Playing, Getting Paid, and Getting Played
For the Love of Amateur Athletics
Made for the Little Leagues
“The outcome of a game will never outlive the pride of belonging, the experience of playing, the friends and the fun.”
— From the website of Official Little League Baseball
The Big Leagues were never really within my reach. At my first at-bat at my first little-league ballgame ever, I struck out swinging on a slow, underhand pitch that came in straight, right over home plate. Even at the green age of five, pipsqueak I was, I knew how humiliating it was to strikeout like that. I walked back to the dugout red in the face with shame, tears welling in my eyes. My father patted my shoulder, and said, “Don’t let it get to you. You’ll hit it next time.”
He was right. I did manage, somehow, against all odds, to get a hit—albeit a soft, dribbling grounder that barely made it to the pitcher’s mound. But, that was plenty good for me. I turned to face my team’s dugout with a sort of How-D’ya-Like-Me-Now expression painted across my face. I’m sure Babe Ruth felt a similar level of pride when he broke 700 home runs. My teammates, however, were a little less than impressed with me and rightly so. I distinctly remember one of my teammates, my friend to this day, Thomas, yelling at me, “Run, you dummy,” so run I did… right down the third-base line. I got called out, and slumped my way back to the dugout, head hanging in shame. That is how, at the age of five, when other kids my age were still aspirational astronauts, firemen, and pirates, I came to terms with the harsh fact that I would never achieve my dreams of playing in the Big League. I would forever remain an amateur athlete, but that was okay.
Amateur athletics, after all, hold a special place in the American heart. Many of us have mental Rockwell paintings of our rec-league days when mom and dad, brother and sister, and occasionally grandma and grandpa, would stand on the sidelines and cheer for us no matter how well—or how poorly—we played. Sure, every youth league had its retinue of overzealous fans who would jeer the officials and goad the kids, but the overwhelming spirit of youth athletics was to encourage a love of the game rather than a dog-eat-dog variety of cutthroat competition. As the official body of Little League Baseball remarks, “the outcome of a game will never outlive the pride of belonging, the experience of playing, the friends and the fun.” How Rockwellian is that?
Of course, there is a flip side. Most people who look at a Rockwell painting are aware, in some sense, that it invokes an idealized sort of nostalgia for a more innocent world that no longer exists (if it ever really even existed to begin with). The same might be said of amateur athletics in the United States. Whether it is gambling rings surrounding youth rec-leagues or college athletes receiving money under table, it is becoming increasingly clear that our idea of amateur sports being played purely for the love of the game might be little more than a figment of our imaginations.
As truth would have it, amateur athletics have a long and troubled past in this country, often reflecting the controversies and conflicts of our times. Whether it’s violence and cronyism, or exploitation and corruption, amateur athletics have occasionally revealed the worse demons of our national nature. What, then, can they reveal about our better angels?
The Spirit of American Amateur Athlete
The baptism of American youths into sportsdom has, in some ways, been a part of the American spirit since the nation’s very founding. It was Thomas Jefferson, the same man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, who also recommended leaving “all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading” (Sounds sort of like a premonition of an after-school sports program). Jefferson was, of course, influenced by the mentality of his time, namely the classically inspired ideal of mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body, but the centrality of athletics to developing the American psyche has persisted through the ages.
Later on in American history, for example, in the decades following the Civil War, the impulse for amateur athletics came not from Greco-Roman ideals but from the popular ideology of Social Darwinism. As intellectuals at American universities worried themselves over the closing of the frontier and its negative effects on American vigor and power, their students found a new arena of physical competition in the athletic arena—little surprise then that the first intercollegiate athletic event was played on November 6th, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. Rutgers beat Princeton handily, by the way, 6–4.
The game that Rutgers and Princeton played, a variation on rugby, shares only a vague likeness with its contemporary descendant, football. Positions were fluid—no tight ends, quarterbacks, or wide receivers. Pads were nonexistent (imagine that, amidst today’s controversy surrounding concussions in the NFL). Games were all but unofficiated, and plays didn’t end until the player at the bottom of the dog pile shouted, “Down!” Football was a new frontier, uncivilized, dangerous, and wild, but the American “civilizing mission,” so strongly felt in the late 19th century, left no wilderness untamed, not even football.
Walter Camp, a man who fell in love with the pigskin sport during his time as captain of the Yale team in the 1870’s and 80's, led the charge in bringing some order to the gridiron game. Camp devised a regulation playing field and many of the positions we still know today, but the game still remained a violent one with clear martial roots.
In 1892, for example, Harvard deployed against its rival, Yale, a play called the “Flying Wedge,” which was inspired by a Napoleonic battle tactic. The play was so violent that the editorial board of the New York Times was moved to write an argument against it, describing “half a ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds.” Surgeons often had to be called onto the field in the play’s aftermath. The President of Harvard, Charles Eliot, found the game of football so repulsively violent and dangerous that he put it to a vote of the faculty to ban it. But it was not just the physicality of football that concerned Eliot; it was the moral lessons it imparted that he detested most. “Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football,” he declared, “That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.” That football survived its early years as a collegiate sport has more to do with the rebellious spirit of students and alumni than the official sanctioning of colleges. In 1903, Harvard graduates paid for the construction of Harvard Stadium with no university funding and, in 1905, hired a coach, Bill Reid, with a salary two times that of an average full professor.
