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| Bob Haldeman of later Watergate fame holds check for construction of UCLA's Pauley Pavillion; Haldeman led the fundraising effort back in the day. |
First
there was Kain Colter, a brawny Northwestern quarterback who wanted to
form a union. Then there was Ed O’Bannon, a former U.C.L.A. basketball
star who did not like seeing others make money by featuring him in a
video game. They
both dealt serious blows to the foundations of the embattled N.C.A.A.,
which rests upon the idea of the athlete as an unpaid amateur. But
the N.C.A.A.'s most formidable opponent of all may be the one coming
down the pike: a stout, 60-year-old antitrust lawyer from Brooklyn named
Jeffrey Kessler.
In
March, Kessler filed a lawsuit against the N.C.A.A. and the major
college athletics conferences that he says will take down the “cartel”
that controls college sports, and do away altogether with rules against
paying college athletes. College
sports experts see Kessler’s case as the biggest threat of all, and,
with reform in the air, they say he has reason to feel confident. If the
N.C.A.A. has shown an inclination to tiptoe toward significant change,
Kessler’s case takes a bazooka to the entire model of college athletics...
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