AUSTIN MEEK

The Last Amateurs

The track stars of the 1970s fought to get today’s athletes paid

Kenny Moore visits Bill Bowerman's bronze at Hayward Field in 2006 (Chris Pietsch/The Register Guard)

Gerald Ford, then vice president of the United States, penned a 5,000-word essay for Sports Illustrated in 1974 outlining his views on various subjects of the day.

It’s fascinating to read now, knowing what we know about sports in America. Ford was prescient on several topics, including the future of the fledgling World Football League and the rise of basketball in China.

He had a few misses, too.

“I don’t know if the Congress will sit still for Thursday night (football) telecasts that might cut the revenue of high school sports,” he wrote.

Segments of Ford’s essay focused on two connected issues: territorial disputes in amateur athletics and the “apparently insatiable” appetite for money in sports.

On the latter issue, Ford warned that commercialization eventually would drive away the average fan, a prediction that remains largely, though not entirely, unfulfilled. He also sympathized with the plight of the amateur athlete, which at that time included anyone hoping to preserve Olympic eligibility.

“A professional athletic career is short-lived at best,” Ford wrote, “and in the free enterprise system a man should be able to realize his worth.”

With America’s Olympic effort hampered by squabbles and infighting, Ford endorsed the creation of a President’s Commission on Olympic Sports, which would produce a report aimed at addressing the turmoil.

A copy of that report exists in a box somewhere in South Eugene, at least according to the memory of its editor. Kenny Moore — a two-time Olympian and author of the 2006 book “Bowerman and the Men of Oregon” — took time off from his job at Sports Illustrated to compile the volume, which was no easy task.

“I’d never worked more long hours rewriting and editing,” he said.

The report paved the way for the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which in turn paved the way for the end of amateurism in Olympic sports. It was a struggle with echoes in current events, including the antitrust lawsuit filed on behalf of former UCLA forward Ed O’Bannon that now rests in the hands of a federal judge.

In the coming days, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken will decide whether college athletes are entitled to compensation for use of their names, images and likenesses. As we await the verdict, it’s worth remembering a battle that occurred almost 40 years earlier, when a group of rebels took on amateurism and won.

Restrictions of the past

Until the 1980s, track athletes operated under the same rules that govern college sports, having no sanctioned way to profit from their abilities without sacrificing Olympic eligibility. The enduring image is Steve Prefontaine, Eugene’s tragic hero, living out of a trailer in Glenwood and struggling to pay his bills.

Prefontaine recognized the inherent inequality that allowed officials with the Amateur Athletic Union to profit from the abilities of unpaid athletes, dining at fancy hotels while American runners traveled in squalor.

“These guys needed to make a living,” said Tom Jordan, Pre’s biographer and the director of the Prefontaine Classic. “It’s kind of like the starving artist. Do you work an 8-hour day job at minimum wage so you can train twice a day?”

Money was available to athletes who knew where to find it, but they resented rules that forced them to subsist on under-the-table payments.

Steve Bence, Prefontaine’s teammate at Oregon, recalls spending a summer with Pre and other runners in Europe, where they accepted money from meet promoters in defiance of AAU rules.

“I was pretty heavily influenced by Pre,” Bence said. “He felt so strongly about it. I could just see what he was going through.

“It felt like the right thing to do.”

Amateurism had no stauncher advocate than Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952-72. Brundage considered amateurism integral to the integrity of the Olympics, a position enforced by the AAU in the United States.

The amateur ideal held that athletes should be motivated purely by love of sport, a belief rooted in antiquity. With sports becoming increasingly commercialized, athletes realized that they weren’t getting a fair deal but often encountered resistance when they argued their case.

“People would always come up and say, ‘Why can’t you just be happy? You’re representing the country. You’re wearing the USA on your shirt,’ ” said Moore, an Olympic marathoner in 1968 and 1972. “You had to try to explain.”

Grievances with the AAU stretched back decades and encompassed more than the amateurism issue. Athletes were forced to train with AAU coaches for international competition, despite the superior instruction they received from their college coaches. The AAU also mandated participation in certain meets, an exercise of authority that galled Prefontaine.

Not one for bureaucratic process, Pre contributed to the cause by, as Moore puts it, “bugging the hell out of us to go to these meetings that he didn’t have the patience for.”

According to accounts of the night, Prefontaine vented about the AAU in one of his final conversations before the car accident that claimed his life on May 30, 1975. He didn’t live to see the overthrow of the AAU, but his friends vowed to carry on the fight.

