GUEST COLUMN: The birth of the amateur vs. professional sports debate

This is the first in a multi-part series on the history of athlete agency leading to the future of college NIL.

In 1885, 22-year-old David Danskin moved to London to work at the Dial Square munitions factory. He had already played football for the Kirkcaldy Wanderers in his native Scotland, and the year after his arrival in London, he formed a club with his new co-workers.

In late 19th century England, it was common for factories and other businesses to sponsor their employees’ amateur football clubs. A fitter workforce, after all, was a more productive workforce, and employees spending their free time playing football meant they were not spending it imbibing at the pubs. Sporting clubs promoted esprit among their workers, and also served as advertisements for the companies’ brands.

In the 1850s, Britain passed the Factory Acts and the Compromise Act which, among other things, established the end of the work week at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. So at 3:00 every Saturday, Danskin and his Dial Square club would take to a local pitch for a match.

The Dial Square factory, and the football pitch the club played on, were located at the Royal Arsenal in the Woolwich district of southeast London. While the club would move to Highbury in north London 27 years later, under Danskin the team would adopt the name it still carries today:

Arsenal Football Club.

And while the advent of television resulted in a variety of kickoff times, nearly two centuries after the passage of the Factory and Compromise Acts, 3:00 on Saturday endures as the “standard” start time, much like noon (Eastern) for college football in America or 1:00 for the NFL.

For much of the latter half of the 19th century, it was forbidden by law to pay football players in England. But in an arrangement that would look all too familiar to American college sports fans today, illicit and shadowy means were found to lure top talent, as club sponsors reveled in the prestige of employing the best players. Many of these players were, in fact, only nominally “employees” of the businesses that sponsored them, presaging how many college football players of today are only nominally “students” at those universities.

Manchester, in the north of England, is widely considered to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and it was in the industrial north that the professionalization of football began. In London and the south, football was played for recreation and a healthy lifestyle by gentlemen. But the rank-and-file workers in the factories that proliferated in the north could never become gentlemen, so they began to play for money. It was not until around the time of Danskin founding Arsenal that the term “amateur” would even emerge to distinguish those for whom football was an avocation and a lifestyle from the uncouth laborers who cheapened the game by making it into an occupation. “Professional” was a pejorative.

Flowing from these class tensions, the football community in London and broadly in the genteel south greatly feared an American-style commercialization of the game they loved and believed the introduction of money would ruin the sport. Albeit with the regional ideological conflict between north and south being reversed in America - it is the south here that illicitly obscured the line between amateur and professional and spurred the decline of amateurism - the English arguments of the late 19th century sound eerily like today’s American pearl-clutching over how (or even if) college athletes should be paid.

Southern fears turned out to be unfounded in England, as the Premier League is the most popular sports league in the world today, and the Football Association (FA) is as much a fundamental organizing force in English society as chip shops and the National Health Service.

Tension surrounding player agency, what athletes are entitled to in terms of compensation and movement, and the legitimacy of the guard rails of “amateurism” has been around for as long as we have had organized sports.

That tension arrived in America 110 years ago.

Pictures of Jim Thorpe from the era look like an athlete who was sent back in a time machine from the 2020s. Where even the finest athletes of a century ago still looked skinny or pasty, Thorpe looked like he should have a Rivals profile, with a chiseled physique at 5’8”, 185 pounds, a 42” chest, 32” waist and massive 24” thighs. His physical makeup was an anomaly, a modern five-star freak who could have been a star running back, slot receiver, or defensive back today.

An orphaned Sac and Fox Native American from Oklahoma, Thorpe - when he could be troubled to show up for class - attended high school and college at Carlisle, a school in Pennsylvania whose mission was to “civilize” Native Americans.

Thorpe broke his school’s high jump record on his first-ever attempt at a high jump… in street clothes. He finished second in the Olympic javelin trials without knowing you could run into the throw. He did it flat-footed.

Thorpe played baseball, football (for the legendary Glenn “Pop” Warner), basketball, lacrosse, tennis and even hockey. He was a ballroom dancer and an expert wild horse wrangler. He could study, re-create and fully master the motion of any physical activity. Remember the “Bo Knows” Nike commercials of the late ‘80s featuring Bo Jackson participating in every sport imaginable? Jim Thorpe was that guy for real.

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Thorpe took gold in both the decathlon and pentathlon. His 1500m time would not be bested by another decathlete for 60 years.

At the medal presentation, Sweden’s King Gustav V exclaimed: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world!"

“Thanks, King,” was Thorpe’s demure reply.

However, when it was learned that Thorpe had played semi-pro minor league baseball in 1909 and 1910, his medals were stripped by the IOC. It was an absurd penalty on a technicality that would eventually be worked out by the time being paid to play minor league baseball would concern Drew Henson.

Thorpe’s medals were officially - posthumously - restored on July 15, 2022, on the 110th anniversary of his decathlon gold.

After the Olympics, Thorpe returned to Carlisle that fall and rushed for 1869 yards on 191 attempts - a shade under 10 yards per carry. Available statistics no longer exist for two games that season, so it’s almost certain that Thorpe was college football’s first 2000-yard rusher.

Thorpe went on to play major league baseball from age 26 to 32 for the New York Giants, Cincinnati Red Legs and (regrettably, given his racial heritage) the Boston Braves. He was a co-founder of the NFL, switching to football from age 33 to 40, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1963. He even played professional basketball before landing in Hollywood as an actor and stuntman.

In his later years, struggling to support two ex-wives and seven children, he was a construction worker and ditch digger.

For the rest of Jim Thorpe’s life, the robbing of his Olympic legacy and the fame and fortune that would have accompanied it hung over him like a dark cloud.

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Coming in PART II: The foundation of the NCAA, and the landmark Curt Flood and Ed O’Bannon cases.