Extracurriculars

Alabama had barely hoisted the BCS national championship trophy late Monday night when the long-winded explications of the entire college athletic landscape were being churned out.

Actually, those missives have been continuing for a good long while. But in the context of a remarkable and dispiriting college football season — fraught with realignment, record streams of television money and a jarring sex abuse scandal — these arguments will take on a new complexion.

The college basketball season is in midstream, but football has been driving the argument more than ever, prompting such non-sporting journalistic figures as Taylor Branch and, more recently, columnist Joe Nocera of The New York Times (here and here) to launch tirades against the NCAA.

And with the NCAA convention beginning Wednesday in Indianapolis, sportswriter Patrick Hruby piles on to that theme, exhorting college athletes in revenue sports — football is his only reference here — to go on strike:

“It would make the bad situation of big-time college sports better by making it more equitable, more honest. By exercising their dormant power, players would become partners, not serfs, free to make negotiable demands instead of unheeded requests. Maybe college athletes don’t want cash. Maybe they want four-year, irrevocable scholarships and lifetime health insurance for their injuries. Maybe they want the same right to profit from their image and endorsement deals that college-attending actors and musicians take for granted. Or maybe they really do want a salaried piece of the multibillion-dollar pie. Whatever the case, the important thing isn’t the particulars; it’s that athletes would have the ability to ask. And that matters. At their core — or at least at the for-show ersatz core that ensures ongoing tax-exempt educational status – college sports are supposed to be about more than wins and losses. They’re supposed to be about building and shaping character. Do we want a system that conditions our athletes to think like atomized short-timers, too cynical and defeated to care about anything but the scraps they can grift from a corrupt system? Or do we want sports to nurture independent thinkers, empowered individuals who also can work together for a common good?”

This thinking is running headlong into more traditional reformers, who continue their windmill-tilting about regaining some notion of the amateur ideal. But Douglas Lederman of Insider Higher Ed is skeptical these calls will be heeded, since they haven’t been before.

A few details of his reporting jump out — the possibility of something like class-action Title IX litigation that may prompt cutbacks in football that women’s sports advocates have wanted for years. One such veteran, former Women’s Sports Foundation head Donna Lopiano, tries making her long-standing claims about the “arms race” more startling than ever, believing this also might quell the cult of the coach that led to scandals at Penn State and Ohio State.

That’s unlikely, as are renewed desires to strip the NCAA of its tax exemption. But Lederman casts a very long-range scenario for possible change:

“And while it is often suggested that the most-visible and richest sports programs own all the power in the NCAA, the Ivy League, Division III and other nonscholarship programs have something on which the sports powerhouses arguably depend: the ability to cloak themselves in the ‘amateur’ mantle that the most competitive and commercialized football and basketball programs have increasing difficulty claiming.

“In a restructured college sports landscape in which the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.”

Thanks to all those on Twitter and elsewhere for their comments this week to the start of my series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.” I’m really humbled by it all.

Of course, I’m not expecting the precincts of The Sisterhood to report in, at least directly. They prefer to stay wrapped in a cocoon of their own making, locking up blog comments and talking only among themselves.

I’m not sure I intended it to turn out this way, but my posts this week ended up being a short history of the women’s sports movement, nearly decade-by-decade. As I’ve been pointing out, this isn’t just about Title IX. Perhaps my biggest arguments have been about the cultural grievances that I outlined in Parts 4 and 5.

Next week, which marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, I want to lay out some ideas about where women’s sports goes next — indeed, where they actually are now. These include reworking Title IX and examining the challenge of women’s pro sports and developing women’s sports around the world, where true oppression still exists.

Of course, I may under the biggest illusion of all in thinking we can move beyond the rhetorical, legal and other cultural realities of the present. I just want to revive the notion of “joy” in women’s sports, which its leaders have disdained for a very long time now.

Regardless of your views on this — and if you disagree, please speak up — let’s start having a conversation. This was one of the main reasons for me taking the plunge and putting this series together. Feel free to comment here or on any of the posts in this series.

Oh, and I promise to write a lot shorter next week!

Part 1: The elusive notion of gender equality in sports

Part 2: Women’s sports and the matter of choice

Part 3: How women have held back women’s sports

Part 4: Making football the enemy of women’s sports

Part 5: Sports and eros, or why sex is more fun than gender

This is the third in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

The standard narrative script followed by women’s sports activists is that men are to blame for the slow progress of female athletics.

But it doesn’t take much digging to discover that women — female physical educators until the 1970s and politically-minded feminists since then — also have hindered what’s referred to now as the women’s sports “revolution.”

Starting in the 1890s, when Senda Berenson Abbott formulated a restricting first set of basketball rules for women, leading figures in women’s athletics wanted anything but a revolution. As much as any men, they expended decades’ worth of energy to prevent that from ever taking place.

