The Point I Should Have Made
“The University of Central Florida, where Jordan is a freshman basketball player, has a $1.9 million contract with Adidas that requires all Golden Knight athletes to wear its shoes and apparel. That includes Jordan, son of Nike icon Michael Jordan.”—
Marcus Jordan needs to get with the Central Florida and wear Adidas, not Nike — chicagotribune.com
Forget the controversy over Jordan. The shocking part of the story is that Adidas is paying $1.9 million to the University of Central Florida so that the team will wear Adidas shoes and apparel. This isn’t UCLA, or Duke, or Indiana. This isn’t the University of Florida. It’s the University of Central Florida.
There is an insane amount of money available in the shoe industry.
(via jeffmiller)
And an insane amount of money available to NCAA programs on the backs of talented kids who don’t get paid.
CBS pays the NCAA $545 billion to broadcast their basketball games. Per year. And let’s not even start on football…
Southpol makes exactly the point I should have made. As a good libertarian, I don’t care if private schools offer scholarships to athletes with the proviso that they don’t accept money for their play. But when public schools do this, we’re all complicit in the deal. Because these schools are established by the exercise of government power, denying athletes their market value is exploitation. And for the most part, it’s exploitation of an economically-vulnerable class. In light of the disproportionate racial composition of some of our most popular sports, this exploitation feels more than a little like racism. I don’t mean to suggest that this racism was ever intended by those who set up this system. But I wonder whether our indifference to the fairness of the arrangement has anything to do with race.
As I think more about this, I don’t think our indifference is a reflection of racism. It’s a reflection, I think, of ageism. We largely don’t care about the young. We let them fight our wars; we make them pay our debts. And we make them play games for our amusement.
