Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform (review)

Ronald Smith’s Pay for Play presents a lively, fluid account of college sports controversies and reform efforts spanning more than 150 years. It is well written and thoroughly researched. As such its audience will be potentially large, spanning from advanced undergraduate readers in history courses to graduate students and professors in higher education programs—and on, perhaps, to concerned, earnest campus administrators and board members. This is a good book for immersion into the peculiar heritage and politics of college sports. Why, then, the reluctance to call it a great book?

The paradox and problem is that Ronald Smith as writer and historian of college sports pays a price for the excellence and originality of his earlier works. About two decades ago his book, Sports and Freedom set a new, high standard for scholarship about college sports. He combined original research in college and university archives with an intriguing perspective. He dared to question much of the conventional lore about amateurism among college athletes and their varsity teams. His interpretation was based on the firm ground of primary source documents and archival materials—few of which had been exhumed and analyzed by any other scholars. In sum, his stellar scholarship cast reasonable doubt on the claim that American college sports recently has fallen from grace into an era of unprecedented bigness and corruption. The historical fact was that commercialism and excesses have been integral, not peripheral, characteristics of college sports in the United States, whether in 1880 or 1980. An ethos of college sports competition in the United States seemed to be that one could ignore the spirit of a law so long as one obeyed the letter of the law on the playing field or crew course.

Pay for Play extends and updates the convergence of these defining characteristics with episodes and events into the twenty-first century. It includes interesting elaborations on presidents, commissions, reports, and conferences between World Wars I and II. And Smith’s survey and tour continues into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—bringing a new generation of readers up to date on the pivotal issues and events. The difference is that in Smith’s current, extended work his argument and sources seem familiar rather than fresh. They are not wrong, just predictable. One explanation for this is that whereas Smith was center stage on the topic in 1989, by 2011 he is in the company of numerous accomplished scholars. Smith brought legitimacy to the serious study of college sports as part of the heritage of American higher education—and in so doing helped foster a critical mass of scholars. If one were to identify the top caliber scholarship that has flourished in the past two decades, one might cite Murray Sperber’s Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports (1998), John Watterson’s College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy (2000), and Michael Oriard’s Reading Football (1993) and Bowled Over: Big Time College Football from from the Sixties to the BCS Era (2009). Yet even this roster hints at, rather than exhausts, the prolific authors whose excellent historical research that has been steadily published in original books since 1990.

Just as Smith opted to focus on the period of 1850 to about 1905 in his path-breaking book years ago, so it is that many of the memorable books published recently are characterized by detailed attention either to a particular theme or an era of about two or three decades. This self-imposed specialization has been for the overall good of the topic of college sports because the complexities and controversies demand that a scholar go deep before going long (to use the obligatory football metaphor).

To continue the college sportscast argot, in Pay for Play, Ronald Smith “goes long”—from 1850 to 2010. And, certainly if any scholar of college sports has earned that honor and right, it is he. Having been...