College basketball players from Michigan, California, LSU and other schools took an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii to roam the beaches and play in the 2017 Maui Classic, while the University of Georgia and Oklahoma football teams got wined and dined at this year's Rose Bowl. They are merely slaves enduring a racist system that won't pay them, says basketball Hall of Famer Spencer Haywood (in photo). He was given a large internet forum to advocate for socialism and a redistribution of wealth by Sean Deveney of The Sporting News.
Plenty of athletes, former athletes and media are waging the present pay-for-play debate, but few use rhetoric as inflammatory as that coming from Deveney-Haywood. Haywood, 68, is a very wealthy man who led the USA to the 1968 Olympic Gold Medal on his way to a fantastic pro basketball career. He also won a lawsuit against the NCAA so he could turn pro before graduating from college, opening the way for the one-and-done jocks:
“They [the NCAA] just got a contract from CBS (and TNT), $8.8 billion, and if you are making that, I think you have to share some revenue. You can’t expect people to continue to work for nothing on a false hope of, well this is about education, we are getting you an education, we will feed you. It sounds a little like 400 years ago, like slavery. Stay in your hut. Stay in that little house. We’ll give you some food. You do all of the work. All of it. And I am telling you that I will take care of you."
Deveney totally agreed with Haywood's reckless statement and wrote, "He has ample reason to see what’s going on in basketball these days ... As a black man who grew up the son of indentured sharecroppers in Mississippi before moving to Detroit to further his basketball career, he sees parallels between his time in the old South and the way big-time basketball operates."
"But let’s think about it," Haywood said. "If you have 11 blacks on your team and you are say, in Kentucky, and they’re creating all this wealth but not getting paid? It does have a tinge of slavery.
“It is what it is. It is very racist because they’re not helping the communities where those kids come from, Chicago and Detroit and so on.”
A reporter with an ounce of objectivity would have said, "Come on, Spencer! You can't be serious!" Deveney, on the other hand, just ate it all up, including this:
“It sounds like my life in Mississippi. And I will just use myself as an example. We picked all of the cotton, from sunup to sundown. We did all of the work that had to be done on the farm, chopping cotton, planting cotton, tilling the soil — all of this work. We were making so little money that we could not survive. We would go to the big boss and say, ‘Hey can we borrow $50 so we can celebrate Christmas?’ The birth of our Lord and Savior. Then we had to pay that $50 back all year long. We were relegated to that same system, we couldn’t leave, we couldn’t leave that farm."
Deveney raved that "Haywood’s credentials on the subject, of course, are well-established," and added: "So Haywood looks at the NCAA system with a cold eye. He sees the offer of free schooling and room-and-board as the only payment for players who generate billions for their colleges as a hollow promise. He sees penalties for collegians who want to transfer — combined with the riches schools pay to coaches who are free to leave at their own whims — as the height of hypocrisy."
College athletes clearly don't agree with Haywood and Deveney. They're still gladly signing letters of intent to gain a free college education in exchange for spots on the varsity teams. What's really hollow is Deveney's brand of "journalism lite."
