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aren't exactly gifts.
“visiting their mothers at Christmas and Easter, abso-
‘lutely! Beyond that there are no strings.

OCTOBER, 1938

     

Should College
Yes!

—> Says Forrest C. Allen

Director of Physical Education, Basketball Coach,
University of Kansas

XS UBSIDIZE college athletes? That’s what we’re

doing now—furtively. There is not a college in the
United States, excepting Johns Hopkins University and
one or two others, that does not subsidize athletes.

Take the university with the 40 thoughtful alumni, for
a sample. Every year each of these “well-heeled” gentle-

‘men endows four scholarships each of which pays $125
-monthly.

This has a way of bringing 160 hand-picked
athletes to the campus every Fall. But the scholarships
The boys have to earn them—by

Or turn to that State university which a year or two

-ago diverted $10,000 from its athletic association for ad-

vertising. The sum bought football and basketball
players . . . at $90 a month.

The same salary scale holds in a certain other school,
but there the selection of the athletes who shall benefit
is a matter of pure science—of trial and error. Each

@ Continuing the Debate-of-the-Month Series

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Photo: _ Inter-
national News

Athletes Be Paid?

August the football department holds a training camp
where the varsity men start conditioning themselves for
the Fall schedule. To the camp come also the freshmen
prospects whom the athletic director and his aides have
corralled during the Summer. Double workouts are
held daily, and the new lads who survive the grind are
selected to attend the institution—at $90 a month, plus
board, room, tuition, and all theater and baseball tickets.
Freshmen who make poor showings in the gridiron
drills are released—just as are the hopeless rookies in the
Spring training camps of baseball’s major leagues.
Which is all very convenient. The coach knows what
he’s to work with before the boys matriculate—not after.

Football is no longer a sport! It’s a business! A sur-
reptitious business, a clandestine business—but a business
nevertheless! I could offer further proof. I could cite
as an added instance the school whose assistant athletic
director is a sort of glorified paymaster. He handles all
the monetary arrangements for the school’s athletes
whether they live on or off the campus. He “cracks
down” on them if they violate training rules or let their
scholastic averages slip. The football coach and the
athletic director, of course, know nothing about it—but
you and I both know that they know.

Someone has said that our American life divides itsel£
into. three epochs: the passing of the Indian, the passing
of the buffalo, and the “passing of the buck.” We are
still in the last epoch—in the administra-
tion of college athletics.

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