This unique sports and labor history charts the revolutionary
transformation of track and field over the past thirty years. In this
time, the sport has changed from an amateur effort whose governing
bodies unfairly controlled its athletes' lives to a professional arena
in which athletes have the power to make decisions in their own best
interests. While historians have chronicled labor history in team sports
such as baseball and football or have lumped track and field into larger
studies of Olympic history, Joseph M. Turrini is the first to
scrupulously detail the efforts of athletes to reorder labor relations
in track and field and to end their decades-long power struggle with
governing bodies.
Combining social and institutional history and incorporating the
recollections of the athletes and meet directors on the front lines,
The End of Amateurism in Track and Field shows how the athletes
thoroughly transformed their sport to end the amateur system in the
early 1990s--changes that allowed the athletes to market their
potential, drastically increase their earning possibilities, and improve
their quality of life.
This book reveals how athletes in the 1950s began to harness the courts,
legislature, and little-known underground labor relations systems that
grew within the sport to untangle the distribution of power and
decision-making by the 1990s. Enlivening the narrative with stories such
as runner Wes Santee's battle with the Amateur Athletic Union and
revelations about the actions of college coaches and rivalries between
the NCAA and AAU, Turrini examines the effects of amateurism on athletes
and explores how changes in the economic context of track and field and
the role of the government helped leverage the end of the 100-year era
of amateur track and field.
