Fast-track bill for college athletes
The supposed penurious purity of amateur athletics has long been a fiction. And then there are players from rich families, who get all the monetary support they need.
But for everyone else, have an agent buy you lunch or a fan purchase your sneakers, and you’re off the team, pal.
Perhaps the greatest athlete in American history, Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, had his two Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon stripped from him because he had played two seasons of semi-pro baseball as a youth — for $2 a game.
One hundred and nine years after those Olympics, we’ve made some progress in coming to terms with the essentially plantation model that was athletic competition. Most high-level amateur athletes play their sports as college students, many of them on scholarships that include room and board.
But no one would pretend that these young people aren’t frequently taken advantage of by the big-bucks athletics departments at our largest universities.
The talented kids can’t make a dime, but the schools can market their images and reap the rewards when wealthy alumni write big checks.
To do a proper end run around such inequities, the California Legislature has already passed a law that will allow college athletes in our state to make money off endorsement deals. But that bill, by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, currently doesn’t go into effect until 2023. After its success in 2019, Florida, New Mexico, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi passed similar legislation, with the changes in those states effective July 1.
A current urgency bill from Skinner, SB 26, authored with Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, would make the change for California athletes effective this July 1 as well, and it very much deserves passage.
Meanwhile, the NCAA, which oversees college athletics, after decades of being hidebound on the subject, is scrambling to rewrite its own rules.
“I would like the NCAA to do the right thing, but I’m not wasting my breath on the NCAA,” Skinner told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m working to ensure California leads by giving student-athletes name, image and likeness rights.”