The modern concept of amateurism was invented from scratch in 19th century Victorian England. It came from a conviction that society's upper and lower classes were meant to occupy separate realms, in athletics and everything else.
So how did it reach the United States and the National Collegiate Athletic Association? It is the story of a cultural exchange between two old cousins that turned out to be, in its implementation, an incompatible fit.
The amateur notion itself was bogus, a fiction dressed up in the laurels of the ancient Olympiad to give it an august heritage. But the concept itself was successful in creating an idealized version of a pure-hearted competitor, which resonated within the culture.
In this world the finest athletes tested themselves against the field in pursuit of honor and glory. The purpose was not victory or in the capturing of spoils, but rather the satisfaction inherent in pursuing perfection. The value of competition was mental and spiritual; it elevated the individual and made him more valuable to society.
Professionals, or mercenary competitors, by contrast, played merely for bags of gold. Victory was the only objective because they coveted the prizes and a gaudy fame over personal honor. This made the professional athlete commercial and therefore impure, which reinforced their inferior status and heritage.
The fact that ancient athletes had competed for cash, prizes, and fame alongside their share of honor and glory, or that Greek and Roman societies had no preference for the amateur performer over the professional, was kept out of the conversation. As a consequence of this eloquent snobbery, and the rigid Victorian system that reinforced it, the primacy of the amateur competitor became accepted wisdom.
The cult of the English Gentleman Amateur had been born.
At its heart the amateur designation was meant to block the talented commoner from humiliating his social superiors in high-stakes competition, and from rising socially and economically at their expense. Because of that, the contention that class engendered superiority had to be protected.
In practical terms this meant that society’s propertied classes had the time and resources to practice and compete in a way that generated more status and prestige w/out them needing to be compensated for their time. The lesser orders, on the other hand, the ones that took payment for their services and performed for the amusement of crowds, were branded w/the scarlet letter of the Professional and left to wallow in the position of social underlings, scorned almost as though they were a class of prostitutes.
It was at Oxford and Cambridge, England’s foremost elite universities, that this spiritual concept of amateurism really took root, eventually making its pitch to the United States as American universities picked up athletic competition in the middle-19th century. The first and most obvious issue was that the English system was un-apologetically undemocratic, restricted to those who were born into privilege, and maintained by an ultra class-conscious society that could force a top-down conformity on the entire culture.
All of these elements made the Gentleman Amateur model a bad fit for the far more socially fluid United States, particularly b/c the entire system was sanctioned by the kind of inherited status that the U.S. had rejected, beginning w/the Declaration of Independence. But none of those issues prevented the presidents and faculties at the Big 3 of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard—the representatives of the Blue Blooded class in American culture—from exalting the unpaid amateur competitor while scorning the corrupted professional.
For many observers in the U.S., this posture from American institutions was confusing from the beginning.
“In England, this distinction is so sharp that an amateur in any sport is a ‘gentlemen’ and draws a Mister before his name when he lands in the papers, while the professional is viewed as almost menial,” a NY-newspaper editorial of the 1890s read.
“It seems that some colleges in this country, at least the high-toned Eastern colleges, show a tendency toward the same sort of snobbishness.”
But the most influential American colleges went all-in on the amateur ideal for several reasons.
For one, they sincerely admired the Gentlemen cultures at Oxford and Cambridge and wanted to emulate the British upper-classes, generally. The Ivy League schools believed they were responsible for training an American ruling class and that CFB would play a crucial role in that process.
Furthermore, during the late 19th century, their student bodies did represent what existed of an American aristocracy—the vaunted WASP class that dominated government, finance, and academia—where a gentleman-amateur culture based on inherited status almost made sense.
Secondly, the presidents and faculties were adamantly opposed to supervising a subculture of warrior jocks that might wander their campuses like a pack of athletic assassins. They wanted academically qualified and ambitious youth who used FB as a close substitute for military training. Keeping professional athletes off of their campuses was, to them, a practical concern.
And thirdly, it allowed the colleges to maintain their academic and social prestige—their honor defended on the gridiron by an elite squad of gentlemen amateurs—whilst indulging their students' and alumni's appetites for Big Game Football.
American Anglophiles like Caspar Whitney, who believed fanatically in the purity of English amateurism, did everything they could to get American onto the same track.
"The ideal of English Universities is gentlemanly sport, not victory,” wrote Whitney in a typical piece.
But the amateur culture created at American colleges, bolstered by their lofty proclamations of competitive purity, was full of contradictions from the beginning. Whether it was athletes receiving inducements or under-the-table compensation, the schools manipulating their admissions processes to accommodate unqualified athletes, or creating a competitive culture in which victory over their rivals in front of bigger and bigger paying crowds became the entire point of fielding a team, there never really was an era when ‘true’ amateurism carried the day.
What was true was that universities had, against all of their stated intentions, boxed themselves into a perfect Catch-22.
