Game with No Winners

Visionary that he was, Baron Pierre de Coubertin foresaw obstacles in pursuing his "grandiose and beneficent work," the founding of the modern Olympic Games. "I am disillusioned," he said, "with the secret war going on between the universities of America and the Amateur Athletic Union."

That was in 1893. In the decades since, the infighting between the A.A.U., which governs nonprofessional sports outside the college orbit, and its campus equivalent, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, has become anything but secret. Their rivalry has reached the stage where Congress is again considering demands that the Federal Government act as referee.

The latest ruckus began when the N.C.A.A. barred coaches and athletes under its jurisdiction from participating in two A.A.U.-sponsored competitions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As a result, a weakened American team lost a track meet to the Russians in Richmond last month. More of the same seemed likely in a series of Soviet-American basketball games that will begin April 29 in Los Angeles. Last week N.C.A.A. Executive Director Walter Byers told the House Special Education Subcommittee that his organization would cooperate in the basketball event if the A.A.U. would formally apply for the services of undergraduate players. The A.A.U. promptly complied. At week's end approval by the N.C.A.A. executive council seemed certain.

The outbreak of good will occurred only because four bills to regulate amateur athletics are pending in Congress. One--aimed primarily at the N.C.A.A. --would make it a federal offense with fines up to $10,000 for any supervisory organization to penalize college players or coaches who represent the U.S. in international competition. The three other bills would create federal bodies to oversee amateur athletics.

The history of the two groups indicates that the current truce is fragile. Founded in 1888, the A.A.U. is a largely volunteer organization which became the sole authority for certifying American Olympics entries, a right that was and is its primary source of power. The N.C.A.A. was formed in 1906 at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt to make and enforce rules that would reduce deaths and injuries in college football. As campus sports flourished, so did the N.C.A.A.

Jurisdictional friction became open warfare in the early 1960s, when the N.C.A.A. created a handful of puppet federations in a blatant attempt to encroach on the A.A.U.'s fuzzily defined domain. The N.C.A.A.'s rationale is that the A.A.U. consists of a bunch of doddering old lettermen who are too inept to cope with modern, big-time athletic events. Many in the A.A.U. answer that the salaried coaches and athletic directors of the N.C.A.A. corrupt their youthful charges by paying them off with scholarships and dubious "fringe benefits."

Even more important is the rivalry over lucrative television contracts. Despite the rhetoric about amateurism, nonprofessional sports have been big business for many years, and promise to grow bigger still. Though the N.C.A.A. has peddled the rights to telecast college football to ABC for $13.5 million, it is still acquisitive enough to covet the $35,000 that the A.A.U. is getting from CBS for television rights to the opening game of the Soviet-American basketball series.

The war between the organizations has led to capricious decrees that often penalize innocent athletes and contribute little to the image of sport. When the N.C.A.A. refuses to clear its athletes for an A.A.U. meet one week, the A.A.U. gets revenge the next by neglecting to submit for certification a world record set by an N.C.A.A. runner. Though the authorities generally wink at under-the-table gratuities of various kinds, the N.C.A.A. once suspended Oregon State's Gary Freeman from the varsity basketball team for violating a rule about offseason play. Freeman's heinous crime: on a trip home to Boise, Idaho, he returned to his high school to play in a seniors v. alumni game in which no score was kept and the admission was all of 250. Not to be outdone, the A.A.U. once strongly chastised a Fort Lauderdale swimmer named Jamie Nelson for saying that a certain breakfast cereal had helped her recover from a pulled muscle. The A.A.U. apparently figured that Jamie could afford the three-year suspension since she was only five at the time. "The athlete is so controlled by artificial restrictions," says 1968 Olympic Decathlon Champion Bill Toomey, "that he has to carry around a book just to know where he can compete and where he can't."

Uncertainty. Efforts to bring some order and rationality to amateur athletics have been going on for years without much success. One attempt to mediate the feud was too much even for Theodore Kheel, an experienced New York labor negotiator who was called in to head a sports arbitration board. "These people," he said after 27 months of investigation and deliberation, "make the Teamsters look like undernourished doves." Kheel's board, however, did issue an opinion in 1968 that spelled out the Jurisdictional rights of both groups. It also provided that neither could "unreasonably" withhold approval of the other's events. The A.A.U. accepted the proposal; the N.C.A.A., complaining that the decision was "a complete misstatement of facts," rejected it. The conflict escalated further this year when the N.C.A.A. withdrew from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Director Byers asked the N.C.A.A.'s 664 member schools not to solicit funds for the 1976 teams.

Where things go now is uncertain.

Last week's compromise showed that cooperation is possible, provided that there is enough motivation--or enough pressure. But congressional committees can hardly intervene in every specific disagreement. The legislative proposals, while attractive as a last resort, might result in adding a new level of bureaucracy to an already tangled situation. An alternative would be to revive the Kheel board's proposals and make them stick. To these should be added a provision for a standing arbitration committee that would consider and promptly rule on specific disputes. That would be one way to end the game in which no one is a winner.

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