Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes

The most shocking feature of this expose of American college athletic programs is that it comes from the man who oversaw those programs as executive director of the NCAA from 1951 to 1986. Written with freelancer Hammer, Byers's depiction is a uniformly dismal one principally regarding football and, to a lesser degree, basketball. At the top of the heap are college presidents, whom Byers terms ``world-weary cynics'' and who hold their jobs for relatively short periods compared with tenured faculty members; then there are head coaches, often greedy self-promoters, and their ever-expanding staffs, who take a huge bite out of athletic budgets; at the bottom are the athletes, who actually earn the money but get nothing in return, least of all a good education. Byers points out the sham of calling a multibillion-dollar industry ``amateur,'' but, in a disappointing conclusion, he stops short of advocating salaries for players, proposing instead an unrealistic program of increased job opportunities for athletes. In his nostalgia for the days when academics ruled the campus, Byers comes across as a man of high principles who appears to have expended his energy on a useless cause. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)