It’s been so long since the word “amateur" meant anything in sport that one might almost— almost— feel a little nostalgia for the days when Canada bitterly fought to have the Soviet mens hockey team declared “professionals” so Canada could play its best players in the 1960s World Championships or Olympics.

On the same topic, who can forget the epic cruelty of taking Olympic medals from American Jim Thorpe because he played a few baseball games? If there was a way to destroy Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s dream of simon-pure sport, the IOC and IIHF found it.

After a century of high-handed bureaucratic buffoonery, the IOC made all professional athletes eligible for the Olympics after the 1988 Games. As of 2004, the only sports in which no professionals compete were boxing and wrestling, although even that required a definition of amateurism based on fight rules rather than on payment.

So it takes a fair degree of brass for the mandarins who’ve run the NCAA to persist so long with their standard of amateurism for “student athletes” into the modern day. While everyone but the athletes themselves got fat on the huge revenues brought in by some (not all) college sports, athletes were hounded/ banned over free running shoes, complimentary meals or even educational materials.

In an apprenticeship system that, in many sports, is predicated on prospective superstars doing their training in a U.S. college before being drafted into the NBA, NFL, MLB or NHL this was unfair and capricious. Those athletes who could go from high school to the pros, such as LeBron James, did so. But they were few and far between.

The result of tortured NCAA interpretations of amateur was prodigies fulfilling just a single season or two in NCAA competition before finally being compensated for their value in the entertainment market. Often they were rushed before they were ready and had short careers. Can you say Mitch Trubisky?

The NCAA had a policing squad that would have made Blue Blood Tom Selleck proud. In just one example of their extreme vigilance football star Reggie Bush had his 2005 Heisman Trophy taken away and his records expunged because his parents were given a better home in which to live.

(And don’t even mention the NCAA hypocrisies of the Hollywood parents’ pay-for-play scheme that landed actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin in jail.)

But time caught up to the NCAA suits. As we’ve pointed out in the past the writing was on the wall from the moment former UCLA hoops star Ed O’Bannon launched a legal case claiming compensation for something Baron de Coubertin never reckoned on— the rights to O’Bannon’s likeness in video games etc. The tsunami of cash this created was unforeseen just a generation ago, and the NCAA had no answer for why it should control a person’s likeness.

Now the Supreme Court of the U.S. has finally called “kaput” on the ruse. While ruling on a side issue affecting scholar/ athletes and free school supplies, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a stinging rebuke to the whole system, warning the NCAA that if SCOTUS were asked to judge an antitrust case on college amateurism the NCAA would be very sorry.

And like that, the NCAA caved. While many details are being worked out athletes and their agents are quickly rushing into file the void, signing broadcast deals, restaurant promotions, trading card options and many other arrangements. Just how much they stand to make it still a guess, but if you are a Reggie Bush star at a school like USC you might not have to leave till all your eligibility is expired. And then take a pay cut in the NFL, NBA, MLB or even NHL.

Obviously, sports stars in high-profile sports like football or basketball will love this. They can now take a longer development route rather than rush to the pros to avoid losing their fortune to an injury. College sports fans are big winners because now they can see their stars play for their schools for up to five years.

For pro sports fans there is the hope of getting more complete prospects in the draft after the athletes spend a few extra years in college refining their trade. The athletes will also have played fewer games (NCAA hockey is a 44-game schedule; the CHL stars can play 100 games in a year.) So less tread off the tires.

Losers? The NCAA panjandrums for one. Their self-appointed holiness was the most obnoxious bureaucratic power play till Anthony Fauci, Teresa Tam and the Health® overlords big footed their citizens in the rush to Covid sainthood. How they save face on keeping “shamateurism” alive 32 years longer than the IOC will be an interesting story.

It’s likely a loss for those athletes in other collegiate sports whose programs were kept alive by the flood of money from football and basketball. That especially means women’s programs which cannot support themselves in their current iteration based on TV ratings and attendance. How schools make up any difference between what they’re getting now and what they’ll get after the athletes have dipped into the pool is anyone’s guess.

It might also be a loss for the academic side of schools which have been hiding their “scholar” athletes in sham liberal-arts courses to keep them eligible. How will it work if the stars now last up to five years? How many criminal justice or cinema courses can they create?

Footnote: Reggie Bush has already petitioned the NCAA and the Heisman board to return his trophy and his records. Here’s hoping they do it quickly. Otherwise the stench might just be too much for an amateur to bear.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

Shamateurism: How the NCAA Took 35 Years To Copy The IOC