***EXCLUSIVE***

Is Sandusky Still a Threat to Children?

Prosecutors asked Tuesday (Feb. 7) to have Jerry Sandusky kept indoors as part of his bail conditions, citing complaints that the former Penn State football assistant was seen outside and watching children in a schoolyard from the back porch of his home, where he remains under house arrest while awaiting trial on child molestation charges.

The state attorney general's office argued in a court filing that Sandusky's bail conditions should be revised so that he is not allowed outside except to seek medical treatment. Prosecutors said they opposed Sandusky's request to be allowed contact with his grandchildren as he awaits trial on 52 child sex-abuse charges.

"Several individuals from the adjacent elementary school have expressed concerns for the safety of children at their school and the adjacent neighborhood," prosecutors wrote. "Such concerns will only mushroom if defendant is permitted to roam at will outside his house."

The allegation he was watching children was outlined in an exhibit attached to the filing, a memo from a state investigator to a county probation officer that said a teacher and intern had reported concern for the children's safety.

"They advised the neighbor that yesterday they had the children outside for recess as it was a warmer day, and that they both witnessed Mr. Sandusky on his rear house deck watching the children play," wrote investigator Anthony Sassano on Jan. 26.

Sandusky's lawyer, Joe Amendola, did not immediately respond to the latest prosecution filing.

It said Sandusky's son's ex-wife "strenuously objects" to her three minor children having any contact with him, and that prosecutors believe Sandusky was fortunate to be granted bail.

"The commonwealth believes that (the) defendant should be in jail," prosecutors wrote. "He has been granted the privilege of being confined in his own home, which is spacious and private and where he can eat food of his own preference and sleep in his own bed at night. House arrest is not meant to be a house party."

That court document, and several motions filed late Monday by Sandusky's lawyer, come ahead of a court hearing Friday regarding his bail modification request.

Sandusky, 68, a former longtime defensive coordinator for Penn State's football team, has maintained he is innocent of the allegations, which claim he engaged in a range of illegal acts with boys over 15 years, from touching their legs to subjecting them to violent sexual assault.

As Sandusky's lawyers prepare for trial, they have asked a judge for copies of secret grand jury testimony, the phone numbers of his accusers and other material. A 37-page pretrial discovery motion sought dozens of records from the state attorney general's office, including subpoenas, photos, unredacted passages of blacked-out documents already provided to the defense, investigative notes and psychiatric records.

Amendola asked for records related to specific young men identified in grand jury reports as Sandusky's victims. Amendola said he was given the names of eight of the 10 alleged victims late last week.

A request contained in the latest defense filings concerned an interview with a former Centre County deputy prosecutor who has said little publicly about the role she may have played in the decision not to prosecute Sandusky more than a decade ago, after a mother complained about contact between Sandusky and her son in a university football team shower.

A state police report, Amendola wrote, "describes an interview with Karen Arnold, a former assistant district attorney of Centre County, wherein she and former District Attorney Ray Gricar had extensive disagreements over a 1998 police investigation regarding the defendant." Gricar disappeared in April 2005 and was declared legally dead last year.

Sandusky wants the phone numbers of his accusers so he can obtain their phone records.

"In many cases, (Sandusky) believes the accusers may have collaborated with each other in making these false accusations," Amendola wrote.

The attorney general's office said Tuesday the defense's discovery motion was under review.

Sandusky wants a list of all witnesses and a narrative of what they are expected to say on the stand, as well as the names of anyone who has come forward as a potential victim "but for various reason(s) did not fit the commonwealth's profile and/or the report was deemed to be false," Amendola wrote.

Amendola acknowledged that state criminal trial rules only require the attorney general's office to provide transcripts of prior testimony of witnesses after they have taken the stand at trial and been questioned by prosecutors.

"The defendant submits his trial in these cases will be repeatedly interrupted for extended periods if lengthy and multiple transcripts of the grand jury testimony of each witness called by the commonwealth are provided to the defendant and his attorneys only at the conclusion of the testimony of each witness," Amendola wrote.

He also asked for a copy of an interview with former football coach Joe Paterno, who died last month.

Amendola said he is opposed to a request by prosecutors to bring in a jury from outside Centre County to hear the case. He said he would file his formal response on that issue later this week.

The scandal resulted in the ousting of Paterno and school President Graham Spanier. Athletic Director Tim Curley was placed on administrative leave, and Vice President Gary Schultz, who was in charge of the university's police department, stepped down.

Schultz and Curley are charged with lying to the grand jury and failure to report to police. They maintain their innocence.

(by Associated Press)

Nike Chief Defends Paterno at Memorial

Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight got a standing ovation at Joe Paterno's public memorial Thursday for defending the late coach's response to an accusation of child sex abuse against a former assistant.

At a ceremony filled with lavish praise that would likely have embarrassed the school's beloved coach, Knight waded into a subject that had been virtually ignored since Paterno died on Sunday from lung cancer - the immediate cause of his firing after 46 seasons leading Penn State's football team to a record-setting 409 wins.

University trustees have said a major reason Paterno was ousted Nov. 9 was that he failed to alert anyone beyond his two superiors at the school when he was told of an abuse allegation against former assistant Jerry Sandusky in 2002. Sandusky was charged with dozens of child sex abuse counts on Nov. 5, two school officials were charged with perjury and former school president Graham Spanier was pushed out the same night as Paterno.

Commenting on those events, Knight said, "it turns out (Paterno) gave full disclosure to his superiors, information that went up the chains to the head of the campus police and the president of the school. The matter was in the hands of a world-class university, and by a president with an outstanding national reputation."

Knight added, "...this much is clear to me. If there is a villain in this tragedy, it lies in that investigation and not in Joe Paterno."

The remark drew a standing ovation from the crowd of 12,000 at the Bryce Jordan Center - with Paterno's widow, Sue, and former defensive coordinator, Tom Bradley, among those rising to their feet.

"Who is the real trustee at Penn State University?" Knight asked.

The campus has been torn by anger over the Sandusky scandal and Paterno's firing, but this week thousands of alumni, fans, students and former players in Happy Valley have remembered Paterno for his stellar career, his love for the school and his generosity.

That made Knight's remarks even more surprising.

Paterno's son and former quarterbacks coach, Jay, also got a standing ovation near the end of the ceremony when he imitated his raised-in-Brooklyn father's voice, telling the audience to "Sit down! Sit down!"

Then, growing serious, he told the crowd, "Joe Paterno left this world with a clear conscience."

Earlier in ceremony, the focus was praise for Paterno and fond memories.

"Bless us this day as we honor and celebrate one of your greatest gifts to the world - Joe Paterno," the Rev. Matthew Laffey said in the opening prayer.

A short time later, after a video montage, former star Penn State quarterback Todd Blackledge said, "No one individual has ever done more for a university anywhere in the country than what Joe Paterno did for this school."

The line drew applause, and Blackledge was followed on the podium in the darkened arena by Lauren Perrotti, a Penn State student and Paterno fellow.

Charles V. Pittman, speaking for players from the 1960s, called Paterno a lifelong influence and inspiration.

"Now, with grown children grandkids and 42 years removed from my playing days, I thought Joe Paterno had taught me all that he could teach me. I was wrong," he said. "Despite being pushed away from his beloved game, and under the extreme pressure of the events of the past few months, Joe's grace was startling."

Pittman said Paterno pushed his young players hard, once bringing Pittman to tears in his sophomore year. He realized later that the coach was not trying to break his spirit but instead was "bit by bit building a habit of excellence."

"He was building a proud program for the school, the state and the hundreds of young men he watched over for a half century," said Pittman, senior vice president for publishing at Schurz Communications Inc., an Indiana-based company that owns television and radio stations and newspapers, and a member of the Board of Directors of The Associated Press.

Thursday's event brought to a close the public mourning period for Paterno.

Public viewings were held Tuesday and Wednesday morning at a campus spiritual center, followed by a funeral Mass, procession and burial for Paterno that afternoon.

(by GENARO C. ARMAS, MICHAEL RUBINKAM, and Kathy Matheson )

Man at Center of the Largest Controversy in College Sports History Speaks-Out

Jerry Sandusky said Monday he is "innocent" of the sexual abuse charges against him, but he did not deny that he "horsed around," showered with and touched boys while he was a Penn State assistant coach.

Meanwhile, police in Pennsylvania said Monday that at least 10 more alleged victims have come forward since Sandusky's arrest earlier this month and that they are investigating their claims, The New York Times reported.

Sandusky told NBC's Bob Costas that his physical encounters with children were never sexual in nature. A grand jury indicted the former defensive coordinator on 40 counts of abuse.

"I have horsed around with kids, I have showered (with them) after workouts. I have hugged them and I have touched their legs without intent of sexual contact," Sandusky told Costas via telephone.

Sandusky denied that he is a pedophile or that he is sexually attracted to young boys, but he also admitted: "I shouldn't have showered with those kids."


(by Sporting News)

Key D.A. In Sandusky Case Disappeared After Failing To Prosecute

The criminal case against former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky has put the media spotlight back on the missing persons case of Ray Gricar. An esteemed district attorney, Gricar failed to prosecute Sandusky for sex crimes in 1998, and later disappeared without a trace.

"We've had a lot of twists and turns. This is another -- obviously on a much greater scale than in the past," Gricar's nephew, Tony Gricar, told The Huffington Post.

According to a Pennsylvania grand jury report, Ray Gricar investigated allegations that Sandusky had inappropriate contact with an 11-year-old boy in a school locker room in 1998.

Earlier this week, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly indicted Sandusky on 40 counts of sex crimes against young boys. According to the grand jury report, there are eight victims who were targeted between 1994 and 2009.

Since Sandusky's arrest, Penn State has been the subject of widespread criticism because of an alleged cover-up of the former coach's alleged illegal activities. Recently, that criticism has also fallen on Ray Gricar, the man who opted not to prosecute Sandusky in 1998.

The former DA, however, is not around to defend his actions. Ray Gricar has been missing since 2005, when he vanished under mysterious circumstances.

Ray Gricar was 59 years old in April 2005. He had served as the district attorney of Centre County for nearly 20 years and was preparing to retire at the end of the year. His career was a success, he was involved in a happy relationship with a woman who worked in his office, and he was close to his 27-year-old daughter, Lara. By all accounts, Gricar had lived a pleasant life and was looking forward to an ideal retirement.

On the morning of April 15, 2005, Gricar called his girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, and told her he was going for a drive on Route 192 toward nearby Lewisburg.

The trip was not out of the ordinary. Gricar reportedly had gone to the town on several occasions in the past to shop at an antique store.

But the DA failed to return home later that night, and calls to his cell phone went unanswered. Concerned, Fornicola contacted Bellefonte police and reported him missing.

The following day, Gricar's red and white 2004 Mini Cooper was found locked and abandoned in a Lewisburg parking lot, not far from the Susquehanna River, and he was nowhere to be found. A search of his vehicle did not indicate a struggle or any sign of foul play, but investigators did find cigarette ashes inside the car.

"Now we're not talking a lot. [It was] some minute cigarette ash on the passenger's side," Bellefonte police officer Darrell Zaccagni told the Cleveland Free Times in 2005. "When they opened the car ... a cigarette smell came out of the car. Ray didn't smoke. And he never let anybody smoke inside his Mini Cooper. Ray was very fastidious about his car."

Gricar's cell phone was locked inside the vehicle, but his keys and other personal effects, including his wallet, were missing. Search dogs were brought in, but they were unable to pick up on Gricar's scent.

Investigators questioned nearby store owners about Gricar. At least one thought he had seen the district attorney inside his shop on the day he disappeared and another was certain he saw Gricar speaking with an unknown woman, but it remains unclear whether the man they saw was actually Gricar.

A search of the Centre County home that Gricar and Fornicola shared also failed to produce any leads. None of his personal belongings were missing, but his work laptop was nowhere to be found.

"It's the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. In some ways, it's worse than having a parent die, I think, because you have no closure. I just want to know where my dad is," Lara Gricar said in a 2005 interview with the Centre Daily Times.

In the days that followed, the FBI and Pennsylvania State Police investigators were called in to assist in the case. Speculation soon turned to suicide -- a subject the Gricar family is all too familiar with.

(by David Lohr)

Complete Grand Jury Report From Penn State Scandal (Explicit Content Presented)

INTRODUCTION

We, the members of the Thirty-Third Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, having
received and reviewed evidence regarding violations of the Crimes Code occurring in Centre
County, and elsewhere pursuant to Notice of Submission of Investigation No. 1,
do hereby make the following findings of fact and recommendation of charges.

FINDINGS OF FACT

The Grand Jury conducted an investigation into reported sexual assaults of minor male
children by Gerald A. Sandusky ("Sandusky") over a period of years, both while Sandusky was a
football coach for the State University ("Penn State") football team and after he
retired from coaching. Widely known as Jerry Sandusky, the subject of this investigation
founded The Second Mile, a charity initially devoted to helping troubled young boys. It was
within The Second Mile program that Sandusky found his victims.

Sandusky was employed by Penn State for 23 years as the defensive coordinator of its
Division I collegiate football program. Sandusky played football for four years at Penn State and
coached a total of 32 years. While coaching, Sandusky started "The Second Mile" in State
College, in 1977. It began as a group foster home dedicated to helping troubled
boys. It grew into a charity dedicated to helping children with absent or dysfunctional families. It
is now a statewide, three region charity and Sandusky has been its primary fundraiser] The
Second Mile raises millions of dollars through fundraising appeals and special events. The
mission of the program is to "help children who need additional support and would benefit from
positive human interaction." Through The Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of
boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations.
Sandusky retired from The Second Mile in September 2010.

VICTIM 1

The Grand Jury conducted an investigation into the reported sexual assault of a minor
child, Victim 1, by Sandusky, when Victim l, a Second Mile participant, was a houseguest at
Sandusky's residence in College Township, Centre County, During the course of
the multi-year investigation, the Grand Jury heard evidence that Sandusky indecently fondled
Victim 1 on a number of occasions, performed oral sex on Victim 1 on a number of occasions
and had Victim 1 perform oral sex on him on at least one occasion.

