Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

            This is the title of a popular love song from my youth, and I take it as my title here to express my confusion and frustration with the rules controlling what it means to be an amateur athlete in America today. I cannot claim to fully understand the rules and laws currently governing amateur sports, but I can say that I think I am unhappy with them.

            Back in the 1920s Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals because it was discovered that he had played what was then called “semi-pro” baseball and was thus not a true “amateur”. When I was in college players/students got scholarships of various types and worths depending on which Universities or schools they played. None of the monies went directly to the players/students. Over the years the rules governing such matters gradually changed by slowly allowing students to receive more and more monetary rewards for their labors.

            As time went bye the NCAA and other regulatory organizations slowly adjusted their rules to accommodate the changing situations in the athletic and business worlds. Somewhere along the line it was decided that it is unfair to ask college athletes/students to put in so many hours, efforts, and years for good old “Siwash” without getting any recompense. This makes a certain amount of sense.

When I was playing, I would have thought I was getting a good deal if I got my education and board and room while I was playing sports for my Alma Mater to be. Today, however, it is considered unfair for schools to “use” students/players without compensating them. Afterall, the school gets a great deal of publicity from its sports teams, and the players might be said to be working for them for nothing. Although board, room, and tuition do not sound like nothing to me, today it would seem to many that this is a kind of “slavery” or at least some sort of serious exploitation.

As near as I can tell, today college athletes can make their own deals with various sports clothing companies without mentioning their school affiliation. Thus, they make their own business deals on the basis of their own abilities, without even mentioning the school for which they play. On the surface this sounds like a pretty good solution to a long-standing problem. It takes the school out of the picture entirely. 

Thus, the student athletes get recompensed for their ability by the sports clothing company without even mentioning the school. EXCEPT for the fact that the student/player wears the uniform of his/or her school, and thus “advertises” it surreptitiously. He or she also makes the team famous or infamous as the case may be. Once the student athlete “graduates”, which hardly ever happens anymore, then the relationship with the uniform company may actually end. As you, or she or he can see, it has all become incredibly complicated, and in my mind unfortunate.

Today’s top collegiate sport stars have become a business unto themselves. Perhaps this is as it should be in order to minimize the possibilities of exploitation, but somehow it all seems wrong to me. Wrong educationally because schools are supposed to stand for education, and as I long time professor I think this is as it should be. Sports should be strictly “extra” and free of monetary connections. I am, of course, hopelessly old fashioned in this regard. Today’s arrangement of shifting the financial arrangements to being between the athlete and the business seems like a sensible solution.

I worry that these things will continue to evolve in the direction of today’s professional sports, which is fine for professionals but in my mind wrong for education, and along the way I wish somehow the academic institutions could stay out of it. What a college athlete does with his or her fame should be up to him or her, and I guess that is actually what it has come down to today. But now it appears that the players are “using” the schools to advance their own careers.

A lot of this hoopla began because some folks were worried that schools were exploiting student athletes. Now it seems the opposite is happening. Today student players are exploiting schools for their own personal benefit in the name of “free enterprise.” As both a long-time athlete and long-time professor I am of course “Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered” by all these issues and changes. For now, I just watch the games, root for my teams, and hope for the future. I guess I still cling to the outmoded Olympic motto of amateur sports.         

CHRISTIAN FAITH AND HUMAN BORDERS (Wed. 12 noon EST)

         This ZOOM CLASS will explore the notion of borders as it is developed in in my book Borderland Theology. Part one examines the whole notion of God’s activity in the world. This theme begins to unfold in the Hebrew Scriptures’ story of the Hebrew peoples’ search for their own country and continues in the Gospels story of Jesus’ Incarnation into the human world. It continues to do so in the rest of the New Testament as the Gospel message spreads around the ancient world. God was active in the human world, crossing and eliminating borders, all along.

            The second part of the book examines the spread of Christianity throughout world history, the development of the Christian faith in Latin America (Mexico and along the Mexico Border) and the work of BorderLinks, an organization dedicated to educating North Americans about the US/Mexico border. The book concludes with a challenge to all Americans, Christians, and those seeking a better world for everyone to ponder the notion of borders in every area of life and to find ways to put their findings into action. It is important that “The Word become flesh.”

            Much of the information and challenge in this book arose from my own and Mari’s work with the organization known as BorderLinks. It begins with a foreword by Rick-Ufford Chase, the founder and longtime director of BoderLinks’ mission. We, together, were able to make something of a difference for the Border people.

This class will probably begin near the first of February.