Payola

The California law signed yesterday has the NCAA, and its blessed brethren, up in arms: you're ruining the student-athlete!!! Well, as all this conflagration has gone on the last few years, each new event prodded my lower brain stem memories. Which memories were that in the 1800s, and perhaps into the early 1900s, colleges regularly paid their teams. It took my fingers more than a quick stroll through the Yellow Googles to find a paper discussing this. I guess none to few want to admit that college athletics was for a long time a professional enterprise.

Chicago, of course, was not the only school driven to excess in promoting its football team. The payment of athletes, many of whom had little pretense of being students, was widespread. A 1906 article by Charles Deming, a former Yale athlete, detailed the findings of a Yale faculty investigation into the school's athletic practices. It uncovered a $100,000 trust fund that had been used to tutor athletes, give expensive gifts to athletes, purchase entertainment for coaches, and pay for trips to the Caribbean.

Another report:

Athletes during the early and mid-1900's were routinely recruited and paid to play; and there were several instances where individuals representing the schools were not enrolled as students. For example, there is one report of a Midwestern university using seven members of its team that included the town blacksmith, a lawyer, a livery man, and four railroad employees(5). the ref: Bronson, A. G. (1958). Clark W. Hetherington-Scientist and philosopher. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

The reactionaries so want the USofA to go back to the future of the 1800s. Here's another chance. Pay 'em.