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The off-field?saga around Auburn University quarterback and likely Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton, took a break when the NCAA declared Newton eligible this past week.? On some level, since he had been playing all along, one must ask when was ever ineligible?? Or does it mean that?the NCAA considering such other now obvious declarations such as proclaiming?the earth?round, recognizing Copernican theory or pardoning Galileo.? But?after an NCAA probe?that seemed to match the brutal and incredulous police investigation in the Academy Award winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire” Newton is eligible.? In “Slumdog Millionaire”?no one could or would?believe an 18-year old poverty-stricken kid in India could ever achieve success within the rules.? Has the same assumption been applied to young African-American football players, who now in the wake of Reggie Bush having to hand back?his Heisman,?are seemingly presumed guilty until being declared innocent?
The incredible rush to judgment Newton and Auburn endured is nothing more than a?contemporary version of the kind of misplaced elitism that kept Jack Kelly, reigning Olympic Champion and now perhaps better known as the father of the late actress Grace Kelly, from rowing at the famed Henley Regatta in 1920 because he had once done manual labor as a brick layer.? Kelly would get the last laugh as he would go onto become a millionaire from that brickwork business and his daughter would wear the?tiara of European royalty on her own most beautiful head.? While Newton may not have the last laugh, he certainly has the chance to let his play exorcise any memories of the investigation.
But, if Cam Newton’s father attempted to exploit his son’s athletic talent by asking for a cash payment, so what! ?He would not be the first or the last athlete to be exploited by a family member or supposed friend.? In a larger sense?what Newton’s?father supposedly asked for was cheap.? It was nothing more than Stanford’s Andrew Luck’s parents did likely demanded from his school.? It’s just that Luck who may be the first pick in the coming NFL draft has a father, Oliver, who is a former standout QB, currently?the West Virginia University Athletic Director, a former NFL executive, lawyer and Phi Beta Kappa and not so short sighted to try to turn his son into a gratuity.? But the Lucks likely demanded that Andrew have a chance to play football at a high level, where he would start and be prepared for both the NFL and a future beyond pro sports.? They no doubt demanded, without ever having to directly ask, that Andrew have a chance to earn $180,000, not in a single secret payment for attending college, but someday, down the road as a bonus or stock option.? Cecil Newton, Cam’s father wasn’t sophisticated enough to make such permissible demands and was likely willing to see his son only as a football player and not as a someone who converts his football career into another more distinguished one in law, medicine or business.? For poorer families, whose children attend college on athletic scholarships, it may be hard to see their kids as more and the NCAA’s outmoded rules on amateurism don’t help.
If a flutist can receive a full music scholarship from a college that can even include a living stipend and also play professionally at Carnegie Hall and be honored for vigorously pursuing her talents, why are college athletes bound to a one-sided contractual relationship with their universities, in the name of amateurism?? A relationship so tilted in favor of their school and ?the NCAA that it permits the use their names and likenesses in video games but prohibits them from receiving any benefit beyond their scholarship for their talents?? Prominent attorney David Cornwell, one of the brightest minds in sports today, this week called this “economic slavery” and accused the NCAA of not living up to its side of the bargain in educating the athletes who earn the revenue.? Cornwell has a point. And this one outcome of the Cam Newton saga should be a happy one, just like the Bollywood-style ending of “Slumdog Millionaire.”? But rather than dancing through the streets and subways, the Newton saga should end with the NCAA finally reconsidering their anachronistic and unreasonably elitist rules on amateurism.? They are the kind of rules that once kept a bricklayer from rowing at Henley and are ultimately made to be broken.? And they have been broken continuously since the first intercollegiate sporting event in the 1840s when Harvard allegedly used ringers against Yale in a boat race, sponsored by a railroad company.
This is not a call for the complete and immediate deregulation of college athletics or for athletes to be paid directly by their school.? But it is a time for a serious look at ending the hypocrisy of collegiate “shamatuerism,” ?which is nothing more than disguised elitism. ?If the Olympics have survived endorsement contracts and the introduction of professionalism, so will the NCAA.
All of which reminds me of a scene in another Academy Award winning film, “Chariots of Fire.” where in preparation for the 1924 Olympics the masters of Cambridge University call sprinter Harold Abrahams on their most genteel carpet for employing a professional coach, saying “the way of the amateur” is best.? Abrahams says, as Newton must have wished he could to NCAA investigators, “you know, gentlemen, you yearn for victory, just as I do, but achieved with the apparent effortlessness of gods.? Yours are the archaic values of the prep school playground. ?You deceive no one but yourselves. I believe in the pursuit of excellence, and I’ll carry the future with me.” Here’s to a future without outmoded and elitist amateurism rules.
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