BY JOHN MARTIN
A new California law seems to strike a blow of economic freedom for students who are athletes. As I read it, the law allows college athletes to make money from exhibitions, endorsements, photos, and perhaps even public appearances.
At first, the NCAA worried that this would compromise their amateur status, but then turned around and endorsed the concept.
Washington Post sportswriter John Feinstein argued it’s time for students in all 50 states to get paid for their part in college sports.
I wonder what John R. Tunis (1889-1975) would think? Tunis is my all-time favorite sportswriter, sports novelist, and tennis broadcaster. In 1928, with a Harvard degree and study at Columbia Law, he sounded an alarm:
“The plain truth is that highly organized competitive sport is not character-building,” Tunis wrote in Harper’s Monthly.
“Under the terrific stress of striving for victory, victory, victory,” Tunis argued, “the player’s worst side is too frequently magnified; his self-control is broken down oftener than it is built up.”
Tunis identified what he saw as a root cause of abuse. In a 1932 Atlantic Monthly, he wrote: “Inter-collegiate athletics and international sport, with the huge superstructures they have built up and the vast sums of money they involve, can never be freed from the intense desire for victory.”
Tunis knew sport first hand. He played college tennis at Harvard, covered professional baseball and college football for The Boston Globe and the New York Evening Post. He broadcast tennis for NBC Radio from Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
The result of too much concentration on victory, he argued, was the loss of the love of sport for its own sake. In his day, Tunis’s criticism of big-time sports (college and professional) was dismissed as naive and hyper idealistic. (He certainly seemed out of touch.)
But what would he say about the Fair Pay to Play Act? Would he perhaps be tempted to accept it as a way to salvage some form of compensation for athletes who love their sport?
In 2012, after lengthy reporting, the civil rights historian Taylor Branch proposed paying college athletes a living wage by universities who derive vast revenues from their toil. His idea was scorned as unworkable.
Tunis argued in his 1967 autobiography, A Measure of Independence: “Our great sports events mean what the comedies and tragedies of the Greek playwrights meant.”
The question today is can we examine our obsession with sports and summon the strength to do something creative and positive?
Could the California law be the start of true reform? If so, I’m sure Tunis would approve. What do you think? Email Aztec Tennis Reporter your thoughts.
