Academics on Athletics

Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports, by Murray Sperber. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. 578 pp. $32.50

Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports, by Andrew Zimbalist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 252 pp. $24.95

Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, by Walter Byers with Charles Hammer, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 413 pp. $34.50 ($21.95)

A hearty perennial of undergraduate education is the admonition that "The Truth shall make you free." I have seen this chiseled in granite over the entrance of a library. I heard it during a dean's welcome at freshman orientation, then again at discussions in a humanities course. Just to make sure that graduating seniors got the message, presidents repeated the theme in commencement addresses. Higher education leaders may believe this, but their message is muted because there are glaring inconsistencies within their own campus. Namely, one university office has been exempted from this academic zoning regulation: the Intercollegiate Athletics Department stands as a peculiar institution whose legacy is that discovering the truth, far from setting one free, imprisons one in a web of frustration and illogic.

This is important for research about higher education, because in recent years there has been a groundswell of excellent scholarly works dealing with intercollegiate athletics. The topic has both endurance and significance now that such disciplines as history, economics, law, literary analysis, and political science have been brought to bear on the serious study of college sports. Don't hold your breath for any strong connection between research and reform. As the scholarship on college sports gets better, the educational and ethical problems of college sports get worse.

Murray Sperber's Onward to Victory stands as Exhibit A in the argument that good research does not necessarily lead to sound policies or practices. In fact, Sperber's pursuit of truth in the past and present of college sports has made him an enduring figure who resembles Sisyphus. Has he been condemned for eternity to push the stone of critical analysis up the mountain of college sports, yet always to have the data come rolling back down? The latest example in Sperber's research quest is a history of the recent past of college sports. It follows from Sperber's earlier works: College Sports, Incorporated and Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football.

Sperber's excellent contributions include his reconstruction of the contracts and strategies of Don Spencer's Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1930s through 1960s, which consciously drafted and then disseminated the images of college football stars in programs and publications across the country. So pervasive were these graphics by commercial artists, such as H. Alonzo Keller, that the heroic depictions on program covers seemed to have come out of a central casting office and then been disseminated nationwide. The pervasive iconography probably qualifies as an indigenous, calculated influential and lucrative commercial art form. And Sperber's ingenious research in the advertising files confirms the suspicion that intercollegiate athletics has been a market to be exploited by media and merchandise for a long part of our nation's social history. Back in the early 1950s, ads for Wheaties breakfast cereal asked consumers the rhetorical question, "Are sports champions made or born?" Quite apart from buyers' response, the verdict is that college sports champions definitely were made in the copy writing and paste up offices. And, important to note is that such commercial ventures could not have flourished without the direct cooperation of college sports information offices. Athletic directors, presidents, and board members knew what they were doing—and knew what was going on in the press rooms, radio network offices, movie studios, and advertising agencies.

At times the promotion of college sports led to some high stakes conflicts between individual institutions and such larger collective entities as conferences and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Coverage of television...