Beer and Circus by Murray Sperber Page B

time” required by coaches; however, the rule allowed athletes to spend as many hours per week as they wanted in “voluntary” sports activities, for example, informal practices, weight-training, conditioning, et cetera. Even the NCAA’s PR director admitted that “under the new rules, athletes can practice more than twenty hours a week. One hundred hours a week if they want, if it’s voluntary.”
    Immediately, the line between mandatory and voluntary blurred. The coaches kept time sheets on the hours that they required their players to be on the practice field or court—and the totals never exceeded four daily or twenty weekly. But the coaches also encouraged their athletes to volunteer to do all the other activities related to sports success. During the first year of the rule, Jerry Eaves, an assistant basketball coach at Howard University, admitted that in his and other sports the athletes “are still doing everything that takes up the same amount of time” as before; “they’re still running” the same training distances, “they’re still doing maximum physical conditioning,” and also “they’re playing” so-called pickup games to supplement official practices.
    Many athletes also regarded the four-and-twenty-hour rule as a sham, and they felt that voluntary/mandatory merged into one time unit. A Division I men’s volleyball player remarked that, beyond the mandatory hours in afternoon practices, the other functions are voluntary, “but it’s not like you don’t have to show up if you don’t want to. We work out as much or even longer now than we did before the rule … . Also each of us wants playing time and needs to keep ahead of everyone else. We know that the coaches totally monitor who is doing the voluntary work. Guess which players the coaches put in the starting lineup?”
    The NCAA four-and-twenty-hour rule continued through the 1990s, obeyed so little that in the fall of 1999, USA Today published a routine item on USC football player R. Jay Soward, in his team’s doghouse because he “was a no-show at workouts that officially were voluntary but were attended by nearly every player on the team.” Soward’s absence “didn’t sit well with Trojans coach Paul Hackett,” and resulted in people “in the program questioning his [Soward’s] work ethic and commitment.” Apparently, no one told USC that they were supposed to pretend to obey the NCAA rule, not openly discuss their flaunting of it with a reporter on a national newspaper.
    But from its inception, with the inclusion of the “voluntary” loophole,
the four-and-twenty-hour rule was never a serious reform, and mainly revealed the hypocrisy of the NCAA, as well as its bureaucratic impulse—coaches rightly complain about the burdensome time sheets that they must fill out for the NCAA, serving no “real world” purpose whatsoever.
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    Yet, in a symbolic sense, the four-and-twenty-hour rule captures the essence of the modern NCAA: its PR pretense of guarding the welfare of student-athletes, versus the reality of its high-powered promotion of a billion-dollar-a-year college sports business, and its lack of concern for the workers in that industry. Joe Abunasser, a former NCAA Division I assistant basketball coach, commented: “The irony of the entire organization [the NCAA] is that its proclaimed intention is to regulate and reform college athletics, when in reality it is the cause of the corruption.”
    Propelling the NCAA’s corruption is the almighty dollar. From a wealthy organization in the 1970s and 1980s, the association, thanks to television’s insatiable appetite for college sports programming, moved into the billionaire range in the 1990s. As a result, the NCAA became an essential part of sports media programming, with the total revenue from college football and basketball games