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Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball
Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own. Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century—and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along—while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports.
An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.
An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution.
336 pages, Paperback
First published August 10, 2020
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May 26, 2021
One of the very many reasons I enjoy reading good historical writing is that it bursts bubbles, demystifies and complicates the simplicities of ideology and appearance and often allows the present to make more sense. This is especially so in relatively contemporary (that is the last 80-100 years: we historians have a distinctive sense of ‘contemporary’) institutional histories. These circumstances apply to this illuminating history of the institutions of mid-20th century US college sport. I read and write this as an outsider.
US (and to a degree Canadian) college sport is distinctive in its commercialisation and in its social, cultural and media profile. Its football dominates media for sizeable parts of the Autumn/Fall and Winter, its coaches are in many cases the highest paid public employees in their state, its programme can be among the most expensive components of their home university’s operations, and the sports ‘student athletes’ are to all intents and purposes employees – professional, not amateur as claimed by the sport’s governing institutions. Much the same applies to basketball, although that game tends to be less capital intensive and therefore more widely distributed across the college and university sectors. Unlike football however, basketball has an end of season tournament, ‘March Madness’, that allows the major institution of college sport – the NCAA – to declare a national champion. Yet, of course, this has not always been so. Kemper’s analysis explores how this tournament came into being, and in doing so more substantively explores the tensions and antagonisms at the core of the institutions of college sport through the early and middle decades of the 20th century.
In unpacking the fraught relationships within and around college sport Kemper does to key things. First, he carefully explores and exposes the different positions and outlooks of those schools that adhered to a commercial sport model, the smaller liberal arts schools that worked in a frame that saw athletics as an integral part of developing rounded human beings, new smaller state schools that aspired to the commercial model but couldn’t compete with big commercial schools and finally the position of the Historically Black Colleges excluded by racist attitudes and Jim Crow rules. Second, he shows that the widespread view that the NCAA exists to serve the interests of big time commercial college sport is to a large degree correct – and crucially shows how it came about.
Kemper draws together a wider series of strands also, so this is not just about the internal politics of the NCAA. First there is the disputes between the NCAA and the AAU (American Athletic Union) over the definition of amateurism and the jockeying for power and authority in those claims, the outcome of which has in part led us to the current situation were college football programmes that are equivalent to the top 0.1% of US businesses are defined as amateur. While this is not surprising, the small but vital role played by the US Olympic Committee in college basketball does become a key and surprising factor in Kemper’s case. Second, there is the attention he pays to the interests of those schools that are within the NCAA, its exclusionary practices and associated claims to authority regarding college sport. Third there is the smaller but nuanced attention he pays to shifting socio-cultural and political contexts, and the crucial significance of the impacts of the Civil Rights movement on college sport.
At the heart of the narrative is the NCAA’s emphasis on big time sport, the alienation of smaller schools (both liberal arts and newer small state schools) and the emergence of an independent, inclusive nationally oriented basketball tournament in Kansas City in the later 1940s. Kemper explores the background to this in debates within the NCAA, in shifting college participation rates and profiles, and in the networks of sport leaders and organisers that result in a powerful and initially small dissident group. He also explores the ways that shifting engagements with issues of race and civil rights in the earlier 1950s saw the growth in what became the NAIA (National Assoc of Intercollegiate Athletics). In unpacking these relations, he therefore traces the failure of the dissident groups within the NCAA to develop a common platform while noting that there were profound differences between their goals. Throughout it all, he explores the ways that the NCAA realised that the only way it could secure its dominance and influence and thereby protect its corporate interests was the restructure in a way that it had long protested was impossible. That is to say, in unravelling a challenge to the institutionalisation of college sport in the mid-20th century he has gone a long way to explaining the origins of its current form.
All those things said, this is a book for specialists. There is a detailed assessment of both the individuals involved and their actions alongside institutional aspects. There are vital issues at stake here in the form, organisation and perception of organised sport as well as its place in higher education. While the focus on the Kansas City tournament and the NAIA Kemper has done well to bring the events and their significance to life and to expose in particular the shortcoming of the NCAA on issues of race as well as its duplicitousness in its actions and contempt for small college members, institutional histories of this kind are hard to make dynamic and engaging. It may well be that these are issues that are distant from my usual areas of engagement and from my work, and I fully appreciate that those closer to the issues will find this more engaging. The scholarship is solid with extremely good access too and use of a diverse set of archive material, some of which seems to have been obscure.
