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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The Ball in College Athletics Seems to be in Court

Bob Haldeman of later Watergate fame holds check for construction of UCLA's Pauley Pavillion;  Haldeman led the fundraising effort back in the day.
The NY Tiimes has a profile of a litigator challenging the status of college athletics: [excerpt]

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...

Full story at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/sports/jeffrey-kessler-envisions-open-market-for-ncaa-college-athletes.html

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