The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 SR 7

C

OLLEGE sports has a lot of hy-

pocrisy. I believe it’s time for the

N.C.A.A. to stop pretending that

education is its top priority and

pay college athletes.

Universities are supposed to be educa-

tional institutions, but for too many of

them their self-worth is tied to winning.

When you win, you make more TV

money. The school receives more alumni

donations and student applications. Lo-

cal businesses fill up with more

customers. Enrollment increases, which

brings more revenue.

The N.C.A.A. is run by universities, so

it has a conflict of interest between edu-

cation and money. We all know how that

conflict turns out. I once spoke to a meet-

ing of athletic directors and told them:

“All you administrators preach educa-

tion, but you vote money. When it’s time

to make rules, you vote for the rules that

will make everybody the most money.”

I’m not saying that voting money is bad.

I’m saying let’s call it what it is. Capital-

ism is the system we operate in. College

basketball is subject to the laws of supply

and demand.

The amateurism of big-time college

sports is antiquated and needs to be re-

defined. We shouldn’t act as if going to

college is a religious experience for ev-

erybody. The best basketball players

right now are not going to college for an

education. They are going to college for

less than a year to make millions in the

pros, which can be a smart decision.

Pretty soon, very few of the best players

will attend college at all. Most of them

will go straight to the N.B.A., the G

League or overseas — or just stay home

and work out.

The problem is, there aren’t enough

jobs for all the high school kids who think

they are pro material. These kids won’t

care about academics, because they

think they’re going to the N.B.A. The

ones who don’t make it, which will be

many if not most of them, would have

been much better off with a college edu-

cation.

But the world is changing, and college

athletics needs to adapt. For many years,

I resisted the idea of paying players. I felt

that it would be too hard to change the

system, and that paying players would

create more problems than it solved. I

thought we had dug our own grave so

deep we couldn’t throw the shovel out.

But recently, I changed my mind.

At this point, I believe the best course

for college basketball is sharing revenue

with players. I’ve been joking for years

that whenever a blue-blood school com-

mits a violation, the N.C.A.A. puts a his-

torically Black college on probation. Now

those jokes don’t sound so funny any-

more, because some big schools are on

federal wiretaps talking about paying

kids and the N.C.A.A. is taking years to

do anything about it.

Everybody within college basketball

knows which schools are buying players

— illegally offering cash or other gifts to

players or their families to persuade

them to attend and play at their schools.

The whole system is filthy with it, well

beyond the few schools publicly named

by the N.C.A.A. Since the N.C.A.A. won’t

hold everyone accountable, paying play-

ers might as well be legal. Schools that

don’t pay for players have an extremely

hard time competing for championships,

and coaches who don’t cheat can barely

hold on to their jobs, because their losses

against the cheaters are counted against

them.

The N.C.A.A. is also teaching young

athletes that the way to succeed in life is

to break rules, not follow them. We are

abdicating our responsibility to act on

the rules we make and corrupting the ed-

ucational mission that universities are

supposed to have. It seems that the

N.C.A.A. is making players into thieves.

It feels like entrapment.

All of this creates a situation where

winning at a school like Georgetown,

where I coached, is harder than at a lot of

places Georgetown wants to compete

with. Georgetown is not the same as

those other schools. Those other schools

are committed to winning at any cost.

They do things we don’t, including but

not limited to paying for players.

If I were coaching right now, I would

cheat, too. I would pay for players, be-

cause if I didn’t I would lose to the cheat-

ers and get fired. The N.C.A.A. has al-

most given coaches no other choice but

to cheat if they want to compete for

championships.

I don’t condone how adults use high

school kids to make money, but a lot of

these kids are not innocent, either. Most

of the kids who take money make a con-

scious decision to do so. I’m sick and

tired of hearing that helpless kids are be-

ing taken advantage of by unscrupulous

adults. These kids know their worth on

the black market, and they decide to

cheat. They are not innocent, and they

should be penalized when they break the

rules. But the people who run the

N.C.A.A. are more guilty than anybody.

They go after petty violations like having

too many coaches at practice, but turn a

blind eye to buying five-star recruits who

bring in millions of dollars’ worth of

ticket sales and TV ratings.

It wasn’t easy for me to come to the

conclusion that players should be paid.

