Sports in America
This requirement of ‘freedom from governmental control’ can produce Alice-in-Wonderland consequences. I recently met with the Olympic committee in a communist dictatorship in which the ruling cadre controls everything, even the weight of a loaf of bread. But the committee assured me that ‘we are completely free of any governmental domination,’ and they showed me a paper to prove it. The dictator had proclaimed, ‘You are free of governmental domination,’ and IOC must accept this affirmation. On the other hand, if the United States Congress seeks to bring order into our Olympic mess, it has to be careful, because we operate our government openly, and the communist members of IOC could well decide that our congressional action constituted governmental interference and kick us out of Olympic competition.
The IOC concerns itself only with the Olympics, and thus operates only once every four years. But each individual sport has its own international federation, and these have acquired considerable power in determining how sports shall be conducted. For example, in track and field, control rests with the International Amateur Athletic Federation, and any American organization seeking to participate internationally in track and field had better keep in its good graces. I shall not be discussing these individual federations further, but they are powerful.
If the chain of command between the IOC and the AAU had remained uncomplicated, American participation in the Olympics would probably have remained fairly stable. But two intrusions of a major nature occurred, and the Olympic picture was to become hopelessly muddled. In 1950, with the best intentions in the world, Congress entered the picture, creating by law the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), which proceeded to identify those American organizations entitled to accredit athletes. Ten of the organizations were already within the AAU, and the few remaining others were scattered among minor organizations. So day-to-day Olympic decisions still rested with the AAU, and USOC was nothing but a kind of athletic holding company.
To pause for a moment, if the arrangement I have outlined so far had obtained, the problem of the young man or woman who wanted to participate in the next Olympics would be simple, whether he was in college, or had graduated, or had never attended any school. He or she merely had to affiliate with some club like the Des Moines YWCA or the New York Athletic Club, which had membership in the AAU, and win meets sponsored by such groups, have his papers forwarded to the USOC, which would routinely forward them to IOC in Lausanne, and in due course the athlete would receive certification of his eligibility. USOC was no bar to orderly Olympic procedures.
But now the second intrusion appears, and it will become totally bewildering and sometimes quite frustrating. Who produces and trains most of our Olympic-quality athletes? Our colleges and universities. Who provides the scholarships, the skilled coaches, the competitive meets and the stadiums in which they are held? The colleges and universities. Who has the prime interest in a junior who would like to compete in the Olympics but who also has another year of eligibility on his scholarship? You know who.
In 1905, a long seventeen years after the organization of the AAU, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered representatives from thirteen schools to the White House to face up to the mounting tragedy of college football which, as we saw earlier, was killing batches of our best young men each fall. The university people not only solved that ugly problem—by outlawing the flying wedge and legalizing the forward pass—but under the leadership of Chancellor MacCracken of New York University, went on to form a permanent intercollegiate organization for the governance of all their games, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Quickly it became the governing body for intercollegiate sports, laying down rules, supervising eligibility, stating who can offer scholarships to whom, and supervising the collection and distribution of receipts.
And quickly the difference between the AAU and the NCAA became clear. The former was composed of well-intentioned and often bumbling gentlemen amateurs who preferred running amateur sport like an old-fashioned club, with the added privilege of going abroad to the Olympics every four years and wearing blazers. The NCAA, on the other hand, was composed of tough-minded and socially reactionary directors of athletics at universities, coaches and well-disciplined faculty representatives, all on salary, whose primary business was to see that collegiate athletics showed a profit. Conflict between the two groups was inescapable.
Briefly, the problem is this. NCAA members spend great amounts of time and money discovering, nurturing and coaching track and field talent, but when the Olympic year rolls around, they must relinquish control over their athletes and watch a group of amateurs bungle the job of administering the United States team at the games. In 1972 at Munich, those in authority couldn’t even get the American sprinters into the starting blocks on time, couldn’t even fill in reports that one of their swimmers was taking doctor-prescribed medication for asthma.
