Accent on Living

FOR some years now, the athletics departments of colleges and universities have prospered through trade associations of their own devising. By means of conferences and leagues, usually regional in their composition, the colleges can apply the standards of higher education to such vexing questions as a common policy toward TV sponsorship, division of gate receipts, spring training, and special courses for mentally retarded athletes.

Nothing is more conducive to poor budgetry and administrative practices than hit-or-miss remuneration of amateur athletes. The conferences have drawn up precise regulations concerning amateurism which enable deans and department chairmen to know exactly what rules their college will violate; and a system of “lines” — payments of a small fraction of the gate receipts into a common fund — keeps the educators on the alert in making sure that the violations are financially worthwhile. Employee morale is improved, also, when the whole squad realizes that the higher salaries must necessarily go to the player who can produce the most publicity and the man with demonstrated drawing power at the box office, rather than to what used to be loosely termed the “deserving student,” a misnomer in any case with its unfortunate implication of curricular interests other than athletic. The deserving student no longer encumbers the amateur payroll, and with him there vanished also the sporadic efforts by alumni groups and overzealous individuals to buy for the college, often at extravagant stipends, promising young amateurs of their own discovery.

Unider conference rule, stability and order obtain today in college football and basketball, sports formerly ravaged by unbridled competition and laissez-faire individualism. Berserk College can compute to a dollar the size of the payroll that the Wingding School of Mines will field against it in the annual Homecoming Day classic between these traditional rivals, and determine whether the gate receipts will justify a comparable outlay or whether an altogether now traditional rival should be found and given a trial two-year contract. A conference squabble is pending, for example, between Hapless Polytechnic and Nirvana Institute over cheerleaders’ wages, and either of these teams might offer a low-budget solution to Berserk’s Homecoming problem, should a change become desirable. And shall State schedule its Founder’s Day classic with State Teachers for the same day that TV will carry the Berserk-Wingding classic? Is it permissible for Berserk to play its own farm club, Berserk Aggies, and if not, bow big a fine would the conference impose?

For all such questions the conference has long since perfected its own code. For the purposes of the employer group — a term used here to describe the college presidents, deans, professors, coaches, concessionaires, and other beneficiaries of the conference system — the code has indeed justified the expectations of its supporters.

From the point of view of the employee group — the workers, wage earners, players, or however one terms them — it was inevitable that they should seek, sooner or later, a place in the ranks of organized labor. It was all very well in the early days of bigtime sports for an outstanding player to be paid a high salary for ushering at the local movie theater or for an occasional job of baby-sitting or lawn mowing. But in such inflationary times as these, the amount of takehome pay becomes the prime consideration not only for the upper-bracket stars but for every man on the squad.

We live in an era of rapid social change. It seems only yesterday that workmen’s compensation was first awarded to a wage-earning amateur for football injuries, sustained in this case as an employee of the University of Denver team. Many professed to see in this only an isolated local dispute, yet in locker rooms throughout the land workers were stirred to re-examine their own place in the sports industry. Where, the backfield star asked himself, will I be at age thirty? What about my wife and kids? What if I got fired? How can I be a high-school coach if my knee goes bad? With questions like these coming to the fore, it remains for the workers in college athletics to decide only with what branch of organized labor to affiliate. The existing musicians’ union, for instance, expects no complications in absorbing the bands, but even negotiators of long experience confess their perplexity in how to classify the drum majorettes, who seem to be somewhere between the musician and the athlete in function and whose numbers are already such as to make them one of the largest groups involved. For how many girl drummers and buglers shall one drum majorette be responsible? If all are subjected by their costumes to equal exposure to frostbite, at what point shall overtime become payable and at what temperature readings? What are the approved age limits for these performers? For apprentices?

For a time, at least, in their early stages, these new labor groups will encounter the same “teething troubles” that beset all such movements. Raiding and jurisdictional disputes are perhaps unavoidable; featherbedding among the cheerleaders, ushers, vendors, and miscellaneous attendants will call for a considerable interval of adjustment. But surely CAAG — the College Amateur Athletes Guild — and the drum majorettes’ union (as yet untitled) will make for themselves in the athletics industry the same posit ion t hat t he SWOC and UAW achieved in steel and the motors. The wonder is only that the move has been so long deferred.