[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Exploiting College Athletes
Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, the NCAA continues to argue that corporate college sport is education rather than business and that scholarship athletes are merely amateurs playing sport during their free time. Not everyone accepts these claims, but the higher-education establishment, through the NCAA, has rallied around the myth of the amateur student athlete and expended substantial legal and financial resources to keep it secure. The NCAA is not merely a rule-making body. It is also a highly effective lobby whose influence reaches into the halls of Congress. The NCAA has recently hired a full-time lobbyist to represent its interests in Washington. In previous years the law firm of Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey kept the NCAA abreast of developments on Capital Hill.
There are many instances in which the NCAA has had to mobilize to defend its business interests. A classic illustration of the NCAA lobby in action occurred in 1977 when the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service threatened to tax television and radio broadcast revenues from college football and basketball as "unrelated business income." The IRS contended that these revenues resulted from activities that were not substantially related to the tax-exempt purpose of higher education.
The Texas institutions under scrutiny were Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University, but an unfavorable IRS ruling could have affected schools and conferences across the country. The IRS was also threatening to tax broadcast revenue from the Cotton Bowl. If the IRS position were upheld, the taxation would be retroactive for three years and would cost the universities millions of dollars in interest and back taxes.The universities acted immediately to bring pressure to bear on the Dallas office of the IRS. On May 12 James M. Moudy................