“He was always there in our spirit,” Moore said.

The fight reached Washington shortly after Pre’s death with the creation of President Ford’s Commission on Olympic Sports. Members of the commission included former Bills quarterback and New York congressman Jack Kemp, Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, former Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson and decathlon gold medalist Rafer Johnson.

The commission’s charge was twofold: to address jurisdictional conflict between governing bodies in amateur athletics, and to explore America’s declining performance in international competition. Its final report, presented to the president in 1977, proposed one centralized governing body for each Olympic sport, along with protection for athletes’ rights and development of women’s athletics.

Working on the commission’s recommendations, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which designated a national coordinating body for amateur sports and ended the turf war between the NCAA and the AAU. Olympic athletes still couldn’t be paid, but the AAU’s stranglehold had been removed.

“We only had one more thing to do,” Moore said. “Amateurism itself.”

The decline of amateurism

The demise of amateurism came a few years later, when a group of road racers decided to take a stand.

The runners formed a union called the Association of Road Racing Athletes, spearheaded by Spokane marathoner Don Kardong, and plotted a blatant act of defiance. The venue for their rebellion was the 1981 Cascade Run Off, a 15-kilometer race in Portland.

At this race, they decided, there would be nothing under the table. Nike’s Phil Knight provided $50,000 for prize money, and the runners made no secret of their plans to accept it.

“We just said, ‘This is demeaning. Why are we having to take money and pretend like we’re not getting it?’ ” said Kardong, an Olympic marathoner in 1976. “A lot of it was just a growing economic possibility, and a sense that this outdated amateur ethic was holding us back.”

Some athletes wondered if the runners were committing professional suicide. Frank Shorter, a gold medalist in the 1972 Olympic marathon and companion of Moore and Prefontaine, devised a plan that would send the prize money to a trust fund, exploiting a loophole in international Olympic rules.

Shorter took his plan to The Athletics Congress, the organization that replaced the AAU. The runners didn’t have universal support from their peers, but the movement was powerful enough that TAC, fearing it would lose control of the sport, accepted the trust-fund solution.

“A lot of people sat back and said, ‘I don’t know if I want to risk anything on this,’ ” Kardong said, “but we did have enough of the key distance runners of the day agree to do it that it worked.”

The trust funds provided a bridge to a system of outright professionalism. Other nations began to follow America’s lead, and the IAAF — once the International Amateur Athletic Federation — became the International Association of Athletics Federations, dropping any allusion to amateurism.

“It took for us to get it (for the world to follow suit),” Moore said. “We had to get it ourselves.”

The next frontier

The advent of professionalism created a complicated legacy.

It has helped countless Olympians who, if not for the breakthroughs of the 1970s and ’80s, would have no access to a professional future. It also bred a system of massive inequality, in which top athletes make millions and the vast majority earn very little.

“I’m proud of what we achieved, but it hasn’t gotten to the point that we envisioned, certainly,” Kardong said. “The money is very much at the top end. You don’t have to be very far down the list before you have trouble generating enough money to live on.”

Runners of that era also have complicated feelings on the subject of amateurism and the NCAA.

In principle, college athletes face the same dilemma as Olympians of that time. While coaches and officials profit from an explosion in TV rights, amateurism rules prevent the athletes from accepting a share.

A clear distinction exists, however, between Olympic athletes of the amateur era and college football players of today. Players receive free education, top-flight instruction and provision for training expenses. Unlike Prefontaine, they can pursue a professional future with no fear of repercussion.

“If it were too similar, we would have fixed it by now,” Moore said. “This is very complicated.”

In general, athletes who broke the amateurism barrier support current efforts to provide more for college athletes, including scholarships that reflect the full cost of attendance.

Bence, Pre’s former teammate, argues that college football needs its own Prefontaine, someone who can become the face of an organized movement.

Kardong harbors no fond feelings for the enforcement of amateurism, but he accepts that it still could have a place in college athletics.

“We are giving these kids a full ride in many cases, and that’s worth something,” he said. “I had to figure out a way to put my two daughters through college, and it’s expensive.”

As colleges grapple with the same questions, it’s worth studying the world that exists on the other side of amateurism. It’s not a utopia, but the first people to cross the barrier are glad they never went back.

“Every step of progress is really hard, but suddenly it comes in big chunks because it’s ready,” Moore said. “Boy, was the world really ready for paying us at that time.”

Is the world ready for it to happen again?

Maybe we’re about to find out.