The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  When African American former Northwestern University quarterback Kain Colter led a high-profile push to unionize his school’s football team in 2014, he did so for a number of reasons: deep misgivings over the power imbalance between NCAA schools and athletes; a lack of financial support for players, especially ones from poorer families; a pattern of steering athletes away from useful and demanding courses of study, the better to keep them eligible for sports; and a system that didn’t seem to do enough to protect football players from brain trauma, nor provide medical coverage for athletes whose campus injuries can afflict them for life.

  According to the book Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, Colter also had a personal motivation for demanding change: the story of his uncle, Cleveland, a former football star at the University of Southern California.

  Cleveland Colter was supposed to be one of the athletic one-percenters. As Indentured reports, he went from top high school recruit to All-American safety, and was considered the best athlete on a Trojans defense that also featured future NFL stars Junior Seau and Mark Carrier. However, a debilitating knee injury his senior year derailed his professional prospects. Years of investing his time and sweat into a sport, and he wouldn’t have a cent to show for it. Today, he runs a school lunch catering business. Imagine what an extra $500,000 would have meant to him, and how it might have changed his life. Imagine what that would mean to any black revenue-sport athlete. That’s money to start a business. Buy a home or a rental property. Pay for a child’s education. Take care of a sick relative. Stick into a stock market index fund, ignore for 40 years, and then retire with peace of mind. Imagine black athletes building lasting wealth for themselves and their communities—in 2013, the median net worth of white American households was $141,900, while the same figure for African American households was just $11,000—instead of watching powerful white people do the same.

  “They’ve imposed a tax on football and basketball players,” says Sonny Vaccaro, the longtime shoe company dealmaker who helped spearhead the O’Bannon lawsuit and has become one of the NCAA’s most vocal critics. “That’s what it is. A tax. Like what the British put on the Americans. They take the money that could be pouring back into those player’s lives. The money comes from mostly one segment of society: African Americans.

  “It is Downton Abbey. We just won’t accept it.”

  Hold up. Aren’t African American football and men’s basketball players receiving something of immense value from the NCAA system? Aren’t they getting a college education—and a debt-free education, to boot?

  Isn’t that a fair and just exchange?

  A few days before the Final Four, Pac-12 commissioner Scott, a white man who made $3.4 million in 2014, and Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, a white woman whose salary is unreported—her predecessors in the job reportedly made around $500,000 annually—copublished an editorial on CNN.com arguing as much. Under a headline reading “College Athletes Are Educated, Not Exploited,” they claimed that 67 percent of all Division I athletes will go on to become college graduates—a slightly higher graduation rate than that of non-athletes—and that campus athletes receive something even more important than a degree: namely, “they’re taught how to be successful in college and in life.”

  For black athletes, however, this is too often not the case. Already disproportionately shut out of an economy they power through sweat, blood, and concussions, they disproportionately receive substandard educations as well.

  Seventeen years ago, a NCAA report examining Division I athletes who enrolled in school in 1992–93 found that just 42 percent of black football players and 33 percent of black basketball players had graduated after six years—far below a 54 percent graduation rate for male students in general. Today, the situation has improved, but not by much. In 2012, a University of Pennsylvania study reported that the six-year graduation rate for black male college athletes in six major Division I conferences was 50.2 percent, less than comparable graduation rates for all students (72.8 percent), all college athletes (66.9 percent), and all African American male students (55.5 percent). In 2016, an update found that the black male graduation rate had slightly improved to 53.6 percent. Also this year, a University of Central Florida study found that the NCAA’s graduation success rate—another six-year measure that accounts for school transfers—for black men’s basketball players on this year’s 68 NCAA tournament teams was 75 percent, 18 points lower than the rate for white players. (The graduation rate for black football players on 2014–15 bowl teams was 66 percent, 19 percent lower than the rate for white players.)

  “Disproportionately, they are not graduating,” Comeaux, the UC Riverside professor, says. “It’s largely based on a notion that it’s not a priority, that classes are just there to maintain eligibility so they can participate in sports.”

  Indeed, graduation rates don’t tell the whole story. In his research, Comeaux has found that engagement with faculty is crucial for academic achievement, yet professors tend to spend much more out-of-class time with white male athletes than black ones. Furthermore, athletes frequently find themselves choosing (or steered into) undemanding majors, which is hardly surprising given that playing big-time college football or basketball is a year-round, high-pressure, physically taxing, 40–60-hour-a-week job with frequent and irregular travel demands. African American former Duke basketball player Shane Battier, an excellent student, majored in religion because it didn’t conflict with his basketball schedule. Kain Colter started at Northwestern as a premed student, but switched his major to psychology after football practice forced him to miss too many science classes. In 1991, African American former Ohio State University running back Robert Smith, an aspiring doctor, quit the school’s football team for a year and instead ran track after accusing coaches of not taking his academic responsibilities seriously.

