Orwell and March Madness
By JOE NOCERA
NYT
If you’ve been watching the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship — a k a March Madness — you’ve undoubtedly seen the commercial. It’s an N.C.A.A. ad that shows college athletes pumping iron, running sprints and playing games. The voice-over, though, talks not about athletic achievement but academic accomplishment. “African-American males who are student-athletes are 10 percent more likely to graduate,” says the narrator. As the ad concludes, a female athlete looks into the camera and says, “Still think we’re just a bunch of dumb jocks?”
How many times have you seen that ad? Hundreds of times? Thousands? It runs constantly, pounding home its relentless message. It is also, when you think about it, a deeply Orwellian exercise, propaganda intended to gloss over the essential hypocrisy that undergirds the tournament. Then again, Orwellian propaganda is what the N.C.A.A. does best.
Athletes are “student-athletes,” a phrase coined by Walter Byers, the man who turned the N.C.A.A. into a modern powerhouse, because he feared that some states might try to classify football and basketball players as employees. College sports follows “the collegiate model,” a term coined in 2006 by one of Byers’ successors, Myles Brand. Realizing that amateurism was becoming outmoded, he needed a new concept that would allow athletic departments to continue exploiting athletes while denying that is what they were doing.
The essence of “the collegiate model” is that college athletes are students first, and that college athletics is secondary to academics. One can then ignore the fact that during this three-week tournament, the N.C.A.A. will reap around $800 million, while the players who make that possible will get nothing. They’re students, after all.
(More here.)
NYT
If you’ve been watching the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship — a k a March Madness — you’ve undoubtedly seen the commercial. It’s an N.C.A.A. ad that shows college athletes pumping iron, running sprints and playing games. The voice-over, though, talks not about athletic achievement but academic accomplishment. “African-American males who are student-athletes are 10 percent more likely to graduate,” says the narrator. As the ad concludes, a female athlete looks into the camera and says, “Still think we’re just a bunch of dumb jocks?”
How many times have you seen that ad? Hundreds of times? Thousands? It runs constantly, pounding home its relentless message. It is also, when you think about it, a deeply Orwellian exercise, propaganda intended to gloss over the essential hypocrisy that undergirds the tournament. Then again, Orwellian propaganda is what the N.C.A.A. does best.
Athletes are “student-athletes,” a phrase coined by Walter Byers, the man who turned the N.C.A.A. into a modern powerhouse, because he feared that some states might try to classify football and basketball players as employees. College sports follows “the collegiate model,” a term coined in 2006 by one of Byers’ successors, Myles Brand. Realizing that amateurism was becoming outmoded, he needed a new concept that would allow athletic departments to continue exploiting athletes while denying that is what they were doing.
The essence of “the collegiate model” is that college athletes are students first, and that college athletics is secondary to academics. One can then ignore the fact that during this three-week tournament, the N.C.A.A. will reap around $800 million, while the players who make that possible will get nothing. They’re students, after all.
(More here.)
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