Word: amateurness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...word in college athletics. Being an “amateur” is as good a thing as being “professional” is bad. But the technicalities can be absurd. If your parents can afford to send you to sports camps every summer, you remain an amateur. You can win the gold medal for your country and the NCAA championship for your college and still be an amateur. But if you join your Olympic teammates on the Wheaties box, you instantly become a professional. That is why some 1998 U.S. women’s ice hockey Olympians...
...being what former Princeton president William G. Bowen calls “regular students” in “Reclaiming the Game,” his indictment of intercollegiate athletics at selective colleges. It is another piece of our aristocratic athletic heritage to pretend that true athletes, amateur athletes, are dispassionate about their sports and uninterested in perfecting their skills. In reality, athletic excellence is a thing of beauty and grace. Its devoted pursuit can dignify the athlete and inspire the observer. Instead, our athletes are objects of economic discrimination and public contempt that would not be tolerated...
...incentives for secondary fields; and discouragement of honors programs. Money is dirty: Students preparing for law, medicine, or business—including many athletes—are treated as outside the liberal arts tradition. Yet the new curricular proposals sustain that great intellectual tradition in name only. The gentleman amateur, dilettantish and unmoved by the financial exigencies of real life, is the ideal student of Harvard’s new curriculum...
...Betts admits that the project is based on several assumptions, “including that an advanced alien civilization is signaling out.” Big assumption, maybe, but Horowitz has always been up for the challenge. At eight, he became the world’s youngest licensed amateur radio operator. More recently, he served as a model for the protagonist in astronomer Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, made into a 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster. Fame can bring glory, but not necessarily little green men—or their flashing lights...
...vast majority go nowhere--YouTube hosts millions of hours of drunken parties, tearful confessions, smiling babies, sleeping cats and screen grabs from World of Warcraft, all doomed to obscurity. Nike showed a firm grasp of the form with a popular clip, an ad stealthily designed to look like amateur footage, showing soccer deity Ronaldinho putting on a pair of sneakers and then, incredibly, nailing the crossbar with a soccer ball four times in a row. Some of the successes are accidental. For a while, one of the popular movies on Google Video was a 20-sec. clip...