Begging for Change : UCLA’s Edwards Says Athletes Don’t Get Enough Money to Live On, and He Wants to See Drastic Measures Taken

UCLA linebacker Donnie Edwards, advocating a national strike by college football players, lashed out this week at NCAA restrictions that he says force some student-athletes to go without food and other basic necessities.

Edwards was suspended by the NCAA for one game last week for allegedly accepting $150 in groceries from a sports agent. He continues to deny he knew the groceries were from an agent, but he doesn’t deny that there are times when he doesn’t have the money to buy groceries on his own.

“It’s not just me,” he said. “A lot of minority student-athletes who play football or basketball have parents who don’t have any money. We’re lucky to get a scholarship. But once we get here, what do we do? The money we get is not enough to even live on, especially in Westwood.”

Edwards’ scholarship covers room, board, books, tuition and an academic fee. Because he chooses to live off campus, he receives $560 a month and is provided two meals a day by the school during the three weeks of fall training camp and the three weeks of spring camp. He gets one meal a day during the football season. Once the season ends, so do the school meals, but Edwards’ monthly check increases to $660.

Edwards, like all athletes, is also allowed to work when school is out of session and there is no football practice. That amounts to approximately seven weeks in the summer.

“People say, ‘Ask your parents.’ My parents don’t have any money,” said Edwards, whose mother has raised eight other brothers and sisters.

“They say, ‘Get a job.’ We can’t work. The NCAA won’t allow us to work. So where are we supposed to get this money? Are we just supposed to be poor? We’ve been working our whole lives to have money in our pocket to buy clothes, to buy food, to buy a piece of pizza. Now, all of a sudden, we can’t work. We are making all this money for the school, but we can’t have a job or have any money in our pockets. That’s confusing. What are you left to do?

“You drive around the street here in Westwood in your little bucket, shooting fumesout of the muffler, and the guy next to you at the stoplight has a Mercedes or a BMW. . . . We’re in Westwood. That’s all you see around here, cellular phones, everybody showing off their wealth. We, as student-athletes, are in the limelight and we’re driving around in 1977 Pintos. I’m not going to mention names, but people I know are getting in trouble with the law just to have some money to buy a new pair of shoes and some groceries.

“Look at how much money they make from college football alone, all those TV deals, the shoe deals, the jersey deals. There’s a lot of money around here. Who’s getting it? All the schools. Who’s being exploited? Us.”

Edwards stresses that his displeasure is with the NCAA, not UCLA. What he would like to see is a national strike by college football players, a day when they march off the field in unison across the country to protest their financial hardship.

The athletes, Edwards said, would be telling the NCAA: “Stop treating us like slaves. Just give us some more money so we can wash our clothes and take a girl to the movies like we should.”

Edwards thinks the message would work wonders.

“People would go crazy. It would change like that,” he said. “We would get a stipend. We would get some more money for food. I think the NCAA would change because, otherwise, they would not get any money. A lot of people would be out of a job if there were no sports in college. It’s all about money.”

That’s not what Edwards is all about. He is not the stereotypical athlete whose only perceived interest in collegiate sports is the opportunity to transform his scholarship into a lucrative pro contract. If that were Edwards’ goal, he would have left after last season, having attracted enough attention as a star linebacker to undoubtedly earn a spot in the NFL draft and the huge contract that can go with it. But, instead, Edwards wanted to use his scholarship to continue his education.

A political-science major, who made the Director’s Honor Roll with a 3.0 grade-point average in the spring of 1993, and then increased that to a 3.18 last winter, Edwards is playing football this season as a graduate student. That has actually cost him money. In the past, he received a Pell Grant, federal financial aid that can amount to $2,340 for one school year, based on need. But he was eligible for that only as an undergraduate.

With only five games left in his Bruin career, Edwards knows any possible NCAA reforms won’t help him.

“I have younger brothers and sisters,” he said. “I have friends who are still going to be in college next year and broke as hell. Some things need to change around here, and I don’t mind being the voice that [pushes for] it.”

