The times they are a'changing - Part 4

From the Free Press email newsletter yesterday:

...Sonny Vaccaro’s “long journey” to get college athletes paid: When I read the news late last week that the NCAA was going to settle a handful of antitrust cases for a staggering $2.8 billion—and that the association and the major college conferences were finally going to be sharing some of their revenue with the athletes who made them all rich—the first thing I did was call Sonny Vaccaro. “It’s been a long journey,” said the 86-year-old Vaccaro. “I always thought the day would come when the players got paid, but I wasn’t sure I would be around to see it.” It’s only right that he is. Because Vaccaro, more than anyone, made this moment possible.

Before he decided to take on the NCAA, Vaccaro marketed basketball shoes; most famously, he convinced Michael Jordan to sign with Nike. (In Air, the movie about that signing, he was played by Matt Damon, an actor the short, bald Vaccaro in no way resembles.) His war on the NCAA began in 2007. As he tells it, he was fed up seeing underprivileged black basketball players “get shafted” (his words) by the NCAA. He had developed close relationships with many of these players, and far too often he’d also seen careers damaged—and even destroyed—by the NCAA. Its essential view was that if a college athlete received anything of value, even a bag of groceries, it was a violation of “amateurism.” And the NCAA was ruthless in punishing even the tiniest infraction. Vaccaro saw amateurism as a sham, disguising the truth that college sports was a multibillion-dollar enterprise built on the backs of an unpaid, mostly black labor force.

At first, Vaccaro mostly spoke to college audiences. It was difficult to persuade people of his point of view because the NCAA had convinced the world that it was the sheriff of college sports, rooting out the rule-breakers. But as more and more money poured into college football and basketball—as coaches made millions and TV contracts got richer—the fact that the athletes who generated all that money were unpaid became too glaring to ignore. Slowly, Vaccaro gained converts—myself very much included. The tide was turning.

The key moment came in 2009 when Vaccaro convinced an attorney named Michael Hausfeld to file an antitrust suit against the NCAA. He also found the plaintiff, Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA star who was upset that his image was being used in a video game without his permission. The image rights were controlled by the NCAA. Five years later, a judge in California ruled that the NCAA was indeed violating the nation’s antitrust laws. Then, in 2021, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in a second big antitrust case. The dam had broken.

The current settlement will pay damages to former and current players who were deprived of their chance to make money on their name, image, and likeness—something college athletes have been able to do since that Supreme Court victory.

There is still one last step, though: tossing out the last vestiges of amateurism and paying the players real salaries. For Vaccaro, that’s always been the holy grail. I hope he’s around to see it. 

—Joe Nocera...

Source: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-helped-standing-rock-go-viral-now. [Scroll down.]