College athletes were always workers, not amateurs: Telander

CHICAGO - I remember when the feeling hit me like a sledgehammer. It was the fall of 1970, and I was on the field in Ohio Stadium in Columbus with my Northwestern teammates, looking up at the red-tinged crowd of 80,000 raging Ohio State fans, seething for fulfillment. It whacked with its simplicity: these people want me to die.

I might have chuckled.

Playing for glory, not a paycheck

Boom. Fact. Reality. (Okay, maybe they only wanted me to be trampled.)

But I knew I wasn’t an amateur, playing for fun and healthiness. I was a worker. I was a fairly skilled one with a job to do. I was an actor in a high-priced, high-stakes, largely unscripted play in which no one knew the ending. (Buckeye fans, of course, were praying for an annihilation.) People had paid big bucks to be entertained, invigorated, and I was there to help make the event as exciting as possible.

Both teams were undefeated in the Big Ten, and the winner of this game would likely go on to the Rose Bowl, the only bowl game then allowed in the conference. Rex Kern, John Brockington, and Jack "They Call Me Assassin" Tatum starred for the Nuts. We Wildcats were led by Mike Adamle and teamwork. We were ahead at halftime, and the rest I won’t go into.

The point is, in this country, where the founding fathers chose democracy and capitalism as two of the societal norms, people get paid for the work they do. That simple. Unless you’re a volunteer, you get paid.

But we athletes weren’t volunteers, and we didn’t get paid. We couldn’t get paid. If we did we’d be thrown off the team and likely out of college, if not prosecuted by the law. We were amateurs. All you had to do was ask the NCAA.

It was always crazy. It couldn’t hold. And it didn’t.

The dam finally breaks

Last Friday, a federal judge signed off on an agreement that lets, or in a sense forces, colleges to pay "amateur" athletes for the first time. All the complicated, propped-up, circular, totally b.s. rules that supported the beloved-by-the-public notion that big-time college athletes are just amateurs taking a brief respite from the malt shop have crumbled.

It starts July 1. And all I can say is, bring it on!

The dyke had been cracking since 2014 when former UCLA star basketball player Ed O’Bannon won a ruling against the NCAA on video game image usage. In 2021, name, image, and likeness freedom for athletes seeped out of the courtroom. Now the ocean has flooded forth. It took the courts to do it, because the NCAA bigshots have fought like mad rodents against athlete freedom. Name, image, likeness, paychecks from schools, endorsements, investments, on and on—the athletes are now free to profit like U.S. citizens. Plus, there are damages to be paid to athletes going back to 2016.

Is all this chaotic? You bet. Who gets what? What conferences benefit? It’s a mess. But there’s only one reason for that: the NCAA, with all its officious, gray-haired, suit-wearing, phony-to-the-hilt leaders, defending amateurism for over a century like Smaug defending his mountain of gold.

In a way, it was Smaug’s gold—for the athletic directors, coaches, assistants, administrators, TV networks, advertisers, boosters. But not for the players. Not the entertainers. Not the workers.

I wrote the book on this—literally

The fraud was so brazen and indefensible to me that I wrote a book about it titled, "The Hundred Yard Lie: The Corruption of College Football and What We Can Do to Stop It." My solution was simple: call what the players do work and let them share in the revenue. The book came out in 1989, and Michigan’s legendary coach Bo Schembechler had this to say about it: "Telander’s a loser. He’s been a loser all his life."

(Rick Telander)

A second and third edition of the book came out through the years, and with changes, a fourth edition in 2020 re-titled "The College Football Problem." Oh, have the NCAA bigshots fought against paying players. Now, after being thrashed by the legal system, they act as if they like it. It’s "a new beginning," said NCAA president Charlie Baker, maybe with a twisted smile. Phonies, they are.

Consider that after he was no longer the iron-fisted director of the NCAA, as he had been for over a quarter-century, Walter Byers wrote in 1995 that the NCAA’s repressiveness "is the plantation mentality resurrected." Wow. It was pitiful of him to say that when he no longer mattered.

College sports will march on

At any rate, fear not, worried fans and gamblers, college sports will carry on. A pay scale and collective bargaining and maybe even a union will come someday. No matter. Michigan and Texas and Alabama and LSU and Florida and Southern Cal and The Ohio State University will still win big. Eventually, people might even call the players what they are, young pros. The athletes’ affiliation with colleges might even fade, except for the colors, the stadiums and the fan bases. And the money.

I mean, think of it. When was the last time a star college quarterback was held out of a game because he flunked a midterm?

My only gripe? How about some far-back football pay, youngsters? Us damaged old boys could be pigs at the trough, too. Wonder what the Supreme Court might say about that.

Dig deeper:

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