Victim 1 testified that he was ll or l2 years old when he met Sandusky through The
Second Mile program in 2005 or 2006. As with the remaining victims, Victim only came to
Sandusky's attention during his second year in the program, when the boy attended The Second
Mile's camp on the Penn State University Park campus. During the 2007 track season, Sandusky
began spending time with Victim 1 Weekly, having the boy stay overnight at his residence in
State College, Sandusky took Victim 1 to professional and college sporting
events, such as Philadelphia Eagles games, or pre-season practices at Penn State. When Victim
slept at the Sandusky residence, he would sleep in a finished bedroom in the basement.
Occasionally, other boys would also stay overnight at Sandusky's home but usually it was only
Victim 1. Sandusky also encouraged Victim 1 to participate in The Second Mile as a volunteer.
Sandusky gave Victim 1 a number of gifts, including golf clubs, a computer, clothes, dress
clothes and cash. Sandusky took the boy to restaurants, swimming at a hotel near Sandusky's
home, and to church.

Victim 1 testified that Sandusky had a practice of coming into the basement room after he
told Victim 1 that it was time to go to bed. Victim testified that Sandusky would "crack his
back." He described this as Sandusky getting onto the bed on which Victim 1 was already lying
and rolling under the boy. With Victim lying on top of him, face to face, Sandusky would mn
his arms up and down the boy's back and "crack" it. The back-cracking became a ritual at
bedtime. Victim 1 said that after Sandusky had cracked his back a number of times, he
progressed to rubbing Victim l's backside while they lay face-to-face on the bed. Victim
testified that this began to occur during the summer of 2005 or 2006, before he entered sixth or
seventh grade. Sandusky then began to blow on Victim l's bare stomach. Eventually, Sandusky
began to kiss Victim on the mouth. Victim 1 was uncomfortable with the contact and would
sometimes ny to hide in the basement to avoid Sandusky. Victim testified that ultimately
Sandusky performed oral sex on him more than 20 times through 2007 and early 2008.
Sandusky also had Victim perform oral sex on him one time and also touched Victim l's penis
with his hands during the 2007-2008 time period. Victim did not want to engage in sexual
conduct with Sandusky and knew it was wrong. Victim stopped taking Sandusky's phone calls
and had his mother tell Sandusky he was not home when Sandusky called. This termination of
contact with Sandusky occurred in the spring of 2008, when Victim 1 was a freshman in high
school.

Before Victim 1 ceased contact with Sandusky, Sandusky routinely had contact with him
at a Clinton County high school where the administration would call Victim 1 out of activity
period/study hall in the late afternoon to meet with Sandusky in a conference room. No one
monitored these visits. Sandusky assisted the school with coaching varsity football and had
unfettered access to the school.

Victim 1 testified about an incident that occurred one evening at the high school when he
and Sandusky were alone in the weight room where there was a rock climbing wall. After
Victim fell off the wall a few times, Sandusky lay down on top of him, face to face, and was
rolling around the floor with the boy. No one was able to see Victim 1 and Sandusky because of
the configuration of the room. Sandusky was lying under Victim with his eyes closed.
Suddenly a wrestling coach, Joe Miller, unexpectedly entered the room and Sandusky jumped up
very quickly and explained that they had just been wrestling.

Joseph Miller testified that he was head wrestling coach for the elementary wrestling
program for that school district. He knew Victim 1, who had wrestled for him. Miller
corroborated that one evening in 2006 or 2007, he returned to the high school to retrieve
something he had forgotten. He saw a light on in the weight room which should have been
turned off and when he went in, he discovered Victim and Sandusky, lying on their sides, in
physical contact, face to face on a mat. He said both Victim and Sandusky were surprised to
see him enter the room. He recalls that Sandusky jumped up and said, "Hey Coach, we`re just
working on wrestling moves." Sandusky was not a wrestling coach. Miller found the use of that
secluded room odd for wrestling because the bigger wrestling room right outside the weight
room had more room to wrestle and more mats. He had seen Victim with Sandusky frequently
before the weight room incident. He saw them together after school and before athletic practice
time.

Steven Turchetta testified that he was an assistant principal and the head football coach at
the high school attended by Victim l. He testified that Sandusky was a volunteer assistant
football coach. Sandusky also worked with children in the Second Mile program in that school
district. Turchetta described the Second Mile as a very large charitable organization that helped
children who are from economically underprivileged backgrounds and who may be living in
single parent households. Turchetta first met Sandusky in 2002 when Sandusky attempted to
assist some Second Mile members who were on Turchetta's football team. Sandusky's
involvement grew from there. In the 2008 season, Sandusky was a full-time volunteer coach.

Turchetta said it was not unusual for him, as assistant principal, to call a Second Mile student out
of activity period at the end of the day, at Sandusky's request, to see Sandusky. He knew of
several students who were left alone with Sandusky, including Victim l. Turchetta characterized
Sandusky as very controlling within the mentoring relationships he established with Second Mile
students. Sandusky would often want a greater time commitment than the teenagers were willing
to give and Sandusky would have "shouting matches" with various youths, in which Turchetta
would sometimes be the mediator. Turchetta would also end up being Sandusky's point of
contact for a youth whom he had been unable to reach by phone the previous evening. Turchetta
testified that Sandusky would be "clingy" and even "needy" when a young man broke off the
relationship he had established with him and called the behavior "suspicious." Turchetta became
aware of Victim l's allegations regarding sexual assault by Sandusky when the boy's mother
called the school to report it. Sandusky was barred from the school district attended by Victim
from that day forward and the matter was reported to authorities as mandated by law.

Office of Attorney General Narcotics Agent Anthony Sassano testified concerning phone
records that establish 61 phone calls from Sandusky's home phone to Victim l's home phone
between January 2008 and July 2009. ln that same time, there were 57 calls from Sandusky's
cell phone to Victim l's home phone. There were four calls made from Victim l's home phone
to Sandusky's cell phone and one call from Victim l's mother's cell phone to Sandusky's cell
phone. There were no calls made to Sandusky's home phone by Victim during that time
period.

Another youth, .A., age fifteen, testified that Sandusky had taken him and Victim 1 to a
Philadelphia Eagles football game and that Sandusky had driven. He witnessed Sandusky place
his right hand on Victim 1's knee; Sandusky had also done this to .A. on more than one
occasion when they were in Sandusky's car. F.A. was uncomfortable when Sandusky did this
and moved his leg to try to avoid the contact. Sandusky would keep his hand on .A.'s knee
even after F.A. tried to move it. FA. also testified that Sandusky would reach over, while
driving, and lift his shirt and tickle his bare stomach. .A. did not like this contact. .A. also
witnessed Sandusky tickling Victim in similar fashion. Sandusky invited .A. to stay over at
his house but F.A. only stayed one time when he knew Victim was also staying over, after
returning from the Philadelphia Eagles game. FA. confirmed that Victim slept in Sandusky's
basement room when .A. stayed there. .A. testified that he stayed away from Sandusky
because he felt he didn`t want to be alone with him for a long period of time, based on the
tickling, knee touching and other physical contact. Victim confirmed that Sandusky would
drive with his hand on Victim l's leg.

VICTIM 2

On March 1, 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant ("graduate assistant") who was then 28
years old, entered the locker room at the Lasch Football Building on the University Park Campus
on a Friday night before the beginning of Spring Break.

The graduate assistant, who was familiar with Sandusky, was going to put some newly purchased sneakers in his locker and get some recruiting tapes to watch. It was about 9:30 p.m. As the graduate assistant entered the locker room doors, he was surprised to find the lights and showers on. He then heard slapping sounds. He believed the sounds to be those of sexual activity. As the graduate assistant
put the sneakers in his locker, he looked into the shower. He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose
age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal
intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant was shocked but noticed that both
Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught.

The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he
had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The
graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to report what
he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno ("Paterno"), head football coach of Pemi State. The next
morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno's home,
where he reported what he had seen.

Joseph V. Paterno testified to receiving the graduate assistant's report at his home on a
Saturday morning. Paterno testified that the graduate assistant was very upset. Paterno called
Tim Curley ("Curley"), Penn State Athletic Director and Paterno's immediate superior, to his
home the very next day, a Sunday, and reported to him that the graduate assistant had seen Jerry
Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a
young boy.

Approximately one and a half weeks later, the graduate assistant was called to a meeting
with Penn State Athletic Director Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business
Gary Schultz ("Schultz"). The graduate assistant reported to Curley and Schultz that he had
witnessed what he believed to be Sandusky having anal sex with a boy in the Lasch Building
showers. Curley and Schultz assured the graduate assistant that they would look into it and
determine what further action they would take. Paterno was not present for this meeting.
The graduate assistant heard back from Curley a couple of weeks later. He was told that
Sandusky's keys to the locker room were taken away and that the incident had been reported to
The Second Mile. The graduate assistant was never questioned by University Police and no other
entity conducted an investigation until he testified in Grand Jury in December, 2010. The Grand
Jury finds the graduate assistant's testimony to be extremely credible.

Curley testified that the graduate assistant reported to them that "inappropriate conduct"
or activity that made him "uncomfortable" occurred in the Lasch Building shower in March
2002. Curley specifically denied that the graduate assistant reported anal sex or anything of a
sexual nature whatsoever and termed the conduct as merely "horsing around"_ When asked
whether the graduate assistant had reported "sexual conduct" "of any kind" by Sandusky, Curley
answered, "No" twice. When asked if the graduate assistant had reported "anal sex between Jerry
Sandusky and this child," Curley testified, "Absolutely not."
Curley testified that he informed Dr. .lack Raykovitz, Executive Director of the Second
Mile of the conduct reported to him and met with Sandusky to advise Sandusky that he was
prohibited from bringing youth onto the Penn State campus from that point forward. Curley
testified that he met again with the graduate assistant and advised him that Sandusky had been
directed not to use Perm State's athletic facilities with young people and "the information" had
been given to director of The Second Mile. Curley testified that he also advised Penn State
University President Graham Spanier of the information he had received from the graduate
assistant and the steps he had taken as a result. Curley was not specific about the language he
used in reporting the 2002 incident to Spanier. Spanier testified to his approval of the approach
taken by Curley. Curley did not report the incident to the University Police, the police agency for
the University Park campus or any other police agency.

Schultz testified that he was called to a meeting with Joe Paterno and Tim Curley, in
which Paterno reported "disturbing" and "inappropriate" conduct in the shower by Sandusky
upon a young boy, as reported to him by a student or graduate student. Schultz was present in a
subsequent meeting with Curley when the graduate assistant reported the incident in the shower
involving Sandusky and a boy. Schultz was very unsure about what he remembered the graduate
assistant telling him and Curley about the shower incident. He testified that he had the
impression that Sandusky might have inappropriately grabbed the young boy's genitals while
wrestling and agreed that such was inappropriate sexual conduct between a man and a boy.

While equivocating on the definition of "sexual" in the context of Sandusky wrestling with and
grabbing the genitals of the boy, Schultz conceded that the report the graduate assistant made
was of inappropriate sexual conduct by Sandusky. However, Schultz testified that the allegations
were "not that serious" and that he and Curley "had no indication that a crime had occurred."
Schultz agreed that sodomy between Sandusky and a child would clearly be inappropriate sexual
conduct. He denied having such conduct reported to him either by Paterno or the graduate
assistant.

Schultz testified that he and Curley agreed that Sandusky was to be told not to bring any
Second Mile children into the football building and he believed that he and Curley asked "the
child protection agency" to look into the matter. Schultz testified that he knew about an
investigation of Sandusky that occurred in 1998, that the "child protection agency" had done, and
he testified that he believed this same agency was investigating the 2002 report by the graduate
assistant. Schultz acknowledged that there were similarities between the 1998 and 2002
allegations, both of which involved minor boys in the football showers with Sandusky behaving
in a sexually inappropriate manner. Schultz testified that the 1998 incident was reviewed by the
University Police and "the child protection agency" with the blessing of then-University counsel
Wendell Courtney. Courtney was then and remains counsel for The Second Mile. Schultz
confirmed that University President Graham Spanier was apprised in 2002 that a report of an
incident involving Sandusky and a child in the showers on campus had been reported by an
employee. Schultz testified that Spanier approved the decision to ban Sandusky from bringing
children into the football locker room and the decision to advise The Second Mile of the 2002
incident.

Although Schultz oversaw the University Police as part of his position, he never reported
the 2002 incident to the University Police or other police agency, never sought or reviewed a
police report on the 1998 incident and never attempted to learn the identity of the child in the
shower in 2002. No one from the University did so. Schultz did not ask the graduate assistant for
specifics. No one ever did. Schultz expressed surprise upon learning that the l998 investigation
by University Police produced a police report. Schultz said there was never any
discussion between himself and Curley about turning the 2002 incident over to any police
agency. Schultz retired in June 2009 but currently holds the same position as a senior vice
president with Penn State, on an interim basis.

Graham Spanier testified about his extensive responsibilities as President of Pemi State
and his educational background in sociology and marriage and family counseling. He confirmed
Curley and Schultz's respective positions of authority with the University. He testified that
Curley and Schultz came to him in 2002 to report an incident with Jerry Sandusky that made a
member of Curley's staff "uncomfortable" Spanier described it as "Jerry Sandusky in the
football building locker area in the shower with a younger child and that they were horsing
around in the shower." Spanier testified that even in April, 2011, he did not know the identity of
the staff member who had reported the behavior. Spanier denied that it was reported to him as an
incident that was sexual in nature and acknowledged that Curley and Schultz had not indicated
any plan to report the matter to any law enforcement authority, the Commonwealth of
The Grand Jury concludes that the sexual assault of a minor male in 2002 should have
been reported to the Department of Public Welfare and/or a law enforcement
agency such as the University Police or the State Police. The University, by its
senior staff, Gary Schultz, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business and Tim Curley,
Athletic Director, was notified by two different Perm State employees of the alleged sexual
exploitation of that youth. mandatory reporting statute for suspected child abuse
is located at 23 ?63l1 (Child Protective Services Law) and provides that when a staff
member reports abuse, pursuant to statute, the person in charge of the school or institution has
the responsibility and legal obligation to report or cause such a report to be made by telephone
and in writing within 48 hours to the Department of Public Welfare of the Commonwealth of
Pemisylvania. An oral report should have been made to Centre County Children and Youth
Services but none was made. Nor was there any attempt to investigate, to identify Victim 2 or to
protect that child or any others from similar conduct, except as related to preventing its re-
occurrence on University property. The failure to report is a violation of the law which was
graded a summary offense in 2002, pursuant to 23 ?6319.2

The Grand Jury finds that Tim Curley made a materially false statement under oath in an
official proceeding on January 12, 2011, when he testified before the 300? Statewide Investigating
Grand Jury, relating to the 2002 incident, that he was not told by the graduate assistant that
Sandusky was engaged in sexual conduct or anal sex with a boy in the Lasch Building showers.
Furthermore, the Grand jury finds that Gary Schultz made a materially false statement
under oath in an official proceeding on January 12, 2011, when he testified before the 30rd
Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, relating to the 2002 incident that the allegations made by the
2 The grading of the failure to report offense was upgraded from a summary offense to a misdemeanor of the third
degree in 2006, effective May 29, 2007.
p. 13graduate assistant were "not that serious" and that he and Curley "had no indication that a crime
had occurred."