It’s always bothered me when people say

college athletes make money for schools

but get nothing in return. A free educa-

tion is not nothing — ask someone with

student loans about that. Ask someone

stuck in a low-wage job if a college de-

gree is nothing. It makes sense to say

that college athletes should receive

more, but don’t devalue education.

Paying players would not be easy. A lot

of difficult questions would need to be an-

swered. For example, if we had paid

players when Allen Iverson was at

Georgetown, he would have believed

that he should be paid more than every-

body else — and he would have been

right. How do you set up a fair compensa-

tion system? How would we ensure that

female athletes are treated equitably un-

der Title IX? How would it change our re-

sponsibility to educate players? What

about the majority of schools whose foot-

ball and basketball teams do not make

money? If we are basically hiring kids to

play college sports, does that mean we

can fire them, too? I haven’t heard any-

one satisfactorily explain how all this

could work. But that doesn’t mean it’s im-

possible, or worse than the alternative.

A wise person once told me that love is

not a word, it’s an action. The same con-

cept applies to fairness and justice. With-

out action, we cannot have fairness and

justice in college basketball. Since the

N.C.A.A. is clearly hurting kids and

coaches by refusing to act on its own

rules, let’s end the charade and allow col-

lege athletes to be paid.

Drop the Charade: Pay College Athletes

JAEDOO LEE

After watching the N.C.A.A. take years to

enforce its own rules, I changed my mind.

OPINION

BY JOHN

THOMPSON JR.

Georgetown

University’s

basketball coach

from 1972-99 and

the author of the

forthcoming “I

Came as a

Shadow: An

Autobiography,”

written with the

journalist Jesse

Washington, from

which this essay is

adapted. Mr.

Thompson died on

Aug. 30.

read the wrong scan. You have a con-

cerning mass on your lung.”

It took over two months of speculation,

scans, antibiotics and higher-level scans

of something the size of an olive that doc-

tors thought could be an old pneumonia

lesion or another minor affliction. I was

rooting for valley fever, a fungal infection

that usually resolves on its own and

sounded festive, like something that

Moon Unit Zappa sang about in the ’80s.

Finally I learned it was a malignant tu-

mor the size of a clementine, with cancer-

ous nodes in both lungs. When some-

thing goes citrus, that’s a bad sign.

During that time, my mental health de-

teriorated. I fell so far behind on writing

deadlines that I was in danger of losing a

book contract. I had a car accident for

which I wasn’t at fault, but I was now too

anxious to drive. I lost track of my fi-

nances, and in one of the lowest points of

my adult life, in the middle of the night,

an unmasked man showed up at my

home and repossessed my car for missed

payments, in view of my child and neigh-

bors.

Congress’s coronavirus relief package

provided eviction relief and forgiveness

LOS ANGELES

T

HIS summer, I walked into an ur-

gent care clinic for a coronavirus

test and walked out with stage

four metastatic lung cancer.

There’s a medical term for an unantici-

pated finding unrelated to the original

medical inquiry; it’s called an “inciden-

taloma.” I was one of the estimated one-

third of Americans who avoided doctor

visits during the pandemic, either out of

fear of the virus or concern for the cost. I

had ignored a minor but persistent

cough for both reasons, and it was only

because my health care provider wasn’t

offering testing and the lines were so

long at the Dodger Stadium drive-

through testing site that I walked into a

random urgent care in a mini-mall where

I was talked into the X-ray — something I

assumed to be the urgent care equivalent

of a cosmetic counter upsell — that led to

my diagnosis.

My 22-year-old child and I were on our

way home when the car broke down. My

phone rang as we waited for a tow on a

dusty shoulder of the freeway. “I’m so

sorry.” It was the urgent care doctor. “I

told you that your X-ray was fine, but I

for some loans, but not car loans and mil-

lions of other Americans have been

forced to skip payments. I negotiated a

return of the vehicle, but the effect on my

credit score was ruinous.

I was also one of the 12.7 million Ameri-

cans who the Economic Policy Institute

estimates lost their health insurance re-

ceived through their workplace or a fam-

ily member this spring. I went from my

union’s employer-sponsored plan, with a

$600-a-year family premium, to a plan

that costs $1,000 a month for my child

and me. If not for the Affordable Care Act

subsidy, the premium would cost $600

more. The subsidy may or not continue,

depending on which way the wind blows.

