Gentleman Amateurs: How NCAA Regulations and College Admissions Decisions Preserve Elite White Masculine Norms

• In Event: Equitable, Indifferent, or Unjust? College Access and Ascendance via Sport

Abstract

In 1852 US college sport began with a Harvard and Yale rowing regatta. In the lead up to the race, debates ensued about who could be a college rower (Smith, 2011). Could graduate students or alumni race? Could the teams scout and enlist local talent? Could athletes receive compensation? (Smith, 2011). Such questions arose from amateurism. Amateurism accompanied rowing—both were imported to America from Oxford and Cambridge—as US universities continually modelled themselves after their British colonizers (Llewellyn & Gleaves, 2014). In the 19th century, the white British ruling class invented the gentleman amateur—an idealized, wealthy man who played sport for pleasure (not profit) and upheld sportsmanship and fair play—to prevent white working-class men, immigrants, and women from athletic competition (Llewellyn & Gleaves, 2014). Previous historical accounts of the rise of college sports contend that amateurism never took off in the US and instead, the NCAA and universities simply used amateur rhetoric to maximize profits (Smith, 1988, 2011).

This session draws upon archival research and theories of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) to argue that amateurism did take hold in the US. I situate the rise of the NCAA and amateurism in the 1890s sports purity movement, trying to eradicate proselytizing (today known as athletic recruitment) or the practice of coaches scouting beyond their campuses for top athletes (Oriard, 2001). Such practices, purists feared, created a cadre of “working-class ringers” and “tramp athletes” or those willing to offer “their [athletic] services to the highest bidder” (Flowers, 2009, p. 354). Sport purists embraced amateurism to cleanse athletics from “degenerate” social classes like the working class, women, and immigrants (Pope, 1997).

I trace how the gentleman amateur ideal became encoded in the first NCAA governing rules and later legitimated by the courts. I review several hegemonic crises to amateurism that challenged the gentleman amateur including the commercialization of college football and the civil rights and feminist movements. These movements expanded college athletic access for working class, women, and Athletes of Color. No longer able to banish undesirables, universities turned to a containment strategy, channeling women, working class, and racial minorities into certain spheres of the institution. For white women this meant playing in segregated, underfunded, and underrecognized sports. For Black men, this meant playing in the highest profile but most exploitative commercial sports. For women of color, this meant remaining on the athletic sidelines as they have no guaranteed legal protections. I argue containment did not end but instead refashioned amateurism. With the help of the US legal system, colleges and the NCAA preserved the underlying impetus of amateurism—sport access for the elite.

Author

• Kirsten Hextrum, Oregon State University