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bluedigger

(17,077 posts)
Mon Jun 23, 2014, 03:07 PM Jun 2014

Dispatches From the NCAA’s Deathbed - By Charles P. Pierce

Dispatches From the NCAA’s Deathbed
The Ed O’Bannon trial is not going well for the titans of college sports

There was one moment last Wednesday during the morning session in the trial of O’Bannon v. NCAA in which my head popped up like a Dalmatian in the backseat of a car. James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist who was testifying on behalf of the defendants, was asked by Judge Claudia Wilken, the remorselessly efficient federal jurist who is presiding over the trial, to clarify something he’d said. Heckman had just answered a question about the central issue of the case: whether NCAA athletes like the plaintiff, former UCLA All-American Ed O’Bannon, have signed away the rights to their names, images, and likenesses to the NCAA based on its purported code of amateurism, and whether, by enforcing that purported code — even after athletes’ eligibility has ended — the NCAA has been acting in restraint of trade and in violation of antitrust laws. Wilken was curious about one point.

“Are you saying,” she asked Heckman, skepticism edging every word like a razor, “that being paid for your name, image, and likeness is the same as being paid for the activity itself?”

I nearly sprained my neck. Jesus, I thought to myself, this thing may have been over for weeks.

If Wilken believes that payment for an athlete’s name, image, and likeness is something different from being paid simply for playing the game — that it constitutes something not in violation of the rules regarding amateurism, but rather something outside of them — then that’s the ballgame. Everybody can grab a beer and go home. If Wilken is entertaining serious doubts on that point, then the NCAA is going to be lucky to get out of Oakland with its (undoubtedly sponsor-logo-festooned) underthings.

http://grantland.com/features/ed-obannon-ncaa-trial-lawsuit/


Pierce does a nice job explaining the larger ramifications of the case, pertaining to control of our own personas. While this is a sports story about amateurism and the NCAA, the principles used to form the decision will have effects throughout society.
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