Shamateurism
Payments to runners under the table

In another forum, Runner's World editor Amby Burfoot and I  started to discuss the fact that until the 1980s, amateur runners could not get paid for competing in and winning races. Yet a few of us made some money, most of it handed us under the table. Our comments follow, joined by those of Don Kardong, 4th in the 1976 Olympic Marathon. Amby and I had planned to entice other runners to talk about this "shamateurism." Unfortunately, the Boston Marathon came along, and we lost momentum. But here is what we wrote until that point.

Amby Burfoot: Hal, Here's where we'll plan the Shamateurism reporting.

We presumably need runners, race directors, and shoe people to tell us what they once received/paid "under the table." Since there's no stigma any longer, this shouldn't be hard. But who knows?

Oh, I've got a great idea: We ask Craig Masback.

Hal Higdon: Amby, I can think of more people to ask than Craig. We need to look in the mirrors ourselves. I have a confession to make. I was not pure as an amateur athlete. When I was a kid, before I had heard of Avery Brundage, my mother posted a 10-cent prize for the winners of a sack race at a grade school festival. I embarrassed her by copping first place and grabbing the money.

Fast forward to 1958 and the Around the Bay Race in Hamilton, Ontario, two years older than Boston, something like 19.5 miles back then, but 30-K now. The top six finishers received gift certificates to a local department store: $60 for first, $50 for second, and so on. I was running even with five-time winner Gordon Dickson, when he started to pull away. I thought, "Hell, it's only $10," so used that justification to let him go.  After the ceremony, one of the officials replaced the gift certificate with cash. I didn't have the purity of heart to hand it back.

One of my problems as a freelance writer back in that era of shamateurism, was that writing about sports for supposedly violated the AAU code. It was using your reputation to make money off your fame as an athlete. Please try to suppress your giggles. When I published an article about skiing in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, the local AAU chairman gave grief. As a result, I sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Lafayette Smith.

The checks were small at first with local publications, larger later as I began to break into national markets, such as Sports Illustrated. I had a deal with SI editor, Andy Crichton, who would instead of paying me, pay my coach, Ted Haydon of the University of Chicago Track Club. Ted used the money to send me off to exotic places. That's how I ran the Kosice Marathon in Czechoslovakia twice at that time.

But I was an innocent among innocents. How about you, Amby? Certainly the statute of limitations has run out on your transgressions against the Amateur Goddess. I have some other names I might name, but after you, Amby.

Amby: I never received anything but the Dave Costill Gatorade money.

I think we send people this email: "Hal Higdon and I are working on....which we plan to publish in our online blogs... yada, yada.

"Using drugs never was and never will be an acceptable part of running/track and field as we know it today. However, taking or giving money is a different deal. It was illegal once, for reasons that are now universally (we believe) seen as silly and archaic. Yet, we have never seen a good, open discussion of what went on in the bad, old shamateurism days. We'd like to start that discussion now, and we would appreciate your help.

So tell us: Were under-the-table athlete payments common in the pre-professional era of our sport? What was commonplace during your heyday? What were athletes asking and receiving from meet promoters and shoe companies?

More importantly, please tell us one or two specific examples of your own involvement in the giving or taking of money in the bad, old days. As we've said, we don't believe there's a stigma attached to this any longer, but it will be interesting to see who responds candidly to our request. The more specific you can be, the better: IE, "Fred Lebow gave me $2000 to run in a late 1970s New York City Marathon." But if you'd rather not mention someone else's name, you can always use: "I got $2500 for showing up at a major Marathon in 1981."

Anyway, you get the picture. We're interested in actual amounts, and also in colorful anecdotes. Like: "The money was always cash and always stuffed into the middle of the flower bouquet given to race winners."

Hal: Okay, I'm on board, Amby, and I can offer some first-hand information from when I, as director of the Michigan City Run, handed out what now seems like petty cash ($1,000) to several of the stars of the late 1970s, before Real Money started flowing into the sport. But I don't want to out Frank & Bill and others without their permission. Where do we start? You've got a better email directory than mine. Let's start with Don Kardong, who also might have been giving and taking in his role as 4th place finisher in the Olympic Marathon in Montreal and director of the Bloomsday Run. All those fast runners didn't show up because he promised them beer and chips at the Red Roof Inn.

And tell us about the money you got from Gatorade. I participated in the same tests at Dave Costill's Human Performance Laboratory and don't remember even getting gas money to drive from Michigan City to Muncie. I probably even beat your performance on the treadmill, running 20 miles three days in a row while having my stomach pumped so they could measure how much fluid was still in there. Those were the fun days.

Don Kardong: (4th 1976 Olympic Marathon, founder Lilac Bloomsday 12K, Spokane WA)

The rules on payment of money were in a state of flux in the years I was competing at a national- and world-class level. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you could win some reasonably valuable merchandise, but I don't think most athletes were offered money, above or below the table, at least not enough to get excited about. I was given a "trophy" of a set of steak knives for winning an indoor race, and I use those knives to this day. I won my first marathon, and as my reward I was given a very wonderful red, shredded foam, beanbag-style chair. I spent many an evening plopped in that thing like a baseball in a catcher's mitt, happily reading novels. Technically, I think both the knives and the chair might have had a value that exceeded the amount allowable for prizes, but no one seemed to care.

It was really only the very best track athletes, the headliners, who seemed to get offers of money in those days. Or at least those were the ones we'd hear rumors about. For the rest of us, getting a little extra travel money was about it.

