Larry Wilson: Jocks and the new big bucks on campus

Never having fully learned the lessons of the Jim Thorpe biographies I read as a kid, I was rather slow to come around to the notion of  paying college athletes for their athletic skills played out in the service of the school.

It was all out of some old-fashioned allegiance to the idea of amateurism. Guys play in college for fun and maybe some glory, right? Maybe impress some girls.

If you go on to become a professional athlete, more power to you. And that’s where the money is.

No more. The fancier quarterbacks, running backs and shooting guards have for a couple of years now been able according to NCAA rules to make big bucks “from third parties using their personal brand, often referred to as their name, image and likeness,” the college sports organization says. “The NCAA fully supports these opportunities for student-athletes across all three divisions,” from big schools to small.

The apparent way forward is for members of all the big college sports teams to be able to ka-ching their way through school whether or not they ever go pro.

In California, this means that football players, for instance, at even schools with crummy recent records such as my  Cal  Golden Bears have, will pull down on the order of $200,000 a year.

That’s not NFL money, much less Shohei Ohtani money.

But, around campus? That’s Champagne money on a formerly beer budget. More on which in a sec.

Back to Jim Thorpe. The citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, one of the greatest American athletes ever, won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm in classic pentathlon and the decathlon. Then those medals were stripped from him after it was revealed he had picked up a little scratch for his enormously poor family by playing a few games of semi-pro baseball before joining the U.S. team.

Generations later, the medals were “restored” to him, 30 years after his death.

That kind of “pure amateur” nonsense was nothing more than upper-middle class White American tut-tutting. It was cool that the greatest American golfer of the early 20th century, Bobby Jones, remained an amateur through his career. One reason why? He came from the right Atlanta circles, and had the chance to make an opportune investment in Coca-Cola and practice gentlemanly part-time law.

Jim Thorpe didn’t have such connections. But he did recover from the ignominy of having his medals stripped to star both as a professional baseball player and early NFL great — and even led a barnstorming Native American basketball team. Before he died young of alcoholism.

The lesson of Jim Thorpe was that the over-enforcement of the elite amateur notion is the definition of classism.

Still and all, I remember being ticked when NBA players were first allowed to play Olympic basketball — just as foreign players began to get as good as the Yanquis at the game. For decades, sending our best college hoops players to the Games worked out fine.  Even when they weren’t pulling down 200 large in the collegiate ranks.

The new formula has not quite been figured out. But: “As of last week, California’s top universities can pay their athletes directly — a dramatic shift in college sports that blurs the line between amateur and professional play. Schools have yet to say how much individual students will actually make or when checks might arrive, though a CalMatters estimate suggests some student-athletes at UC Berkeley could make roughly $200,000 a year. … At public universities, such as UC Berkeley, schools could use taxpayer dollars to make these payments.” No one’s pretending it’s the water polo players who’ll rake it in. First is football, then men’s basketball, then women’s basketball — the cash cows.

I’m just trying to figure out the lifestyle changes. Full scholarships and nice weight-training facilities don’t put folding money in the wallet. This does. Will BMOCs rent penthouse suites rather than live in the dorms? Dine at Chez Panisse rather than Top Dog? Take their dates to Cabo for the weekend rather than the movies? Make a down payment on the Lambo now rather than on draft day?

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.