee Ford appointed to
implement his ideas forwarded a
proposal to the U.S. Congress to
form a single organization to
oversee amateur athletics.
Both the NCAA’s Walter Byers and
AAU opposed the idea.

That opposition led to provisions
in the bill that limited the U.S.O.C.
to serving only “as the
coordinating body for amateur
athletic activity in the United
States directly relating to
international amateur athletic
competition.”
The NCAA and the AAU would
continue to control domestic
amateur sports.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter
signed the Amateur Sports Act. He
said at the signing: “This
legislation, based on the
recommendations of the
President’s Commission on
Olympic Sports, establishes
procedures and guidelines . . .
without placing the Federal
Government in control of amateur
sports.”

He added, however, that the bill
strayed from its original intent
framed in the 1950s and 1960s to
make physical fitness a priority for
all Americans.
Instead, the bill passed by
Congress and signed by Carter
focused on elite athletes, who
would soon be paid and rewarded
with endorsements.

In January 2023, the NCAA would
once again appeal to the federal
government to defend its right to
define amateurism and control
collegiate athletes.
That happened after a series of
court decisions hammered the
NCAA’s rules blocking amateurs
from being paid to play.

JRN 589 - The Myth of Amateurism

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

Similar a JRN 589 - The Myth of Amateurism

Similar a JRN 589 - The Myth of Amateurism (9)

Más de Rich Hanley

Más de Rich Hanley (20)

Último

Último (20)

JRN 589 - The Myth of Amateurism