5 - Sport, Institution, and the Devil

Summary

In 2009, former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a lawsuit against the NCAA for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and for denying his right of publicity. At the center of the case was the use of his likeness (and that of twenty other plaintiffs) in the very sport-based video games developed and distributed by Electronic Arts discussed in the last chapter. The courts have now ruled that in fact selling the students’ likenesses without compensation was illegal, and those with a claim have now received deferred compensation (approximately one thousand dollars each). This very public case had wide-reaching effects, including inspiring football players at Northwestern University to attempt to unionize on the grounds that they were university employees. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dismissed their petition to unionize, but also did not explicitly rule out that athletes might be university employees. In the wake of these two cases, public outcry was split as to whether or not athletes should be paid and the topic itself has become a social issue. As such it became the rallying point for sociological critics that connect the industry of sport to wider cultural and historical inequalities and see sport as ‘perpetuating a class ideology that justifies inequality and serves as a basis for public policies that foster it’ (Coakley 298). That there are inequalities in sport, as there are in any but the most simplistic of utopias, is entirely granted in the present volume, and the sociology of sport has drawn much-needed attention to these inequalities. But it has also been the conclusion of this book that an overemphasis on inequality in sport not only obscures the many benefits of sport participation, but also has its own historical and cultural provenance and contributes to the figuration of the athlete as monstrous other. There is once again an irony in both reducing athletes to violence or privilege and simultaneously sympathizing with the many abuses of the sporting world. This chapter, however, will instead explore via the science fictional extrapolation the many varied ways that athletes and the institutions that regulate their sports interact.

The most common criticism in the context of college athletics has been the corrupting influence of financial interests in sport, particularly focused on governing institutions such as the NCAA.