  This year’s Final Four featured two schools, Syracuse and North Carolina, whose basketball programs were recently involved in academic scandals. A NCAA investigation found that Syracuse’s athletic staff members accessed the email accounts of several athletes, communicated directly with faculty members while pretending to be those athletes, and also did school work for them; most notably, the Orange’s former director of basketball operations helped former Big East Defensive Player of the Year Fab Melo remain eligible by completing one of his papers. Meanwhile, malfeasance at North Carolina was far more widespread: school employees steered 1,500 athletes over 18 years toward no-show “paper classes” in the school’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies that never actually met and only required students to hand in a single research paper. African American former Tar Heels basketball player Rashard McCants, a member of the school’s 2005 national championship team, told ESPN that he even made the dean’s list in the spring of 2005—despite not attending any of the four classes for which he received straight A’s. Last year, McCants’s sister Rashanda, a former North Carolina basketball player, and African American former UNC football player Devon Ramsay filed a federal class action lawsuit against the school, alleging that athletes were harmed by the paper class scheme—a practice that lead plaintiff’s lawyer Michael Hausfeld said “was nothing more than an integral, foreseeable part of the entire enterprise of big-time contemporary college athletics, in which academics is truly the stepchild to athletics, and the meaningful education that the NCAA promises and commits to is nothing more than an illusion.”

  McCants’s case is extreme. But are second-rate athlete educations all that uncommon? Eight years ago, USA Today investigated the phenomenon of academic “clustering”—that is, large numbers of athletes taking particular majors at much higher rates than the general student body, possibly (or presumably) because those majors are less demanding and will help them remain eligible—and determined that it was commonplace at big-time sports schools. A 2009 study of clustering in ACC football found that black players were more likely to cluster than their white counterparts, and that at six s
chools, over 75 percent of the black players were enrolled in one of two majors.

  “Graduation doesn’t equal education,” says Hawkins, the University of Georgia professor. “That’s one of the things I’ve always been critical of. I’ve been on this campus 20 years. We can graduate athletes. But what’s the quality of that education, and does it lead to gainful employment in fields that are comparable to what they’ve studied? We’ve studied football players 10 years out and we find that’s not the case. Players are working in fields that are sort of beneath their degree. I think that’s a pattern.”

  On the first night of the NCAA tournament’s Sweet Sixteen—around the same time Villanova tipped off against the University of Miami, Florida—sociologist and longtime civil rights advocate Harry Edwards stood behind a podium at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, addressing a college athletes’ rights conference.

  “Let’s be honest and straight up,” he said. “When we talk about football and basketball, we are talking about the black athlete.”

  In the early 1960s, Edwards had been one of those athletes himself, a basketball player and record-setting discus thrower at San Jose State. Looking around, he saw a campus that was mostly white—students, faculty, administrators, curriculum; everything save its sports stars—and an athletic department that was defined by its “willingness to exploit black athletic talent.” He saw white athletes “get [summer] jobs that black starters didn’t get,” and “tours to places that black athletes didn’t even know were being given.” After returning to the school as a part-time instructor, Edwards presented a list of civil rights grievances to San Jose State’s leadership on behalf of the school’s black students and athletes; the group, which included black football players, threatened to sit out the first game of the 1967 season if their demands—including more black students and professors, equal access to student housing, and desegregated fraternities and sororities—weren’t met. (Shortly thereafter, Edwards would become famous for attempting to organize an African American athlete boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics, an effort that inspired John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s seminal black power salute on the medal stand in Mexico City.)

  “Why should we play where we can’t work?” Edwards said, recalling that San Jose State canceled the game. (The cancellation prompted a war of words with then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who called Edwards “a criminal, unfit to teach.” Edwards dubbed the future president “a petrified pig, unfit to govern.”) “People thought that question was insane at the time,” Edwards continued, adding that the school’s athletics and campus sports in general could be characterized as “a plantation structure.”

  “Fifty years later, that statement can still be made,” he said. “It has not changed.”

  Most of the people who currently run college athletics would disagree. Vehemently. The entire enterprise can’t possibly be unjust, let alone racially unjust. Not when athletes—including African American athletes—are given so much. Small cash stipends. Four-year scholarships. Unlimited snacks. Access to world-class coaching and palatial training facilities. Athletes get to play exciting games before large crowds of adoring fans; they get academic tutors to help them learn, and to literally walk them to and from class. Exploited? If anything, they should feel grateful—and not like the former players suing the NCAA in federal antitrust court, whom Texas women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky, a white woman who makes roughly $500,000 a year, says are entitled malcontents who “sucked a whole lot off the college athletics pipe.”

  Except: the injustice in college sports isn’t just about the terms of the deal. It’s about the terms of the dealing. Amateurism deprives athletes—again, predominantly black athletes—of freedoms and rights the rest of us take for granted. The same antitrust laws that prevent schools from colluding to limit assistant basketball coach salaries don’t protect campus athletes, even when federal courts rule that the NCAA and its member schools are violating those laws. Sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, who is currently leading a bellwether case against the association, says athletes “don’t have any rights under federal labor laws. They don’t get to form a union, strike, collectively bargain, or file unfair labor practice complaints. That’s not available to college athletes.” Instead, they exist as second-class citizens, separate and unequal, just as the NCAA intended—according to former association director Byers, the term “student-athlete” was a legalistic ruse specifically created in the 1950s to prevent injured football players from collecting workers’ compensation.

