The Rules Don't Fit the Game

The recent Eastern College Athletic Conference ruling on the eligibility of Gene Kinasewich has raised questions of far more importance than whether or not Kinasewich is to play for Harvard this season. The Kinasewich case has dramatized the confusion and hypocrisy in the way United States sports groups define an amateur athlete.

For more than two years the Amateur Athletic Union and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have been engaged in a vicious jurisdictional battle over who is the proper judge of amateur status. The conflict has achieved nothing and has produced several ridiculous situations. This summer the AAU told a touring Peruvian basketball team that it might be ineligible for the Olympics if it played NCAA college teams in the U.S. whose players were not registered by the AAU.

But both parties to the NCAA-AAU squabble have ignored the real issue in amateur athletics. This fact was brought home last month when the International Olympics Committee issued a mandate banning all subsidized athletes from Olympic competition, which, if strictly enforced, could disqualify more than half the U.S. Olympic team.

Kinasewich was disqualified by the ECAC because he had accepted subsidies for playing Junior A hockey in Canada four years ago. The ECAC claimed that these subsidies, which amounted to $450 one year and $702 the next made Kinasewich a professional under the rules of the Conference.

The ECAC had good reasons for being highly suspicious of Kinasewich's Junior A background. The Junior A Leagues in Oanada are used as farm clubs by professional hockey teams. A small number of players are actually paid salaries by the pro teams.

Others are paid subsidies by the Junior A. The subsidies are determined, as is a Harvard scholarship, on the basis of need. Kinasewich, who is an orphan, had to work to help pay for his room and board. As Junior A hockey demands intensive practice, he could not play hockey and work at the same time. Therefore the team paid him the equivalent of what he could have earned, and gave him the chance to continue in school. It also paid him money for lodging and meals for out-of-town games.

In effect, then, hockey was Kinasewich's part-time job. Under the strict U.S. definition, he was a professional.

But Kinasewich's "professionalism" is of a special breed. It is certainly not the same as a boy playing minor league baseball in the United States. His status is very similar to that of a boy attending college on an athletic scholarship.

A football player at Louisiana State University, Ohio State, or any of the other big-time football schools receives much more money or its equivalent in services than Kinasewich ever did. A full scholarship with books, room, board, and a "job" at one of these schools is often worth $2,000-3,000 a year. One big southern school made it a practice to give each player $50 each week for spending money in addition to his other benefits. These subsidies may not constitute professionalism in the strictest sense of the word, but they sure are close to it.

The argument can be carried further. Players on AAU basketball teams like the D-C Truckers or the Phillips 66 squad are nominally holding down jobs with the companies who sponsor the teams. During the season, this job becomes simply playing basketball. Tennis players who travel the amateur tournament circuit receive expense money that does not force them out of the better class hotels. The same holds true in other supposedly amateur sports. In all these cases, the excesses are usually far more extreme than in the Kinasewich case.

It is increasingly clear that an amateur athlete can not be successful in today's intensely competitive sporting events unless he devotes almost all his time to his game. Except for the very rich, this is not possible without some kind of outside assistance.

The ECAC refuses to recognize this fact. Students in other ECAC colleges on athletic scholarships and those students who compete in the summer in amateur sports are every bit as professional as the ECAC claims Kinasewich is. If the ECAC really wants to restore purity to its house, it has far more serious matters to deal with than Kinasewich. And Kinasewich is only one of the 104 Canadians playing on ECAC teams.

But even playing by the ECAC's rules, it is hard to justify disqualifying Kinasewich SPORTS ILLUSTRATED recently pointed out that most of the other Canadians in the ECAC are "professionals" like Kinasewich, but had lied on eligibility affidavits about their past, Kinasewich's main problem, one might say, is that he is honest and reported his subsidy Unlike some other college "student" athletes, he is also honest about wanting an education; after all, he came to Harvard knowing he might be ineligible in the Ivy League when he had opportunities at other, less particular, schools.

In view of the Olympic Committee's ruling, the NCAA and the AAU must face the fact that all their talk misses the point. Excuses about practices in other countries are irrelevant. They must either admit that many of their athletes are not amateurs, or redefine just what an amateur athlete is.