The End of Amateurism in American Track and Field (review)

Most Americans today view athletes as superstars who get paid lots of money to entertain by performing well in their sports. Few question, however, how sports came to be the high-profile moneymaking industries they are—or are not—and the struggles the athletes went through to gain their status as amateurs or professionals. In this book, Joseph M. Turrini tells the story of American track and field's evolution from pre-Civil War "pedestrianism" (10) to the professional sport of the 1990s. His goal is to follow American track and field's movements into and out of amateurism without overshadowing the key issues and players in these transitions with examinations of the evolutions of other sports or the international arena of the Olympics, as previous books have.

The first organization formed to preside over organized American track and field was the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). The AAU was founded and operated on the premise of amateurism, the idea "that true athletes competed not for monetary gain but for the love of sport . . . [and] regarded any form of financial reward for athletic success as unseemly, contrary to good sportsmanship and gentlemanly behavior" (13). Turrini strings together the stories of athletes' discontent with what became known as AAU's "shamateurism" (32), including the perspectives of women and racial minorities in addition to those of the majority white male competitors. He interweaves among those stories the numerous efforts of individuals, such as Wes Santee in chapter 2, and collectives, such as college track and field coaches in chapter 3, to overturn or at least challenge the AAU. Although the majority of these attempts failed, they compounded and eventually resulted in the new, and current, age of professional track and field.

Turrini concentrates on the evolution of American track and field through his inclusion of a large number of oral history interviews in addition to textual documentation. He uses oral history in a standard way, with the classic objective of documenting the perspectives and experiences of the previously silenced and unrepresented. In this case, the track and field athletes were the individuals silenced or ignored by the predominating AAU, which persisted in treating the athletes as if they were children. The quotations from the interviews are sprinkled throughout this book with the same authority as his other written sources. In this way, Turrini does not show favoritism for one form of supporting documentation over the other. Nevertheless, it requires that readers consult the notes on each chapter to determine whether a quotation is from a written source or an oral history interview.

However, the book lacks a discussion of the oral history interview methodology. The list in the bibliography does indicate that the majority of Turrini's interviews were telephone interviews, but there is no analysis or discussion as to how that method may or may not have affected the resulting interview. Many of the interviews in the bibliography listed someone other than Turrini as the interviewer. Also absent from the book is a discussion of the difference between conducting his own interviews and using oral histories recorded by other interviewers.

On the other hand, there is mention of interviews done by the President's Commission on Olympic Sports (PCOS). The PCOS studied what was happening in track and field in the mid-1970s, which eventually led to the creation of The Athletics Congress, the organization that took over the governance of track and field from the AAU in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Turrini writes that, as part of its investigation,

the PCOS hired track athletes to interview their peers throughout the country. . . . By hiring athletes the PCOS gained honest assessments and opinions, and by having the interviewees go to the athletes, at a broad range of meets in locations throughout the country, the PCOS acquired as wide a sample of opinions as possible since it did not require athletes to travel to a hearing site to provide input

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