The Los Angeles Lakers are reportedly going hard after two-time NCAA basketball champion coach Danny Hurley out of UConn. And one argument for Hurley to take the L.A. offer is that the NCAA, with its NIL‘s and its transfer portals, is in a state of flux as it continues to develop from its amateur past (insert cynical chuckle here) into what is essentially a quasi-professional sport.
So the argument goes, why stay at the NCAA level where your roster will change every year as the sport enters this fractious quasi-pro state, when you can go to a real professional sport which is already well settled? Well, this, in one one way, explains the world of track and field.
We just saw how Leonard Korir, after much wrangling, is now being allowed to represent the USA in the Paris Olympic Marathon. This, after he was denied a position because World Athletics was awarding 14 universality places on the Olympic Marathon starting grid to athletes from underrepresented National Olympic Committees. These universality places are designed to increase the diversity of participating nations across the sports program of the Olympic Games.
But WA wasn’t simply adding 14 unqualified universality newbies to the field. Those 14 were displacing people who had actually qualified. Well, that’s just one more example why athletics has never achieved professional, mainstream support that so many of its fans desperately want it to.
As long as the sport remains tied, cradle-to-grave, amateur-to-pro, to its long standing Federation-based Olympic model, with its 214 politically diverse (often corrupt) federations, it will continue to resemble a developmental NCAA-like entity more than a professional sport.
Yes, the sport of athletics wants to become more professional. WA has just announced a new $10 million “Ultimate Championships”, a biennial event pitting world, Olympic and Diamond League winners against the year’s top-performing athletes to determine the “best of the best”. They have scheduled the three-day event for September 2026 in Belgrade, which hosted such a successful World Championships in 2023.
But a professional sport can’t simultaneously be developing amateurs by displacing professionals. Either you are a professional sport or you’re not. It can’t be one size fits all because we have seen the results of that attempt for how many decades is it now?
Maybe this Ultimate Championships will be the answer. But people consume sports in predictable packages, and athletics needs to develop a purely professional setting, not just one, biennial event, where the schedules and competitions align with how other professional sports present themselves to the public. Where all that matters is eyeballs on the screen and asses in the seats. Not adding unqualified athletes to help develop the sport. That is a different and distinct function for a separate organization.
We just went through a big dust up on ESPN‘s First Take show where provocateur Steven A. Smith and basketball analyst Monica McNutt got into a heated debate about the WNBA and the role of rookie Caitlin Clark.
The issue revolved around how the WNBA has been around for more than a quarter century and only now, with Caitlin Clark coming out of Iowa, have eyeballs come to the screen. And how the established players in the WNBA, while liking that the eyeballs are there, are also a little resentful that Caitlin Clark, a white girl, is the one who brought the attention.
So, understandably, the players who have been around for a while, most of whom are black, are a little chippy and are knocking Clark around in their games. And people new to watching the WNBA are questioning this treatment.
But the results are what the results are. For 25 years, the NBA has subsidized the WNBA looking and looking and looking for some catalyst to make it catch on. Well, finally they found one who happened to be a white girl out of Iowa. That has brought out both a positive and a negative side.
We saw this with the NBA in the 1970s when that league was going downhill. The Finals were shown on tape-delay and nobody was watching because the public perceived it as a league full of thugs taking drugs.
It wasn’t until 1979 NCAA Finals stars Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came into the league and joined the two top franchises in Boston and Los Angeles that the NBA took off and became what it is today. But it took the catalyst of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and the subsequent rise of Michael Jordan to turn its fortunes around. It’s just so happened Larry Bird was white and Magic Johnson was black. But both men instantly proved to be worth all the hype.
Bird transformed a 29-win Celtics team into a 61-win team and won Rookie of the Year honors. Magic led the Lakers to the NBA title. If Clark suddenly transforms her team or leads them to a WNBA title, you can bet the resentment will cease.
Boston-raised comedian Bill Burr had a very funny bit a few years back that nobody in the WNBA caught Covid, his way of saying because nobody was going to their games.
“Where were all the feminists?” he wondered. “We gave you a league, and none of you showed up. Instead, women were watching the Kardashians or those Real Housewives shows. So, that’s where the money went, because the money follows the eyeballs.”
Irrespective of the quality of WNBA basketball, nobody was paying attention until Caitlin Clark showed up. Now it’s up to her to prove the hype.
Same thing in track and field. Usain Bolt was a catalyst. He brought eyeballs to track and field. But when Usain Bolt retired, nobody took his place and track and field went back under the radar.
Are the track athletes of today great? Yes. Does it matter? No! Because nobody is watching, especially when the sport is stuck behind streaming paywalls and replaces qualified pros with developmental Joes.
The sport is trying like mad to make somebody a star. But it’s not something you can create. It has to happen of its own accord. The best athletes have to come into your sport because they see a financial future there.
Track and field needs a Caitlin Clark. Not white, necessarily, but someone able to breakthrough beyond the confines of the narrow niche sport.
They had one in Usain Bolt. They had one in the 1980s with Carl Lewis. Before them, in the 1930s, there was Jesse Owens. All three were black, but all three transcended track and connected with mainstream America.
Today, there is no one who fills that role in a sport still governed (though it is trying) like its 1896. The way they have set up the schedule and arranged the sport doesn’t bring middle American eyeballs to the screen. And it likely never will when the powers still want one size to fit all. That’s not a professional approach.
Oh, the consensus seems to be, Danny Hurley should jump at the Lakers offer.
End of rant.
END
WANDERING IN A RUNNING WORLD 
I agree, but I believe an even bigger problem is the short-term, selfish, and insular thinking of track’s federations, most especially World Athletics and USATF. Their primary concerns are making money for themselves in the short-term and maintaining their power (which includes limiting the power of the athletes to market themselves through the “black-out” periods during global championships) rather than growing the sport. Growing the sport might mean giving more power to athletes, possibly even to the point of an athlete transcending the sport, as Michael Jordan did with basketball and the NBA, and that scares them.