The singular philosophical line running through organized women’s scholastic sports has been anti-commercial, and until the 1960s, largely anti-competitive. For the better part of 70 years, these women resisted efforts to expand competitive athletic opportunities, working especially hard to prevent varsity sports from trumping intramurals and “play days” on high school and college campuses.

That’s because for many of these women’s leaders, maintaining control of women’s sports — and keeping them out of the hands of men favoring a commercial, highly competitive model of sports the women reviled — has mattered above all else, even at the expense of increased opportunities for female athletes.

Maiden Aunts don’t always know best

“When equal opportunity knocks,” posted on the NCAA website in January, chronicles the dramatic, contentious 1981 vote at the NCAA convention to sponsor women’s college athletics, which since 1972 had been governed by the female-led Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The story amply quotes two high-profile AIAW stalwarts who still believe that women’s sports was dealt a severe setback when the organization collapsed.

Said former Texas women’s athletics director and Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, the AIAW president during its last sports season of 1981-82:

“I think the NCAA takeover slowed down the development of women’s sports probably by a good five to 10 years.”

For most of its existence, however, the AIAW was short of money, and ambivalent about pursuing commercial options. The AIAW also was the defendant in one of the first Title IX sports lawsuits because it initially banned athletic scholarships, while the NCAA permitted them for male athletes.

Just let this sink in for a moment: Women discriminating against women, as the age of Title IX dawned. How many years did that set back women’s sports?

This policy, eventually dropped in an out of court deal, was a byproduct of the AIAW’s egalitarian philosophy but untenable in the wake of the new law.

From that point on, AIAW leaders were focused more on holding on to power and their self-proclaimed virtuous approach than catering to the competitive desires of female athletes. Within the organization there was disagreement about later revisions of the scholarship policy that prevented women athletes from receiving aid for anything more than tuition and fees, and other rules that banned schools from paying coaches for recruiting trip expenses.

According to data gathered by sports historian Ying Wushanley, the AIAW spent more than 20 percent of its overall revenues ($847,000) on legal expenses during its 10-year history, while allocating only eight percent ($315,000) on championship competitions for women athletes.

During its final three years (1979-82), as it battled for survival, the AIAW burned through $569,000 for lawyers, mainly to fight the NCAA.

But even well before the NCAA vote, top women’s coaches — including Tennessee Lady Vols legend Pat Summitt — were publicly saying that the NCAA was the way to go, as she reflected 20 years later:

“For me it was tough emotionally, but professionally it was clear cut. We felt emotionally tied to the AIAW, but there comes a time when you have to look at the big picture, opportunities for your sport and women’s athletics across the board.”

That the AIAW required schools to pay their own way to national tournaments also made it easier for athletics departments to cast their lot with the NCAA, which then as now foots the bill for those expenses.

Virtue or politics?

Also by this time, even some AIAW leaders had become disenchanted with the organization’s activities, including what women’s basketball writer Mel Greenberg described as a vendetta against schools and individuals supporting the NCAA move. Judith Holland, like Lopiano a former AIAW president, felt that women athletes were being shortchanged amid all this, and testified on behalf of the NCAA during the AIAW’s unsuccessful antitrust trial.

For that, Holland, then an associate athletics director at UCLA, was labeled a “co-conspirator,” as if she were the Whittaker Chambers of women’s sports. In a recent video interview posted on the Pac 10 website, Holland, now retired, affirmed her belief that the NCAA-AIAW merger was good for women athletes (picks up at the 2:50 mark):

“I don’t think you should have different rules for women than you had for the men. And the women couldn’t have an impact on the rules for the men unless they were in the same association.”

But in the same NCAA website piece linked above, former Iowa women’s AD Christine Grant, who preceded Lopiano as AIAW president, underscored the political animus of sports feminists like her:

“The whole decade of the ’80s was pretty much a whole downer. We just seemed to be losing one thing after another.”

She doesn’t define who she meant by “we,” but in truth it didn’t include female athletes. The AIAW was gone, and from 1984 to 1988 Title IX sports compliance was on the back burner thanks to the Grove City vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling, which exempted parts of educational institutions not receiving direct federal aid. (Congress pre-empted the decision by passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, then overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan.)

Concluded Wushanley in his 2004 book, “Playing Nice and Losing,” which culminated with the AIAW-NCAA dispute:

“Toward the end, the AIAW became more of a political agency for women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women athletes.”

But women’s sports were starting to flourish at the college level, especially basketball, in which iconic figures like Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards were competing. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Summitt guided the powerful U.S. team to the gold medal. Two years later, the women’s hoops team at Texas, where Lopiano still presided, won its first and still only national championship in undefeated 35-0 fashion.