If they decided to be truly amateur, declining to hire a “professional” coach and competing w/bonafide students who practiced here and there during their free time, they’d hemorrhage prestige as they were steamrolled on the field and jeered at in the newspapers that covered the sport w/increasing fascination. And, beyond the shame of defeat, there would be a painful loss of revenue as the public stopped associating their schools w/a manly, winning culture, and quit purchasing tickets.
The college that went down that road would be regarded as Pencil-Neck U, the place where bookworms went to grow weak and pale, putting the nation’s very future at risk. But, if the colleges were to admit that they ran a professional program—which meant expensive coaches, open recruiting, a diluted academic culture, and a growing dependence on ticket revenues to cover a myriad of costs—they’d undercut their stature as citadels of learning. Losing academic prestige was unacceptable to most of the presidents and faculties of the era, most of whom wanted to drop FB outright and restore what they saw as an academic world spun off its axis.
The schools had put themselves in a position from which the facts of the matter could not be spoken in plain English, and created a culture of hypocrisy, even dishonesty, that went into the genetic coding of the sport.
"We are told by the college officials that we must conduct our sports and play along amateur lines,” Brown University's athletic director said. “But we must finance them along lines that are purely commercial and professional."
Professional performance, amateur ideals. The two went together like a fast boat on an asphalt parking lot.
"The organizer wins in athletics, as he does in business,” said Walter Camp, the so-called Father of American FB, who'd built at Yale the most comprehensive recruiting, training, and player subsidy operation in the sport's early history.
Camp's organization, backed by a deep slush fund that he administered himself, would keep the Elis on top of the sport for most of their first 40 seasons of play. But even that did not stop Camp from spuriously extolling the high moral code of amateurism.
"A gentleman never competes for money, directly or indirectly," Camp wrote. "Make no mistake about this. No matter how winding the road may be that eventually brings the sovereign to the pocket, it is the price of what should be dearer to you than anything else—your honor."
A contemporaneous editorial in the NY Daily News, which hit on what we would recognize as the modern perspective, took the other side of the argument:
“The amateur may be right in England, but we have long believed that it is not suited to the United States. There is little class distinction here, and there should be none in American sport between the man who earns his living and the man who lives on the income of inherited wealth. If a man can play football, he should not be denied the right to earn an education with the talent he has. He should not be encouraged to stay away from college because he has a quick mind and powerful body but little money. Many college authorities seem to feel that football playing should be confined to the rich. They are wrong."
But ironically, as CFB's popularity and profitability rose, the compulsion to sell the sport as a strictly amateur affair increased. When the NCAA was formed in 1905 and 1906 its first president, Capt. Palmer Pierce of West Point, laid out the organization’s idealized vision of the amateur competitor. It was a declaration that twisted the NCAA’s sense of its primary mission at launch.
“This organization wages no war against the professional athlete, but it does object to such a one posing and playing as an amateur. It smiles on the square, manly, skillful contestant, imbued with love of the contest he wages; it frowns on the more skillful professional who, parading under college colors, is receiving pay in some form or other for his athletic prowess.”
It is a statement that indicates how naive the NCAA always has been about the way the game behind the game was played. By the 1920s, just as commercial radio began to proliferate alongside the daily newspapers, CFB was generating millions of dollars as an entertainment business. The coaches were professionals, the athletes were "amateurs" being compensated in an underground economy, and the games had been monetized through massive on-campus stadiums and concessions.
For all of the similarities between British and American cultures, rooted in a shared Anglo-Saxon, Enlightenment heritage the idea that an athlete, based on an inherited social class, shouldn’t be compensated in exchange for competing, never really made sense in the U.S.
While the cultural discord was being pointed out by certain members of the media, the colleges rallied to protect their realm. John L. Griffith, the first commissioner of the Big Ten—a powerful league whose leadership had been instrumental in creating the NCAA—described in detail the almost mythical mindset that defined the authentic amateur.
"The influence of athletic professionalism is detrimental to a college man,” wrote Griffith. “It tends to make him dissatisfied to play the game for its own sake and makes of his athletic powers a marketable commodity. The game is robbed of the exhilarating inspiration of achievement merely for achievement's sake, and many of the very important character building qualities which form a part of collegiate athletics are lost the moment the incentive of personal gain is introduced.”
Amateurism became the NCAA's own peculiar institution, and it would hold up for a century against multiple heavy bombardments. College athletes were amateurs and amateurs weren’t paid because—if they were paid—then they no longer would be be amateurs, and people paid to watch amateurs, according to the NCAA.
The Association would argue this tautology into the 21st Century as it battled challenges to its model all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Let those who value mere winning above all else have their professionals,” a defiant Whitney, the apostle of amateurism, once said.
And for many years the colleges had it every way they wanted it, with the all-out pursuit of victory and glory and revenue, but done using the so-called amateurs, which made it somehow sublime.
Amateur by branding and ethos, but professional and commercial by policy and reality. It was a treacherous relationship that for a long time was regarded as inviolable. But in the second decade of the 21st Century, fully 150-years into the experiment, with billions of TV dollars now bolstering the sport, the issue has reached its ultimate crisis.
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