A NEW BOOK is on the market chastising college sports for the exploitation of student-athletes. Here we go again. Another liberal voice rising from the coffee house. Last week it was save the porpoises, the humpback whales and the fir trees. This week it's save the quarterbacks and point guards. It's amazing how many people graduate from Berkeley.
But upon closer inspection, the author's name of "Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes" sets off bells from the past - recalling a different image entirely than of someone who drinks herb tea and marches on embassies.Walter Byers?
THAT Walter Byers?!
Sure enough, the longtime chief of police of the NCAA is the book's author. And if you think writing a book is the last thing this man would ever do, wait until you see what he's written.
The man who ruled the NCAA as its executive director from 1951 through 1987 with a no-nonsense attitude and an aversion for public appearances that ranked up there with Michael Jackson, has become a cheerleader against the NCAA. He is unabashedly calling for an end to the "hypocrisy" of college athletics. Among other things:
- He wants to see governmental legislation that would establish an "Athletes' Bill of Rights" - "to guarantee that players need not sign away freedoms available to other students solely because they engage in college athletics."
- He advocates an end to the "arbitrary salary cap" currently in place - a cap he says is cleverly disguised as grant-in-aids.
- And he's all for a system that would allow the "have-nots" opportunities to become competitive again - for example, he believes those schools with football teams that have perennial losing records should get to have more recruiting visits and privileges than the schools that keep hammering them.
Common sense and fair play, in other words, is what Walter Byers is suggesting. He even thinks schools should pay taxes on the income they make from athletics.
All this, from the executioner who sentenced SMU to the "death penalty" in 1987 and who tirelessly ordered his enforcement officers to chase down coaches who gave recruits a quarter so they could call home or who sent Christmas cards to their own players.
For a lot of people who have been close to, or inside, the NCAA the past several decades, it's like watching the highway patrolman who gave you a ticket for going 56 standing at the front of a protest arguing for an end to the speed limit. Jerry Tarkanian must be in the final stages of apoplexy.
Byers freely admits where he's been and what he's done. He doesn't apologize for doing his job for 36 years, and doing it as well as he possibly could. But he explains that what he thinks now, and what he's advocating, is precisely because of where he's been and what he's seen. He tried the system. The system doesn't work.
College athletics have changed. There are more loopholes than there are loops. More rules than reason. The NCAA does not address reality. That's what Byers is saying.
In his book he recounts a conversation he had with a football player named Ron Zell Brewer who played for TCU in 1985. Brewer, it was discovered, had accepted payments of $200 a month from a TCU booster - a discovery that landed TCU and Brewer in big NCAA trouble.
Byers recalls observing to Brewer that he must have been racked with guilt during the time he accepted that under-the-table money.
"Heck no," replied Brewer, "I enjoyed myself while it was happening."
What Brewer did may not have been right, and Byers isn't saying it was. But he is saying the NCAA fails to address reality. He says it's time that the NCAA recognizes its own hypocrisy and pays the people who are the reason enormous money is being generated in the first place. And he means pay them right. "The colleges are already paying the athletes," Byers writes. "The grant-in-aid established that."
It's an old war cry but with, you've got to admit, an interesting new voice. In a way, it's like Robert McNamara, President Nixon's Secretary of Defense, who in his recent book, "In Retrospect," criticized America's involvement in the Vietnam War - and he was one of the chief architects of that involvement.
Walter Byers. Stubborn, stodgy, belligerent, reclusive Walter Byers is crying revolution in college athletics. He's saying the NCAA is out of date and, worse, out of touch. It calls crimes that are not crimes. It oppresses its very constituency, the student-athlete.
This isn't an agent looking for his 10 percent, or a coach trying to sign a kid who can run a 4.4 40. This is the guy who used to pull the trigger. If he says enough is enough, maybe it is.