In his response to a sweeping Yahoo Sports story outlining corruption in college basketball, NCAA president Mark Emmert said something that isn’t technically true.
Even the first college sporting event in the United States involved cheating
A boat race in 1852 began what we now know as intercollegiate competition. They were cheating then, and they’re cheating now.
Harvard
These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America. Simply put, people who engage in this kind of behavior have no place in college sports
What he’s referring to is any type of cheating in college sports. But Emmert needs to learn his history. As the NCAA and college sports have evolved, so has cheating at every step of the way. So it won’t surprise you to know that both money and ineligible players factored into the very first intercollegiate sporting event.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
The NCAA was formed in 1906 under a different name via a charter from president Teddy Roosevelt. The main directive was to investigate why players kept dying in college football. By the time the organization had formed, there was a pretty robust network of college sports already in play.
Back in 1852, years before the first football game, Harvard and Yale competed in a boat race at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. It’s widely recognized as one of if not the first college sporting events in America.
There was corporate money in the thing from the beginning.
In order to encourage rail travel to the resort area of Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad provided the college crews with an all-expense-paid, two-week vacation in return for participating in the resort’s regatta.
The company promoted the event with bright red fliers and advertisements of excursion train schedules.
As the story goes, on a train ride along the lake, the bowman on Yale’s rowing club struck up a conversation with a man named James Elkins, the superintendent of the B&C Montreal Railroad. He had just invested money into the land around the lake, and wanted to make the place a tourist destination.
“If you will get up a regatta on the lake between Yale and Harvard, I will pay all the bills.”
Yale got Harvard on board with some persuasion, and so the regatta was on. Before that, sports were largely an intracollegiate thing.
Harvard
A thousand people attended the first event — including future president Franklin Pierce, but seven years later the number of attendees had exploded to 20,000. The event has been held annually since 1859.
But that first event wasn’t necessarily on the up-and-up.
In an effort to gain a competitive advantage, Harvard used a coxswain who was not a student. A book called Scandals in College Sports says the cheating might have been even more rampant that day, and that there were multiple ineligible participants.
It was later discovered that some men who competed in the race were not college students; they are believed to have been professional rowers who were hired for the event. He therefore observes: “even before the starting gun went off or an oar hit the water, two elements were at play: the event was totally commercial, and the participants were cheating.”
Louisville was only this week stripped of a national championship due to playing an ineligible player. If the Yahoo report ends up causing the NCAA to act, then many more wins will be vacated due to ineligible players having a hand in the proceedings. The events in which corporate logos are emblazoned on uniforms and non-athletes have the opportunity to strike it rich off of the competition will continue either way.
There has always been the influence of commercial money in college sports, and there has always been a team looking to gain an edge via unscrupulous means. It’s impossible to divorce college sports from either of those two things.
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