More NCAA Discrimination Against Athletes With Stupid Amateurism Rules
When I was a senior at Princeton, Brooke Shields was a freshman. At the time of her matriculation, she was already a highly paid professional model and actress (Blue Lagoon). No one ever suggested that she not be allowed to participate in the amateur Princeton Triangle Club shows because she was already a professional.
When I was a sophomore at Princeton, I used to sit in my small dining hall (the now-defunct Madison Society) and listen to a guy named Stanley Jordan play guitar in a really odd way. Jordan was already a professional musician (a few years after he graduated he would release an album that was #1 on the jazz charts for nearly a year). Despite the fact that Jordan was a professional and already earned a lot of money from his music, no one ever suggested that he not be allowed to participate in a number of amateur Princeton music groups and shows.
My daughter is an art major at a school called Art Center in Pasadena (where she upsets my preconceived notions of art school by working way harder than I did in college). She and many, if not most of her fellow students have sold their art for money already, but no one as ever suggested that they not be allowed to participate in school art shows and competitions.
A football player for the University of Central Florida has lost his place in the team, and hence his scholarship, due to his YouTube channel. UCF kicker Donald De La Haye runs "Deestroying," which has over 90,000 subscribers and has amassed 5 million views, thus far. It's not the channel itself that cost him his scholarship, though -- it's the fact that he has athletics-related videos on a monetized account.
The NCAA saw his videos as a direct violation to its rule that prohibits student athletes from using their status to earn money. UCF's athletics department negotiated with the association, since De La Haye sends the money he earns from YouTube to his family in Costa Rica. The association gave him two choices: he can keep the account monetized, but he has to stop referencing his status as a student athlete and move the videos wherein he does. Or, he has to stop monetizing his account altogether. Since De La Haye chose not to accept either option, he has been declared inelegible to play in any NCAA-sanctioned competition, effectively ending his college football career.
When I was a sophomore at Princeton, my sister was a Freshman. We were sitting in my dorm the first week of school, watching US Open tennis as we were big tennis fans at the time. My sister told me that she still had not heard from her fourth roommate yet, which was sort of odd. About that time, the semifinals of the US Open were just beginning and would feature an upstart named Andrea Leand. My sister says, hey -- that's the name of my roommate. And so it was. Andrea was a professional tennis player, just like Brook Shields was already a professional actress and Stanley Jordan was already a professional musician. But unlike these others, Andrea was not allowed to pursue her talent at Princeton.
I don't know if student athletes should be paid by the school or not. We can leave that aside as a separate question. People of great talent attend universities and almost all of them -- with the exception of athletes -- are allowed to monetize that talent at the same time they are using it on campus. Athletes should have the same ability.
Postscript: I wrote about this years ago in Forbes. As I wrote there:
The whole amateur ideal is just a tired holdover from the British aristocracy, the blue-blooded notion that a true "gentleman" did not actually work for a living but sponged off the local [populace] while perfecting his golf or polo game. These ideas permeated British universities like Oxford and Cambridge, which in turn served as the model for many US colleges. Even the Olympics, though, finally gave up the stupid distinction of amateur status years ago, allowing the best athletes to compete whether or not someone has ever paid them for anything.
In fact, were we to try to impose this same notion of "amateurism" in any other part of society, or even any other corner of University life, it would be considered absurd. Do we make an amateur distinction with engineers? Economists? Poets?...
In fact, of all the activities on campus, the only one a student cannot pursue while simultaneously getting paid is athletics. I am sure that it is just coincidence that athletics happens to be, by orders of magnitude, far more lucrative to universities than all the other student activities combined.
