Amateurism debate echoes long history of sponsorship

As Germany prepared to host the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the Nazi party spared no costs to arrange for every detail to fit into its carefully tailored public image. With that mindfulness for the public eye, Adi Dassler, a Nazi party member and budding shoe designer, knew how important it was to get Jesse Owens in his shoes.

Owens was set to be the star of the coming Olympics, and, as Barbara Smit details in her book "Sneaker Wars", it didn’t matter that Owens did not fit the Nazi ideal of an Aryan race. Dassler saw an immense marketing opportunity in linking his shoe company to the globally iconic Owens.

No value seems to have been more deeply held by Dassler than the actual value of cheap advertising. And more than 80 years later, Adidas, the company founded by and named for Dassler, still knows this basic principle.

In a world where the NCAA has prohibited athletes from being paid for their labor while in college, some defenders of amateurism in college athletics have claimed that there simply isn’t enough money to pay college athletes.

Last Tuesday, when an FBI investigation revealed a widespread scandal of apparel companies funneling money to would-be "amateur" athletes, major corporations such as Adidas proved this to be overwhelmingly and indisputably untrue. And, according to some, maybe that isn’t a bad thing.

“A cynic — maybe even a realist — would argue that at the very least, at least in this situation, the athletes themselves that bring so much wealth to universities through the playing of basketball and football are finally at least getting some form of financial compensation for their talents and what they bring,” said Matt Andrews, a UNC history professor and sport historian.

“Now it's all done against the rules, and so no one wants to applaud rule breaking. But if that's one of your critiques of amateurism and the NCAA, there's a way in which you could say that this is progress.”

The details of the scandal rocked the sports world, and the shock has already led to significant consequences, such as the dismissal of Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Pitino and long-time athletic director Tom Jurich from Adidas-sponsored Louisville. More consequences are sure to follow as the FBI investigation builds cases against more coaches, more universities and more apparel companies.

There was initial shock that so many big names were involved, but not much is inherently shocking about the scandal.

The findings showed conclusively that high school and college athletes were being paid thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, to commit to relationships with agents and corporations, or to play for schools that benefit from sponsorship deals with these companies. 

As Taylor Branch famously wrote in his article for The Atlantic, the sports apparel industry literally told the NCAA of its intentions right to their faces more than a decade ago.

Branch recounts a presentation by infamous sports media executive Sonny Vaccaro, one of the pioneers of the big time sports apparel sponsorships that rule college and professional sports today. In 2001, he spoke in front of a collection of NCAA and Olympic officials and university presidents, including former UNC-system president William Friday.

Branch set up the exchange: "'Why,’ asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, ‘should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?’"

“Vaccaro did not blink. ‘They shouldn’t, sir,’ he replied. ‘You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,’ Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, ‘But there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.’”

As the man who inked Michael Jordan to his first shoe deal, Vaccaro was well known around the sports industry for his marketing vision. And his words have proved credible.

Universities sign deals where they receive hundreds of millions of dollars to outfit their athletes in sponsored gear. Coaches cash out as well. Pitino received over two million dollars, legally, from Adidas in 2015.

Meanwhile, the athletes receive none of that cash. 

“How is this also in any way different than when Nike gives the University of North Carolina x millions of dollars to outfit their team?” Andrews said. "Shoe companies are paying universities and players already. It's just that this is under the table rather than over the table."

This scandal has shown that apparel companies are finding ways to work out that same deal, but this time skipping the middleman and going directly to the athletes who create the value for the companies.

“There's some sort of underground market value that people have worked out,” Andrews said. “And the players are being compensated based on that calculus. I think you could make the argument that this is not criminal — it's progressive.”

What makes the scandal controversial is that the FBI made ten arrests. As markets drove money directly to the athletes, NCAA rules forced the involved agents to operate illicitly, resulting in charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The NCAA prevents college athletes from signing sponsorship deals or from profiting off of their own likenesses. Meanwhile, billions of dollars change hands every year in the college sports industry through university-arranged TV, apparel and merchandising deals.

“This just goes to show us even more how much money is out there,” Andrews said. “Even the money we knew about was staggering. Now there's this staggering amount of underground money that was being circulated.”

While the actual criminal charges against coaches and agents and the sanctions against the involved universities will take center stage, the impact on the structure of the NCAA is in question.

Whether this will be a watershed moment that leads to reform of the NCAA structure, or whether it will result in more of the same, remains to be seen.  

Meanwhile, athletes like Brian Bowen, a Louisville basketball player who allegedly received $100,000 to commit to the school and has since been suspended by the university, are facing the consequences created by the NCAA’s basic premise of not allowing college athletes to profit from their abilities while in school. 

Whether or not change is coming for the NCAA, what many have called a glaring hypocrisy over who the organization allows to profit from college athletics has been pushed to the forefront. 

“The NCAA has presented itself as sort of the moral guardian of college sports,” Andrews said. “We're keeping it amateur in the name because amateurism is the purest form of sports. But they're clearly not doing their job.”

@James_Tatter

sports@dailytarheel.com