Spencer Hall's "Broke"

[Alma]

So Spencer Hall wrote a piece about why college athletes should be paid, juxtaposing it with his own life experiences just above and occasionally at the poverty line.

There are some excellent stretches of writing here, even if the personal stuff tends to outstrip the polemic for paying college athletes.

But, after you've read it, I do have a question about a particular graf, because it seems to be a key one in answering any argument against paying college athletes, but the writing strikes me as murky and Deadspin-y in a piece that clearly intends to be serious, and not bad-ass snarky.

Here's the graf. It helps, again, to read the whole thing:

"Dismiss every single lie about amateurism. If they come cloaked in this kind of horse****, throw them into orbit and hope they die the painful, bloodboiling death they deserve. You are under no duty to respect an argument because it comes in with the faux-innocent naivete of those who have the luxury of arguing from the dignified repose of Platonic principle. Oh, but what if we removed the money from amateur athletics? Close a brothel. Just try it, and see how far that gets you. If someone would like to start a policy argument about a contraband economy with the words, "If we just did what we were supposed to," toss them in the nearest well and seal it. They understand nothing about humanity and will get someone killed sooner rather than later."​

I get the first half of the graf. I feel like the second half of it is essentially an argument for nihilism-as-humanism, but I suppose I haven't read enough of Hall's serious work to actually know.

By its end, you have a kind of moral simplicity that I'd be curious to see some our more conservatively-inclined posters examine.

"Either what is going on is a vast confusion of what constitutes capital, or it is theft from every single football player that plays this stupid game to enrich a coach, athletic director, and the university. This is a system that willfully commits one of the greatest insults possible: making someone poorer, and then claiming that poverty as a necessary, virtuous and good thing."​

 

[dixiehack]

I think it is more nihilism for its own sake, such as in this paragraph that sums up my reality perfectly:

Note: I can't explain what it is, but something in you, once you're convinced of your own brokeness, believes in nothing but that. I didn't have a fraction of what real, survival-level, street poverty inflicted on people -- the real physical danger, the effects on health and cognitive development, the lifelong scars -- but I did and always will have the sense of being totally and completely alien from the concept of security, of stability, of deserving anything.

 

[Alma]

Well, lots of writers - sports or otherwise - are fashionably nihilist. Hall's piece ups the ante to some extent by writing the words: "They understand nothing about humanity and will get someone killed sooner rather than later." I have no idea what place that line has in a piece about paying college athletes - it seems a bit much - but it sticks out.

 

[JayFarrar]

I thought it was a good but odd piece.

You had these searing recollections or half-ass recollections of being "broke" mixed in with that snarky, Deadspin-y bull**** that made me think it was written in that Malcolm Gladwell style of two unconnected pieces written by different people.

One an overly earnest writer and the other a web troll aiming to get shares with outrageous hotakez.

 

[Mr. Mediocre]

Spencer's a terrific writer, and he illustrates facets of his own life that really resonated with me. The debit card anecdote is something I feel every day of my life.

There's one thought I couldn't shake as it pertains to the theme, though. SB Nation is a network made up largely of unpaid or barely paid contributors, who produce thousands of links that help generate revenue.

How much of that revenue goes toward paying a livable wage to SBN's few full-time staffers, and how much comes from Vox's venture capital, I don't know. But does the message coming through a channel that seems to operate on a model not all that different from the NCAA lessen its impact?

 

[reformedhack]

A decent read. I'm not sure the personal stuff helped to make his larger point, but I also don't feel like I wasted my time reading it. I took it for what it was — one person's point of view, filtered through his own lens.

There was one line that was dead on, though: "My dad bought a boat. I should have known at the time that was a bad sign, because buying a boat is never a good idea and is an indicator that something has gone wrong in your life ..."

 

[Brian]

I thought it was fantastic. There are certainly holes in his arguments, but I thought this was more about the paranoia poverty engenders than coming up with an answer to the more complex issues of amateurism. There are a million reasons why "Just pay them their ******* money" isn't totally feasible, but something like this does hopefully let some people try to consider the other side of the equation. If "just pay them" is simplistic, so is the notion that these guys should put their brains and bodies on the line for a 2.5 percent chance they'll make the NFL and tuition for a degree in exercise science. I'll take a piece like this, where humanity is injected into the discussion over the REAL nihilism I read so often: Yeah, college athletics is a ****ed up system, but whatcha gonna do? It's too hard to fix, so let's not try.

 

[Florida_Man]

I thought it was fantastic. There are certainly holes in his arguments, but I thought this was more about the paranoia poverty engenders than coming up with an answer to the more complex issues of amateurism. There are a million reasons why "Just pay them their ******* money" isn't totally feasible, but something like this does hopefully let some people try to consider the other side of the equation. If "just pay them" is simplistic, so is the notion that these guys should put their brains and bodies on the line for a 2.5 percent chance they'll make the NFL and tuition for a degree in exercise science. I'll take a piece like this, where humanity is injected into the discussion over the REAL nihilism I read so often: Yeah, college athletics is a ****ed up system, but whatcha gonna do? It's too hard to fix, so let's not try.

I agree completely. Spencer's piece isn't so much, "Here is how we should fix college athletics," and more, "Being poor is bad in a way that people who don't experience it can't imagine, and yet we allow the NCAA and college athletics programs enrich themselves while keeping a lot of these guys in poverty, by either design or practice."