Patriotism demanded that some kind of modus vivendi be worked out, and various truce proposals succeeded, but only temporarily. If the Los Angeles YMCA wanted to hold a meet with the YWCA, that would be a closed meet, since it fell under only one jurisdiction, the AAU. And if in the same city, on the same day, UCLA wanted to hold a meet with USC, that also would be closed, but it would be conducted by the NCAA. But what if the YMCA wanted to hold a meet with the UCLA? That would be an open meet, and a jurisdictional dispute would arise.
Also, suppose that various athletes in California are invited to visit Russia to compete with athletes living in the Kiev district. California men and women from both the YMCA and UCLA would be chosen for the team, but now real trouble ensues. The former are under the jurisdiction of the AAU, and it is affiliated with the international federation governing track and field, but the UCLA athletes owe their allegiance to the NCAA, and it is not directly affiliated with the international federation. Therefore, it must turn its athletes over to the AAU. Rather than submit to this humiliation, the NCAA will quite often refuse to release its athletes to the AAU. The American team is inferior. The Russians win a big victory, by default.
In this struggle I am one of the few outside observers who have always sided with the NCAA. They produce the athletes, pay for them, and coach them. Also, they are professionals who work at their jobs the year round. And on the playing field they usually make the right decisions. I much prefer them to either the AAU or the USOC. But when one watches the NCAA in its routine decisions and sees the colossal stupidity of some of them, continued loyalty becomes difficult.
• The NCAA in an effort to apply at least a minimum standard, adopts an eligibility rule of some ingenuity. A would-be athlete coming out of high school must prove by tests and records that he has reached an educational level which will enable him to score in his college classes 1.60 on a 4.0 scale. ‘Means he can handle the hard letters of the alphabet up to M.’ Ivy League schools, with stellar academic records like Harvard and Brown, feel that they should enforce a more demanding standard. ‘In those factories you gotta know the whole damned alphabet.’ But the NCAA threatens to discipline these colleges if they operate under the more stringent rule.
• A Jewish athlete at Yale wants to visit Israel to participate in the Maccabiah Games, but the NCAA has decided not to cooperate with the AAU in authorizing those specific games, so all Yale teams are threatened with reprisals.
• Walter Byers, the permanent secretary of the NCAA, considers the official Newsletter a proper place to extol Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s attack on freedom of the press, and to espouse other right-wing manifestations.
• An impartial study of NCAA disciplinary penalties shows that it is primarily black athletes who feel the ax, rarely whites.
• The NCAA passes high-sounding rules, then fails to enforce them. In one hilarious case involving a University of Richmond athlete who had already graduated, the NCAA granted one extra year of eligibility, after tearful pressure from the university.
• The NCAA has been especially arrogant in refusing to allow its players to participate in i
nternational competitions.
• The NCAA customarily sides with the big schools, because that’s where the money is, and pays inadequate or no attention to health benefits from sports, intramurals or women’s rights in the sports world. It is not by accident that many women coaches are fighting the belated attempts of the NCAA to take over jurisdiction of women’s sports.
On the plus side, the NCAA does make an attempt to try to bring order into the chaos of intercollegiate sport. It has the power to discipline Long Beach and to declare mighty Oklahoma ineligible for two years—thereby depriving it of fat television contracts—for having altered grades of a high school hotshot. And it does stand for many of the best aspects of American sports. It is by no means a deficit organization.
I have consulted most of the available material on the AAU-NCAA conflict, and three serious studies seem preeminent. Ron Barak, in the Southern California Law Review (1968), compiled an extensive summary of the matter under the title ‘The Government of Amateur Athletics; The NCAA-AAU Dispute.’ Its 113 detailed footnotes indicate the available research. Unusually readable is the 56-page mimeographed History and Current Status of Amateur Sports Problems issued by an unidentified source on September 19, 1974. But the most challenging is a paper by James V. Koch, professor of Economics at Illinois State University, entitled ‘A Troubled Cartel: The NCAA,’ Law and Contemporary Problems (1973).