VICTIM 3

Victim 3, now age 24, met Sandusky through The Second Mile in the summer of 2000,
when he was between seventh and eighth grade. The boy met Sandusky during his second year in
the program. Sandusky began to invite Victim 3 to go places with him. Victim 3 was invited to
Sandusky's home for dinner, to hang out, walk the family dogs and to go to Penn State football
games and to Holuba Hall and the gym. When Victim 3 went to the with Sandusky, they
would exercise and then shower. He recalls feeling uncomfortable and choosing a shower at a
distance from Sandusky. Sandusky then made him feel bad about showering at a distance from
him, so Victim 3 moved closer. Sandusky initiated physical contact in the shower with Victim 3
by patting him, rubbing his shoulders, washing his hair and giving him bear hugs. These hugs
would be both face to face and with Sandusky's chest to Victim 3's back. Victim 3 said that on at
least one occasion, Sandusky had an erection when he bear hugged Victim 3 from behind. He
also recalled that when he slept over at Sandusky's residence, he slept in the basement bedroom.
He testified that Sandusky would come into the bedroom where he was lying down. He
sometimes said he was going to give Victim 3 a shoulder rub; sometimes he would blow on
Victim 3's stomach; other times he tickled Victim 3. Sandusky would rub the inside of Victim
3's thigh when he tickled him. On two occasions Victim 3 recalls that Sandusky touched Victim
3's genitals through the athletic shorts Victim 3 wore to bed. Victim 3 would roll over on his
stomach to prevent Sandusky from touching his genitals.
Victim 3 knew Victim 4 to spend a great deal of time with Sandusky.

VICTIM 4

The investigation revealed the existence of Victim 4, a boy who was repeatedly subjected
to Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse and Indecent Assault at the hands of Sandusky. The
assaults took place on the Penn State University Park campus, in the football buildings, at
Toftrees Golf Resort and Conference Center ("Toftrees") in Centre County, where the football
team and staff stayed prior to home football games and at bowl games to which he traveled with
Sandusky.

Victim 4, now age 27, was a Second Mile participant who was singled out by
Sandusky at the age of 12 or 13, while he was in his second year with The Second Mile program
in 1996 or 1997. He was invited to a Sandusky family picnic at which there were several other
non-family members and Sandusky's adopted children. Victim 4 described that on that first
outing, Sandusky had physical contact with him while swimming, which Victim 4 described as
testing "how [Victim 4] would respond to even the smallest physical contact." Sandusky engaged
Victim 4 in workouts or sports and then showered with him at the old East locker rooms across
from Holuba Hall, the football practice building. Sandusky initiated physical contact with Victim
4 by starting a "soap battle"--throwing a handful of soap at the boy and from there, the fight
turned into wrestling in the shower. Victim 4 remembers indecent contact occurring many times,
both in the shower and in hotel rooms at Toftrees.

Victim 4 became a fixture in the Sandusky household, sleeping overnight and
accompanying Sandusky to charity functions and Penn State football games. Victim 4 was listed,
along with Sandusky's wife, as a member of Sandusky's family party for the 1998 Outback Bowl
and the 1999 Alamo Bowl. He traveled to and from both bowl games with the football team and
other Pemr State staff, coaches and their families, sharing the same accommodations. Victim 4
would frequently stay ovemight at Toftrees with Sandusky and the football team prior to home
games; Sandusky's wife was never present at Toftrees when Victim 4 stayed with Sandusky.

This was where the first indecent assaults of Victim 4 occurred. Victim 4 would attend the pre-
game banquet and sit with Sandusky at the coaches' table. Victim 4 also accompanied Sandusky
to various charity golf outings and would share a hotel room with him on those occasions.

Victim 4 stated that Sandusky would wrestle with him and maneuver him into a position
in which Sandusky's head was at Victim 4's genitals and Victim 4's head was at Sandusky's
genitals. Sandusky would kiss Victim 4's inner thighs and genitals. Victim 4 described Sandusky
rubbing his genitals on Victim 4's face and inserting his erect penis in Victim 4's mouth. There
were occasions when this would result in Sandusky ejaculating. He testified that Sandusky also
attempted to penetrate Victim 4's anus with both a finger and his penis. There was slight
penetration and Victim 4 resisted these attempts. Sandusky never asked to do these things but
would simply see what Victim 4 would permit him to do. Sandusky did threaten to send him
home from the Alamo Bowl in Texas when Victim 4 resisted his advances. Usually the
persuasion Sandusky employed was accompanied by gifts and opportunities to attend sporting
and charity events. He gave Victim 4 dozens of gifts, some purchased and some obtained from
various sporting goods vendors such as Nike and Airwalk. Victim 4 received clothes, a
snowboard, Nike shoes, golf clubs, ice hockey equipment and lessons, passes for various
sporting events, football jerseys, and registration for soccer camp. Sandusky even guaranteed
Victim 4 he could be a walk-on player at Penn State. Victim 4 was in a video made about
linebackers that featured Sandusky, and he appeared with him in a photo accompanying an
article about Sandusky in Sports Illustrated.

The Penn State football program relocated to the Lasch Football Building in 1999 and
that facility had a sauna. Victim 4 reported that after the move, most of the sexual conduct that
did not occur in a hotel room occurred in the sauna, as the area is more secluded.
Victim 4 remembers Sandusky being emotionally upset after having a meeting with Joe
Paterno in which Paterno told Sandusky he would not be the next head coach at Penn State and
which preceded Sandusky's retirement. Sandusky told Victim 4 not to tell anyone about the
meeting. That meeting occurred in May, l999.

Eventually, Victim 4 began to intentionally distance himself from Sandusky, not taking
his phone calls and at times even hiding in closets when Sandusky showed up at Victim 4's
home. Victim 4 had a girlfriend, of whom Sandusky did not approve. Sandusky tried to use guilt
and bribery to regain time with Victim 4. Victim 4 had begun to smoke cigarettes and had
Sandusky buy them for him. Victim 4 also said that Sandusky once gave him $50 to buy
marijuana at a location known to Victim 4. Sandusky drove there at Victim 4's direction and
Victim 4 smoked the marijuana in Sandusky's car on the ride home. This was when Victim 4
was trying to distance himself from Sandusky because he wanted no more sexual contact with
him.

VICTIM 5

Victim 5, now age 22, met Sandusky through The Second Mile in 1995 or 1996, when he
was a 7 or 8 year old boy, in second or third grade. Sometime after their initial meeting at a
Second Mile camp at Penn State, Sandusky called to invite the boy to a Penn State football
game. Victim 5 was thrilled to attend. Sandusky picked him up at home and then Sandusky drove
to pick up Victim 6. There were a couple of other kids in the car. The boys were left at Holuba
Hall by Sandusky. They attended the Sandusky family tailgate and the football game. This
became a pattem for Victim 5, who attended perhaps as many as 15 football games as
Sandusky's guest.

Victim 5 walked out of the shower and dried himself off and got dressed. Sandusky never
touched him again. Victim 5 thinks that he did not get invited to any football games after that.

VICTIM 6

Victim 6, who is now 24 years old, was acquainted with Victim 5 and another young
boy in The Second Mile program, their interaction with Sandusky overlapped. Victim 6
was referred to the Second Mile program by a school counselor. He met Sandusky at a Second
mile picnic at Spring Creek Park when he was seven or eight years old, in 1994 or 1995. After
Sandusky interacted with Victim 6 after a skit at the picnic, Sandusky telephoned to invite
Victim 6 to tailgate and attend a football game with some other boys. He was picked up by
Sandusky. Victim 5, B.K., and other boys were present. They went to Holuba Hall, a football
practice building on the Penn State campus, and were left there by Sandusky. They threw
footballs around until it was time for them to walk to the tailgate hosted by Sandusky's family
and then attended the football game. Victim 6 recalls this pattern repeating many times.

Victim 6 recalls being taken into the locker room next to Holuba Hall at Penn State by
Sandusky when he was 11 years old, in 1998 Sandusky picked him up at his home, telling him
he was going to be working out. As they were driving to the University, Sandusky put his right
hand upon Victim 6's left thigh several times. When they arrived, Sandusky showed Victim 6 the
locker rooms and gave him shorts to put on, even though he was already dressed in shorts. They
then lifted weights for about 15 or 20 minutes. They played "Polish bowling" or "Polish soccer",
a game Sandusky had invented, using a ball made out of tape and rolling it into cups. Then
Sandusky began wrestling with Victim 6, who was much smaller than Sandusky. Then Sandusky
said they needed to shower, even though Victim 6 was not sweaty. Victim 6 felt awkward and
tried to go to a shower some distance away from Sandusky but Sandusky called him over, saying
he had already warmed up a shower for the boy. While in the shower, Sandusky approached the
boy, grabbed him around the waist and said, "I'm going to squeeze your guts out." Sandusky
lathered up the boy, soaping his back because, he said, the boy would not be able to reach it.
Sandusky bear-hugged the boy from behind, holding the boy's back against his chest. Then he
picked him up and put him under the showerhead to rinse soap out of his hair. Victim 6 testified
that the entire shower episode felt ve1'y awkward. No one else was arotmd when this occurred.
Looking back on it as an adult, Victim 6 says Sandusky's behavior towards him as an ll year old
boy was very inappropriate.

When Victim 6 was dropped off at home, his hair was wet and his mother immediately
questioned him about this and was upset to learn the boy had showered with Sandusky. She
reported the incident to University Police who investigated. After a investigation by
University Police Detective Ronald Shreffler, the investigation was closed after then-Centre
County District Attorney Ray Gricar decided there would be no criminal charges. Shreffler
testified that he was told to close the investigation by the director of the campus police, Thomas
Harmon. That investigation included a second child, B.K., also ll, who was subjected to nearly
identical treatment in the shower as Victim 6, according to Detective Schreffler.

Detective Schreffler testified that he and State College Police Department Detective
Ralph Ralston, with the consent of the mother of Victim 6, eavesdropped on two conversations
the mother of Victim 6 had with Sandusky on May 13, 1998, and May 19, 1998. The mother of
Victim 6 confronted Sandusky about showering with her son, the effect it had on her son,
whether Sandusky had sexual feelings when he hugged her naked son in the shower and where
Victim 6's buttocks were when Sandusky hugged him. Sandusky said he had showered with
other boys and Victim 6's mother tried to make Sandusky promise never to shower with a boy
again but he would not. She asked him if his "private parts" touched Victim 6 when he bear-
hugged him. Sandusky replied, don't think At the conclusion of the second
conversation, after Sandusky was told he could not see Victim 6 anymore, Sandusky said,
understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you. I wish I
were dead." Detective Ralston and the mother of Victim 6 confirm these conversations.

Jerry Lauro, an investigator with the Department of Public Welfare,
testified that during the 1998 investigation, Sandusky was interviewed on June 1, 1998, by Lauro
and Detective Schreffler. Sandusky admitted showering naked with Victim 6, admitted to
hugging Victim 6 while in the shower and admitted that it was wrong. Detective Schreffler
advised Sandusky not to shower with any child again and Sandusky said that he would not.

The Grand Jury was unable to subpoena B.K. because he is in the military and is
stationed outside the United States.

VICTIM 7

Victim 7, now 26 years old, met Sandusky through the Second Mile program, to which he
was referred by a school counselor at about the age of 10, in 1994. When Victim 7 had been in
the program for a couple of years, Sandusky contacted Victim 7's mother and invited Victim 7 to
a Penn State football game. He would also attend Sandusky's son's State College High School
football games with Sandusky.

Victim 7 enjoyed going on the field at Penn State games,
interacting with players and eating in the dining hall with the athletes. Victim 7 would stay
overnight at Sandusky's home on Friday nights before the home games and then go to the games
with him. Sometimes they would go out for breakfast and would attend coaches meetings.
Victim 6 was also a part of this group of boys. He knew B.K. and several other boys that were in
Sandusky's circle.

Victim 7 testified that Sandusky made him uncomfortable when he was a young boy. He
described Sandusky putting his hand on Victim 7's left thigh when they were driving in the car
or when they would pull into his garage. Victim 7 eventually reacted to this by sitting as far
away from Sandusky as he could in the front seat.

He also described more than one occasion on which Sandusky put his hands down the
waistband of Victim 7's pants. Sandusky never touched any private parts of Victim 7. Victim 7
would always slide away because he was very uncomfortable with Sandusky's behavior. Victim
7 described Sandusky cuddling him when he stayed at his home, lying behind him with his
around the boy. Sandusky also bear-hugged Victim 7 and cracked his back. He also took Victim
7 to Holuba Hall to work out and then to the East Area Locker rooms to shower. Victim 7 was
very uncomfortable with this shared showering. Sandusky would tell Victim 7 to shower next to
him even though there were multiple other showerheads in the locker room. Victim 7 testified
that he has a "blurry memory" of some contact with Sandusky in the shower but is unable to
recall it clearly. Victim 7 had not had contact with Sandusky for nearly two years but was
contacted by Sandusky and separately by Sandusky's wife and another Sandusky friend in the
weeks prior to Victim 7's appearance before the Grand Jury. The callers left messages saying the
matter was very important. Victim 7 did not return these phone calls.

VICTIM 8

In the fall of 2000, a janitor named James "Jim" Calhoun observed Sandusky in
the showers ofthe Lasch Building with a young boy pinned up against the wall, performing oral
sex on the boy. He immediately made known to other janitorial staff what he had just witnessed.