  Throughout American history, exploitation has flowed from inequality. It flowed after blacks were deemed three-fifths of a person at the original Constitutional Convention, and when they were later denied due process under Jim Crow; it flowed when women were denied the right to vote. Under Apartheid, the McCormicks write, South African laws prevented black workers from striking—sapping whatever bargaining power they otherwise might have flexed—and also mandated specific wages and hours for many blacks. Meanwhile, whites were allowed unfettered access to a free market. Sound familiar?

  “I’ve used the term ‘racial injustice’ [to describe college sports], but I try to avoid using the term ‘racism,’ ” says Yee, the sports agent. “I can’t look into someone’s heart and know their intentions. But the facts are in plain view.

  “I’ve never ever had one of my [athlete] clients ever say to me that the current system is equitable. Nobody. In fact I have one caucasian client who grew up with black friends, played at a prominent school, has done very well for himself, came from an upper-class family. And he thinks this is one of the greatest injustices in American society. It really bothers him at his core.”

  Yee’s client is in the minority, at least among whites. In 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that while 66 percent of nonwhites supported college athlete unionization, only 38 percent of whites did. Similarly, 51 percent of nonwhites favored paying college athletes—but just 24 percent of whites agreed. A HBO Real Sports/Marist poll last year revealed more of the same: while 59 percent of African Americans felt college athletes should be paid, only 26 percent of whites concurred.

  Numbers like those caught the attention of Tatishe Nteta, a University of Massachusetts political science professor whose research focuses on ethnic politics. So did a 2014 soliloquy from then–ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd, who caught flack from civil rights groups after making arguably coded statements about pay-for-play. “I don’t think paying all college athletes is great, not every college is loaded and most 19-year-olds [are] gonna spend it—and let’s be honest, they’re gonna spend it on weed and kicks,” Cowherd said on air. “And spare me the ‘they’re being extorted’ thing. Listen, 90 percent of these college guys are gonna spend it on tats, weed, kicks, Xboxes, beer, and swag. They are, get over it!”

  Nteta knew from previous studies that underlying racial animus helps shape whites’ attitudes toward health care, welfare, and criminal justice—in short, the more resentment a white person feels toward African Americans, the more likely they are to oppose public policies they perceive as benefiting blacks. “Say you ask a question about building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico,” Nteta says. “Rather than think about how much that will cost, or how ridiculous the idea is, you just think about your attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and Mexicans, and that influences how you think about building a wall.”

  Do white attitudes toward amateurism work the same way? In the fall of 2014, Nteta and two academic colleagues attached a set of targeted questions to a larger public opinion poll connected to congressional midterm elections. They found that race isn’t the only reason whites oppose pay-for-play, but it’s a major one. In fact, Nteta says that negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes, with higher levels of resentment corresponding with higher levels of opposition. “We tried to look at factors like interest in college sports, your love of the NCAA, if you were a co
llege athlete, if you were a union member,” he says. “We found that none of that is important. But race can’t be divorced from this story.”

  Nteta cautions that his research is preliminary, and not quite ready to publish in an academic journal. Additional work is needed. Still, it raises an unsettling possibility: if college sports carries Branch’s “whiff of the plantation,” then perhaps the rest of us do too.

  A few weeks ago, Yee spoke to students and faculty at the University of Virginia’s School of Law, his graduate alma mater. When college sports came up, he noted that most NCAA-level women’s cross-country teams are made up of white runners. He then asked listeners to participate in a thought exercise. Imagine, he said, if those teams brought in millions of dollars. Then imagine if the money mostly went to well-paid black administrators, and to black athletes competing in non-revenue sports. Would that situation be tolerated, let alone tolerated for decades?

  “The reaction was largely silence,” Yee says.

  BOMANI JONES

  Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace

  from the undefeated

  Friday night, in a league whose business is Americana, Colin Kaepernick took a stand rarely seen in pro sports. It wasn’t from his seat on the sideline, where he paid no regard for the National Anthem in its favorite game. It was after—when Steve Wyche of the NFL Network asked why he sat while others stood. Kaepernick was strident, unflinching, and unapologetic. When reporters surrounded his locker Sunday for more, he gave it to them.

  The attention he’s received was ineluctable, but he hadn’t courted it. Had he done so, more than one reporter would have noticed that he stayed seated and asked him about it. Or asked after the previous game, when—though he didn’t play—he did the same thing. But he did not hide when confronted, as New England Patriot Tom Brady did while giving airtime to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump via conveniently placed campaign paraphernalia in his locker. With more to lose than Brady, he made himself clearer.