In his article Professor Koch investigates the NCAA in the coldly analytical way he would use in studying any other cartel:
Despite the claims of the NCAA that it is a champion of amateur athletics and physical fitness in colleges and universities, it is in fact a business cartel composed of university-firms which have varying desires to restrict competition and maximize profits in the area of intercollegiate athletics. Economic theory in the area of cartelization has proven to be a remarkably accurate predictor of the stresses and strains which have beset the NCAA.
Koch quotes approvingly Senator Cook’s acerbic statement: ‘The NCAA is a body primarily designed to protect and defend its member institutions from the professional sports world and to make sure that collegiate sports gets its share of the sports business pie.’ In his discussion, Koch always refers to ‘university-firms’ in order to remind the reader of the essential business interests of the cartel: ‘NCAA rules limit the number of student-athletes that a given university-firm can purchase, how long these student-athletes may be used, and the prices that may be paid for them.’
Applying abstract rules governing all cartels, Koch says that the NCAA shift from the 1.60 proof of ability to the 2.00 was a normal concession to the big-time university-firms. Declaring freshmen eligible to play varsity ball was the cartel’s gesture to cutting production costs. Breaking the membership into three levels was an effort to keep all groups happy. And the limitation of the number of scholarships to be granted will probably have to be revoked, because it poses a hardship on the larger university-firms.
The cartel is troubled, says Koch, because most of the member firms are losing money, and he says that proper cartel management would dictate the following changes: 1) severe cutting of costs; 2) shortening the time expended in recruiting; 3) establishment of a draft system, whereby the top high school prospects were distributed equitably; 4) increasing revenue by renting stadiums to professional teams; 5) sponsoring championship playoffs; 6) and above all, reaching some kind of agreement with the AAU to forestall government intervention.
It has been evident for some time that there is no possibility of self-discipline in the brawl between the AAU and the NCAA. After the 1972 Olympics had ended in recrimination, the NCAA withdrew from USOC, and Samuel Barnes of the NCAA said. ‘The troubles in Munich are only the latest example of the continuous, countless bunglings of the USOC. We have had enough.’ Walter Byers added, ‘The situation is worse now than in the sixties. The only external force that has clout to bring about reorganization is the agency that gave USOC its original charter, Congress.’ Arthur Lentz, executive director of USOC, retaliated, ‘Logically, they have a point, though it’s a great disappointment that they would make their point this way. It pours more fuel on the fire.’ Jack Kelly, president of the AAU, defended his organization by saying, ‘Walter Byers would like to be czar of all amateur sports in this country and has been frustrated in his attempt.’ Chuck Neinas, commissioner of the Big Eight and supporter of the NCAA, made the serious charge that whereas USOC had a surplus of $1,300,000 in the bank, it ‘could not feed or house the athletes at the Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon.’ And a USOC official charged Byers with sabotaging the 1976 Olympics by taking his organization out of the committee and asking his 664 member schools not to solicit funds for the 1976 games.
Obviously, something had to be done, but the results of previous attempts to unravel this snarl had given no cause for hope. In 1962 President Kennedy had asked General Douglas MacArthur to mediate, in hopes of putting together a respectable American team for the 1964 Olympics, and a sort of truce was patched up, only to dissolve quickly thereafter. In 1963 Kennedy handed the job to Bud Wilkinson, with results even less permanent. Later that year Kennedy invited the professional management firm of Arthur D. Little to try to bring some order out of the chaos, and it accomplished little except laying the philosophical groundwork for Senator John Tunney’s Omnibus Sports Bill of 1973. This in turn became the proposed Amateur Athletic Act of 1974, which we shall be inspecting in just a moment. A Senate committee chaired by Senator Warren Magnuson looked into the troubles after the 1964 Olympics, and in 1967 Vice-President Hubert Humphrey appointed a blue-ribbon panel of five distinguished citizens—Solicitor Archibald Cox, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, Cleveland publisher Thomas Vail and Marine Commandant David Shoup, headed by labor negotiator Theodore Kheel—to knock heads. It failed.
