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In this in-depth look at the heated debates over paying college athletes, Ronald A. Smith starts at the beginning: the first intercollegiate athletics competition—a crew regatta between Harvard and Yale—in 1852, when both teams received an all-expenses-paid vacation from a railroad magnate. This striking opening sets Smith on the path of a story filled with paradoxes and hypocrisies that plays out on the field, in meeting rooms, and in courtrooms—and that ultimately reveals that any insistence on amateurism is invalid, because these athletes have always been paid, one way or another.From that first contest to athletes’ attempts to unionize and California’s 2019 Fair Pay to Play Act, Smith shows that, throughout the decades, undercover payments, hiring professional coaches, and breaking the NCAA’s rules on athletic scholarships have always been part of the game. He explores how the regulation of male and female student-athletes has shifted; how class, race, and gender played a role in these transitions; and how the case for amateurism evolved from a moral argument to one concerned with financially and legally protecting college sports and the NCAA. Timely and thought-provoking, The Myth of the Amateur is essential reading for college sports fans and scholars.

In an era when college football coaches frequently command higher salaries than university presidents, many call for reform to restore the balance between amateur athletics and the educational mission of schools. This book traces attempts at college athletics reform from 1855 through the early twenty-first century while analyzing the different roles played by students, faculty, conferences, university presidents, the NCAA, legislatures, and the Supreme Court. _x000B__x000B_Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform also tackles critically important questions about eligibility, compensation, recruiting, sponsorship, and rules enforcement. Discussing reasons for reform--to combat corruption, to level the playing field, and to make sports more accessible to minorities and women--Ronald A. Smith candidly explains why attempts at change have often failed. Of interest to historians, athletic reformers, college administrators, NCAA officials, and sports journalists, this thoughtful book considers the difficulty in balancing the principles of amateurism with the need to draw income from sporting events.

Over a half-century ago, I was involved in the early discussions of a sport history organization with the principal founder of NASSH, Guy Lewis. I recount the pre-NASSH years and the formation of NASSH including the all-male and physical education origins in a meeting with the National Physical Education Association for Men in 1971. Besides Guy Lewis, others are noted including Marvin Eyler, Carl Bode, Seward Staley, John Betts, Alan Metcalfe, Bruce Bennett, and Max Howell. Three problematic areas are discussed including Canadian–American relations; welcoming women into the organization; and embracing historians, American studies scholars, and others into NASSH. How the Journal of Sport History was created and the acceptance of the NASSH logo, an ancient Greek torch runner, are documented.

Perhaps more than any other two colleges, Harvard and Yale gave form to American intercollegiate athletics--a form that was inspired by the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry overseas, and that was imitated by colleges and universities throughout the United States. Focusing on the influence of these prestigious eastern institutions, this fascinating study traces the origins and development of intercollegiate athletics in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Smith begins with an historical overview of intercollegiate athletics and details the evolution of individual sports--crew, baseball, track and field, and especially football. Then, skillfully setting various sports events in their broader social and cultural contexts, Smith goes on to discuss many important issues that are still relevant today: student-faculty competition for institutional athletic control; the impact of the professional coach on big-time athletics; the false concept of amateurism in college athletics; and controversies over eligibility rules. He also reveals how the debates over brutality and ethics created the need for a central organizing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which still runs college sports today. Sprinkled throughout with spicy sports anecdotes, from the Thanksgiving Day Princeton-Yale football game that drew record crowds in the 1890s to a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt on football violence, this lively, in-depth investigation will appeal to serious sports buffs as well as to anyone interested in American social and cultural history.

Noted sports historian writes on the relationship of the media to college athletics. Chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 by Choice Magazine The phenomenal popularity of college athletics owes as much to media coverage of games as it does to drum-beating alumni and frantic undergraduates. Play-by-play broadcasts of big college games began in the 1920s via radio, a medium that left much to the listener's imagination and stoked interest in college football. After World War II, the rise of television brought with it network-NCAA deals that reeked of money and fostered bitter jealousies between have and have-not institutions. In Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport noted author and sports insider Ronald A. Smith examines the troubled relationship between higher education and the broadcasting industry, the effects of TV revenue on college athletics (notably football), and the odds of achieving meaningful reform. Beginning with the early days of radio, Smith describes the first bowl game broadcasts, the media image of Notre Dame and coach Knute Rockne, and the threat broadcasting seemed to pose to college football attendance. He explores the beginnings of television, the growth of networks, the NCAA decision to control football telecasts, the place of advertising, the role of TV announcers, and the threat of NCAA \"Robin Hoods\" and the College Football Association to NCAA television control. Taking readers behind the scenes, he explains the culture of the college athletic department and reveals the many ways in which broadcasting dollars make friends in the right places. Play-by-Play is an eye-opening look at the political infighting invariably produced by the deadly combination of university administrators, athletic czars, and huge revenue.

Walter Camp, often called the “Father of American Football,” may have stated best the role students played in creating American intercollegiate athletics. “Neither the faculties nor other critics assisted in building the structure of college athletics,” Camp noted, three years after completing his six-year football career at Yale, “it is a structure which students unaided have builded.”¹ Camp did not claim, however, that students were unaided in the efforts to reform the student games. Students, nevertheless, started the process of reform following the second intercollegiate contest. Several years after Yale’s defeat in the first intercollegiate crew meet, Yale men challenged

If the women’s educational model was losing its impact during the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women’s (AIAW’s) decade-long control of women’s sport, there was no comparable model for the participation of African Americans, men or women. While most collegiate African American athletes were in the historically black colleges for the period until the 1970s, their model had been the same traditional commercial-professional model of the dominant “white” institutions of higher learning. By the 1970s, there was a major effort to recruit talented black male athletes by the major northern and southern powers in both basketball and football. Not only