All in all, then this is an important contribution to the field and for that reason (even if there were no other) is to be celebrated and welcomed.
US (and to a degree Canadian) college sport is distinctive in its commercialisation and in its social, cultural and media profile. Its football dominates media for sizeable parts of the Autumn/Fall and Winter, its coaches are in many cases the highest paid public employees in their state, its programme can be among the most expensive components of their home university’s operations, and the sports ‘student athletes’ are to all intents and purposes employees – professional, not amateur as claimed by the sport’s governing institutions. Much the same applies to basketball, although that game tends to be less capital intensive and therefore more widely distributed across the college and university sectors. Unlike football however, basketball has an end of season tournament, ‘March Madness’, that allows the major institution of college sport – the NCAA – to declare a national champion. Yet, of course, this has not always been so. Kemper’s analysis explores how this tournament came into being, and in doing so more substantively explores the tensions and antagonisms at the core of the institutions of college sport through the early and middle decades of the 20th century.
In unpacking the fraught relationships within and around college sport Kemper does to key things. First, he carefully explores and exposes the different positions and outlooks of those schools that adhered to a commercial sport model, the smaller liberal arts schools that worked in a frame that saw athletics as an integral part of developing rounded human beings, new smaller state schools that aspired to the commercial model but couldn’t compete with big commercial schools and finally the position of the Historically Black Colleges excluded by racist attitudes and Jim Crow rules. Second, he shows that the widespread view that the NCAA exists to serve the interests of big time commercial college sport is to a large degree correct – and crucially shows how it came about.
Kemper draws together a wider series of strands also, so this is not just about the internal politics of the NCAA. First there is the disputes between the NCAA and the AAU (American Athletic Union) over the definition of amateurism and the jockeying for power and authority in those claims, the outcome of which has in part led us to the current situation were college football programmes that are equivalent to the top 0.1% of US businesses are defined as amateur. While this is not surprising, the small but vital role played by the US Olympic Committee in college basketball does become a key and surprising factor in Kemper’s case. Second, there is the attention he pays to the interests of those schools that are within the NCAA, its exclusionary practices and associated claims to authority regarding college sport. Third there is the smaller but nuanced attention he pays to shifting socio-cultural and political contexts, and the crucial significance of the impacts of the Civil Rights movement on college sport.
At the heart of the narrative is the NCAA’s emphasis on big time sport, the alienation of smaller schools (both liberal arts and newer small state schools) and the emergence of an independent, inclusive nationally oriented basketball tournament in Kansas City in the later 1940s. Kemper explores the background to this in debates within the NCAA, in shifting college participation rates and profiles, and in the networks of sport leaders and organisers that result in a powerful and initially small dissident group. He also explores the ways that shifting engagements with issues of race and civil rights in the earlier 1950s saw the growth in what became the NAIA (National Assoc of Intercollegiate Athletics). In unpacking these relations, he therefore traces the failure of the dissident groups within the NCAA to develop a common platform while noting that there were profound differences between their goals. Throughout it all, he explores the ways that the NCAA realised that the only way it could secure its dominance and influence and thereby protect its corporate interests was the restructure in a way that it had long protested was impossible. That is to say, in unravelling a challenge to the institutionalisation of college sport in the mid-20th century he has gone a long way to explaining the origins of its current form.
All those things said, this is a book for specialists. There is a detailed assessment of both the individuals involved and their actions alongside institutional aspects. There are vital issues at stake here in the form, organisation and perception of organised sport as well as its place in higher education. While the focus on the Kansas City tournament and the NAIA Kemper has done well to bring the events and their significance to life and to expose in particular the shortcoming of the NCAA on issues of race as well as its duplicitousness in its actions and contempt for small college members, institutional histories of this kind are hard to make dynamic and engaging. It may well be that these are issues that are distant from my usual areas of engagement and from my work, and I fully appreciate that those closer to the issues will find this more engaging. The scholarship is solid with extremely good access too and use of a diverse set of archive material, some of which seems to have been obscure.
All in all, then this is an important contribution to the field and for that reason (even if there were no other) is to be celebrated and welcomed.
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