For more than a century, the NCAA marketed college athletics on the premise of amateurism — the idea that student-athletes competed purely for love of the game, untainted by financial compensation. Ronald A. Smith’s The Myth of the Amateur: A History of College Athletic Scholarships dismantles that narrative with meticulous historical research, revealing that NCAA amateurism history is less a principled tradition than a carefully constructed illusion.
Smith, a distinguished sports historian, traces the origins of college athletic scholarships back to the nineteenth century, long before the NCAA existed in any meaningful regulatory form. From the earliest days of intercollegiate competition, universities found ways to compensate talented athletes — through subsidized room and board, no-show jobs, and preferential academic treatment. The so-called amateur ideal was never uniformly practiced; it was selectively enforced and conveniently redefined whenever institutional interests demanded flexibility.
The book documents how the NCAA, founded in 1906, gradually codified amateurism not to protect athletes but to protect the commercial interests of member institutions. By controlling the definition of amateur status, the organization effectively created a cartel — one that generated billions of dollars in revenue while restricting the very athletes who made that revenue possible. Smith argues that the scholarship system itself, formalized in the 1950s, was a pragmatic compromise that quietly acknowledged the professional nature of big-time college sports while maintaining the amateur facade for public consumption.
Central to Smith’s thesis is the concept of institutional hypocrisy. Universities celebrated the scholar-athlete ideal in press releases while quietly building athletic departments that functioned as minor professional leagues. The NCAA amateurism model, he contends, was never about ethics — it was about control.
The Myth of the Amateur arrives as essential reading in the post-Alston and NIL era, when federal courts and market forces have finally begun unraveling what Smith identified decades ago. His work provides the essential historical foundation for understanding why college athletics finds itself in its current state of transformation — and why that transformation was always inevitable.