That changed for a lot of distance runners, includiing myself, by the late 1970s. Runners were in increasing demand, and the booming sport of road racing had both the interest and the resources to pay to get the best runners. Having finished fourth in the 1976 Olympic marathon, I was good enough to be offered money on a couple of occasions. Once, picking up my packet for a major marathon, I was surprised when five one-hundred-dollar bills fell out. I hadn't been offered any money in advance, but there it was. About that same time I was enticed to run a race in South America, and race officials there pulled me away from a pre-race party to a semi-secluded place outside to hand me the $3,000 I had been promised, and it was in cash. It honest to God felt like a drug deal, and I think more than anything that experience brought home what a demeaning set of rules we were living under. At a time when our skills were highly marketable and we had people willing to pay us, amateur rules meant the process had to be conducted like a back alley dope purchase. At the same time, athletes in the Eastern Bloc countries were living for all intents and purposes as professionals.

The rules did start to change, or at least to get fuzzy, at about that time. You couldn't be paid to run or to lend your name to a product, but you could do certain kinds of promotional activities, like speaking at a clinic, and be paid for that. You could own a running store, but only if you worked there most of the time. And there was a lot of gray area in terms of what was and wasn't allowable.

In the early years of Bloomsday (1977-1981), our elite athletes were paid modest amounts, but officially the money was paid to them to be speakers at our running clinics. Even this had the potential to get you in trouble, although I can't think of anyone who did. In our second year (1978) we paid a very well known runner $1,000 to come to our race. He spoke at the clinic, which seemed to give legitimacy to the payment, but the next year he asked for $5,000, which was both a challenge to our budget and difficult to justify as payment for a 45-minute talk. Sadly, we had to pass.

The was about the time when it all began to break down. Athletes were getting paid more and more money, which amateur rules technically didn't permit. It was clear to most of us that if those rules didn't exist it would be possible to make a living on the roads. The 1980 Olympic boycott was the final straw, making it clear that even the thing that kept many runners in line, the aspiration to compete in the Olympics, could be glibly taken away. Anger at the boycott combined with a prospering road racing scene, and in 1980 the first professional road races took place. Then, in June of 1981, most of the top names in U.S. road racing ran in the Cascade Run Off in Portland, Oregon, and won prize money. That was really the beginning of the end of amateurism as a requirement for runners, track and field athletes, and other Olympic athletes. The U.S. "Dream Team" that competed in Olympic basketball made the change in rules known throughout the world. The Olympic Games, instead of requiring adherence to an outdated amateur code, became simply and appropriately a competition among the best athletes in the world.

Hal: Don's comments about the beanbag chair reminded me of my trip to Finland with an AAU team during the summer of 1956. I was on a roll competitively and won three of five races at distances between 3,000 and 5,000 meters, the two "losses" being third places in Turku, the highest profile meet. (One of the runners who outkicked me in a 3,000 in Finland was Paavo Nurmi's son.) Jim Beatty of North Carolina was on the same team, doing equally well at the middle distances. Our prizes typically were silverware, well-crafted items, but what do you do with a single spoon or fork? I suppose there were some uses for a lone knife, but this was before terrorism became a hobby for some people.

The silverware languished in a drawer or on a shelf for a quarter century in our house, occasionaly to be polished, then my wife came up with the brilliant idea of having an artist melt down the metal and craft rings for our 25th wedding anniversary, also a bracelet for her. I have that ring on my right finger as I type these remarks, and it means more to me than any cash payment that would have been long since been spent.

Also running with us that summer was Grant Scruggs of the University of Michigan. Grant had native American blood, so had attended that land-grant college on a full scholarship. I remember him telling me that his grandmother hated the White Man and preferred living among Negroes. Grant was a quarter miler, probably not even best in the Big Ten, but the Finns were notoriously poor sprinters. They maybe had one runner in the country capable of 10.6 for the 100. So Grant dropped down to the 100 and 200 and made a living that summer while staying in Finland, sweeping the sprints in nearly every meet he ran.

Very interesting topic.  I am assuming that the term shamateurism is referring to the "sham" of amateurism.

But what of today's athletes that get compensation for playing sports for a school?  Perhaps shamaterism still exists.

It does. I'm convinced that the NCAA is rotten to the core. Just a minor league for the pros, kept alive by alumni who are Rah Rah about their alma mater. So much money is involved for those schools that qualify for bowl games and playoffs that everyone is tempted to cheat. They probably spend as much money on the teams as they collect, but then the alumni are happy. Of course, I went to a school of 850, so may be biased.

Definitely an interesting topic to discuss.  I don't have a clear opinion on the topic, but I do see a few points of merit.  First, as stated the players are there to receive an education.  They are (usually) scholarship athletes.  Only a small percentage will make it to the pro level.  Those that are top athletes are being compensated... some by having the "job" of turning on the lights at practice... some from under the table deals.  They drive cars that are not in their names.  They places to go where they are never charged for food and drink, etc.

If you started paying college athletes, then they are technically now employees.  I'm sure that introduces some complication into the whole system.  What if they then form a players union?  Then college athletes go on strike over collective bargaining agreements on revenue sharing, merchandising, etc... then you have agents representing college athletes out of high school.  Wait!  Why not pay the top high school students, too?

I don't know.  There is a LOT of money in play.  While part of me feels like the athletes should be compensated (since without them there would be NO money), another part of me thinks that for most the free education is the payment - and my hope is that they use it to their advantage.  For the top athletes who go pro, the college experience is part of how you pay your dues to make it to the show.

One other thought... for most NCAA events, I think that the fan base would be there regardless of the talent level.  By that I mean that you can't make an argument that a particular player is drawing the revenue.    Certainly, there are some notable college athletes that draw attention and may sell more jerseys, but the college fan base to me seems instutional, not player based.  I could be wrong, though.

Slippery slope once you start paying the college athletes.