There’s never a good time to be diag-

nosed with stage 4 cancer, but in America

you can find yourself saying, “You’re so

lucky you got diagnosed with cancer in

January,” to your new cancer buddies. A

September diagnosis like mine means

that I’ll hit my plan’s annual out-of-

pocket maximum just in time for the new

calendar year reset.

Having lung cancer while a virus that

attacks the lungs is surging across the

globe is a real double whammy. I’m un-

able to read the facial expressions of the

new caregivers and doctors I’m sud-

denly dependent on, masked as they are,

and I wonder what effect it has on them

that they have never seen my face either.

Most providers aren’t allowing patients

to be accompanied to appointments and

procedures. You know when it seems

most essential to be surrounded by

friends and family? When you are diag-

nosed with a terminal illness. But as

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk

show host whom I never expected to

have anything in common with, said of

the health challenges caused by his own

lung cancer: “Mine are no better and

mine are no different and mine are no

more special than anybody else. But it

can feel like a roller coaster.”

I am lucky enough to have a wide sup-

port network, but I have learned that

when you tell people you have cancer,

they will want to give you things — just

not the things you actually want. A dear

friend was kind enough to purchase a

juicer for me, only I don’t have the ener-

gy to use it, and what I really longed for

was a fleecy blanket. That juicer sits in

my kitchen now, like a bad boyfriend, re-

minding me of the ways I’m not measur-

ing up, in this case, by my failure to make

juice.

A gift package from AstraZeneca, the

company that makes the targeted gene

therapy I am now taking, arrived at my

doorstep. I was hoping it was a Groupon

for a facial because one of the side effects

of the medication can be acne, but, no, it

was a daily pill counter with geriatric-

friendly oversize lettering. In case I was-

n’t already feeling as if I’d aged a decade,

that did the trick.

I’ve been offered prayers, antioxidant

supplements and empowering language

to define myself, only I don’t want to be

someone’s cancer warrior, or crazy, sexy

cancer survivor, or even a cancer thriver.

“Thriver” sounds exhausting. I’m al-

ready in a competitive business, and now

I have to be a high achiever at cancer,

too?

My health has stabilized, and my on-

cologist tells me this portends well for

long-term management. I am working

again and exercising, although the other

night, I texted my neighbor because I

was so fatigued that I didn’t have the

strength to open a bottle of Gatorade.

Could he give me a hand?

“I know this looks bad,” I told him, “but

I’ve got great news: the medication is

working, the tumors are shrinking!”

“So how long do you have to take this

stuff ?” he asked.

“The rest of my life.”

Silence. A chronic illness threatens to

turn you into that most unsavory of so-

cial pariahs, a Debbie Downer.

“But there’s an excellent chance that

science will find a cure. So long as I sur-

vive this virus. But you know me, I’m a

cancer... warrior.”

Last week, I called Becca, a social

worker and cancer counselor, whom I am

fortunate enough to get to speak with ev-

ery week. I explained my situation. The

medication I take every day retails at

$500 a dose. I qualify for a subsidy, but

only if I continue to purchase a premium

insurance plan. Others in my cancer sup-

port group with lesser plans report pay-

ing between $1,000 and $3,000 a month

out of pocket.

“I’m so grateful the therapy promises

a longer life span,” I told her, “but am I

your only client who wonders if it would-

n’t be better to check out earlier? I don’t

want to become a burden to my family.”

“No,” she sighed. “I hear this all day.”

I’m lucky to find myself where I am to-

day. If not for Covid-19, chances are that

the cancer would have gone unchecked

and spread even farther, so I guess the

coronavirus saved my life. Or perhaps

that’s overstating it, and the pandemic

prolonged my life. I’m lucky for the intu-

ition of a mini-mall urgent care doctor.

I’m lucky for scientific advancements.

But it will take more than luck for me to

afford the lifetime of care this diagnosis

requires.

Can I interest anyone in a new juicer?

It’s never been used and I’m willing to let

BENEDIKT LUFT it go for a good price.

If I hadn’t gone in for

a test, I wouldn’t have

learned I had lung cancer.

The Coronavirus Saved My Life

OPINION

BY ANNABELLE
GURWITCH
The co-host of the
Tiny Victories
podcast and the
author of the
forthcoming book
“You’re Leaving
When? Adventures
in Downward
Mobility.”