Do as we say, not as we do

Sporting News, The, Feb 5, 1996 by Russ Gough

Call me old-fashioned, idealistic, even naive. But of all the pressing issues facing college sports, none are more critical than sportsmanship and ethics.

Problem is, every time sportsmanship and ethics are about to get their rightful -- and necessary -- place in the spotlight, they get benched in favor of college sports' most dominant topic: money.

That's precisely what happened at the recent NCAA Convention in Dallas. Despite the fact that the convention's official centerpiece theme was "Integrity: Sportsmanship and Ethical Conduct in Inter-collegiate Athletics," the real name of the game in Dallas was -- surprise, surprise -- how to make, control and divvy up the almighty dollar.

Division I-A schools had begun to voice discontent with the one-school, one-vote policy that limited their control over issues like scholarships, scheduling and post-season playoffs (read: money). So with a promise to smaller schools that they would continue to receive sumptuous slices of the billion-dollar television-contract pie, the NCAA delegates voted overwhelmingly for a new legislative structure that gives each NCAA division the power to shape its own destiny.

So, for example, the way has been paved for major football schools to usher in a national football playoff, and they won't have to share millions in new revenue with smaller schools.

Wallstreet would be proud of the events in Dallas: Money not only talked, it voted. Decisively and brashly.

Many college sports fans, however, are not proud. We are embarrassed, if not ashamed, primarily because this high-stakes wheeling and dealing was carried out in the name of amateurism and education -- at a convention whose theme was supposed to be sportsmanship and ethics.

Let me be perfectly clear: There is nothing inherently unsportsmanlike or unethical -- or even anti-educational -- about college sports contests generating millions of dollars. The reality is that big-time college sports are wildly popular in and out of the university setting, serve important institutional purposes (as any big-time president will attest) and require a bundle of money to operate.

But it is flagrantly wrong for NCAA leaders and university presidents to continue calling the name of the big-time college game amateurism, when every college sports fan in this country knows the primary force driving and shaping the game is money.

Let's face it. What continues to undermine college sports' integrity more than anything else is not the big money but the big lie; professionalism under the pretense of amateurism. Commercial exploitation hiding behind a veil of academic ideals.

The problem is one of dishonesty.

This dishonesty is precisely what made one particular vote on the NCAA convention floor so brazenly unsportsmanlike and unethical. While schools voted overwhelmingly in the name of their own financial interests, they did not do so, even in a small way, for student athletes. A piece of legislation that would have allowed student athletes to work, (like any other deserving American) to their heart's and pocketbook's content during the offseason was defeated with a resounding do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do attitude.

That student athletes continue to be treated so unfairly under the aegis of amateurism is simply unconscionable.

To appreciate the absurd heights we've reached with this hypocrisy, consider what a university president wrote about commercialism in college football nearly 60 years ago: "Here is our supreme problem -- that of honesty. Our colleges and universities are supposedly the source of our social morality and idealism. From these institutions we hurl thunderbolts at the corruptions of politics and the dishonesties of business . have professors and college presidents to denounce the deceits of others while afraid to expose the evasions of their own athletics?"

What's even more striking is the president's prescription for restoring honesty and respectability to college sports. He urged schools to bring football "up to the moral level now maintained by professional football and baseball" by legitimizing what to that point were under-the-table subsidies to athletes -- in other words, by bringing these subsidies above the table and calling them athletic scholarships.

What the wise president saw all too clearly 60 years ago is that the ideal of amateurism would need to be sacrificed for the sake of restoring honesty and integrity to the halls of higher learning.

My point isn't that schools should begin paying athletes over and above the value of their' scholarships. I'm arguing that the NCAA should own up to the hypocrisy, should stop talking and legislating as though big-time sports were amateur and should allow athletes to work and conduct personal business as they see fit.

That's the right thing to do, that's one of the primary ways to restore integrity to college sports, and that's what should have dominated discussions in Dallas.

Russ Gough is a professor of ethics at Pepperdine University. His new book, "Character is Everything: Promoting Ethical Excellence in Sports" (Harcourt Brace) is due out in july. His e-mail address is rgough@pepperdine.edu.