University of Virginia Library

THE SPORTS SCENE

By Bob Cullen

YESTERDAY IN WASHINGTON, the National Collegiate
Athletic Association petitioned the Justice Department
to begin an anti-trust investigation into the Amateur
Athletic Union, the internationally recognized governing
body for amateur sports in this country. It was but another
round in the long skirmish between the two bodies,
a dispute that has only hurt the athletes involved.

The core of the dispute has been the right to sanction
track meets involving collegiate athletes, a function long
performed by the AAU. However, an estimated 90% of
the amateur athletes in this country compete for colleges
under the jurisdiction of the NCAA, and that body has
begun in the past several years to demand the right to
sanction events in which college athletes participated.

To do this, the NCAA set up an organization known
as the United States Track and Field Federation, which it
then claimed had the sole right to sanction track meets
involving college athletes. Since then, it has relented to the
point of being willing to settle for co-ordinate but equal
sanctioning. The USTFF set up its own national championships.

NEITHER SIDE has shown any willingness to compromise
since the war started. Numerous attempts to reach
a settlement have been instigated by outside agencies worried
about the future of amateur athletics. General MacArthur
negotiated some sort of cease-fire in 1963 that has since
been broken many times. The most recent settlement was
instigated by the Senate and mediated by Theodore Kheel,
a New York labor negotiator who had less trouble with
the Transit Workers Union than he did with the Poobahs
of the AAU and NCAA.

The AAU accepted Kheel's recommendations but an
NCAA spokesman rejected them, saying that they would
continue what he called an AAU monopoly over amateur
athletics. Their legal action through the Justice Department
followed. Now Senator Warren Magnuson has announced
his intention of incorporating Kheel's recommendations
into binding legislation. Several other Congressmen
have come up with legislation of their own.

WHAT IMPRESSES US MOST about this conflict is
the total and sheer asininity of it. The conflicts in track
and field belong exactly where the name implies they do:
on the track. Sport is, in essence, the determination of
who can run faster, jump higher, or throw something
further. A race between Jim Ryun and Dave Patrick is a
good thing and should be run if only the Timbuktu City
Council sanctions it. That two groups of willful old men
should attempt to interfere with it is repulsive. We don't
really care who is "right" in this dispute, though we
doubt that anyone is. We only wish that both sides would
buy a Monopoly set and release their frustrations that
way.

For their petty quarrel has deeply hurt the group that
both sides claim to be protecting, the athletes. Both the
AAU and the USTFF have threatened to terminate the
eligibility of athletes competing in events sanctioned by
one and not by the other, though public outcry has prevented
it in all but the cases of some Iowa school girls.

FOR THE COLLEGE ATHLETE, the dilemma is cruel:
if he competes at his school's insistence, or through his
own preference, in a USTFF meet, he risks loss of AAU
eligibility and forfeiture of his right to compete in the
Olympics; if he competes in a meet sanctioned only by
the AAU, he risks blacklisting by the USTFF which would
entail an end to competition for his school, through the
USTFF affiliation with the NCAA, and in many cases
a resultant loss of the scholarship through which he attends
school.

This is an Olympic year, and whether we like it or
not, the Olympic showing of a nation is important to that
nation's world prestige. Presently there are many groups
that seem to be working towards disrupting our Olympic
effort. Many of them, in particular Dr. Harry Edwards
Black Boycott movement, have legitimate protests to voice.
What we object to is the abrogation through coercion
of an individual's right to compete against anyone at
any time. This is precisely what the NCAA and the AAU
are both threatening to do. Neither have the best interests
of the athletes at heart in their actions, though
both may think that they do. Their quarrel has degenerated
into a vindictive war, whose casualties are the athletes
that care little about the particulars of the dispute. What
right do these men in stuffed shirts have to tell any
athlete who has dedicated himself to the pursuit of excellence
in his event that he cannot prove his skill in
competition?

WE HOPE THAT if the Congress does act that it will
think solely of enforcing this right to compete through
appropriate legislation. It is regrettable that the men to
whom track and field has been entrusted could not have
accomplished this rather obvious goal on their own, and
now must be curbed like wayward children from their
efforts to destroy the sport.