FRONTLINE continues its new monthly magazine program with the lead story "Money and March Madness," an inside look at the multi-billion dollar business of the NCAA and its brand of amateur college sports. In this investigation, correspondent Lowell Bergman gains access to Sonny Vaccaro, a former marketing executive at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok who helped bring about the rapid commercialization of college basketball. Vaccaro's success made coaches, administrators, and companies rich. But the players remain at the mercy of the NCAA, which, despite a new $10.8 billion contract for its basketball tournament, has continued to insist that the athletes don't get paid. Now, Vaccaro has left the business world and he's spearheading a class-action lawsuit that aims to ensure that players get a piece of the action.
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Money and March Madness
Press Release
FRONTLINE INVESTIGATES THE BUSINESS OF “MARCH MADNESS”
FRONTLINE Presents
Money and March Madness
Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
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This March, the nation will once again go “mad,” as more than 140 million people tune in to watch one of the biggest sporting events on earth—the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. But “March Madness” isn’t just a basketball tournament. It’s become big business, with television rights alone worth $10.8 billion over 14 years.
In
Money and March Madness, airing Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman (
Post Mortem, The Card Game) takes a hard look at the economics of the annual NCAA tournament—a cash cow for amateur athletics that generates enormous dollars for everyone except the players themselves, raising basic questions of fairness that are now leading a handful of influential figures to challenge the way the NCAA operates.
Chief among the NCAA’s critics is Sonny Vaccaro, a former executive at Nike, Adidas and Reebok who was a key figure in the commercialization of college and high school basketball in the 1980s and ’90s. In his first in-depth interview since leaving the world of sports marketing, Vaccaro tells FRONTLINE he’s had a change of heart after years of helping big corporations profit from amateur athletics. Now, he says, he’d like to help the players get in on some of the profits. “Unless the people who make the rules and the people who divide the money up come to their senses, there’s no recourse for the student-athlete,” says Vaccaro. “Everybody has a right except the player. The player has no rights.”
The question of paying players in big-time college sports has been raised for years, but now it’s gaining new force, thanks to a class-action suit that Vaccaro and others helped initiate on behalf of former players. The suit challenges one of the pillars of college athletics, a contract that the NCAA forces all players to sign which bars them from earning any money at any time from their college playing careers.
“The case is terribly important,” says Andrew Zimbalist, an expert on sports economics. “It goes to the core principles of the NCAA’s amateurism. ... If you look at it economically from afar, you say here’s an organization that, in the name of amateurism, has imposed a plethora of restrictions, a large number of which seem to be consistent with trying to maximize the economic return that the schools get. ... In practice, the NCAA functions as a trade association for the athletic directors and the coaches and the conference commissioners.”
“Who are these people making all this money?” former Final Four MVP and current Chicago Bulls star Joakim Noah asks Bergman. “And shouldn’t the kids, once their college careers are over, shouldn’t they get a piece of that? This is something that needs to be exposed.”
But the new president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, defends the amateurism of college basketball and rejects any form of payments to players. “I think that it would be utterly unacceptable to convert students into employees,” Emmert tells Bergman. “The point of March Madness, of the men’s basketball tournament, is the fact that it’s being played by students. ... What amateurism really means is that these young men and women are students; they’ve come to our institutions to gain an education and to develop their skills as an athlete and to compete at the very highest level they're capable of. And for them, that’s a very attractive proposition.”
All eyes now are on the pending outcome of the class-action suit against the NCAA. “You’ve got to get a decision here,” Vaccaro says. “It’s amateurism or it isn’t. Say yes or say no. If it’s yes, then take care of the kids. If it’s no, then the kids should be free to do what they want and shouldn’t have to sign [away their rights on] scholarship papers.”
Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei?
Also in this hour: An intimate portrait of a man who’s sometimes called China’s Andy Warhol—a global art star who’s now using his international renown, along with a video camera and a growing underground Twitter following, to push the boundaries of freedom in today’s China.
The Private Life of Bradley Manning
And an in-depth portrait of Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks.
Money and March Madness is a FRONTLINE production with Cam Bay Productions. The correspondent and writer is Lowell Bergman. The film is produced by Zachary Stauffer and senior produced by Carl Byker. The series senior producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by Reva and David Logan. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation and by the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund. Additional funding for FRONTLINE’s expanded broadcast season is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.
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