It should not be surprising, therefore, to find that members of Congress, irritated by such intransigeance on the part of the sports community, began bringing in bills which would discipline all parties. The bills about to be cited are quite different from the omnibus bill proposed by Senator Marlow Cook, which dealt with all professional sports; these restrict themselves to the confusion in amateur ranks.
Three distinguished former athletes who were also members of Congress brought in bills: Congressman Bob Mathias of California; Congressman Jack Kemp of New York; Senator John Tunney of California. Congressman James O’Hara of Michigan also proposed a measure which would untangle America’s Olympic problems.
But after preliminary skirmishing, major attention focused on Tunney’s Amateur Athletic Act of 1973, S.2365, which incorporated ideas earlier proposed by Senators James Pearson, Marlow Cook, Mike Gravel and Warren Magnuson. (In 1974 it would become S.3500.) It merits the closest study by anyone concerned about American amateur sports.
If passed, it would create two major bodies, both funded by the same authorization of $1,100,000 a year. Originally the government would also create a permanent fund of up to $50,000,000, provided private sources contributed a like amount, the resulting $100,000,000 to be invested so that yearly interest would be available for constructive sports purposes.
An Amateur Sports Board of five members appointed by the President, with advice and consent of the Senate, unsalaried but entitled to $150 a day while working, plus a per diem. This board would revoke all existing charters and issue new ones, seeing to it that possession of the new charters did not congregate in any one group, as present charters do in the hands of the AAU, which controls eight and possibly nine. The board would also resolve differences that might arise regarding closed and open competitions. Of great importance, the board would wipe the USOC slate clean by appointing nine fresh members to control American participation in the Olympics.
A National Sports Development Foundation governed by sixteen trustees, serving without yearly salary but entitled to $100 a day when working, plus per diem, to be appointed by the board, the trustees to appoint a president, who will make the seventeenth member. The dutie
s of the foundation would be to collect and supervise funds, and to spend ‘not more than $1,000,000 each year’ in the furtherance of physical fitness, health, safety and general sports activity.
It would not be illogical for one to be against the Cook Bill because it established a bureaucracy to control all sports, but to be in favor of the Tunney Bill because it merely sought to unravel complexities in amateur sports. Adverse critics have charged that once the board had cleaned up the Olympics mess it would, like all previous commissions, seek new fields to control, with the inevitable consequence that we would find ourselves with a sports czar, whether we wanted one or not. The Tunney bill passed in the Senate 62-29 but could not reach a vote in the House.
I am impressed by the fact that twice before, Congress has intervened in American sports, each time with dubious results. In 1950 it granted a charter to USOC, which seems to have encouraged that group in its obstinacy. In 1964 it granted a charter to Little League Baseball, which encouraged that organization to make some rather foolish decisions.
Furthermore, certain critics of the Tunney bill have pointed out that all the administrative benefits that might accrue from that bill could just as easily be attained by merely having Congress revise the USOC charter.
One aspect of the Tunney bill merits the closest investigation. Would dictation by the United States government as to how USOC must conduct its affairs make all our teams ineligible for Olympic competition, since it would run counter to the basic Olympic law that national organizing committees must remain free of governmental domination? Many ridicule this apprehension, but Lord Michael Killanin of Ireland, who has succeeded Avery Brundage as president of the IOC, has issued a sharply worded warning. Arthur Gander, president of the international federation governing gymnastics, has said, ‘The AAU is the only body in the United States who can arrange international competition with affiliated federations. Further, the AAU is the only body who selects an Olympic or World Champion team. The AAU has the right to do it. How it does it, it doesn’t bother us, you know.’ And the Marquess of Exeter has replied in answer to a specific question on this matter, ‘The AAU is the affiliated member … and it alone is recognized. Whereas governments naturally have power in their own countries to set up any body that they like, any body set up in opposition to our recognized member (the AAU) would not be acceptable, and any athletes not affiliated to our official body would be ineligible for international competition, including the Olympic Games.’