Beer and Circus by Murray Sperber

athletic scholarships from guaranteed four-year awards to one-year renewable grants. From their inception, the four-year deals had ensured some institutional commitment to an athlete’s education; whether the player became an all-American, a benchwarmer, or never suited up due to injury, he or she could continue in college on scholarship. But coaches despised the four-year grants—from their viewpoint, it wasted far too many scholarship slots on athletes “who didn’t work out”—who didn’t help the team win—and the coaches pressured the NCAA into changing all athletic scholarships to one-year awards, renewed or canceled every July 1. After the rule came on line, at most NCAA schools, coaches made the annual decisions on their players, generally renewing or cutting on the basis of athletic ability.
    The one-year grants gave coaches enormous power over their athletes, and, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as college sports became more popular and the rewards of winning ever more lucrative, particularly for coaches, in the form of enhanced contracts and endorsements, their demands on their athletes escalated. In previous eras, every college sport had an off-season during which some athletes caught up on their studies, and others just relaxed and recuperated. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, as weight-training and other conditioning methods became an essential part of athletics, the off-season disappeared from the college sports calendar. Then, in-season leisure time for athletes became briefer, to the point where, in the early 1990s, observers noted that because college athletes “can expect to spend … 50 hours or more each week in their sport, coaches generally expect the hours required for team-related tasks [meetings, videotape viewing, etc.] … to be taken from leisure time, which they often consider a low priority.”
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    For many generations, the lives of college athletes in big-time programs had resembled those of regular vocational students. In the 1970s and 1980s, when many other students edged out of their “dominant subcultures,” most athletes withdrew further into their vocational mode, to the
point where even the proponents of intercollegiate athletics worried about the intense daily pressure placed upon the jocks. In 1991, a nationally published guidebook for college athletes and their parents began chapter one with:

    The label of student-athlete says it all. A college student who is also an athlete is asked to live two roles and be two people in one. No other college students are identified in this hyphenated way—no others are pulled in two completely different directions. No other students are asked to be one person for half the day and someone else the other half.

    Without realizing it, authors Stephen K. Figler and Howard E. Figler placed student-athletes in the traditional vocational category. However, contrary to their assertion, many other students “are pulled in two completely different directions,” and endure split lives—all those men and women who work at full-time jobs and also attend college full-time, as well as all those who are parents and must divide their lives among family, school, and job obligations. (By the early 1990s, vocational students comprised over 50 percent of the national undergraduate population, but, ironically, demographers excluded student-athletes from that pool; the demographers, not recognizing that athletic scholarships were payments-in-kind for full-time sports jobs, counted athletes as regular students.)
    The Figlers, even if they never used the term vocational, expressed the athletes’ dilemma in the same way that university counselors described the lives of stressed-out vocational students: instead of the full-time job or family, “The team demands so much of your time that you cannot perform … in courses that you want or need for your future.” In addition, the outside