By Nick Romeo GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
An important NCAA bylaw trumpets this lofty sentiment about athletic amateurism: “Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.”
The statement gathers many disputed elements into a single sentence: that college athletics is “avocational,” that participants are “student-athletes” (with its suggestion that the two roles bear the same weight), and that one of the organization’s chief responsibilities is to shield its charges from exploitative money-making schemes.
In fact, Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss argue in their remarkable new book, “Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA,’’ the organization may be the biggest threat to the long-term interests and well-being of the college athletes it claims to protect.
Nocera and Strauss build their case through a combination of anecdotes and analysis, tracking in chronological sequence the growing commercialization of college sports since the 1950s and the more recent efforts by a loose confederation of athletes, lawyers, economists, and advocates to oppose the NCAA’s stranglehold on money and power. It’s a complex argument, full of intricate legal and economic points, but the conclusion is simple. Through its system of rules, the NCAA forces athletes to accept the bulk of the risk for a meager share of the financial gain their efforts produce.