Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes - Hardcover

Byers, Walter; Hammer, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 047210666X ISBN 13: 9780472106660

Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr, 1995

Synopsis

Byers believes that modern-day college sports are no longer a student activity: they are a high-dollar commercial enterprise, and college athletes should have the same access to the free market as their coaches and colleges. He favors no one as he cites individual cases of corruption in NCAA history. From Byers's first enforcement case, against the University of Kentucky in 1952, to the NCAA's 1987 "death penalty" levied against Southern Methodist University of Dallas, he shows the change in the athletic environment from simple rules and personally responsible officials to convoluted, cyclopedic regulations with high-priced legal firms defending college violators against a limited NCAA enforcement system. This book is a must for anyone involved in college sports - athletes, coaches, fans, college faculty, and administrators.

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Reviews

The most shocking feature of this expose of American college athletic programs is that it comes from the man who oversaw those programs as executive director of the NCAA from 1951 to 1986. Written with freelancer Hammer, Byers's depiction is a uniformly dismal one principally regarding football and, to a lesser degree, basketball. At the top of the heap are college presidents, whom Byers terms ``world-weary cynics'' and who hold their jobs for relatively short periods compared with tenured faculty members; then there are head coaches, often greedy self-promoters, and their ever-expanding staffs, who take a huge bite out of athletic budgets; at the bottom are the athletes, who actually earn the money but get nothing in return, least of all a good education. Byers points out the sham of calling a multibillion-dollar industry ``amateur,'' but, in a disappointing conclusion, he stops short of advocating salaries for players, proposing instead an unrealistic program of increased job opportunities for athletes. In his nostalgia for the days when academics ruled the campus, Byers comes across as a man of high principles who appears to have expended his energy on a useless cause. Photos not seen by PW.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From 1951 to 1966, Byers was executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which oversees the conduct of college sports by its 1,099 members. Focusing on big-time NCAA football and basketball, he records abuses of admission and academic standards, the influence of television revenues, and misconduct by coaches and others. Citing his own reform efforts, he concludes that playing college sports is often not an amateur but a professional matter and that athletes should be better rewarded. Like Francis X. Dealy Jr.'s Win at Any Cost (LJ 10/15/90), this offers radical solutions and is well recommended.?Morey Berger, St. Joseph's Hosp. Medical Lib., Tucson, Ariz.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 047210666X
• ISBN 13: 9780472106660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 424