Reggie Bush, shown here playing for the University of Southern California, could be losing his Heisman Trophy due to allegedly accepting illegal benefits, according to the NCAA. Could this start a movement by black athletes against the NCAA? Dr. Boyce Watkins seems to be hopeful.Thanks to the considerable power of Facebook, I ran across an opinion piece written by Dr. Boyce Watkins regarding the current controversy surrounding Reggie Bush and his perhaps temporary retention of "his" Heisman Trophy.
For those who don't know, Bush is in the middle of a controversy for allegedly violating NCAA rules r
egarding illegal benefits. Here is an account of some of the trouble dogging Bush. The University of Southern California, where Bush played his college football, has all but made him disappear from anything related to USC. At this point, from a USC perspective, the only traces of Bush are mostly in the memories of those who watched him play back in the day.
Recently, however, Bush has been back in the spotlight as USC returned its Heisman Trophy (from the Bush era) and there is a rumor that the Heisman people are ready to snatch back Reggie's version of the trophy.
That brings me to this, from Watkins, who had strong opinions on the issue:
When I read about the possibility that Reggie Bush may have his Heisman Trophy taken, I became irritated beyond imagination. "Here we go again," I thought. "Another self-righteous group of hoity-toity NCAA administrators making value judgments about the character of black male athletes."
If they can’t defeat them on the field, the game is then to create artificially contrived mechanisms for evaluating the worth of the athlete from a morality standpoint. The problem for the NCAA, however, is that when it comes to ethics, they have no room to claim the moral high ground. In fact, you might say they are crooks.So, officials allegedly want to take Reggie Bush’s Heisman because he might have violated a set of rules that represent nothing less than a complete double standard that places athletes and their families (many of whom are black) at the bottom of an artificial caste system which puts coaches at the top (most of whom are white)? Can we say “apartheid” anyone? Are you trying to say that Reggie Bush wasn’t worth millions of dollars to USC and the NCAA in television deals, ticket sales, jersey sales and the like? Yea, I thought so.
Watkins is an outspoken critic of the NCAA and what he sees as its unwillingness to share revenues with the student-athletes.
In this piece, however, Watkins takes it another major step with his call for, in essence, a boycott as could be read in his headline, "Black Athletes Should Ignore The Heisman."
Here is more from the piece:
Why in the world have we somehow been convinced that black athletes (white ones too) and their families are not deserving of a slice of the massive revenue that athletes earn for their universities? Did anyone watch USC football games to see anyone other than Reggie Bush and the other athletes on the field? If that’s not the case, then why in the world has he been chastised like a runaway slave for simply getting a mere fraction of the money that he deserves? Even China has a more equitable system of wealth distribution than the NCAA, who has made an art form out of turning the false into something that we all believe to be real. That long list of rules and regulations created by the NCAA is designed to control athletes so they themselves can get wealthy from athlete labor. We know that.
There is some truth to what Watkins has to say about student-athletes not being able to share in revenue they generate.
Sharing that revenue, I believe, is a complicated situation even though I do not necessarily disagree that student-athletes should be able to taste a little more of the revenue. BUT, how to get that done is VERY complicated and not as easy as a lot of people think.
The bottom line is that these student-athletes are not going to risk their position by going against the NCAA. They see their position as valuable. For the student-athletes, right now at least, the benefits of the NCAA outweigh any perceived exploitation.
Just saying ...
Until that changes, no boycott will have any legs.
Dr. Boyce Watkins:
http://newsone.com/newsone-original/boycewatkins/dr-boyce-black-athletes-should-ignore-the-heisman-trophy/
Yahoo Sports:
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=ys-bushheisman090710
More on Reggie Bush:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/brennan/2010-09-08-heisman-bush-young_N.htm