Fellow Office of Physical Plant employee Ronald Petrosky was also working that
evening and recalls that it was football season of 2000 and it was a Thursday or Friday evening,
because the football team was away for its game. Petrosky, whose job it was to clean the
showers, first heard water running in the assistant coaches' shower room. He then saw that two
people were in the assistant coaches' shower room. He could only see two pairs of feet; the upper
bodies were blocked. Petrosky waited for the two persons to exit the shower so he could clean it.
He later saw Jerry Sandusky exit the locker room with a boy, who he described as being between
the ages of ll and 13. They were carrying bags and their hair was wet. Petrosky said good
evening and was acknowledged by Sandusky and the boy. He noted that the hallway in the Lasch
building at that point is long and that Sandusky took the boy's hand and the two of them walked
out hand in hand. Petrosky began to clean the shower that Sandusky and the boy had vacated. As
he worked, Jim approached him. Petrosky described Jim as being upset and crying. Jim reported
that he had seen Sandusky, whose name was not known to him, holding the boy up against the
wall and licking on him. Jim said he had "fought in the [Korean] war seen people with their
guts blowed out, arms just witnessed something in there I'1l never forget." And
he described Sandusky performing oral sex on the boy. Petrosky testified that Jim was shaking
and he and his fellow employees feared Jim might have a heart attack. Petrosky testified that all
the employees working that night except Witherite were relatively new employees. In
discussions held later that shift, the employees expressed concern that if they reported what Jim
had seen, they might lose their jobs. Jim's fellow employees had him tell Jay Witherite what he
had seen. Jay Witherite was Jim's immediate supervisor. Witherite testified that Jim was "very
emotionally upset", "very distraught", to the point that Witherite "was afraid the man was going
to have a heart attack or something the way he was acting." Jim reported to Witherite that he had
observed Sandusky performing oral sex on the boy in the showers. Witherite tried to calm Jim,
who was cursing and remained upset throughout the shift. Witherite told him to whom he should
report the incident, if he chose to report it.

Witherite testified that later that same evening, Jim found him and told him that the man
he had seen in the shower with the young boy was sitting in the Lasch building parking lot, in a
car. Witherite confirmed visually that it was Sandusky who was sitting in his car in the parking
lot. Witherite says that this was between 10:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. Petrosky also saw Sandusky
drive very slowly through the parking lot about 2 to 3 hours after the incident was reported to
him by Jim, at approximately 11:30 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Petrosky recognized Sandusky in his
vehicle. Petrosky testified that Sandusky drove by another time, about two hours later, again
driving by very slowly but not stopping. The second drive-by was between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
Petrosky testified that Sandusky did not enter the building either time. The area is well lit and the
coaches' cars were known to Petrosky.

Jim was a temporary employee at the Lasch Building, working there for approximately 8
months. No report was ever made by Jim Calhoun. Jim presently suffers from dementia, resides
in a nursing home and is incompetent to testify. Victim 8's identity is unknown.

Embroiled in Sexual Scandal, Paterno Seeks Legal Counsel

Representatives for Joe Paterno contacted Washington, D.C., criminal defense lawyer J. Sedwick Sollers on Thursday to represent the former football coach in the Penn State sex abuse case, NBC News reports.

Sollers represented President George H.W. Bush in the Iran-Contra affair two decades ago.

Representatives for Joe Paterno contacted Washington, D.C., criminal defense lawyer J. Sedwick Sollers on Thursday to represent the former football coach in the Penn State sex abuse case, NBC News reports. (AP Photo)A source close to Paterno told NBC News that in addition to investigations by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, Paterno is also concerned about the likelihood of civil lawsuits by Jerry Sandusky's alleged victims and their families. Paterno has not been charged with any crimes and, according to NBC, has been described as a cooperating witness.

Paterno's son Scott denied an earlier report that said his father had hired Sollers.

"To be clear, no lawyer has been retained. Not sure where that report originated," Scott Paterno said via his Twitter account Thursday.

Paterno was fired Wednesday night by the Penn State Board of Trustees, in response to a grand jury report in the Sandusky case.

In 2002, Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Paterno that he’d witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in the locker room shower, Paterno told athletic director Tim Curley, then later informed vice president of business and finance Gary Schultz, according to the report.

Schultz and Curley said they told university president Graham Spanier, and a decision was made to not allow Sandusky back on campus with boys from his charity, The Second Mile. No one informed police.

Curley and Schultz have been charged with perjury and failure to report the incident to authorities, as required by state law. Curley is on administrative leave from Penn State. Spanier was fired with Paterno.

(by Sporting News Staff)

Al Davis

1929 - 2011

( R.I.P. )

(All photos by Sporting News Staff)

The 2012 London Olympics Boxing Scandal

The International Boxing Association (AIBA) has been rocked to the core after BBC Newsnight alleged tonight that it has uncovered evidence of secret payments of millions of dollars from Azerbaijan in exchange for two boxing Olympic gold medals at the London 2012 Olympics.

The allegations claim that an individual from Azerbaijan paid $9 million (£6 million/€7 million) to the World Series Boxing (WSB) which is the professional tournament owned by AIBA.

AIBA have admitted that an Azeri national did indeed pay one of their competitions the money but they deny any deal to fix medals.

AIBA President CK Wu has stated that the allegations are "totally untrue and ludicrous" and that the "WSB is conducted in a totally transparent way".

He added that AIBA had a zero tolerance policy on corruption and that he would conduct an immediate investigation into the allegations.

The accusations revolved around Ivan Khodabakhsh - the WSB chief operating officer - with Newsnight claiming that whistle-blowers revealed that he had resorted to desperate measures after the WSB ran into financial difficulties in the United States and was in urgent need of funding.

The insiders said Khodabakhsh told them that a secret deal had been done to secure funding from Azerbaijan in return for the guarantee that two Azerbaijani fighters would win Olympic gold at London 2012

An unnamed insider said: "Ivan boasted to a few of us that there was no need to worry about World Series Boxing having the coin to pay its bills.

"As long as the Azeris got their medals, WSB would have the cash."

Khodabakhsh has already reacted to the claims calling them "an absolute lie".

"I deny that I have offered anyone two gold medals or have any understanding that anybody else has offered two gold medals to Azerbaijan," he said.

The AIBA had previously claimed that the money for WSB America came from a private Swiss company but documents show communications between Khodabakhsh, AIBA chief executive Ho Kim and Azerbaijan's Minister for Emergency Situations Kamaladdin Heydarov about an investment agreement for a $10 million (£6.5 million/€7.5 million) loan.

These include an e-mail from Khodabakhsh to the Ministry in Azerbaijan with the following request: "Please transfer the investment money soonest possible to the WSB America account".

AIBA say that Government Minister Heydarov introduced a private Azerbaijani investor to WSB and that the Minister and his assistant acted as the interface between the two since the investor did not speak good English.

Sporting events promoter Barry Hearn was asked to look at the economics of WSB when it was first mooted in 2009 and came to the conclusion that it could not make money.

"If an investor comes into this scheme with $10 million (£6.5 million/€7.5 million) I can only think he's arrived from another planet," said Hearn.

Following the BBC Newsnight programme, AIBA released a statement on the allegations which said: "In 2010, an agreement was signed between WSB SA, a Swiss incorporated company which runs the World Series of Boxing competition under the auspices of the AIBA, and a Swiss investment company for a loan in respect of the operation of WSB's American franchises.

"The Swiss investment company facilitated the making of the loan, which originated from an Azerbaijani investor.

"The loan was not 'secret' and nor was there anything improper about it.

It was an arm's length transaction between two entities made on a commercial basis and with a view to a commercial return for the investor.

"While that investor prefers not to be named, as is their right under the terms of the agreement, AIBA/WSB can confirm that they are a private investor and are not the Azerbaijani Government (whether the Ministry of Emergency or any other arm of the Government) and that none of the funds were derived from Azerbaijani Government.

"Any suggestion that the loan was made in return for promises of gold medals at the 2012 Olympics is preposterous and utterly untrue.

"AIBA/WSB believe that such such allegations have been made by individuals with an axe to grind, who are totally discredited.

"As well as unjustifiably imputing corruption to AIBA/WSB, they demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the procedures which lead to the award of Olympic boxing medals and the impossibility of influencing these."

The allegations are set to cast a huge shadow over the organisation at the worst possible time with the AIBA 2011 World Championships – a qualifying event for the London 2012 Olympics – set to get underway this week in the Azerbaijan capital Baku.

AIBA had already scheduled an Extraordinary Congress ahead of the competition for Saturday (September 24) which now looks set to be dominated by these allegations.

The allegeations are also set to overshadow Baku's bid to host the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics.

(by Tom Degun)

Inside The NCAA Monolithe

“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001.

“We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“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.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.

But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.

Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room. “There’s fear,” Friday told me when I visited him on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill last fall. As we spoke, two giant construction cranes towered nearby over the university’s Kenan Stadium, working on the latest $77 million renovation.
(The University of Michigan spent almost four times that much to expand its Big House.) Friday insisted that for the networks, paying huge sums to universities was a bargain. “We do every little thing for them,” he said. “We furnish the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on.” Friday, a weathered idealist at 91, laments the
control universities have ceded in pursuit of this money. If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night, he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.” He longed for a campus identity more centered in an academic mission.

The United States is the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports at institutions of higher learning. This should not, in and of itself, be controversial. College athletics are rooted in the classical ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—and who would argue with that? College sports are deeply inscribed in the culture of our nation. Half a million young men and women play competitive intercollegiate sports each year. Millions of spectators flock into football stadiums each Saturday in the fall, and tens of millions more watch on television. The March Madness basketball tournament each spring has become a major national event, with upwards of 80 million watching it on television and talking about the games around the office water cooler. ESPN has spawned ESPNU, a channel dedicated to college sports, and Fox Sports and other cable outlets are developing channels exclusively to cover sports from specific regions or divisions.

With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in
profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.

Scandal after scandal has rocked college sports. In 2010, the NCAA sanctioned the University of
Southern California after determining that star running back Reggie Bush and his family had received “improper benefits” while he played for the Trojans. (Among other charges, Bush and members of his family were alleged to have received free airfare and limousine rides, a car, and a rent-free home in San Diego, from sports agents who wanted Bush as a client.) The Bowl Championship Series stripped USC of
its 2004 national title, and Bush returned the Heisman Trophy he had won in 2005. Last fall, as Auburn University football stormed its way to an undefeated season and a national championship, the team’s star quarterback, Cam Newton, was dogged by allegations that his father had used a recruiter to solicit up to $180,000 from Mississippi State in exchange for his son’s matriculation there after junior college in 2010.

Jim Tressel, the highly successful head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, resigned last spring after the NCAA alleged he had feigned ignorance of rules violations by players on his team. At least 28 players over the course of the previous nine seasons, according to Sports Illustrated, had traded autographs, jerseys, and other team memorabilia in exchange for tattoos or cash at a tattoo parlor in Columbus, in violation of NCAA rules. Late this summer, Yahoo Sports reported that the NCAA was investigating allegations that a University of Miami booster had given millions of dollars in illicit cash and services to more than 70 Hurricanes football players over eight years.

The list of scandals goes on. With each revelation, there is much wringing of hands. Critics scold schools for breaking faith with their educational mission, and for failing to enforce the sanctity of “amateurism.”

Sportswriters denounce the NCAA for both tyranny and impotence in its quest to “clean up” college sports.

Observers on all sides express jumbled emotions about youth and innocence, venting against
professional mores or greedy amateurs.

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can
exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Don Curtis, a UNC trustee, told me that impoverished football players cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home. Curtis is a rarity among those in higher education today, in that he dares to violate the signal taboo: “I think we should pay these guys something.”

Fans and educators alike recoil from this proposal as though from original sin. Amateurism is the whole point, they say. Paid athletes would destroy the integrity and appeal of college sports. Many former college athletes object that money would have spoiled the sanctity of the bond they enjoyed with their teammates.

I, too, once shuddered instinctively at the notion of paid college athletes.

But after an inquiry that took me into 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. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is
colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel. Efforts to reform it—most notably by the three Knight Commissions over the course of 20 years—have, while making changes around the edges, been largely fruitless. The time has come for a major overhaul. And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

Founding Myths

From the start, amateurism in college sports has been honored more often in principle than in fact; the NCAA was built of a mixture of noble and venal impulses. In the late 19th century, intellectuals believed that the sporting arena simulated an impending age of Darwinian struggle. Because the United States did not hold a global empire like England’s, leaders warned of national softness once railroads conquered the last continental frontier. As though heeding this warning, ingenious students turned variations on rugby into a toughening agent. Today a plaque in New Brunswick, New Jersey, commemorates the first college game, on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers beat Princeton 6–4.

Walter Camp graduated from Yale in 1880 so intoxicated by the sport that he devoted his life to it without pay, becoming “the father of American football.” He persuaded other schools to reduce the chaos on the field by trimming each side from 15 players to 11, and it was his idea to paint measuring lines on the field.

He conceived functional designations for players, coining terms such as quarterback. His game remained violent by design. Crawlers could push the ball forward beneath piles of flying elbows without pause until they cried “Down!” in submission.

In an 1892 game against its archrival, Yale, the Harvard football team was the first to deploy a “flying wedge,” based on Napoleon’s surprise concentrations of military force. In an editorial calling for the abolition of the play, The New York Times described it as “half a ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds,” noting that surgeons often had to be called onto the field. Three years later, the continuing mayhem prompted the Harvard faculty to take the first of two votes to abolish football. Charles Eliot, the university’s president, brought up other concerns. “Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football,” declared Eliot. “That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.” Still, Harvard football persisted. In 1903, fervent alumni built Harvard Stadium with zero college funds. The team’s first paid head coach, Bill Reid, started in 1905 at nearly twice the average salary for a full professor.

A newspaper story from that year, illustrated with the Grim Reaper laughing on a goalpost, counted 25 college players killed during football season. A fairy-tale version of the founding of the NCAA holds that President Theodore Roosevelt, upset by a photograph of a bloodied Swarthmore College player, vowed to civilize or destroy football. The real story is that Roosevelt maneuvered shrewdly to preserve the sport—and give a boost to his beloved Harvard. After McClure’s magazine published a story on corrupt teams with phantom students, a muckraker exposed Walter Camp’s $100,000 slush fund at Yale. In response to mounting outrage, Roosevelt summoned leaders from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House, where Camp parried mounting criticism and conceded nothing irresponsible in the college football rules he’d established. At Roosevelt’s behest, the three schools issued a public statement that
college sports must reform to survive, and representatives from 68 colleges founded a new organization that would soon be called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A Haverford College official was confirmed as secretary but then promptly resigned in favor of Bill Reid, the new Harvard coach, who instituted new rules that benefited Harvard’s playing style at the expense of Yale’s. At a stroke, Roosevelt
saved football and dethroned Yale.