While basic Title IX compliance still lagged in far too many places, the superior resources and organization of the NCAA were beginning to pay off for women.

Coming Thursday: Longstanding complaints about football hogging financial resources took a darker, nastier turn in the early 1990s, when more radical voices in sports feminism demonized the sport on cultural grounds.

—

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Sports legal beagle Brian Goff thinks Mark Yost’s Wall Street Journal take on the Reggie Bush saga misses quite a few points, and typically overreaches with moralizing that sportswriters apparently cannot resist on subjects like these.

Ray Ratto sees the last stalwart defenders of the notion of amateurism attempt a desperate fling at curtailing the commercial enterprise of college football, and reckons how it might end:

“And in these brazenly Darwinian times, with colleges across the country no longer even trying to hide that the only true motivation for their athletic departments is to squeeze money out of the customer base, the illusory virtues of education that the NCAA likes to brag about matter less and less.

“Indeed, the jockeying to trade up, which has now reached Villanova and Montana for God’s sake, and the side-door deals for recruits, which has now touched Kentucky and Tennessee (along with all the others), is part of the same general tone.

“The planets must grow. The giants must feed. And subtlety is for little prissy schoolmarms, because this is where the carnivores roam.

“Subtlety is the only way cheating can thrive untroubled. Keeping everyone quiet, keeping everyone happy, keeping everyone paid — that takes time, and attention to detail, and unlimited resources. You try and cut a corner here, forget to cross a T or dot an I, you have a donor who isn’t kicking in as much to the ancillary slush fund — it all adds up to less attention to the small stuff.

“That is, unless the NCAA is suddenly infused with new enforcement resources and the mood to use it, which seems counter to their secondary goal of keeping the wheels turning by keeping the engines churning.

“Their primary goal? Making people think this is a noble enterprise.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education adds up the salaries of the 14 highest-paid NCAA executives and comes up with a grand total of $6 million for the 2008-09 academic year. New president Mark Emmert’s salary hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s speculated to be in the $1 million annual range, around the same as his predecessor, the late Myles Brand.

As Andy Katz points out, about $1.2 million of that subsequently has been shaved away due to the recent retirements of three long-time officials, incuding Tom Jernstedt.

I’m still digesting the recently-released NCAA report on revenues and expenses covering 2004-2009 (download the PDF here); the organization’s in-house summary is here).

As for the highest paid college athletics director in the country, who abruptly “retired” this week, as a growing ticket scandal has grown enough legs to prompt a federal investigation, among other inquiries? That’s Lew Perkins of Kansas, which has announced that his going-away package amounts to $2 million, or half his 2009 annual salary. (h/t The Wiz of Odds)

Bravo to Henry Abbott of TrueHoop, for calling out the Enes Kanter-Kentucky imbroglio for what it is:

“Does anybody think any of this prohibits Kanter from playing at an elite level a year from now? Whether Kanter was paid or not, and whether he passes NCAA muster or not, hes exactly what the NCAAs best stars are: a de facto professional, whose valuable work can make lots of people money except, oddly, him. Hes right on track to join the NBA in 2011, and no matter where he plays between now and then, in terms of his bizarro employment status and income, hell likely fit right in with the best young players from around the world. The players all know that, the teams all know that and the agents all know that. Its too bad this underground, backstabbing NCAA world, and the myth of the amateur student-athlete, keep the system from being reshaped to accommodate the reality that valuable players generally do get paid, one way or another.”

(h/t John Clay)

Unlike Georgia football player A.J. Green, at least Kanter is in a sport in which the athlete has more leverage and better options.

And heaven forbid the young tennis player at Princeton who let a former athlete there pay her tuition, thereby earning the full attention of the NCAA, which has meted out what its considers appropriate “punishment.” (h/t Jon Pessah)

On the same day that Reggie Bush was informed he would be stripped of the 2005 Heisman Trophy, the agent for a Turkish club basketball team claims that he paid Kentucky recruit Enes Kanter more than $100,000.

The NCAA is still investigating top college football programs for reported player involvement with agents, and the ultra-successful recruiter in the middle of numerous allegations at North Carolina has resigned.

One of the top wide receivers in college football is being investigated for allegedly selling one of his game jerseys — something his university is allowed to do with impunity. Quelle scandal!

Update: He’s now been suspended four games for the offense.

Who, or what, is being hurt here? The NCAA’s status as overlord of amateur athletics, despite the millions that Bush, Marvin Austin, A.J. Green and other “amateur” athletes make for their universities and the college sports industry.

Yet this news is delivered with all the breathlessness of disclosures about criminal activity. The media sanctimony over Bush is especially rich, with journalists and news organizations part of that same college sports industry.

ESPN.com’s Jemelle Hill sums up these distorted ideals quite correctly.