Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Like the centaur, the "student-athlete" is a mash-up of two real things to create one fictional thing. Anyone who defends the NCAA's exploitation of so-called "student-athletes" subscribes to the idea that there once was such a thing as student-athletes: young men (they were all men at the time, of course) who received a free education in exchange for playing wholesome athletics for a university. But this was never true.For (more) evidence of this, see this 1944 article in the Lincoln Star about the Kansas-Nebraska football rivalry.Here's Bert Kennedy, Kansas' quarterback in 1896, on the sanctity of the student-athlete:
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Dude can barely read? No problem. Enroll him in the law school so he can still play football. The only thing that's changed is the fraud has gotten more elaborate.There's also a neat little tidbit about head trauma:"William Blaine, a Sioux Indian youth we found at Haskell Institute, was our star," Kennedy recalled yesterday. "Despite the fact he had no more than a fourth-grade education, we enrolled him in the school of law and kept him eligible."
Remember this next time someone claims to invent a football helmet that prevents concussions. Again, the only thing that's changed is that the fraud has gotten more elaborate."He suffered a slight concussion of the brain in practice before the Nebraska game and we fashioned a padded canvas headpiece to protect him. It was the first football helmet I ever saw…The Indian protested that his head ached and he couldn't run…but he traveled 60 yards to a touchdown so fast the Nebraskans never laid a hand on him."