For nearly 50 years, the NCAA, with no real authority and no staff to speak of, enshrined amateur ideals that it was helpless to enforce. (Not until 1939 did it gain the power even to mandate helmets.) In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation made headlines with a report, “American College Athletics,” which concluded that the scramble for players had “reached the proportions of nationwide commerce.” Of the 112 schools surveyed, 81 flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios. Fans ignored the uproar, and two-thirds of the colleges mentioned told The New York Times that they planned no changes. In 1939, freshman players at the University of Pittsburgh went on strike because they were getting paid less than their upperclassman teammates.

Embarrassed, the NCAA in 1948 enacted a “Sanity Code,” which was supposed to prohibit all concealed and indirect benefits for college athletes; any money for athletes was to be limited to transparent scholarships awarded solely on financial need. Schools that violated this code would be expelled from NCAA membership and thus exiled from competitive sports.

This bold effort flopped. Colleges balked at imposing such a drastic penalty on each other, and the Sanity Code was repealed within a few years. The University of Virginia went so far as to call a press conference to say that if its athletes were ever accused of being paid, they should be forgiven, because their studies at Thomas Jefferson’s university were so rigorous.

The Big Bluff

In 1951, the NCAA seized upon a serendipitous set of events to gain control of intercollegiate sports.

First, the organization hired a young college dropout named Walter Byers as executive director. A journalist who was not yet 30 years old, he was an appropriately inauspicious choice for the vaguely defined new post. He wore cowboy boots and a toupee. He shunned personal contact, obsessed over details, and proved himself a bureaucratic master of pervasive, anonymous intimidation. Although discharged from the Army during World War II for defective vision, Byers was able to see an opportunity in two contemporaneous scandals. In one, the tiny College of William and Mary, aspiring to challenge football powers Oklahoma and Ohio State, was found to be counterfeiting grades to keep conspicuously pampered players eligible. In the other, a basketball point-shaving conspiracy (in which gamblers paid players to perform poorly) had spread from five New York colleges to the University of Kentucky, the reigning national champion, generating tabloid “perp” photos of gangsters and handcuffed basketball
players. The scandals posed a crisis of credibility for collegiate athletics, and nothing in the NCAA’s feeble record would have led anyone to expect real reform.

But Byers managed to impanel a small infractions board to set penalties without waiting for a full convention of NCAA schools, which would have been inclined toward forgiveness. Then he lobbied a University of Kentucky dean—A. D. Kirwan, a former football coach and future university president—not to contest the NCAA’s dubious legal position (the association had no actual authority to penalize the university), pleading that college sports must do something to restore public support. His gambit succeeded when Kirwan reluctantly accepted a landmark precedent: the Kentucky basketball team would
be suspended for the entire 1952–53 season. Its legendary coach, Adolph Rupp, fumed for a year in limbo.

The Kentucky case created an aura of centralized command for an NCAA office that barely existed. At the same time, a colossal misperception gave Byers leverage to mine gold. Amazingly in retrospect, most colleges and marketing experts considered the advent of television a dire threat to sports. Studies found that broadcasts reduced live attendance, and therefore gate receipts, because some customers preferred
to watch at home for free. Nobody could yet imagine the revenue bonanza that television represented.

With clunky new TV sets proliferating, the 1951 NCAA convention voted 161–7 to outlaw televised games except for a specific few licensed by the NCAA staff.

All but two schools quickly complied. The University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame protested the order to break contracts for home-game television broadcasts, claiming the right to make their own decisions.

Byers objected that such exceptions would invite disaster. The conflict escalated. Byers brandished penalties for games televised without approval. Penn contemplated seeking antitrust protection through the courts. Byers issued a contamination notice, informing any opponent scheduled to play Penn that it would be punished for showing up to compete. In effect, Byers mobilized the college world to isolate the
two holdouts in what one sportswriter later called “the Big Bluff.”

Byers won. Penn folded in part because its president, the perennial White House contender Harold Stassen, wanted to mend relations with fellow schools in the emerging Ivy League, which would be formalized in 1954. When Notre Dame also surrendered, Byers conducted exclusive negotiations with the new television networks on behalf of every college team. Joe Rauh Jr., a prominent civil-rights attorney, helped him devise a rationing system to permit only 11 broadcasts a year—the fabled Game of the Week.

Byers and Rauh selected a few teams for television exposure, excluding the rest. On June 6, 1952, NBC signed a one-year deal to pay the NCAA $1.14 million for a carefully restricted football package. Byers routed all contractual proceeds through his office. He floated the idea that, to fund an NCAA infrastructure, his organization should take a 60 percent cut; he accepted 12 percent that season. (For later contracts, as the size of television revenues grew exponentially, he backed down to 5 percent.) Proceeds from the first NBC contract were enough to rent an NCAA headquarters, in Kansas City.

Only one year into his job, Byers had secured enough power and money to regulate all of college sports.

Over the next decade, the NCAA’s power grew along with television revenues. Through the efforts of Byers’s deputy and chief lobbyist, Chuck Neinas, the NCAA won an important concession in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, in which Congress made its granting of a precious antitrust exemption to the National Football League contingent upon the blackout of professional football on Saturdays. Deftly,
without even mentioning the NCAA, a rider on the bill carved each weekend into protected broadcast markets: Saturday for college, Sunday for the NFL. The NFL got its antitrust exemption. Byers, having negotiated the NCAA’s television package up to $3.1 million per football season—which was higher than the NFL’s figure in those early years—had made the NCAA into a spectacularly profitable cartel.

“We Eat What We Kill”

The NCAA’s control of college sports still rested on a fragile base, however: the consent of the colleges and universities it governed. For a time, the vast sums of television money delivered to these institutions through Byers’s deals made them willing to submit. But the big football powers grumbled about the portion
of the television revenue diverted to nearly a thousand NCAA member schools that lacked major athletic programs. They chafed against cost-cutting measures—such as restrictions on team size—designed to help smaller schools. “I don’t want Hofstra telling Texas how to play football,” Darrell Royal, the Longhorns coach, griped. By the 1970s and ’80s, as college football games delivered bonanza ratings—and
advertising revenue—to the networks, some of the big football schools began to wonder: Why do we need to have our television coverage brokered through the NCAA? Couldn’t we get a bigger cut of that TV money by dealing directly with the networks?

Byers faced a rude internal revolt. The NCAA’s strongest legions, its big football schools, defected en masse. Calling the NCAA a price-fixing cartel that siphoned every television dollar through its coffers, in 1981 a rogue consortium of 61 major football schools threatened to sign an independent contract with
NBC for $180 million over four years.

With a huge chunk of the NCAA’s treasury walking out the door, Byers threatened sanctions, as he had against Penn and Notre Dame three decades earlier. But this time the universities of Georgia and Oklahoma responded with an antitrust suit. “It is virtually impossible to overstate the degree of our resentment … of the NCAA,” said William Banowsky, the president of the University of Oklahoma. In the landmark 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the NCAA’s latest football contracts with television—and any future ones—as an illegal
restraint of trade that harmed colleges and viewers. Overnight, the NCAA’s control of the television market for football vanished. Upholding Banowsky’s challenge to the NCAA’s authority, the Regents decision freed the football schools to sell any and all games the markets would bear. Coaches and administrators
no longer had to share the revenue generated by their athletes with smaller schools outside the football consortium. “We eat what we kill,” one official at the University of Texas bragged.

A few years earlier, this blow might have financially crippled the NCAA—but a rising tide of money from basketball concealed the structural damage of the Regents decision. During the 1980s, income from the

March Madness college basketball tournament, paid directly by the television networks to the NCAA, grew tenfold. The windfall covered—and then far exceeded—what the organization had lost from football.

Still, Byers never forgave his former deputy Chuck Neinas for leading the rebel consortium. He knew that Neinas had seen from the inside how tenuous the NCAA’s control really was, and how diligently Byers had worked to prop up its Oz-like façade. During Byers’s tenure, the rule book for Division I athletes grew to 427 pages of scholastic detail. His NCAA personnel manual banned conversations around water coolers, and coffee cups on desks, while specifying exactly when drapes must be drawn at the NCAA’s 27,000-square-foot headquarters near Kansas City (built in 1973 from the proceeds of a 1 percent surtax
on football contracts). It was as though, having lost control where it mattered, Byers pedantically exerted more control where it didn’t.

After retiring in 1987, Byers let slip his suppressed fury that the ingrate football conferences, having robbed the NCAA of television revenue, still expected it to enforce amateurism rules and police every leak of funds to college players. A lethal greed was “gnawing at the innards of college athletics,” he wrote in his memoir. When Byers renounced the NCAA’s pretense of amateurism, his former colleagues would stare blankly, as though he had gone senile or, as he wrote, “desecrated my sacred vows.” But Byers was better positioned than anyone else to argue that college football’s claim to amateurism was unfounded. Years
later, as we will see, lawyers would seize upon his words to do battle with the NCAA.

Meanwhile, reformers fretted that commercialism was hurting college sports, and that higher education’s historical balance between academics and athletics had been distorted by all the money sloshing around.

News stories revealed that schools went to extraordinary measures to keep academically incompetent athletes eligible for competition, and would vie for the most-sought-after high-school players by proffering under-the-table payments. In 1991, the first Knight Commission report, “Keeping Faith With the Student Athlete,” was published; the commission’s “bedrock conviction” was that university presidents must seize control of the NCAA from athletic directors in order to restore the preeminence of academic values over athletic or commercial ones. In response, college presidents did take over the NCAA’s governance. But by 2001, when the second Knight Commission report (“A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education”) was issued, a new generation of reformers was admitting that problems of corruption and commercialism had “grown rather than diminished” since the first report. Meanwhile the NCAA itself, revenues rising, had moved into a $50 million, 116,000-square-foot headquarters in Indianapolis. By 2010, as the size of NCAA headquarters increased yet again with a 130,000-square-foot expansion, a third Knight Commission was groping blindly for a hold on independent college-athletic conferences that were behaving more like sovereign pro leagues than confederations of universities. And still more money continued to flow into NCAA coffers. With the basketball tournament’s 2011 television deal, annual March Madness broadcast revenues had skyrocketed 50-fold in less than 30 years.

The Myth of the “Student-Athlete”

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports
economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

“We crafted the term student-athlete,” Walter Byers himself wrote, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.” The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given
the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.”

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not
meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU running back, carried the ball on a “Red Right 28” sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. “It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player,” Waldrep recalled.

Waldrep was paralyzed: he had lost all movement and feeling below his neck. After nine months of paying his medical bills, Texas Christian refused to pay any more, so the Waldrep family coped for years on dwindling charity.

Through the 1990s, from his wheelchair, Waldrep pressed a lawsuit for workers’ compensation. (He also, through heroic rehabilitation efforts, recovered feeling in his arms, and eventually learned to drive a specially rigged van. “I can brush my teeth,” he told me last year, “but I still need help to bathe and dress.”)

His attorneys haggled with TCU and the state worker-compensation fund over what constituted
employment. Clearly, TCU had provided football players with equipment for the job, as a typical employer would—but did the university pay wages, withhold income taxes on his financial aid, or control work conditions and performance? The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football. (Waldrep told me school officials “said they recruited me as a student, not an athlete,” which he says was absurd.)

The long saga vindicated the power of the NCAA’s “student-athlete” formulation as a shield, and the organization continues to invoke it as both a legalistic defense and a noble ideal. Indeed, such is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.

Last Thanksgiving weekend, with both the FBI and the NCAA investigating whether Cam Newton had
been lured onto his team with illegal payments, Newton’s Auburn Tigers and the Alabama Crimson Tide came together for their annual game, known as the Iron Bowl, before 101,821 fans at Bryant-Denny Stadium. This game is always a highlight of the football season because of the historic rivalry between the two schools, and the 2010 edition had enormous significance, pitting the defending national champion Crimson Tide against the undefeated Tigers, who were aiming for their first championship since 1957. I expected excited fans; what I encountered was the throbbing heart of college sports. As I drove before daybreak toward the stadium, a sleepless caller babbled over WJOX, the local fan radio station, that he “couldn’t stop thinking about the coin toss.” In the parking lot, ticketless fans were puzzled that anyone need ask why they had tailgated for days just to watch their satellite-fed flat screens within earshot of the
roar. All that morning, pilgrims packed the Bear Bryant museum, where displays elaborated the misery of Alabama’s 4–24 run before the glorious Bryant era dawned in 1958.

Finally, as Auburn took the field for warm-ups, one of Alabama’s public-address-system operators played “Take the Money and Run” (an act for which he would be fired). A sea of signs reading $CAM taunted Newton. The game, perhaps the most exciting of the season, was unbearably tense, with Auburn coming from way behind to win 28–27, all but assuring that it would go on to play for the national championship.

Days later, Auburn suspended Newton after the NCAA found that a rules violation had occurred: his father was alleged to have marketed his son in a pay-for-play scheme; a day after that, the NCAA reinstated Newton’s eligibility because investigators had not found evidence that Newton or Auburn officials had known of his father’s actions. This left Newton conveniently eligible for the Southeastern Conference championship game and for the postseason BCS championship bowl. For the NCAA, prudence meant honoring public demand.

“Our championships,” NCAA President Mark Emmert has declared, “are one of the primary tools we have to enhance the student-athlete experience.”

“Whoremasters”

NCAA v. Regents left the NCAA devoid of television football revenue and almost wholly dependent on March Madness basketball. It is rich but insecure. Last year, CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting paid $771 million to the NCAA for television rights to the 2011 men’s basketball tournament alone. That’s three-quarters of a billion dollars built on the backs of amateurs—on unpaid labor. The whole edifice
depends on the players’ willingness to perform what is effectively volunteer work. The athletes, and the league officials, are acutely aware of this extraordinary arrangement. William Friday, the former North Carolina president, recalls being yanked from one Knight Commission meeting and sworn to secrecy about what might happen if a certain team made the NCAA championship basketball game. “They were going to dress and go out on the floor,” Friday told me, “but refuse to play,” in a wildcat student strike.

Skeptics doubted such a diabolical plot. These were college kids—unlikely to second-guess their
coaches, let alone forfeit the dream of a championship. Still, it was unnerving to contemplate what hung on the consent of a few young volunteers: several hundred million dollars in television revenue, countless
livelihoods, the NCAA budget, and subsidies for sports at more than 1,000 schools. Friday’s informants exhaled when the suspect team lost before the finals.

