When Hartford Business Journal recruited me from my college newspaper, I wasn’t allowed to consult with a lawyer or an agent. Using some mercenary to improve my negotiating position would have been a violation of the National Newspaper Association policy, which emphasized the purity of soul and lack of filthy lucre in the process.
Actually, there wasn’t much to negotiate, because another part of the policy banned the payment of salary to young journalists, on the theory that the intellectual engagement and privilege of writing for a real, live newspaper was reward enough.
In fact, the Business Journal is forbidden from not only paying me a regular wage or fee, but I can’t even receive a barrel of rum on my desk, or a tattoo parlor visit for the work I do. The education I receive working here is supposed to be enough. If I win a Pulitzer Prize, the paper isn’t even allowed to pay for my mom and dad to come to the ceremony.
There have been several different editors at the Business Journal during my tenure — some better than others. But I couldn’t really leave, when there was one that I didn’t like. According to the National Newspaper Association rules, if I embarrass the paper by leaving, for any reason at all, I’m forbidden from working at another paper for one year. The editors who left? They were free to work anywhere they wanted.
All right, all right. Yes, I made it all up. Except for the part about not getting paidˆ nearly enough.
The scenario didn’t describe my circumstances, but that’s pretty much the way it is for Division I college athletes, trapped in the plantation run by the NCAA. They don’t get paid (except, of course, for that college scholarship, which has a marginal cost to the university of about 15 cents). They aren’t allowed to have competent legal talent or a savvy agent to represent them. They aren’t even allowed to play semi-pro ball for money during the off-season — or even before they’re recruited at all.
And if they transfer from one Division I school to another, thus embarrassing the adults, they are prohibited from playing the next season — unlike their coaches, who are free to roam around for ever-increasing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At least in theory, the colleges are forbidden from offering the recruits anything of any real value, except a line of jive. Only the adults can make a buck on college athletics. Don’t even offer those recruits a stick of gum.
UConn head basketball coach Jim Calhoun is pretending to be peeved at the NCAA for “suspending” him for three games next season for various kinds of murky funny business relating to a former UConn student manager who, in his current role as a professional basketball agent, performed such horrific sins as paying for a recruit’s SAT exam registration fee. The violations are more symptom than disease. Why shouldn’t recruits be wined, dined, offered signing bonuses, sent alluring text messages and provided limo service from the airport?
The kids are cogs in the NCAA monopoly; it is their labor that makes the adults rich, that fuels the beer and shoe sales; that generates millions of dollars of television revenue; that pays the big bucks to coaches and athletic directors.
Professor Andrew Zimbalist at Smith College, one of the leading analysts of the sports plantation, had it about right in his book, “Unpaid Professionals: Commercialization and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports.” He writes: ‘No other industry in the United States manages not to pay its principle producers a wage or salary.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