Edwards shakes his head at the thought of how the lives of a select few star student-athletes change when their collegiate days are over, how they go from the nightmare of near-poverty to the dream of fabulous wealth. He watched that happen last year to teammate J.J. Stokes, the Bruin receiver who went on to sign a multimillion-dollar contract with the San Francisco 49ers.

“The night before the draft,” Edwards said, “he [Stokes] was poor, no car. He was asking me, ‘Donnie, can you give me a ride?’ And then, the next day, he had all that money. He didn’t do anything differently. He just went from one business to the next.”

But for now, Edwards must put his own dreams on hold and grapple with the business at hand, trying to exist on $560 a month.

“My check is not relative to what it costs to live in Westwood,” he said. “It’s not close.”

Edwards remembers the first time he went apartment hunting in Westwood.

“I looked at the cost of rent,” he said, “and it was like, whoa, wait a minute. That’s my whole check. Am I not supposed to eat?”

Edwards wound up sharing a West Los Angeles apartment with two roommates. His portion of the rent is $450 a month. That leaves him $110, plus whatever he has saved up, for expenses.

“It goes,” he said, “for food, laundry, telephone bill, gas, car repairs, you name it. And don’t forget about parking. We have to pay $117 per quarter [semester] to park at school. I’m fortunate enough to have a car. A lot of people don’t even have cars.”

Edwards says that, on the first of each month, he pays his rent and scrapes together $100 to buy groceries. Those groceries last about a week and a half.

“That hundred doesn’t last long for me,” he said. “I’m 235 pounds. I’m a football player. I expend a lot of energy during the day, I’m hungry and I have a big appetite. Toward the end of the month, I eat a 20-cent bag of noodles thrown into hot water with some seasoning on it, some rice, macaroni and cheese. No meat. You know, cheap meals. Just trying to survive and not lose a lot of weight. You look in your cupboards and you ain’t got nothing.

“It’s always like that. Ask any athlete on the team if they have food in their refrigerator. Ask any athlete how many times a day they eat. They’ll tell you, ‘Once.’ It’s crazy.”

One solution Edwards would like to see is the extension of the one meal a day, referred to as the training table, to include the entire school year.

“There are some schools in this country that have training table year around,” he said. “Why can’t we? We are football players. We depend on our bodies--our size and our strength. Everybody expects us to be at a certain weight all year.”

Edwards’ coach, Terry Donahue, agrees with the idea of extending the training table.

“We should have it year round,” he said.

Such a proposal was brought up last spring by USC Coach John Robinson at a meeting of Pacific 10 Conference coaches and unanimously approved.

“We felt it would enhance the life of the athlete,” Donahue said, “and enhance the performance of the conference. Other schools have it and it is a distinct recruiting advantage.”

But the proposal faces little chance of becoming reality because of the need to include other affected student-athletes (The men’s and women’s basketball teams also eat at training table) in any extension, making the cost prohibitive. UCLA spends $251,965 for the football training table alone. That figure would have to be doubled.

“We need to endow the money,” Donahue said. “This is one of the ongoing battles in this conference.”

Edwards thinks football players should be treated differently because of their particular needs.

“How does a 300-pound offensive lineman,” he said, “eat the same as a softball player?”

If Edwards were to live in the dorms, he would get three meals a day, but he wouldn’t receive any money.

“I live off-campus to have some privacy and to see the money,” he said. “People who live in the dorms are broke. They can’t do nothing. They are boring . . . No money. No nothing. [They] can’t take a girl on a date.”

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Living on the Edge

A look at Donnie Edwards’ monthly budget during football season:

INCOME

Scholarship allotment: $560.

EXPENSES

Covered by scholarship: Books, tuition, academic fee, one meal a day.

Rent: $450 (Edwards shares an off-campus apartment with two others; if he lived on campus in a dorm, he would receive no cash but would receive three free meals a day.

Groceries: $100.

Laundry, car repairs, phone bill, auto insurance, etc.: $10.

* Income supplemented by what he can earn in the seven weeks of summer when he’s allowed by the NCAA to work or by family help where possible.

* Once the football season ends, his monthly income allotment goes to $660, but he must pay for all his meals, leaving him $210 a month for all expenses, including food.