Cognizant of its precarious financial base, the NCAA has in recent years begun to pursue new sources of revenue. Taking its cue from member schools such as Ohio State (which in 2009 bundled all its promotional rights—souvenirs, stadium ads, shoe deals—and outsourced them to the international sports marketer IMG College for a guaranteed $11 million a year), the NCAA began to exploit its vault of college sports on film. For $29.99 apiece, NCAA On Demand offers DVDs of more than 200 memorable contests in men’s ice hockey alone. Video-game technology also allows nostalgic fans to relive and even
participate in classic moments of NCAA Basketball. NCAA Football, licensed by the NCAA through IMG College to Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest video-game manufacturers, reportedly sold 2.5 million copies in 2008. Brit Kirwan, the chancellor of the Maryland university system and a former president at Ohio State, says there were “terrible fights” between the third Knight Commission and the NCAA over the ethics of generating this revenue.

All of this money ultimately derives from the college athletes whose likenesses are shown in the films or video games. But none of the profits go to them. Last year, Electronic Arts paid more than $35 million in royalties to the NFL players union for the underlying value of names and images in its pro football series—but neither the NCAA nor its affiliated companies paid former college players a nickel. Naturally,
as they have become more of a profit center for the NCAA, some of the vaunted “student-athletes” have begun to clamor that they deserve a share of those profits. You “see everybody getting richer and richer,”

Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, told
USA Today recently. “And you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”

Some athletes have gone beyond talk. A series of lawsuits quietly making their way through the courts cast a harsh light on the absurdity of the system—and threaten to dislodge the foundations on which the NCAA rests. On July 21, 2009, lawyers for Ed O’Bannon filed a class-action antitrust suit against the NCAA at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. “Once you leave your university,” says O’Bannon, who
won the John Wooden Award for player of the year in 1995 on UCLA’s national-championship basketball team, “one would think your likeness belongs to you.” The NCAA and UCLA continue to collect money from the sales of videos of him playing. But by NCAA rules, O’Bannon, who today works at a Toyota dealership near Las Vegas, alleges he is still not allowed to share the revenue the NCAA generates from his own image as a college athlete. His suit quickly gathered co-plaintiffs from basketball and football,
ex-players featured in NCAA videos and other products. “The NCAA does not license student-athlete likenesses,” NCAA spokesperson Erik Christianson told The New York Times in response to the suit, “or prevent former student-athletes from attempting to do so. Likewise, to claim the NCAA profits off student-athlete likenesses is also pure fiction.”

The legal contention centers on Part IV of the NCAA’s “Student-Athlete Statement” for Division I, which requires every athlete to authorize use of “your name or picture … to promote NCAA championships or other NCAA events, activities or programs.” Does this clause mean that athletes clearly renounce personal interest forever? If so, does it actually undermine the NCAA by implicitly recognizing that athletes
have a property right in their own performance? Jon King, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, expects the NCAA’s core mission of amateurism to be its “last defense standing.”

In theory, the NCAA’s passion to protect the noble amateurism of college athletes should prompt it to focus on head coaches in the high-revenue sports—basketball and football—since holding the top official accountable should most efficiently discourage corruption. The problem is that the coaches’ growing power has rendered them, unlike their players, ever more immune to oversight. According to research by Charles Clotfelter, an economist at Duke, the average compensation for head football coaches at public
universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since the Regents decision in 1984; that’s more than 20 times the cumulative 32 percent raise for college professors. For top basketball coaches, annual contracts now exceed $4 million, augmented by assorted bonuses, endorsements, country-club memberships, the occasional private plane, and in some cases a negotiated

percentage of ticket receipts. (Oregon’s ticket concessions netted former football coach Mike Bellotti an additional $631,000 in 2005.)

The NCAA rarely tangles with such people, who are apt to fight back and win. When Rick Neuheisel, the head football coach of the Washington Huskies, was punished for petty gambling (in a March Madness pool, as it happened), he sued the NCAA and the university for wrongful termination, collected $4.5 million, and later moved on to UCLA. When the NCAA tried to cap assistant coaches’ entering salary at a mere $16,000, nearly 2,000 of them brought an antitrust suit, Law v. NCAA, and in 1999 settled for $54.5 million. Since then, salaries for assistant coaches have commonly exceeded $200,000, with the top assistants in the SEC averaging $700,000. In 2009, Monte Kiffin, then at the University of Tennessee,
became the first assistant coach to reach $1 million, plus benefits.

The late Myles Brand, who led the NCAA from 2003 to 2009, defended the economics of college sports by claiming that they were simply the result of a smoothly functioning free market. He and his colleagues deflected criticism about the money saturating big-time college sports by focusing attention on scapegoats; in 2010, outrage targeted sports agents. Last year Sports Illustrated published “Confessions
of an Agent,” a firsthand account of dealing with high-strung future pros whom the agent and his peers courted with flattery, cash, and tawdry favors. Nick Saban, Alabama’s head football coach, mobilized his peers to denounce agents as a public scourge. “I hate to say this,” he said, “but how are they any better
than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None.”

Saban’s raw condescension contrasts sharply with the lonely penitence from Dale Brown, the retired longtime basketball coach at LSU. “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids,”

Brown once reflected. “We’re the whoremasters.”

“Picayune Rules”

NCAA officials have tried to assert their dominion—and distract attention from the larger issues—by chasing frantically after petty violations. Tom McMillen, a former member of the Knight Commission who was an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, likens these officials to traffic cops in
a speed trap, who could flag down almost any passing motorist for prosecution in kangaroo court under a “maze of picayune rules.” The publicized cases have become convoluted soap operas. At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

A few months later, the NCAA investigated rumors that Ohio State football players had benefited from “hook-ups on tatts”—that is, that they’d gotten free or underpriced tattoos at an Ohio tattoo parlor in exchange for autographs and memorabilia—a violation of the NCAA’s rule against discounts linked to athletic personae. The NCAA Committee on Infractions imposed five-game suspensions on Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s tattooed quarterback, and four other players (some of whom had been found to have sold their Big Ten championship rings and other gear), but did permit them to finish the season and play in
the Sugar Bowl. (This summer, in an attempt to satisfy NCAA investigators, Ohio State voluntarily vacated its football wins from last season, as well as its Sugar Bowl victory.) A different NCAA committee promulgated a rule banning symbols and messages in players’ eyeblack—reportedly aimed at Pryor’s controversial gesture of support for the pro quarterback Michael Vick, and at Bible verses inscribed in the eyeblack of the former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

The moral logic is hard to fathom: the NCAA bans personal messages on the bodies of the players, and penalizes players for trading their celebrity status for discounted tattoos—but it codifies precisely how and where commercial insignia from multinational corporations can be displayed on college players, for the financial benefit of the colleges. Last season, while the NCAA investigated him and his father for the
recruiting fees they’d allegedly sought, Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.

“Restitution”

Obscure NCAA rules have bedeviled Scott Boras, the preeminent sports agent for Major League
Baseball stars, in cases that may ultimately prove more threatening to the NCAA than Ed O’Bannon’s antitrust suit. In 2008, Andrew Oliver, a sophomore pitcher for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, had been listed as the 12th-best professional prospect among sophomore players nationally. He decided to dismiss the two attorneys who had represented him out of high school, Robert and Tim Baratta, and retain Boras
instead. Infuriated, the Barattas sent a spiteful letter to the NCAA. Oliver didn’t learn about this until the night before he was scheduled to pitch in the regional final for a place in the College World Series, when an NCAA investigator showed up to question him in the presence of lawyers for Oklahoma State. The
investigator also questioned his father, Dave, a truck driver.

Had Tim Baratta been present in their home when the Minnesota Twins offered $390,000 for Oliver to sign out of high school? A yes would mean trouble. While the NCAA did not forbid all professional advice—indeed, Baseball America used to publish the names of agents representing draft-likely underclassmen—NCAA Bylaw 12.3.2.1 prohibited actual negotiation with any professional team by an adviser, on pain of disqualification for the college athlete. The questioning lasted past midnight.

Just hours before the game was to start the next day, Oklahoma State officials summoned Oliver to tell him he would not be pitching. Only later did he learn that the university feared that by letting him play while the NCAA adjudicated his case, the university would open not only the baseball team but all other Oklahoma State teams to broad punishment under the NCAA’s “restitution rule” (Bylaw 19.7), under which the NCAA threatens schools with sanctions if they obey any temporary court order benefiting a college athlete, should that order eventually be modified or removed. The baseball coach did not even let his ace tell his teammates the sad news in person. “He said, ‘It’s probably not a good idea for you to be at the game,’” Oliver recalls.

The Olivers went home to Ohio to find a lawyer. Rick Johnson, a solo practitioner specializing in legal ethics, was aghast that the Baratta brothers had turned in their own client to the NCAA, divulging attorney-client details likely to invite wrath upon Oliver. But for the next 15 months, Johnson directed his litigation against the two NCAA bylaws at issue. Judge Tygh M. Tone, of Erie County, came to share his outrage. On February 12, 2009, Tone struck down the ban on lawyers negotiating for student-athletes as a
capricious, exploitative attempt by a private association to “dictate to an attorney where, what, how, or when he should represent his client,” violating accepted legal practice in every state. He also struck down the NCAA’s restitution rule as an intimidation that attempted to supersede the judicial system. Finally, Judge Tone ordered the NCAA to reinstate Oliver’s eligibility at Oklahoma State for his junior season, which started several days later.

The NCAA sought to disqualify Oliver again, with several appellate motions to stay “an unprecedented Order purporting to void a fundamental Bylaw.” Oliver did get to pitch that season, but he dropped into the second round of the June 2009 draft, signing for considerably less than if he’d been picked earlier. Now 23, Oliver says sadly that the whole experience “made me grow up a little quicker.” His lawyer claimed victory. “Andy Oliver is the first college athlete ever to win against the NCAA in court,” said Rick Johnson.

Yet the victory was only temporary. Wounded, the NCAA fought back with a vengeance. Its battery of lawyers prepared for a damages trial, ultimately overwhelming Oliver’s side eight months later with an offer to resolve the dispute for $750,000. When Oliver and Johnson accepted, to extricate themselves ahead of burgeoning legal costs, Judge Tone was compelled to vacate his orders as part of the final
settlement. This freed NCAA officials to reassert the two bylaws that Judge Tone had so forcefully overturned, and they moved swiftly to ramp up rather than curtail enforcement. First, the NCAA’s Eligibility Center devised a survey for every drafted undergraduate athlete who sought to stay in college another year. The survey asked whether an agent had conducted negotiations. It also requested a signed release
waiving privacy rights and authorizing professional teams to disclose details of any interaction to the NCAA Eligibility Center. Second, NCAA enforcement officials went after another Scott Boras client.

The Toronto Blue Jays had made the left-handed pitcher James Paxton, of the University of Kentucky, the 37th pick in the 2009 draft. Paxton decided to reject a reported $1 million offer and return to school for his senior year, pursuing a dream to pitch for his team in the College World Series. But then he ran into the
new NCAA survey. Had Boras negotiated with the Blue Jays? Boras has denied that he did, but it would have made sense that he had—that was his job, to test the market for his client. But saying so would get Paxton banished under the same NCAA bylaw that had derailed Andrew Oliver’s career. Since Paxton was planning to go back to school and not accept their draft offer, the Blue Jays no longer had any incentive to protect him—indeed, they had every incentive to turn him in. The Blue Jays’ president, by telling reporters that Boras had negotiated on Paxton’s behalf, demonstrated to future recruits and other teams that they could use the NCAA’s rules to punish college players who wasted their draft picks by returning to college. The NCAA’s enforcement staff raised the pressure by requesting to interview Paxton.

Though Paxton had no legal obligation to talk to an investigator, NCAA Bylaw 10.1(j) specified that anything short of complete cooperation could be interpreted as unethical conduct, affecting his amateur status. Under its restitution rule, the NCAA had leverage to compel the University of Kentucky to ensure
obedience.

As the 2010 season approached, Gary Henderson, the Kentucky coach, sorely wanted Paxton, one of
Baseball America’s top-ranked players, to return. Rick Johnson, Andrew Oliver’s lawyer, filed for a declaratory judgment on Paxton’s behalf, arguing that the state constitution—plus the university’s code of student conduct—barred arbitrary discipline at the request of a third party. Kentucky courts deferred to the university, however, and Paxton was suspended from the team. “Due to the possibility of future penalties, including forfeiture of games,” the university stated, it “could not put the other 32 players of the team and the entire UK 22-sport intercollegiate athletics department at risk by having James compete.” The NCAA
appraised the result with satisfaction. “When negotiations occur on behalf of student-athletes,” Erik Christianson, the NCAA spokesperson, told The New York Times in reference to the Oliver case, “those negotiations indicate that the student-athlete intends to become a professional athlete and no longer remain an amateur.”

Paxton was stranded. Not only could he not play for Kentucky, but his draft rights with the Blue Jays had lapsed for the year, meaning he could not play for any minor-league affiliate of Major League Baseball.

Boras wrangled a holdover job for him in Texas with the independent Grand Prairie AirHogs, pitching against the Pensacola Pelicans and Wichita Wingnuts. Once projected to be a first-round draft pick, Paxton saw his stock plummet into the fourth round. He remained unsigned until late in spring training, when he signed with the Seattle Mariners and reported to their minor-league camp in Peoria, Arizona.

“You Might As Well Shoot Them in the Head”

“When you dream about playing in college,” Joseph Agnew told me not long ago, “you don’t ever think about being in a lawsuit.” Agnew, a student at Rice University in Houston, had been cut from the football team and had his scholarship revoked by Rice before his senior year, meaning that he faced at least $35,000 in tuition and other bills if he wanted to complete his degree in sociology. Bereft of his scholarship, he was flailing about for help when he discovered the National College Players Association, which claims 7,000 active members and seeks modest reforms such as safety guidelines and better death benefits for college athletes. Agnew was struck by the NCPA scholarship data on players from top Division I basketball teams, which showed that 22 percent were not renewed from 2008 to 2009—the same fate he had suffered.

In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action antitrust suit over the cancellation of his scholarship and to remove the cap on the total number of scholarships that can be awarded by NCAA schools. In his suit, Agnew did not claim the right to free tuition. He merely asked the federal court to strike down an NCAA rule, dating to 1973, that prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than a one-year commitment, to be renewed or not, unilaterally, by the school—which in practice means that coaches get to decide each year whose scholarships to renew or cancel. (After the coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to Tulsa, the new Rice coach switched Agnew’s scholarship to a recruit of
his own.) Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with all eight colleges that had recruited him, and each college could have decided how long to guarantee his scholarship.