Concerns surrounding football were not unfounded. The game was deadly. In 1905, some 20 players died of injuries sustained during games and practice alike. Accounts of these deaths are gruesome. Randall McLeod, for example, had his intestines ruptured and passed away soon after. Many other players were knocked unconscious in the violent, padless, scrums, never to awaken. As an interesting—but still morbid—side note, one of football’s casualties in 1905 was an 18 year old girl. The Daily Press of Newport News, VA reported, a “Miss Bernadette Decker died this morning from a malady resembling malignant peritonitis, due to injuries received in a game of football.” The game was also immersed in the sorts of sordid, corrupt rackets that defined the Gilded Age of American History. McClure’s magazine discovered that various college football teams had “phantom players” on their rosters, and a muckraking journalist uncovered a $100,000 slush fund at Yale for Walter Camp—that’s about $2.5 million in 2017.
College football’s problems were so serious that they attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt who apocryphally vowed to either “civilize or destroy the sport.”
The real story of Roosevelt’s intervention on behalf of collegiate football was—perhaps unsurprisingly—somewhat less noble than the fairy-tale story of a president stepping in to save America’s favorite game from itself. Roosevelt was a Harvard alum and he liked to see Harvard win (even more so, now that his son Theodore Jr. was playing for the Crimson). On October 9th, 1905, he invited to the Whitehouse head coaches and representatives of the three football powerhouses—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—to talk some football.
“In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!” In 1903, the president told an audience, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
At Roosevelt’s insistence the three schools issued public statements that college sports “must reform to survive,” and agreed to found and immediately join a new organization by the name of the National Collegiate Athletic Association along with 68 other schools. The first secretary of the NCAA came from Haverford, but he promptly resigned in favor of the new Harvard Coach, Bill Reid, who put into place rules that favored Harvard’s style of play over Yale’s. As Taylor Branch of The Atlantic puts it, “At a stroke, Roosevelt saved football and dethroned Yale.” Thus in 1905 the NCAA came into being.
Professional Amateurs
“Our purpose is to govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount.”
—NCAA Mission Statement
Go to just about any D1 campus around the country, and you will quickly discover a rare breed of celebrity—the College Athlete. Campus bookstores sell flashy posters of their likenesses, and souvenir shops sell t-shirts with their names emblazoned boldly on the back. One popular bar serving students at the University of Virginia even cordons off a section for athletes on busy nights, with velvet rope and bouncer, delivering them the true VIP experience. College athletes, for good or for bad, are a big deal.
So are collegiate athletics, now more than ever before thanks to the NCAA.
College sports are big business. In the 2011–2012 fiscal year, the most recent year for which audited numbers are available, the NCAA raked in the chips, totaling in at $871.6 million. More recent numbers are expected to inch ever so much closer to $1 billion, with an estimated $912 million in 2015. College athletes don’t just generate big bucks for the NCAA; they also bring in absurd amounts of cash for their own schools. The University of Oregon, for example, earns annually $196 million from its athletic teams.
Meanwhile, in spite of their celebrity treatment around campuses, the athletes receive, whose skills and effort generate the revenue, receive no reward themselves. Of course there have been instances when college athletes receive rewards under the table, like the notorious scandal that broke surrounding the star Reggie Bush during his time at USC, where he raked in so-called “improper benefits” in the forms of housing, airfare, and limousines calculated to equal an extravagant and astonishing $280 thousand. Such benefits are obviously against NCAA regulations, but a growing chorus argues—no longer all that controversially—that perhaps these athletes should see some of the fruits of their labor.
Even the very term “Student-Athlete,” which the NCAA offers as some sort of platonic ideal that even Jefferson would smile at, is troubling. Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist, describes its origins as a legal concoction of NCAA lawyers to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”
Taylor Branch of The Atlantic sees the phantom of colonialism in the NCAA, describing “a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust.” Others occasionally catch a “whiff of the plantation” but regardless of the true nature of the exploitation in the NCAA, it is difficult to deny it’s there.
The question is, what are we to do? Are spectators like you and me complicit in this racket? It seems so, and that is no doubt troubling, but no easy solution reveals itself to us. Do we stop watching? Do we pay college athletes? Do we abolish the NCAA? Who’s to say? Like other facets of the American experience, foundations of exploitation haunt us and are not easily overcome. Is there any room for optimism, or is our love affair with amateur athletics doomed to negation by the nabobs of negativity?
Back to the Little Leagues
What about the little leagues?
In recent years, even the little leagues have come under the siege of nefarious forces. In 2012, nine youth football coaches were arrested in South Florida for gambling on their own games. In Roanoke, VA, a former railroad hub in Coal Country, a similar story emerged, as heated brawls broke out in the aftermath of rec-league games. Heated tempers over lost bets, it turned out, were likely the cause. So not even little league athletics have been able to avoid a loss of innocence.
Is anything holy anymore?
I think it is, especially in amateur athletics. It’s just a matter of where you direct your gaze. Sure negative fans, locker-room controversies, paid-off officials, greedy administrations, and inevitable injuries might detract from some of the value of amateur sports, but look deeper and you’ll still find what makes them good.
The team spirit, the striving for physical excellence, the enjoyment of pure simple fun—these are values that we learn from amateur sports. In more ways than one, the true nature of athletics is most visible on the little league field, where athletic competition is about athletic competition. As Benny Rodriguez, the little-league all-star from The Sandlot says, “Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking. Just have fun.”
(An earlier edition of this article stated that Reggie Bush received benefits with a value of $280 million. This figure was incorrect. The correct figure was $280,000. We apologize for the error.)
