Big 12 athletic conference Commissioner Bob Bowlsby made headlines recently when he blasted the National Collegiate Athletic Association as an exploitative sham organization that turns a blind eye to schools who win by cheating. Both of those accusations are, of course, true, bordering on undeniably so.
But as to the question of whether college athletes should be paid, Bowlsby was less certain. The commish postulated that if colleges are going to pay football players to tackle and basketball players to dribble in front of adoring crowds, we also should pay field hockey players to ... um ... run? Do they run in field hockey? I'm going to say "yes," but then again, that's kind of the point.
"It is hard to justify paying student-athletes in football and men's basketball and not recognizing the significant effort that swimmers and wrestlers and lacrosse players and track athletes all put in," said Bowlsby. "We have both a legal obligation and a moral obligation to do for female student-athletes and male Olympic sports athletes just exactly what we do for football and basketball student-athletes. I don't think it's even debatable."
Well, excuse me for debating the undebatable, but I don't think it's even debatable that he's wrong.
The injustice in not paying top-level football and basketball players isn't that hard work empirically deserves a monetary offset. There are thousands of people devoting their lives to being great chess players, too, but that doesn't mean they all deserve a paycheck. The "moral and legal" problem is that the fat cats at the NCAA and their member colleges are raking in the dough while the young men generating the revenue are struggling to pay for Taco Bell. Irony is a kid not being able to afford his own replica basketball jersey at the neighborhood bodega.
The market for field hockey jerseys, in contrast, is more "mom and dad" than mom-and-pop.
Now, if some video game maker can find a way to make a profit on EA SPORTS NCAA COLLEGE SQUASH '14: THE SQUASHENING, then by all means, cut those squash players a check. If 15,000 people will show up to watch a water polo match, sign those guys up for their stipend. But until that happens, let's compare apples to apples. All athletic endeavors are not created equal, and public demand for a sport -- unfairly or not -- matters.
The error in logic demonstrated by Mr. Bowlsby is the same type of misguided attempt to feign "fairness" that drives many bleeding hearts in myriad different crusades. Like sports, society simply values some talents more highly than others. If I'm the world's foremost origami artist, for example, that's a tremendous feather in my neatly folded paper hat. But if someone doesn't value that skill enough to pay me for it, then all my hard work is worth no more than personal pride and a few carefully crafted reams.
Is that fair? Of course not. Certainly not to the swans, anyway. But a market requires both a seller and a buyer; without the latter you're just a guy with a neat, worthless skill. And when it comes to college athletics, people will pay to sit in a skybox and watch college football, but they won't show up to watch 19-year-olds pole vault. That may not be fair, but who ever said life was?
An athlete is supposed to play for the love of the game, and I'm betting most of them do. College field hockey players voluntarily subjugate themselves to the NCAA's draconian rules because doing so gives them a chance to showcase their hard-fought skillset. For those college athletes who value money more than the personal fulfillment of swimming or wrestling or playing lacrosse or running track, maybe it's time to switch sports.
NATE STRAUCH IS A REPORTER AND COLUMNIST WITH THE SHERMAN-DENISON (TEXAS) HERALD DEMOCRAT.
Commentary on 08/02/2014