Agnew’s suit rested on a claim of an NCAA antitrust violation combined with a laudable academic goal—making it possible for students to finish their educations. Around the same time, lawyers from President Obama’s Justice Department initiated a series of meetings with NCAA officials and universities in which they asked what possible educational rationale there was for allowing the NCAA—an organization that did not itself pay for scholarships—to impose a blanket restriction on the length of scholarships offered by colleges. Tidbits leaked into the press. In response, the NCAA contended that an athletic scholarship was a “merit award” that should be reviewed annually, presumably because the degree of “merit” could change. Justice Department lawyers reportedly suggested that a free market in scholarships would expand learning opportunities in accord with the stated rationale for the NCAA’s tax-exempt status—that it promotes education through athletics. The one-year rule effectively allows colleges to cut underperforming “student-athletes,” just as pro sports teams cut their players. “Plenty of
them don’t stay in school,” said one of Agnew’s lawyers, Stuart Paynter. “They’re just gone. You might as well shoot them in the head.”

Agnew’s lawsuit has made him a pariah to former friends in the athletic department at Rice, where everyone identified so thoroughly with the NCAA that they seemed to feel he was attacking them personally. But if the premise of Agnew’s case is upheld by the courts, it will make a sham of the NCAA’s claim that its highest priority is protecting education.

“They Want to Crush These Kids”

Academic performance has always been difficult for the NCAA to address. Any detailed regulation would intrude upon the free choice of widely varying schools, and any academic standard broad enough to fit both MIT and Ole Miss would have little force. From time to time, a scandal will expose extreme lapses. In 1989, Dexter Manley, by then the famous “Secretary of Defense” for the NFL’s Washington Redskins, teared up before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities, when admitting that he had been functionally illiterate in college.

Within big-time college athletic departments, the financial pressure to disregard obvious academic shortcomings and shortcuts is just too strong. In the 1980s, Jan Kemp, an English instructor at the University of Georgia, publicly alleged that university officials had demoted and then fired her because she refused to inflate grades in her remedial English courses. Documents showed that administrators
replaced the grades she’d given athletes with higher ones, providing fake passing grades on one notable occasion to nine Bulldog football players who otherwise would have been ineligible to compete in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. (Georgia lost anyway, 24–20, to a University of Pittsburgh team led by the future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino.) When Kemp filed a lawsuit against the university, she was publicly vilified as a troublemaker, but she persisted bravely in her testimony. Once, Kemp said, a supervisor demanding that she fix a grade had bellowed, “Who do you think is more important to this university, you or Dominique Wilkins?” (Wilkins was a star on the basketball team.) Traumatized, Kemp twice attempted suicide.

In trying to defend themselves, Georgia officials portrayed Kemp as naive about sports. “We have to compete on a level playing field,” said Fred Davison, the university president. During the Kemp civil trial, in
1986, Hale Almand, Georgia’s defense lawyer, explained the university’s patronizing aspirations for its typical less-than-scholarly athlete. “We may not make a university student out of him,” Almand told the court, “but if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a
garbage man when he gets through with his athletic career.” This argument backfired with the jurors: finding in favor of Kemp, they rejected her polite request for $100,000, and awarded her $2.6 million in damages instead. (This was later reduced to $1.08 million.) Jan Kemp embodied what is ostensibly the NCAA’s reason for being—to enforce standards fairly and put studies above sports—but no one from the
organization ever spoke up on her behalf.

The NCAA body charged with identifying violations of any of the Division I league rules, the Committee on Infractions, operates in the shadows. Josephine Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and a longtime committee member who was then serving as its vice chair, told Congress in 2004 that one
reason her group worked in secret was that it hoped to avoid a “media circus.” The committee preferred to deliberate in private, she said, guiding member schools to punish themselves. “The enforcement process is cooperative, not adversarial,” Potuto testified. The committee consisted of an elite coterie of
judges, athletic directors, and authors of legal treatises. “The committee also is savvy about intercollegiate athletics,” she added. “They cannot be conned.”

In 2009, a series of unlikely circumstances peeled back the veil of secrecy to reveal NCAA procedures so contorted that even victims marveled at their comical wonder. The saga began in March of 2007, shortly after the Florida State Seminoles basketball team was knocked out of the NIT basketball tournament, which each spring invites the best teams not selected for the March Madness tournament. At an athletic-department study hall, Al Thornton, a star forward for the team, completed a sports-psychology quiz but then abandoned it without posting his written answers electronically by computer. Brenda Monk, an academic tutor for the Seminoles, says she noticed the error and asked a teammate to finish entering Thornton’s answers onscreen and hit “submit,” as required for credit. The teammate complied, steaming
silently, and then complained at the athletic office about getting stuck with clean-up chores for the superstar Thornton (who was soon to be selected by the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round of the NBA draft). Monk promptly resigned when questioned by FSU officials, saying her fatigue at the time could not excuse her asking the teammate to submit the answers to another student’s completed test.

Monk’s act of guileless responsibility set off a chain reaction. First, FSU had to give the NCAA preliminary notice of a confessed academic fraud. Second, because this would be its seventh major infraction case since 1968, FSU mounted a vigorous self-investigation to demonstrate compliance with NCAA academic rules. Third, interviews with 129 Seminoles athletes unleashed a nightmare of matter-of-fact replies about
absentee professors who allowed group consultations and unlimited retakes of open-computer assignments and tests. Fourth, FSU suspended 61 of its athletes in 10 sports. Fifth, the infractions committee applied the byzantine NCAA bylaws to FSU’s violations. Sixth, one of the penalties announced in March of 2009 caused a howl of protest across the sports universe.

Twenty-seven news organizations filed a lawsuit in hopes of finding out how and why the NCAA proposed to invalidate 14 prior victories in FSU football. Such a penalty, if upheld, would doom coach Bobby Bowden’s chance of overtaking Joe Paterno of Penn State for the most football wins in Division I history.

This was sacrosanct territory. Sports reporters followed the litigation for six months, reporting that 25 of the 61 suspended FSU athletes were football players, some of whom were ruled ineligible retroactively from the time they had heard or yelled out answers to online test questions in, of all things, a
music-appreciation course.

When reporters sought access to the transcript of the infractions committee’s hearing in Indianapolis, NCAA lawyers said the 695-page document was private. (The NCAA claimed it was entitled to keep all such records secret because of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that it had won in 1988, in NCAA v. Tarkanian, which exempted the organization from any due-process obligations because it was not a government organization.) Media outlets pressed the judge to let Florida State share its own copy of the
hearing transcript, whereupon NCAA lawyers objected that the school had never actually “possessed” the document; it had only seen the transcript via a defendant’s guest access to the carefully restricted NCAA Web site. This claim, in turn, prompted intercession on the side of the media by Florida’s attorney general, arguing that letting the NCAA use a technical loophole like this would undermine the state’s sunshine law mandating open public records. After tumultuous appeals, the Florida courts agreed and ordered the NCAA transcript released in October of 2009.

News interest quickly evaporated when the sports media found nothing in the record about Coach
Bowden or the canceled football victories. But the transcript revealed plenty about the NCAA. On page 37, T. K. Wetherell, the bewildered Florida State president, lamented that his university had hurt itself by cooperating with the investigation. “We self-reported this case,” he said during the hearing, and he later
complained that the most ingenuous athletes—those who asked “What’s the big deal, this happens all the time?”—received the harshest suspensions, while those who clammed up on the advice of lawyers went free. The music-appreciation professor was apparently never questioned. Brenda Monk, the only instructor
who consistently cooperated with the investigation, appeared voluntarily to explain her work with learning-disabled athletes, only to be grilled about her credentials by Potuto in a pettifogging inquisition of remarkable stamina.

In January of last year, the NCAA’s Infractions Appeals Committee sustained all the sanctions imposed on FSU except the number of vacated football victories, which it dropped, ex cathedra, from 14 to 12. The final penalty locked Bobby Bowden’s official win total on retirement at 377 instead of 389, behind Joe
Paterno’s 401 (and counting). This carried stinging symbolism for fans, without bringing down on the NCAA the harsh repercussions it would have risked if it had issued a television ban or substantial fine.

Cruelly, but typically, the NCAA concentrated public censure on powerless scapegoats. A dreaded “show cause” order rendered Brenda Monk, the tutor, effectively unhirable at any college in the United States.

Cloaking an old-fashioned blackball in the stately language of law, the order gave notice that any school hiring Monk before a specified date in 2013 “shall, pursuant to the provisions of Bylaw 19.5.2.2(l), show cause why it should not be penalized if it does not restrict the former learning specialist [Monk] from having
any contact with student-athletes.” Today she works as an education supervisor at a prison in Florida.

The Florida State verdict hardly surprised Rick Johnson, the lawyer who had represented the college pitchers Andrew Oliver and James Paxton. “All the NCAA’s enforcements are random and selective,” he told me, calling the organization’s appeals process a travesty. (Johnson says the NCAA has never admitted to having wrongly suspended an athlete.) Johnson’s scalding experience prompted him to undertake a law-review article on the subject, which in turn sent him trawling through NCAA archives. From
the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, he found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” Johnson asks. It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year. Even after its plump cut for its own overhead, the NCAA dispersed huge sums to its 1,200 member schools, in the manner of a professional sports league. These annual payments are universal—every college gets something—but widely uneven. They keep the disparate shareholders (barely) united and speaking for all of college sports. The payments coerce unity within the structure of a private association that is unincorporated and unregulated, exercising amorphous powers not delegated by any government.

Searching through the archives, Johnson came across a 1973 memo from the NCAA general counsel
recommending the adoption of a due-process procedure for athletes in disciplinary cases. Without it, warned the organization’s lawyer, the association risked big liability claims for deprivation of rights. His proposal went nowhere. Instead, apparently to limit costs to the universities, Walter Byers had implemented the year-by-year scholarship rule that Joseph Agnew would challenge in court 37 years later.

Moreover, the NCAA’s 1975 convention adopted a second recommendation “to discourage legal actions against the NCAA,” according to the minutes. The members voted to create Bylaw 19.7, Restitution, to intimidate college athletes in disputes with the NCAA. Johnson recognized this provision all too well, having won the temporary court judgment that the rule was illegal if not downright despotic. It made him nearly apoplectic to learn that the NCAA had deliberately drawn up the restitution rule as an obstacle to due process, contrary to the recommendation of its own lawyer. “They want to crush these kids,” he says.

The NCAA, of course, has never expressed such a desire, and its public comments on due process tend to be anodyne. At a congressional hearing in 2004, the infractions-committee vice chair, Josephine Potuto, repeatedly argued that although the NCAA is “not bound by any judicial due process standards,” its enforcement, infractions, and hearing procedures meet and “very likely exceed” those of other public
institutions. Yet when pressed, Potuto declared that athletes would have no standing for due process even if the Supreme Court had not exempted the NCAA in the 1988 Tarkanian decision. “In order to reach due-process issues as a legal Constitutional principle, the individual challenging has to have a substantive
property or liberty interest,” she testified. “The opportunity to play intercollegiate athletics does not rise to that level.”

To translate this from the legal jargon, Potuto used a circular argument to confine college athletes beneath any right to freedom or property in their own athletic effort. They have no stake to seek their rights, she claimed, because they have no rights at stake.

Potuto’s assertion might be judged preposterous, an heir of the Dred Scott dictum that slaves possessed no rights a white person was bound to respect. But she was merely being honest, articulating assumptions almost everyone shares without question. Whether motivated by hostility for students (as critics like Johnson allege), or by noble and paternalistic tough love (as the NCAA professes), the denial of fundamental due process for college athletes has stood unchallenged in public discourse. Like other
NCAA rules, it emanates naturally from the premise that college athletes own no interest in sports beyond exercise, character-building, and good fun. Who represents these young men and women? No one asks.

The debates and commissions about reforming college sports nibble around the edges—trying to reduce corruption, to prevent the “contamination” of athletes by lucre, and to maintain at least a pretense of concern for academic integrity. Everything stands on the implicit presumption that preserving amateurism
is necessary for the well-being of college athletes. But while amateurism—and the free labor it provides—may be necessary to the preservation of the NCAA, and perhaps to the profit margins of various interested corporations and educational institutions, what if it doesn’t benefit the athletes? What if
it hurts them?

“The Plantation Mentality”

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro
believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

Vaccaro retired from Reebok in 2007 to make a clean break for a crusade. “The kids and their parents gave me a good life,” he says in his peppery staccato. “I want to give something back.” Call it redemption, he told me. Call it education or a good cause. “Here’s what I preach,” said Vaccaro. “This goes beyond
race, to human rights. The least educated are the most exploited. I’m probably closer to the kids than anyone else, and I’m 71 years old.”

Vaccaro is officially an unpaid consultant to the plaintiffs in O’Bannon v. NCAA. He connected Ed O’Bannon with the attorneys who now represent him, and he talked to some of the additional co-plaintiffs who have joined the suit, among them Oscar Robertson, a basketball Hall of Famer who was incensed that the NCAA was still selling his image on playing cards 50 years after he left the University of Cincinnati.

Jon King, an antitrust lawyer at Hausfeld LLP in San Francisco, told me that Vaccaro “opened our eyes to massive revenue streams hidden in college sports.” King and his colleagues have drawn on Vaccaro’s vast knowledge of athletic-department finances, which include off-budget accounts for shoe contracts.

Sonny Vaccaro and his wife, Pam, “had a mountain of documents,” he said. The outcome of the 1984
Regents decision validated an antitrust approach for O’Bannon, King argues, as well as for Joseph
Agnew in his continuing case against the one-year scholarship rule. Lawyers for Sam Keller—a former quarterback for the University of Nebraska who is featured in video games—are pursuing a parallel “right of publicity” track based on the First Amendment. Still other lawyers could revive Rick Johnson’s case
against NCAA bylaws on a larger scale, and King thinks claims for the rights of college players may be viable also under laws pertaining to contracts, employment, and civil rights.

Vaccaro had sought a law firm for O’Bannon with pockets deep enough to withstand an expensive war of attrition, fearing that NCAA officials would fight discovery to the end. So far, though, they have been forthcoming. “The numbers are off the wall,” Vaccaro says. “The public will see for the first time how all the money is distributed.”

