Me. I don't cheat on my taxes. Don't pad my expense account. Don't lie to women, except in a pinch.
My lifetime ledger of stolen booty, aside from ball point pens filched from Holiday Inn nightstands, comes to a paperback edition of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, shoplifted from a Lebanon, Tenn., drugstore, circa 1963, and a magnificent neon-lit five-foot-wide Budweiser clock swiped from the old ice house in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on a Budweiser-addled night in 1963. (Returned the following morning, with the sobering realization that hanging a contraband neon-lit Budweiser clock on your wall, like any stolen piece of great art, amounts to a tacit admission of low-down thievery.)
Otherwise, I judge myself reasonably honest. Fair to middling range. My code of personal ethics, however, would not prohibit flouting the hypocritical rules levied against on college jocks by a money-corrupted sports cartel. No money in my pocket? I'd take what the booster slipped my way.
The NCAA oversees two multi-billion dollar athletic conglomerations, college football and basketball, professional in every sense but one.
They're enterprises gone mad with TV contracts and multi-million dollar coaches and millionaire athletic directors and assistant coaches who make three or four or five or six times more than the average professor. NCAA member schools, in their rampant commercialism, sign exclusive big money deals with sports apparel companies. (Led by the University of Michigan with a $66.5 million agreement granting Adidas sole right to garb the school's athletes.) The schools peddle sports bric-a-brac and numbered team jerseys with sales fueled by the market value of the corresponding and conveniently uncompensated players. Not to mention those millions derived from luxury skybox leases and ticket sales and ever-escalating TV contracts — the NCAA last year signed a 14-year, $11 billion TV contract just to televise the basketball tournament.
Look down a list of highest paid public officials in any of the old Confederate states and the head football and basketball coaches and athletic directors at the state universities invariably top those lists. Governors and college presidents, apparently, aren't worth nearly as much to as a top assistant college football coach at an SEC school.
A study by Duke University economics professor Charles Clotfelter found that the average compensation for head football coaches at major public universities has now reached $2 million, up 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1984, while college professors at those same school received a cumulative 32 percent bump in salary.
Yet this out-of-control, money-grubbing enterprise receives lavish tax breaks, based on federal laws requiring that income and expenses of these "nonprofit" sports spectaculars correspond to a "charitable mission." Two years ago, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned Congress that the college sports money machines were running amok. "The large sums generated through advertising and media rights by schools with highly competitive sports programs raise the question of whether those sports programs have become side businesses for schools."
Side businesses? Not hardly. These are full blown professional leagues. Except, of course, for the unpaid, often impoverished students whose labor, athletic skill and risk of injury fuel this mighty money machine.
Last week, the National College Players Association released a study by Drexel University economist Ellen J. Staurowsky that found that if big-time college sports divided their revenues using the same player-owner formula employed by pro-sports leagues, the average Football Bowl Subdivision player would earn $121,000 per year, while the average basketball player at those schools knock down $265,000.
Of course, the NCAA spends considerable time trying to keep those very athletes from exploiting their own market value (or hiring an agent), policing even petty offenses. Saturday night, Ohio State and the University of Miami played a game widely disparaged as a contest between athletes who had committed unpardonable sins against the NCAA. Consider the charges against the Ohio State transgressors: that they swapped jerseys and other athletic apparel for tattoos or piddling amounts of money. Ohio State, meanwhile, has a license to sell all the jerseys associated with individual star players that the market can bear.
On Saturday night, both teams were sent onto the field wearing uniforms festooned with a dozen or so logos of whatever sports apparel company has paid millions for an exclusive right to lease these human billboards.
None of this stuff, of course, is all that new. More blatant, maybe, but we tend to shrug it off. Heap the blame on those greedy players. Maybe it's because we've left too much of the reporting to a sports media with a financial stake of its own in collegiate sports. (Or, at the least, in those extravagant press-box buffets the athletic departments stage on game day.)
But when Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, author of the acclaimed three-volume America in the King Years, considered The Shame of College Sports in the October issue of The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/8643/2/ he brought moral gravity to a long-festering scandal. The eminent civil rights historian wrote that "after an inquiry that took me into the locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what's before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.
"Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene — corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as 'student-athletes' deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution — is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation."
The plantation system in big-time college sports funnels all those millions into other pockets, leaving the players, often the poorest class of students on campus, vulnerable to the likes of Nevin Shapiro and other rogue boosters. Oh those greedy athletes, pocketing an illicit $100 gift, or a free tattoo, scalping their tickets, selling their jerseys, and jeopardizing the $121,000-a-year worth of peonage they owe the university, not to mention that they're sullying Nike's bought-and-paid-for ad space.
Well, if I were a player, performing for nothing in a big money Saturday spectacular, and my wallet was empty, my disgust for the financial exploitation of athletes would trump ethical pangs. I'd take it. A bit of illicit swag hardly registers against the real shame of college sports.
By Fred Grimms