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

Introduction

Introduction A resort steamer, Lady of the Lake, lay on the calm waters of Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, on a fine day in August 1852, while the excited passengers listened to martial music of the Concord Mechanics Brass Band. They all awaited the beginning of competition between the crews of Harvard and Yale as they took in the view of the Red Hills behind the village of Centre Harbor at the northern end of the lake.1 As a purely commercial venture of the newly opened Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad, the first intercollegiate athletic contest in America2 was secondary to the promotional wishes of what would be the dominating industrial success of the nineteenth century: the railroad industry. To James Elkins, the superintendent of the Boston to Montreal rail line, it was a business deal, and he would “pay all the bills” for an eight-day rowing vacation if Yale and Harvard athletes would agree to put on several rowing exhibitions. But to the crews of the two most prestigious institutions of higher learning in America, this was merely a “jolly lark.”3 Following a Harvard victory over Yale, before possibly a thousand cheering spectators, including Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce, a second contest scheduled for the following day was canceled due to the weather. Nevertheless, when the conditions cleared somewhat, the Harvard and Yale crews rowed on the lake “for the gratification of the townspeople.”4 In the intervening century and a half, athletics continued to serve as a gratification for those both inside and outside institutions of higher learning. Athletics also have provided ample cause for reformers to try to bring college sports into a role complementary to the academic goals of higher education. Although a New York City newspaper predicted that the Harvard-Yale crew meet and intercollegiate athletics in general would “make little stir in a busy world,” they did just that.5 Nearly as soon as intercollegiate athletics were introduced, questions demanding reform arose. The first came about when Yale and Harvard renewed their athletic competition in 1855, a half-dozen years before the American Civil War. Immediately a problem arose. Harvard decided that the coxswain who led the Harvard crew to victory in 1852 would again be the leader in the boat despite having graduated two years before. He participated, and Harvard won again. The eligibility of graduates and especially graduate students would remain on the reform agenda for the next half century. Early on, most of the questions 2 | Introduction of eligibility reform were left to students to resolve, for students alone had created intercollegiate athletics, and students negotiated not only the schedules of competition but also the terms under which the competitions would be held. There were no athletic conferences at first and no national organizations, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to determine the conditions around which the contests would be conducted. There were only five logical groups that could reform athletics either at individual institutions or among a number of colleges in the early years. First, the students acted in their own self-interest to create competitive sports that would serve them, but they had little need of or interest in reforming what they had constructed. Second, the faculty had a direct interest in reforming athletics, because athletics came to dominate the extra curriculum of most colleges and affect the academic side of higher education during the second half of the nineteenth century. Third, presidents were often concerned about the domination of such intercollegiate sports as crew, baseball, track and field, and football in the late 1800s and the impact they had, both negative and positive, on their colleges. Fourth, governing boards, which were formed to create college policy, had a direct interest in the value of college athletics to their institutions. Fifth, graduates of institutions, who were often crucial to the financial success of colleges, had a keen interest in how athletics were used to the benefit of the institution. Reform efforts, then, could come from a variety of interest groups, but because four of the five groups were led principally by cheerleaders, not reformers, significant reforms were difficult to achieve over a century and a half. In almost all cases, reform efforts over the first century and a half of intercollegiate sports were brought about for one of four reasons: (1) to create competitive equity, the “level playing field”; (2) to bring about financial solvency; (3) to consider banning or restricting brutal or unsavory practices; or...