Paying Players
September 20, 2019
There's been a lot of talk about new legislation in California that would permit college football players to benefit financially from their likeness, whether it's to do ads or to sell trading cards.
This is not a new thing in college football. In the Roaring '20's many famous players were paid to use their likeness. Notre Dame's famous Four Horsemen were featured in an ad for a plow company where they rode some draft horses that were pulling boats along the Erie Canal.
Red Grange was used to sell Pall Mall cigarettes until Coach Zuppke found out and made him switch to shilling for Coach's family's Prohibition era moonshine business.
The practice was banned by the NCAA in 1930. No, not because of the Great Depression. There was an unfortunate incident involving Minnesota star Bronko Nagurski. Bronko was a big man in all dimensions and one of the new fangled condominium companies wanted him to endorse their new super-sized product for "large" men. It was made using natural rubber from the Dutch East Indies.
Bronko proudly did the advertisements and got a large monthly supply that he used with his many female fans to avoid any little Bronkos running around. Unfortunately his second month's supply of condominiums were made from a rubber tree that had been infected with chimpanzee syphilis and it resulted in significant Bronko shrinkage as well as a disease outbreak that left most of Minneapolis infertile.
The NCAA stepped in to regulate and eventually decided to ban the use of player likenesses due to the infamous Land O Lakes Birth Dearth. And now you know the rest of the story.