NCAA: The real lesson in corporate greed

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

It is not lost on me that one of the founders of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) was Teddy Roosevelt, the first progressive liberal president of the United States.

I have always thought of the NCAA as being dictatorial and inflexible, much like the trends playing out in the federal government, trends that started under the very same President Teddy Roosevelt.

I laugh when people talk about unfairness in business and trot out figures of corporate executives making x times what the average worker makes.

In high school and college sports, the coaches and executives make an infinite amount more than the average worker — the average worker is a slave, working for free and following rigid dictates illegal in any other business (such as being told what to eat and what time to go to bed).

And the NCAA is indeed a business.

According to USA Today (Oct.15, 2012), the NCAA assets have passed a half a billion dollars. Its current president, Mark Emmert, is projected to make $1.6 million per year.

Yet, people shell out money, lots of money, to see the NCAA’s workers (the student-athletes) work under conditions that can only be considered restrictive at best.

You say NCAA serfdom is voluntary? Tell me another route an aspiring and qualified young person can reach professional basketball or football without going through the gulags of the NCAA.

I went to the “Final Four” of basketball this year, since it happened to be in Atlanta and since a friend happened to have two extra tickets which he had gotten in the NCAA’s lottery.

He was willing to sell them to me at face value – $237 each. In order for him to get these, he had had to put his name in the lottery and be willing to have his credit card charged a year ago for the full amount.

Only if he did not “win” the lottery, which takes place in late summer, would his money, which the NCAA had been holding for months, be refunded. Now, in most venues, $237 should get you a pretty good seat. But in the Georgia Dome, with 75,000 other people, we were sitting in a corner, fairly high up and about as far away from the court (a tiny postage stamp in the far distance) as one could be.

Want an adult beverage at this event? Not possible. The NCAA dictates prohibition while you are in their house (although I expect the bourgeois in the sky boxes were not constrained to the same rules as us proletariat in the mere hundreds of dollars seats).

Nope, there was no beer or other alcohol to be found in the place. This worked out pretty good for Coca-Cola, headquartered less than a mile away and one of the major sponsors.

We were all constrained to guzzling Coke products by the gallon with our spicy nachos. In the house of the NCAA, the beverage concession is a monopoly.

So why is it OK to have an organization that pulls in millions, pays its coaches and executives millions and treats its regular workers, the 400,000 players (a number they announced at the games), like slaves all without nary a peep from the general public?

Further, why does the general public bad-mouth corporations who pay their employees according to the laws of the land, treat them as dictated by the laws of the land, and have vast legal departments just to make sure they are doing so?

And the issue is even deeper than this. Why was it OK, in the last half of the last century, to consider it a breakthrough and a privilege to allow the descendants of the slaves of the 1860s to become the modern slaves of the NCAA?

Why has the African-American community not seen the similarities and protested the indignity?

Hypocrisy, in any color, thy name is sports fans. Yes, folks, you are no better than the Romans that watched the Christians being fed to the lions.

I say you because I have never been a sports fan. I just don’t get it. Yes, I have attended many sporting events, including the Olympics when they came to Atlanta 17 years ago, the Indianapolis 500 and countless professional baseball games (my wife is a rabid fan).

I guess it is a “bucket list” thing. However, I do not follow any sports and can’t see why anyone would waste their time doing so. Yet, I concede it is your privilege to do so if you choose.

But I will close with this. Think before you criticize businesses which follow the law, pay their employees according to the law, pay their taxes, and do everything the government dictates.

And then ask yourself, if you choose to criticize the only thing that makes an economy work – business – why you then turn a blind eye when it comes to collegiate sports whose workers are paid nothing and who are controlled by rules intolerable and illegal elsewhere?

Why do we (me included) willingly pay outrageous sums to enter a tightly controlled environment and watch these unpaid workers (if you happened to remember to bring your binoculars) do something meaningless in the greater scheme of things, while we sit on our behinds?

It is time we examine our values – and the NCAA's.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.