The Myth of the Amateur
A History of College Athletic Scholarships
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- 28,99 €
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- 28,99 €
Publisher Description
In this in-depth look at the heated debates over paying college athletes, Ronald A. Smith starts at the beginning: the first intercollegiate athletics competition—a crew regatta between Harvard and Yale—in 1852, when both teams received an all-expenses-paid vacation from a railroad magnate. This striking opening sets Smith on the path of a story filled with paradoxes and hypocrisies that plays out on the field, in meeting rooms, and in courtrooms—and that ultimately reveals that any insistence on amateurism is invalid, because these athletes have always been paid, one way or another.
From that first contest to athletes’ attempts to unionize and California’s 2019 Fair Pay to Play Act, Smith shows that, throughout the decades, undercover payments, hiring professional coaches, and breaking the NCAA’s rules on athletic scholarships have always been part of the game. He explores how the regulation of male and female student-athletes has shifted; how class, race, and gender played a role in these transitions; and how the case for amateurism evolved from a moral argument to one concerned with financially and legally protecting college sports and the NCAA. Timely and thought-provoking, The Myth of the Amateur is essential reading for college sports fans and scholars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sports historian Smith (Wounded Lions) takes a definitive look at American colleges' fraught history of paying athletes to play sports. The origins of pay to play, Smith writes, can be traced to the first American intercollegiate contest in 1852, when a rowing match between Harvard and Yale became an all-expenses-paid vacation in exchange for competitors' participation. In bringing the narrative up to the present, Smith amply documents the hypocrisy in the insistence that college players should be considered amateurs, and that academic standards were not compromised to accommodate sports. Not only have American colleges splashed out huge sums to hire professional coaches—some of whom are the "highest paid" officials at their institutions today—they've also perpetuated the "amateur-professional dilemma" by providing athletes "academic tutoring, giving free meals at a training table, and offering athletic scholarships." In the 1980s, even the hallowed Ivy League succumbed to the imperative to win, when Columbia accepted "academically unqualified football players" in order to recover from "the embarrassment of continual losing." Smith has no illusions that pressure on colleges will ever lead to meaningful reform. While the level of detail may verge on overkill for those with a cursory interest, Smith's exhaustive research paints a disturbing picture of entrenched corrupt practices. Those interested in both education and sports will be enlightened, if dismayed.
