Sentiment Is Growing to Provide the Athlete With Spending Money

Sentiment is growing for a controversial concept--finding a legal way to give college athletes spending money.

There are proposals that provide a most basic answer: pay them to play.

State Sen. Ernest Chambers of Omaha has introduced a bill every year since 1981 to make University of Nebraska football players employees of the state to allow them to be paid.

His argument is that football players bring millions of dollars to the university while playing an arduous and sometimes dangerous game. He also believes paying the players would remove the hypocrisy in college athletes.

Sen. Tom Mann of Des Moines introduced a bill in the Iowa Legislature in late January proposing athletes be paid in cash and gifts from either the university or alumni. The universities would be required to draw up salary scales for the athletes.

Although neither bill is considered passable, the idea is now the subject of serious discussion.

Lou Holtz, the new football coach at the University of Notre Dame, and Al McGuire, former basketball coach at Marquette University, discussed the idea during recent visits to Chicago.

One of Holtz’s concerns is semantics.

“I find difficulty with the words being paid ,” Holtz said. “I find an awful lot of coaches say an individual ought to be paid, but when you read into it, they’re talking about a stipend in order to live. When you think about ‘being paid’ you think about getting thousands of dollars.

“I am basically against paying athletes, but what I would like to see is the athletes receive a larger share of the Pell Grant,” he said. “The Pell Grant is based on need. In other words, if an individual comes out of a poor home, he is qualified for ‘X’ amount of dollars. I would like to see athletes receive that maximum amount.”

The NCAA Presidents Commission, which will meet April 2-3 in Chicago, will discuss just that idea. They will review the current limitations on financial aid to student-athletes, which is tuition and fees, room and board, required books and up to $900 of the Pell Grant for qualifying students, which is well below the maximum amount.

The main idea, at least in the minds of Holtz and McGuire, is to find a way to help the players get some spending money so their lives can approximate a normal college student’s. McGuire says players, especially inner-city athletes, are sometimes forced by peer pressures to look for ways to get spending money.

“The ball players have to be able to maintain the image and style of other school students,” McGuire said. He also noted many colleges have nationwide recruiting which causes traveling problems.

“What if a parent dies? How do they get home?” he said. “They have to come up with some way for them to get money, so at least it’s not constantly pimping around, looking for a sugar daddy.”

“When I was in college, I never had any money in my pocket, except maybe I always had a dollar,” Holtz said. “My mother took on a second job to enable me to have the opportunity. But I always had an uncle or an aunt I could turn to in a time of need.

“Today there are many athletes that happen to be in college that have nobody in the immediate family they can turn to in the time of crisis. What they allow you to do is allow you to give him a scholarship to pay for his academics, but that individual can not work.”

Holtz pointed out that there are unusual constraints on an athlete’s time which makes it impossible for him to earn money the way other college students do.

“At the University of Minnesota (where Holtz coached for two seasons), we did not start school until Sept. 22 but we had to report for football practice Aug. 18,” he said. “They got out of class on June 12. They had six weeks to work the entire year. Out of that money, they had to pay for transportation, all clothes, toothpaste and things along that line.

“You say, well, let them work during the school year (and during their particular off-season). But then there were abuses along that line also. So I don’t know what the answer is.”