College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA's Amateur Myth

The heart of the authors' argument is that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) continues to maintain ""that corporate college sport is education rather than business"" and that the educational establishment ""has rallied around the myth."" Sack, a professor of sociology and management at the Univ. of New Haven in Conn. and a former college football star, and Staurowsky, who teaches sports sciences at Ithaca College in N.Y. and is a former college athletic director, finger the NCAA as their villain. They accuse the organization of pretending to embrace amateurism while fighting for professionalism during the past half century; of helping colleges avoid suits by seriously injured athletes who were being used for financial gain; and of allowing schools to give athletic scholarships to students who were unqualified academically. The authors further charge the NCAA with sabotaging women's sports programs in an attempt ""effectively to deny women equal educational opportunities."" Their solution is a two-tiered system that would allow certain colleges to field semipro teams and to pay their players accordingly (as some institutions have been doing for decades), while other schools would have strictly amateur teams. The historical perspective provided in this well-organized study helps readers to better understand how the present system came about. (July)