The Origins of the Nehemiah Rule
by Steve McGill
After a long hiatus that was mainly caused by an endless amount of work during the school year, I’m spending much time this summer working on the biography I’ve been writing on the great Renaldo “Skeets” Nehemiah. I just finished the first draft of the ninth chapter, and am currently working on the tenth. The book will be a total of thirteen chapters, so I’m hoping to get the first draft done by the end of September, which I will be able to do if I can get as much done this summer as I’m planning to. Private coaching has picked up a lot recently, which I assume is because of the access to vaccinations as well as the steadily decreasing Covid numbers, and the end of quarantine rules that came with it. And while I love private coaching more than anything in the world, especially when the athletes are fully engaged, I gotta get this dang book done! So I’m trying to keep the coaching to the weekends and occasionally during evenings so that I can get a lot of writing done during the day.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
But I digress. I’m here to talk about the content of chapter nine, which covers Nehemiah’s legal battle in his attempt to regain reinstatement of his amateur status after he signed a contract to play professional football with the San Francisco 49ers in 1982. While Nehemiah knew when he signed the football contract that he was relinquishing his amateur status, he still hoped that the rules would be changed by the governing bodies because rules regarding amateurism were being modified significantly in many other amateur sports. Also, amateurism in track and field had become somewhat of a joke by this time. For decades, the best athletes had been receiving under-the-table payments from meet promoters, and since the 1960’s, shoe companies like rivals Adidas and Puma had been paying athletes handsomely for wearing their shoes and apparel. Nehemiah himself was largely identifiable by his red Puma singlet and shorts, as well as his Puma spikes.
In the chapter, in order to provide context for Nehemiah’s situation, I discuss the history of amateur track and field since the late 1800’s. The first year of the modern Olympics was 1896, which was a time when, in England and the United States, amateur sports were limited to members of the upper and middle classes. Members of the lower class were considered too ignorant to be allowed to participate. So, amateurism as an ideal never really existed. There never was a time when amateurism was what the definition of the word “amateur” suggested: someone who participates in athletic competition for the love of the sport itself. The athletes who were called amateurs belonged to wealthy families, so they could afford to train and compete without worrying about financial matters. A rule was also put in place that prevented athletes who were professional sport from competing as an amateur in an amateur sport. So, a professional boxer, for example, was not only disallowed from competing as an amateur boxer, but he also couldn’t compete as an amateur wrestler or shot putter, etc. This rule was the one that Nehemiah challenged when he sued track and field’s international governing body, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF, now known as World Athletics), and the sport’s national governing body, The Athletics Congress (TAC, now known as USATF).
The most well-known athlete to fall victim to this rule was Jim Thorpe, a part-Native American, part Irishman who won the pentathlon (which is no longer contested) and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics. But after the Games were over and he was chilling at home with his medals, a report came out that he had played minor league baseball three years earlier and was paid for it. Once the report became national news, Thorpe was stripped of his medals. The logic for the rule was that being a professional in one sport gave him an advantage when competing against amateurs. This logic made sense on paper, but plenty of amateurs competed professionally under aliases. Thorpe’s mistake was that he used his real name when playing baseball.
Throughout the 20th century, the battles raged on, as amateur athletes pushed back against draconian rules. Many athletes challenged the authority of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) — the sport’s governing body until it morphed into TAC in 1980. The AAU dictated when and where athletes could run, and any athlete who challenged their authority could be subjected to a lifelong suspension. Jesse Owens, for example, the 1936 Olympic gold medalist in four events, was commanded by the AAU to join a tour of nine European cities directly after the Games. Owens, tired and homesick, didn’t want to run in nine more meets and spend another month in foreign countries. So after the first few meets, Owens and his coach flew back home to the States. The AAU banned him indefinitely, and he never competed in track and field again.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, the big meet was the US vs. the USSR, which was track and field’s version of the cold war. The AAU wanted its best athletes competing in this annual event, and mandated that they do so. The athletes preferred not to compete in the meet because doing so meant missing out on other meets in Europe where they could make a lot of under-the-table money from meet promoters. Then, in 1972, after the Olympic Games in Munich, a new professional circuit was formed, called the International Track Association (ITA). This development led to the AAU imposing what is commonly known as the “contamination rule,” which states that an amateur athlete who competes in a race against a professional athlete can lose his/her eligibility. This rule helped the AAU to maintain its power over athletes by instilling fear, as no one who was still amateur was willing to forfeit a chance to compete in the Olympics.
The contamination rule was imposed by the IAAF in regards to Renaldo. TAC had actually given him permission to compete in domestic meets in the indoor season of 1983. But the IAAF squashed that, saying that only the IAAF had the power to decide who is and who isn’t allowed to compete. The IAAF was led at this time by Primo Nebiolo of Italy, who seemed to take it personally that Renaldo had left athletics for professional American football. Renaldo and his agent, Ron Stanko, sued the IAAF, and won victories at every level of jurisdiction. But after each victory, Nebiolo responded by saying he didn’t care what the courts said, Renaldo was not allowed to run. As a last resort, Renaldo and Stanko took their case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS). This was 1986, and CAS had just come into existence in 1984. Its purpose was to serve as a center for arbitration regarding sports-specific cases, and its decisions were binding.
Renaldo and Stanko traveled to Australia to have their case heard by three CAS judges. They brought with them a tape of the biggest hits Renaldo had taken while playing for the 49ers in order to show the judges that playing football was absolutely not aiding him as a track runner. It took the judges all of 30 minutes to decide unanimously in Renaldo’s favor. However, while Renaldo was on the plane heading back home, Nebiolo was meeting with the three judges and telling them that he didn’t care about their decision, he was still not going to allow Renaldo to run.
Three days later, apparently under pressure by other members of the IAAF to stop dragging this out and embarrassing the sport, Nebiolo informed Renaldo that if he dropped his lawsuit and stopped playing football, his amater status would be reinstated. Renaldo was, of course, enraged, because Nebiolo could’ve told him that a long time ago instead of wasting so much of his time and money.
Ultimately, about a month later, Nebiolo changed the rule stating that professionals in other sports could not compete as amateurs in athletics. TAC followed suit by amending the Amateur Act of 1978 by similarly stating that professionals in other sports could now legally compete as amateurs in track. The rule came to be known as the Nehemiah Rule, and it exists to this day.
Ironically, professionalism entered the sport of athletics in 1983, at the first World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. By the time Renaldo was reinstated in 1986, track athletes like Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses were making more money running track than Renaldo was playing football. But surely, Renaldo’s departure from the sport in 1982 had something to do with that. But why Nebiolo wouldn’t reinstate Renaldo despite the fact that he had allowed professionalism into the sport is something we will never know.
[/am4show]
