Byers built the NCAA on a few well-chosen words

Had Walter Byers received a nickel in royalties every time the term "student-athlete" was used, he might have been worth as much as the NCAA, which he put on the path to becoming a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Byers, who died Tuesday at age 93, was the NCAA’s first executive director (1951-87) and, in that capacity, presciently contrived to combine “student” and “athlete” into the omnipresent term it has become today.

“We crafted the term ‘student-athlete’ and it soon was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for such words as ‘players and ‘athletes,’” Byers wrote in his 1995 book “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.”

These days not only do athletic administrators and coaches still habitually employ it, but sportscasters routinely parrot it, few of them understanding its derivation, intended purpose or decades-long impact. 

The term grew out of the necessity in the 1950s when athletes, football players chief among them, who suffered injuries began showing the temerity to seek compensation for their medical bills. The cases of players who sought workmen’s comp for injuries and, in one instance the widow of a player who sought death benefits when her husband died from a head injury, sent tremors through the halls of the NCAA and its members. 

As a defense, the coupling of “student” and “athlete” was ingenious. At once it classified players as students, not university employees who might be due compensation for their injuries and toil beyond the classroom. In addition it designated them as  athletes that member institutions could control and administer under the banner of the rapidly growing NCAA without the messy interference of a union.

At NCAA championships those who dare depart from the preferred lexicon to use just “athlete” or, heaven forbid, “player” run the risk of being corrected — or shot a cold look of displeasure. 

And for 60 years “student-athlete” gave the NCAA powerful cover. While it insisted upon protecting the amateur purity of the athletes, the NCAA grew by leaps and bounds to the point where it rakes in multi billions just for the rights to its men’s basketball tournament. Administrators raked in huge salaries and multi-million dollar coaches became the rule in football and men’s basketball rather than the exception.  

Only lately has the NCAA’s armor become vulnerable. The Ed O’Bannion ruling last year affirmed the right of athletes to profit from use of their likenesses and names. More recently NCAA members have moved to provide year-round training tables. Beginning Aug. 1 scholarship athletes may begin receiving cost of attendance stipends from the schools they attend.

To his credit in his later years Byers recognized what the NCAA had become and not only began to decry some of its hypocrisy but sought to become a voice for change. 

In a 1987 Associated Press interview, he said he proposed drastic changes in the NCAA model to the organization’s council but was ignored. “They looked at me as though I had desecrated my sacred vows. There was not one smiling face in that room,” he was quoted as saying.

By then the Goliath that the NCAA had become was almost unchangeable from within.

Byers died just as his “student-athletes” were showing signs of becoming “stakeholders” in the enterprise that has become college athletics.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com.