PINE NUTS – Majoring in Basketball
February 14, 2025 | McAvoy Lane
Paying college athletes under the table has always been a dirty little secret, until now. I distinctly remember smiling a wry smile as a kid, when I heard the news that my hero, the greatest running back I ever saw, Hugh McElhenny, took a cut in pay when he went from the Washington Huskies to the San Francisco Forty Niners.
More recently, I remember talking with the great Arkansas basketball coach, Nolan Richardson aboard the Tahoe Queen one day, when he laughed and told me, “Oh, we love your Nevada transfers, because they already have their cars.”
Finally, last year, the NCAA agreed to start sharing broadcast revenues with their players. Bravo! But stay tuned, for now we are going to shoot for the moon…a degree in sports! Picture our academically meritorious point guard. Yes, this hoopster gets a scholarship, gets paid cash money, and gets a college degree for dribbling a basketball.
Personally, I kinda like the idea of awarding an athletic degree for playing a sport.
I remember my older brother Tom, RIP, telling me about a conversation he once had with all-star catcher Johnny Bench…
“Johnny, do you ever regret never having attended college?”
“Yes Tom, I sometimes think about buying me a little college.”
There we go, if you can make enough money playing professional sports to buy yourself a small college, you can then award yourself an honorary degree, and hang it proudly on your wall at home for all to see…
Now I ask you, should playing sports become a college major? Should practice and competition be part of the curriculum? Is sports as much a portal to the human condition as music and art and drama? Let’s ask Nike!
In full disclosure, I was once offered a position with Nike, a company I admire still, but I turned it down when informed I would have to move from the Island of Maui to Beaverton, Oregon, where it rains, then stays up nights and rains.
But Nike seems to approve of the possibilities of choosing a sport as a major, and why shouldn’t they? Those athletes wear shoes don’t they? And once those athletes are being paid cash money to compete, well, they will then have the money to buy their own shoes, and Nike will no longer have to give them their shoes.
Hey, let’s try it! We’ve come a long, long way from the day Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals after it was discovered he was paid to play minor league baseball prior to the 1912 Olympics. The Olympic Committee would reinstate Thorpe as the winner of the decathlon and pentathlon 110 years later, just a tad late for Jim to savor…
As a former diver at Oregon whose audience consisted entirely of his immediate family, I am hardly qualified to judge the merits of awarding degrees for playing college sports. But most humbly I say, “Let the meritorious games begin!”
Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO
