Amateurism.

[dhole]

Right. So, last time, I said that I'd post about my insane process next. Which I'm not going to do, I'm afraid. In fact, I think I'll wait until I sell a story composed through my current process, and then wait even more until it's published, and then I'll forget to post about my process

Comments

[txanne]

1. Sir, this rant is a thing of beauty and perfection.

2. Owns their own name? What? /hides in anticipation of finding out

[dhole]

There's a collegian nicknamed, "Johnny Football," because his name is Johnny and because he plays football. Someone told ESPN that young Mr. Football had been paid several hundred dollars to sign autographs.

Being paid to sign one's own name is the sort of thing that the NCAA simply cannot allow, so they're trying to prove that he did this, so as to prevent him from playing next season. Or at least, they're acting like they want to prevent him from playing next season, but he's popular enough that they stand to make a lot of money off of him playing, so they don't really want to do that. My guess is that he gets away with it, and someone less popular gets made an example of at some point in the near future.

[txanne]

Oh, I get it. It's the same BS that gets kids in trouble for letting people crash on their couches, except marginally more legit. They aren't supposed to get any benefit, including money, that a regular student would not. So it's not that he doesn't own his name, it's that he's not supposed to get cash for signing it. If he hadn't charged money, he would have been fine.

I taught a Divison I football player. Here's what I learned from the experience: we should put them all on salary, and not require them to go to school, and then give them room/board/tuition/books for the same number of years that they played, redeemable within 20 years of their last college game.

[supergee]

If humanity becomes civilized, big-time "amateur" sports will be seen as one of the barbarities of our time, along with forcing the poor to bear unwanted children and having nongovernment organizations that are too big to fail.

[rereader]

Or if a publishing house decided to put out a line of amateur fiction, where the publisher charged the same amount, but not only didn't pay the authors, made special rules to make sure that nobody could give the authors any money.

Amazon is working on that. (With the help of the US Justice Department.)

Well said, sir!

[adrianna_r]

I thought the entire idea behind the Olympics was to showcase the physical human ideal in a variety of contests that test the optimal values of the conservation of momentum equations of human beings, while ALSO allowing both amateurs and professionals to compete, as a kind of "Ms. Universe" thing except for "who can throw this heavy thing really really far" rather than "who's got the finest piece of arse". I didn't think it mattered where the talent came from, as long as it was natural (undrugged, but genetic engineering through breeding is ok) and the best you could get.

The regional pre-olympics makes sense to me, then, as you would give a chance to whoever showed up to compete but would only promote people to the next level of American Idol if they were good, regardless of whether they've been doing this for a while, for money, or not.... And then you'd launch all the good ones at this giant muscular pissing contest and see who wins. That seems to be the general concept behind most sports anyway

[dhole]

The thing about the modern Olympic games was that they were founded during the Victorian period, and the idea that amateurs were morally superior to professionals was a Victorian thing. So one of the big stories of the modern games was when Jim Thorpe, who won medals in 1912 was stripped of his awards when people found out that he had been paid as much as $2 a game for playing baseball a few years prior.

(The ancient Olympics had cash prizes for people who won competitions, but that's another story.)