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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.

A well-constructed and reasoned debunking of the mythology of amateurism in for-profit NCAA athletics For the last 60-plus-years, as the revenue-generating capacity of Power Five football and men's basketball has dramatically increased, NCAA Division I Power Five football and men's basketball players (college profit-athletes) have been economically exploited, their labor has been severely restricted. To mask this inequity, the NCAA and its members created, disseminated, and embedded a fictitious \"collegiate model of athletics\" established and repeatedly modified for the benefit of member schools, designed to ensure profit-athletes were denied employment status and just compensation for their athletic labor. The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes: An Amateurism That Never Was provides a comprehensive historical, sociological, legal, financial, and managerial argument for the reclassification of profit-athletes as employees. Such a reclassification would permit profit-athletes to gain not only fair financial compensation but also equal access to educational benefits that have been promised but systematically denied. The authors trace how Power Five college sports have morphed into a hyper professionalized and commercialized sport-business enterprise. They provide evidence that at least since 1956 the NCAA's amateurism has been a collusive, exploitative, and racialized \"pay for play\" scheme that disproportionately affects Black profit-athletes. The authors cut through the institutional doublespeak of approved benefits, cost-of-attendance stipends, or name, image, likeness (NIL) collectives to lay bare the immorality of Power Five college sports. The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes makes the case that profit-athletes (and their representatives) must have the right to unionize and freely negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with management (e.g., NCAA, Power Five conferences and athletic departments). In addition, this book offers a forward-thinking structure in which individual labor contracts, or a potential collective bargaining agreement, address profit-athlete compensation and working conditions.

This book is unique in that it offers the first truly rigorous application of economic principles to its subject. The authors analyse: * the economic literature on sporting leagues * the demand for professional team sports * the players' labour market. Amongst the topics discussed are the US system of franchising and draft picks and the chances of their being adopted elsewhere, the implications of player strikes, the onset of pay-per-view and digital television, and the relatively new notion that sport is a business like any other.