Amateurish

Is, as amateurish has done, in the defense that the cartel in restraint of trade known as the NCAA is putting up in the Ed O'Bannon case now before a court in California. As this Wall Street Journal story puts it;

The NCAA includes many provisions about amateurism in its 439-page Division I manual but lacks a hard-and-fast definition of the word. Essentially it says that an amateur is an athlete who (a) is not a professional, and (b) abides by the NCAA's rules of amateurism. Those rules can change, and often do.

The NCAA's tenets of amateurism sometimes appear to shadow the winds of public perception.

Which is why university Athletic Directors interviewed during televised college football and basketball games always refer to 'the student athlete'. They need to keep the perception alive that what the fans are seeing has nothing to do with commerce, but everything to do with education.

It's clear that the NCAA has been willing to add benefits to the bare-bones notion of amateurism. Where it has drawn a hard-and-fast line: linking athlete compensation to the laws of supply and demand. That is the battlefield where the O'Bannon case is being fought.

....The NCAA has long employed, in essence, two operating models: a professional one when it negotiates business contracts, and an amateur one when it distributes the fruits of those contracts. The O'Bannon plaintiffs want the NCAA to more closely align its distribution methods to its business operations.

Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA football player and president of the National College Players Association, is rooting for the plaintiffs, and for something he said has been missing on the athletes' side of the NCAA equation: free enterprise.

"What is evil," Huma asked, "about Americans getting what they're worth?"

And since a large percentage of those athletes are African Americans, what's up with the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world being MIA in this battle?