Walter Byers and the <scp>NCAA</scp> : Power, Amateurism, and Growing Controversy in Big‐Time College Sport. By Smith, Ronald A., Knoxville, <scp>TN</scp> : University of Tennessee Press, 2025. 320 pp. $24.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1‐62‐190949‐1

In the foreword to Walter Byers and the NCAA: Power, Amateurism, and Growing Controversy in Big-Time College Sport, editor Brian Ingrassia writes that when “Ron Smith writes about the history of intercollegiate athletics, we listen” (xi). Indeed, in this study of Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), author Ronald A. Smith demonstrates why he is the leading expert on the history of US intercollegiate sport. Like Smith's previous 10 books, Walter Byers and the NCAA is distinguished by extensive archival research, incisive critiques of institutions, and timely connections between the storied past of intercollegiate athletics and its turbulent present. The contribution of this book to Smith's oeuvre is the portrait of Byers, who as executive director from 1951 to 1987 was the NCAA's biggest advocate, but in his retirement became one of college sport's biggest critics. By untangling that contradiction, Smith provides valuable scholarship for researchers and teachers of college sports history and administration alike. Importantly, this book is not a biography of Byers, who ascends the throne of the NCAA directorship by page fourteen with only passing mention of his childhood, brief athletic career, and short stint as a foreign correspondent for the United Press. Rather, this is a detailed history of the NCAA under Byers, and the influence and limitations of his despotic leadership. This is not to say that Walter Byers and the NCAA is only an institutional history, as Smith demonstrates many times how Byers' personality and background shaped NCAA policy. Byers's Midwestern suspicion of the east coast, for example, shaped his aggressive negotiations with New York-based TV networks. Likewise, his experience growing up in deeply segregated Kansas City contributed to his slow-walking of collegiate desegregation and his support of racially-biased academic policies. Smith reveals Byers' fingerprints on multiple NCAA policies over the course of fourteen chapters, each covering a different challenge to college athletics during the executive director's thirty-six-year tenure. The book begins with Byers' first major decision: seizing control of television negotiations in order to take “the NCAA from an impoverished association with one secretary in a rented hotel room in Chicago to a multi-million-dollar enterprise” (14). Using extensive material from the NCAA archives, Smith documents Byers's influence on other key intercollegiate policies, from coining the term “student athlete” to scuttle workers' compensation claims to opportunistically offering championships for women in order to increase the NCAA's power. Perhaps Byers's greatest influence was ensconcing amateurism as a key principle of the NCAA through tyrannical enforcement. Here, Smith connects to his extensive prior scholarship, including Sport and Freedom and The Myth of the Amateur, to note that the original, Victorian definition of amateurism never truly existed in US college sport. Even though “Byers never defined the term amateurism,” he was nevertheless a “a major force in defending the ever-changing way the NCAA applied it to college athletics.” Even as Byers personally negotiated hundred-million dollar television contracts, oversaw the construction of new NCAA offices, and “apparently never turned down a salary increase,” Smith shows how the executive director used the full extent of NCAA authority to block college athletes from profiting from their labor (16). Yet while Byers successfully limited students, he was less effective at forestalling coaches, administrators, and institutions from reaping financial rewards. Although Byers ruled college sport with tyrannical aggression, Smith documents his multiple defeats, including the Oklahoma Supreme Court case that cost the NCAA its monopoly control of television, and Jerry Tarkanian, a college basketball coach and Byers's personal nemesis who defied NCAA censure after two decades of legal wrangling. These defeats, as much as his amateur policies, show that Byers “was fully in support of this tradition of opposing the rights of athletes and in favor of fostering the interests of institutions and conferences” (27). Each chapter is arranged topically, which while consistently the right approach and makes for the most compact narrative, does sometimes lead to repetition. For example, in the series of three chapters on the impact of television, background on Byers's personal life and NCAA legal moves appears in both the chapter on the Oklahoma lawsuit and the chapter that immediately follows about Byers's role in television negotiations. This repetition culminates in the final chapter on Byers's confessional memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct. In this chapter, Smith focuses on four areas where Byers's thinking in the tell-all contradicted his prior actions: the Sanity Code, policy enforcement, antitrust, and the treatment of women and minorities. Yet although previous chapters had already focused on each of these four areas, Smith extends the analysis in new and interesting ways, elaborates on Byers's thinking, and draws the book to a close. Such is often the case when Smith retreads what appears at first to be familiar ground, and one benefit of this approach is that each chapter is a cohesive whole. Therefore, any interested scholar can focus on the chapters most relevant to their work or assign them in any number of courses as standalone readings. Walter Byers's attempt to rehabilitate his own image and criticize the institution he led for 36 years makes for a compelling conclusion to this complex work. In Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Byers bemoaned many athletic sins that he himself made possible by aggressively growing college sport. As Smith notes, it “took Byers a lifetime following the blighted and false concept of amateurism to realize the harm he and the NCAA had been doing to athletes for years” (203). Smith artfully concludes Walter Byers and the NCAA by noting that these contradictions embodied in the longtime executive director are “part of the incongruity that helps tell the story of the NCAA… The lasting impact of Walter Byers on the NCAA is still an enigma, a conundrum for future historians to unpack.” For those who will in the future attempt to untangle the conundrum of Walter Byers, Ronald A. Smith has done a masterful job of leading the way. The author has nothing to report.