 

[SBR]

Good writer but I can't ignore the stiff odor of bull**** coming off the parts involving his own history. This guy was not poor. Not even ****ing close. His family drove Audis and Lincolns and BMWs, lived in big houses with swimming pools.

I've been poor and that ain't it. Poor people don't buy boats, period.

He kind of couches it by calling his family "broke," which has a slightly different connotation, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

 

[JackReacher]

That story is 3,400 words. It could have been written just as well (and probably better) in about 2,000. Maybe fewer.

 

[dixiehack]

The boat and BMW were things his father bought well after Spencer grew up and left home. The Audi is described as a beater, and few things on earth depreciate like a Lincoln.

More to the point, he even said that they didn't stay broke, but he also demonstrated how they didn't stay Not Broke. And again, that's a pattern I relate to, both growing up and as an adult. The wheel spins your way for a while and you can afford a few middle class trappings, like a car with leather seats and a week at Disney. But you never fully enjoy it because you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, because it always does.

 

[Alma]

I agree completely. Spencer's piece isn't so much, "Here is how we should fix college athletics," and more, "Being poor is bad in a way that people who don't experience it can't imagine, and yet we allow the NCAA and college athletics programs enrich themselves while keeping a lot of these guys in poverty, by either design or practice."

I'm not sure a lot of these colleges are getting rich off of college athletics. I think coaches are, because they command market rate, but most coaches put in 80 hour weeks, too, and most coaches do not grow up with silver spoons in their mouths, and most coaches who aren't the head coach are on 1-year contracts.

The number of great CFB players are finite. If you pay em, you can sure as **** bet that about 30 teams will be great, and the rest won't, over time, even bother with it. They'll close shop. Now, perhaps that's the way it oughta be, the 1% helping the 1%. I dunno.

And how you do all that while circumventing Title IX - that is, not paying women athletes who don't generate a dime of profit for the school - I'd love to know.

 

[Songbird]

People who have are always waiting to be people who have not?

I'm not sure that's really a thing other than by a select few who are insecure about everything.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

I'm not sure a lot of these colleges are getting rich off of college athletics. I think coaches are, because they command market rate, but most coaches put in 80 hour weeks, too, and most coaches do not grow up with silver spoons in their mouths, and most coaches who aren't the head coach are on 1-year contracts.

The number of great CFB players are finite. If you pay em, you can sure as **** bet that about 30 teams will be great, and the rest won't, over time, even bother with it. They'll close shop. Now, perhaps that's the way it oughta be, the 1% helping the 1%. I dunno.

And how you do all that while circumventing Title IX - that is, not paying women athletes who don't generate a dime of profit for the school - I'd love to know.

Simple. Offer them the same scholarships, but allow them to make money off their name, and allow unlimited gifts by boosters.

A booster, as long as they don't represent the school, doesn't have to give a female athlete a car just because he gave one to the quarterback.

That would mean the athletes get the market rate, just like the coaches get. As far as 30 teams being great while the rest aren't, what makes you think that isn't happening now?

 

[JackReacher]

Simple!

 

[Songbird]

It's the simplest thing
there isn't much to it
all you've gotta do
is doodle-e-do it
I like the rest
but the part
I like best goes
doodle-e
doodle-e-do
DOOT DOOT!

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Simple!

Well, besides the selfishness and greed of the NCAA, coaches and administrators, what is so hard about it?

 

[Alma]

Simple. Offer them the same scholarships, but allow them to make money off their name, and allow unlimited gifts by boosters.

A booster, as long as they don't represent the school, doesn't have to give a female athlete a car just because he gave one to the quarterback.

This strikes me as a little naive. ****, when they "give" the houses to people on Extreme Makeover, at some point, they gotta take over taxes/payments or sell it.

The last person who personally bankrolled a college program that I'm aware of was DuPont, and he was insane. I just don't think it'd work like this.

More likely, the schools would get a handful of "sponsors" and the players would get a cut of that.

 

[User 11148]

A booster, as long as they don't represent the school, doesn't have to give a female athlete a car just because he gave one to the quarterback.

Not giving one to the female athlete would make him a bigot, though ...

 

[daemon]

The system is ****ed up, but so is the notion that these athletes aren't getting anything for their labor. Tell that to someone who graduates with $120,000 in student debt and is forced to live far worse a lifestyle than a college football until they move out of an entry level job. The underlying premise to all of these polemics is that a college degree is worthless to THESE KINDS OF KIDS, which is a kind of ****ed up way to think in itself when you actually peel back the layers. The problem is that, in a pay-for-play system, the vast majority of college football players would not command a market rate high enough to pay their way through school. As Alma noted, the first step would be for all the BCS schools to agree to trim rosters from 85 to at least 65, given all the money it would save. Gradually, schools would drop out of D-I as they realized that it simply did not make sense to pay more than the cost of a scholarship for more than X number of players. Does it make sense for Vanderbilt to pay the third-string linebacker more than a scholarship? See ya. Where's Duke's threshold at? Stanford? Like Alma said, eventually you'd have a league of 30-40 schools who could make a legit business out of it. Everybody else would continue to play with all the kids whose market rate is equal to or less than the cost of attendance, which is most of them. Even in The League, I'd be surprised if anybody bid more than the cost of a scholarship for the 53rd man on the roster, since so much of the money would flow to the top 22 players on each team.

I really think everybody drastically overestimates the market value of all college football players outside of the starters in the top 30-40 programs.