National Career Annihilation Association
August 15, 2002 - The NCAA is forcing Jeremy Bloom to make the decision he desperately tried to avoid-between his professional skiing career and a full-ride football scholarship to CU. Bloom filed a lawsuit July 27, 2002 against the NCAA seeking permission to keep his ski sponsorships, among other incentives, in order to prolong his World Cup career while playing collegiate football. After four days of testimony in a permanent injunction hearing, Judge Daniel Hale of the Boulder District Court ruled in favor of the NCAA.
Much of Bloom's argument in court centered on the NCAA's unfairness to athletes regarding sponsorship. The organization makes hundreds of millions of dollars off of sponsorship endorsements, television contracts, and the appearance of its athletes, while, at the same time prohibiting the athletes themselves from accepting products, gifts, or making money off any type of sponsorship at all. It's ironic that the NCAA is worried about ski sponsors stealing their show-it's as impossible to find a televised mogul competition as it is to avoid the deluge of collegiate football games and their commercials. Essentially a collegiate athlete is a slave to the NCAA and emancipation appears hopeless.
Hale's ruling allows the NCAA to continue to lay claim to not only an athlete's talents on the playing field, but also his likeness and talents away from athletics. In addition to giving up his skiing sponsors, Bloom will be forced to put a modeling and television career on hold if he chooses to suit up for CU.
"It's extremely disappointing for me," Bloom said on ESPN.com. "These are my childhood dreams that I was able to pursue and work a lifetime for and when your future is put in other people's hands and it gets denied, it's very difficult. But I stood up for myself and what I believe in and I'm proud of that."
Though the U.S. Ski Team would lament the loss of one of their most talented bumpers, playing football, even under the tyrannical umbrella of NCAA, could have its perks: Bloom's four-year education at the pricey University of Colorado would cost him nothing, and there's the possibility of a lucrative professional football career. Having already started practice with the Buffs, Bloom has minimal time to make his decision. In fact, he has just one week to drop all of his sponsors and endorsements if he chooses to play football. It's a weighty decision with a renewed Tommy Hilfiger modeling contract, a shot at the 2006 Winter Olympics, and a possible career in television as a sampling of opportunities Bloom would sacrifice to be a Buff.
"I don't know what I'm going to do yet," Bloom told ESPN.com. "The first step is to talk to my attorneys, the University of Colorado, and my family and try to see all my options and make a decision from there."
Perhaps it's time to defer to the boys of Southpark and ask, "What would Brian Boitano Do?"-Jackie Baker