by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University – Scholarship in Action
Sports agent Josh Luchs admitted recently during an interview that he’s been paying college athletes for years. He said that in order to get athletes to sign with him, he’d give them amounts as high as $10,000 in hopes that he might have their name on a contract for millions.
Please don’t act as if you’re surprised. Also, don’t act as if you’re somehow offended by the reality that in an allegedly free and capitalist society that someone would (gasp) pay a few thousand bucks to land a multi-million dollar commodity. The only thing disturbing about Luch’s revelation is that he didn’t pay the athletes even more.
I personally consider Luchs to be part hero, part villain. He’s a hero because everyone knows that athletes and their families deserve a piece of the billions that they earn for the fat cats with the NCAA. College athletics produces revenue on par with all of the other professional sports leagues. For some reason, we are caught up in the antiquated notion that we are somehow preserving the innocence of revenue-generating athletes by forcing their families to remain in poverty while others get rich from their labor.
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