Vaccaro has been traveling the after-dinner circuit, proselytizing against what he sees as the NCAA’s exploitation of young athletes. Late in 2008, someone who heard his stump speech at Howard University mentioned it to Michael Hausfeld, a prominent antitrust and human-rights lawyer, whose firm had won suits against Exxon for Native Alaskans and against Union Bank of Switzerland for Holocaust victims’ families.

Someone tracked down Vaccaro on vacation in Athens, Greece, and he flew back directly to meet Hausfeld. The shoe salesman and the white-shoe lawyer made common cause.

Hausfeld LLP has offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and London. Its headquarters are on K Street in Washington, D.C., about three blocks from the White House. When I talked with Hausfeld there not long ago, he sat in a cavernous conference room, tidy in pinstripes, hands folded on a spotless table that reflected the skyline. He spoke softly, without pause, condensing the complex fugue of antitrust litigation into simple sentences. “Let’s start with the basic question,” he said, noting that the NCAA claims that student-athletes have no property rights in their own athletic accomplishments. Yet, in order to be eligible
to play, college athletes have to waive their rights to proceeds from any sales based on their athletic performance.

“What right is it that they’re waiving?,” Hausfeld asked. “You can’t waive something you don’t have. So they had a right that they gave up in consideration to the principle of amateurism, if there be such.” (At an April
hearing in a U.S. District Court in California, Gregory Curtner, a representative for the NCAA, stunned O’Bannon’s lawyers by saying: “There is no document, there is no substance, that the NCAA ever takes from the student-athletes their rights of publicity or their rights of likeness. They are at all times owned by the student-athlete.” Jon King says this is “like telling someone they have the winning lottery ticket, but by the way, it can only be cashed in on Mars.” The court denied for a second time an NCAA motion to dismiss the O’Bannon complaint.)

The waiver clause is nestled among the paragraphs of the “Student-Athlete Statement” that NCAA rules require be collected yearly from every college athlete. In signing the statement, the athletes attest that they have amateur status, that their stated SAT scores are valid, that they are willing to disclose any educational documents requested, and so forth. Already, Hausfeld said, the defendants in the Ed
O’Bannon case have said in court filings that college athletes thereby transferred their promotional rights forever. He paused. “That’s ludicrous,” he said. “Nobody assigns rights like that. Nobody can assert rights like that.” He said the pattern demonstrated clear abuse by the collective power of the schools and all their
conferences under the NCAA umbrella—“a most effective cartel.”

The faux ideal of amateurism is “the elephant in the room,” Hausfeld said, sending for a book. “You can’t get to the bottom of our case without exposing the hypocrisy of amateurism, and Walter Byers says it eloquently.” An assistant brought in Byers’s memoir. It looked garish on the shiny table because dozens of
pink Post-its protruded from the text. Hausfeld read to me from page 390:

The college player cannot sell his own feet (the coach does that) nor can he sell his own name (the college will do that). This is the plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives.

He looked up. “That wasn’t me,” he said. “That was the NCAA’s architect.” He found a key recommendation on page 388:

Prosecutors and the courts, with the support of the public, should use antitrust laws to break up the collegiate cartel—not just in athletics but possibly in other aspects of collegiate life as well.

Could the book become evidence? Might the aged Byers testify? (He is now 89.) Was that part of the plaintiffs’ strategy for the O’Bannon trial? Hausfeld smiled faintly. “I’d rather the NCAA lawyers not fully understand the strategy,” he said.

He put the spiny book away and previewed what lies ahead. The court soon would qualify his clients as a class. Then the Sherman Antitrust Act would provide for thorough discovery to break down exactly what the NCAA receives on everything from video clips to jerseys, contract by contract. “And we want to know what they’re carrying on their books as the value of their archival footage,” he concluded. “They say it’s a lot of money. We agree. How much?”

The work will be hard, but Hausfeld said he will win in the courts, unless the NCAA folds first. “Why?” Hausfeld asked rhetorically. “We know our clients are foreclosed: neither the NCAA nor its members will permit them to participate in any of that licensing revenue. Under the law, it’s up to them [the defendants]
to give a pro-competitive justification. They can’t. End of story.”

In 2010 the third Knight Commission, complementing a previous commission’s recommendation for published reports on academic progress, called for the finances of college sports to be made transparent and public—television contracts, conference budgets, shoe deals, coaches’ salaries, stadium bonds,
everything. The recommendation was based on the worthy truism that sunlight is a proven disinfectant. But in practice, it has not been applied at all. Conferences, coaches, and other stakeholders resisted disclosure; college players still have no way of determining their value to the university.

“Money surrounds college sports,” says Domonique Foxworth, who is a cornerback for the NFL’s
Baltimore Ravens and an executive-committee member for the NFL Players Association, and played for the University of Maryland. “And every player knows those millions are floating around only because of the 18-to-22-year-olds.” Yes, he told me, even the second-string punter believes a miracle might lift him into the NFL, and why not? In all the many pages of the three voluminous Knight Commission reports, there is
but one paragraph that addresses the real-life choices for college athletes. “Approximately 1 percent of NCAA men’s basketball players and 2 percent of NCAA football players are drafted by NBA or NFL teams,” stated the 2001 report, basing its figures on a review of the previous 10 years, “and just being drafted is no assurance of a successful professional career.” Warning that the odds against professional
athletic success are “astronomically high,” the Knight Commission counsels college athletes to avoid a “rude surprise” and to stick to regular studies. This is sound advice as far as it goes, but it’s a bromide that pinches off discussion. Nothing in the typical college curriculum teaches a sweat-stained guard at Clemson or Purdue what his monetary value to the university is. Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

The most basic reform would treat the students as what they are—adults, with rights and reason of their own—and grant them a meaningful voice in NCAA deliberations. A restoration of full citizenship to “student-athletes” would facilitate open governance, making it possible to enforce pledges of transparency in both academic standards and athletic finances. Without that, the NCAA has no effective checks and balances, no way for the students to provide informed consent regarding the way they are governed. A thousand questions lie willfully silenced because the NCAA is naturally afraid of giving “student-athletes” a true voice. Would college players be content with the augmented scholarship or allowance now requested
by the National College Players Association? If a player’s worth to the university is greater than the value of his scholarship (as it clearly is in some cases), should he be paid a salary? If so, would teammates in revenue sports want to be paid equally, or in salaries stratified according to talent or value on the field?

What would the athletes want in Division III, where athletic budgets keep rising without scholarships or substantial sports revenue? Would athletes seek more or less variance in admissions standards? Should non-athletes also have a voice, especially where involuntary student fees support more and more of college sports? Might some schools choose to specialize, paying players only in elite leagues for football, or lacrosse? In athletic councils, how much would high-revenue athletes value a simple thank you from the tennis or field-hockey players for the newly specified subsidies to their facilities?

University administrators, already besieged from all sides, do not want to even think about such questions.

Most cringe at the thought of bargaining with athletes as a general manager does in professional sports, with untold effects on the budgets for coaches and every other sports item. “I would not want to be part of it,” North Carolina Athletic Director Dick Baddour told me flatly. After 44 years at UNC, he could scarcely
contemplate a world without amateur rules. “We would have to think long and hard,” Baddour added gravely, “about whether this university would continue those sports at all.”

I, too, once reflexively recoiled at the idea of paying college athletes and treating them like employees or professionals. It feels abhorrent—but for reasons having to do more with sentiment than with practicality or law. Not just fans and university presidents but judges have often found cursory, non-statutory excuses to leave amateur traditions intact. “Even in the increasingly commercial modern world,” said a federal-court judge in Gaines v. NCAA in 1990, “this Court believes there is still validity to the Athenian concept of a complete education derived from fostering the full growth of both mind and body.” The fact that “the NCAA
has not distilled amateurism to its purest form,” said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1988, “does not mean its attempts to maintain a mixture containing some amateur elements are unreasonable.”

But one way or another, the smokescreen of amateurism may soon be swept away. For one thing, a victory by the plaintiffs in O’Bannon’s case would radically transform college sports. Colleges would likely have to either stop profiting from students or start paying them. The NCAA could also be forced to pay tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in damages. If O’Bannon and Vaccaro and company win, “it will turn college sports on its ear,” said Richard Lapchick, the president of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, in a recent interview with The New York Times.

Though the O’Bannon case may take several years yet to reach resolution, developments on other fronts are chipping away at amateurism, and at the NCAA. This past summer, Sports Illustrated editorialized in favor of allowing college athletes to be paid by non-university sources without jeopardizing their eligibility.

At a press conference last June, Steve Spurrier, the coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks football team (and the winner of the 1966 Heisman Trophy as a Florida Gator), proposed that coaches start paying players $300 a game out of their own pockets. The coaches at six other SEC schools (Alabama, Florida, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, LSU, and Tennessee) all endorsed Spurrier’s proposal. And Mark
Emmert, the NCAA president, recently conceded that big changes must come. “The integrity of collegiate athletics is seriously challenged today by rapidly growing pressures coming from many directions,”

Emmert said in July. “We have reached a point where incremental change is not sufficient to meet these challenges. I want us to act more aggressively and in a more comprehensive way than we have in the past.

A few new tweaks of the rules won’t get the job done.”

Threats to NCAA dominion also percolate in Congress. Aggrieved legislators have sponsored numerous bills. Senator Orrin Hatch, citing mistreatment of his Utah Utes, has called witnesses to discuss possible antitrust remedies for the Bowl Championship Series. Congressional committees have already held hearings critical of the NCAA’s refusal to follow due process in disciplinary matters; other committees have explored a rise in football concussions. Last January, calls went up to investigate “informal” football workouts at the University of Iowa just after the season-ending bowl games—workouts so grueling that 41 of the 56 amateur student-athletes collapsed, and 13 were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening kidney condition often caused by excessive exercise.

The greatest threat to the viability of the NCAA may come from its member universities. Many experts believe that the churning instability within college football will drive the next major change. President Obama himself has endorsed the drumbeat cry for a national playoff in college football. This past spring, the Justice Department questioned the BCS about its adherence to antitrust standards. Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten, has estimated that a national playoff system could produce three or four times as much money as the existing bowl system does. If a significant band of football schools were to demonstrate that they could orchestrate a true national playoff, without the NCAA’s assistance, the association would be terrified—and with good reason. Because if the big sports colleges don’t need the
NCAA to administer a national playoff in football, then they don’t need it to do so in basketball. In which case, they could cut out the middleman in March Madness and run the tournament themselves. Which would deprive the NCAA of close to $1 billion a year, more than 95 percent of its revenue. The organization would be reduced to a rule book without money—an organization aspiring to enforce its rules
but without the financial authority to enforce anything.

Thus the playoff dreamed of and hankered for by millions of football fans haunts the NCAA. “There will be some kind of playoff in college football, and it will not be run by the NCAA,” says Todd Turner, a former athletic director in four conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, and Pac-10). “If I’m at the NCAA, I have to
worry that the playoff group can get basketball to break away, too.”

This danger helps explain why the NCAA steps gingerly in enforcements against powerful colleges. To alienate member colleges would be to jeopardize its own existence. Long gone are television bans and the “death penalty” sentences (commanding season-long shutdowns of offending teams) once meted out to Kentucky (1952), Southwestern Louisiana (1973), and Southern Methodist University (1987). Institutions receive mostly symbolic slaps nowadays. Real punishments fall heavily on players and on scapegoats like literacy tutors.

A deeper reason explains why, in its predicament, the NCAA has no recourse to any principle or law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing. Scholars and sportswriters yearn for grand juries to ferret
out every forbidden bauble that reaches a college athlete, but the NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else? No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature—a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.

For all our queasiness about what would happen if some athletes were to get paid, there is a successful precedent for the professionalization of an amateur sports system: the Olympics. For years, Walter Byers waged war with the NCAA’s older and more powerful nemesis, the Amateur Athletic Union, which since 1894 had overseen U.S. Olympic athletes. Run in high-handed fashion, the AAU had infamously banned Jesse Owens for life in 1936—weeks after his four heroic gold medals punctured the Nazi claim of Aryan supremacy—because instead of using his sudden fame to tour and make money for the AAU at track meets across Europe, he came home early. In the early 1960s, the fights between the NCAA and the AAU over who should manage Olympic athletes become so bitter that President Kennedy called in General Douglas MacArthur to try to mediate a truce before the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Ultimately, Byers prevailed and effectively neutered the AAU. In November 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan Amateur Sports Act. Amateurism in the Olympics soon dissolved—and the world did not end. Athletes, granted a 20 percent voting stake on every Olympic sport’s governing body, tipped balances in the United States and then inexorably around the world. First in marathon races, then in tennis tournaments, players soon were allowed to accept prize money and keep their Olympic eligibility. Athletes profited from sponsorships and endorsements. The International Olympic Committee expunged the word amateur from its charter in 1986. Olympic officials, who had once disdained the NCAA for offering scholarships in exchange for athletic performance, came to welcome millionaire athletes from every quarter, while the NCAA still refused to let the pro Olympian Michael Phelps swim for his college team at Michigan.

This sweeping shift left the Olympic reputation intact, and perhaps improved. Only hardened romantics mourned the amateur code. “Hey, come on,” said Anne Audain, a track-and-field star who once held the world record for the 5,000 meters. “It’s like losing your virginity. You’re a little misty for awhile, but then you realize, Wow, there’s a whole new world out there!”

Without logic or practicality or fairness to support amateurism, the NCAA’s final retreat is to sentiment.

The Knight Commission endorsed its heartfelt cry that to pay college athletes would be “an unacceptable surrender to despair.” Many of the people I spoke with while reporting this article felt the same way. “I don’t want to pay college players,” said Wade Smith, a tough criminal lawyer and former star running back at
North Carolina. “I just don’t want to do it. We’d lose something precious.”

“Scholarship athletes are already paid,” declared the Knight Commission members, “in the most meaningful way poss-ible: with a free education.” This evasion by prominent educators severed my last reluctant, emotional tie with imposed amateurism. I found it worse than self-serving. It echoes masters who once claimed that heavenly salvation would outweigh earthly injustice to slaves. In the era when our college
sports first arose, colonial powers were turning the whole world upside down to define their own interests as all-inclusive and benevolent. Just so, the NCAA calls it heinous exploitation to pay college athletes a fair portion of what they earn.

(by Taylor Branch)