The good news for Michael Zheng is that if he hurries, he might make it back in time for the start of class for the spring semester at Columbia University. Class technically started on Tuesday, but depending on the schedule for the second semester senior, hopefully he won’t miss much. He might, however, have a bit of jetlag, since he’ll be flying back directly from Melbourne, Australia, where he just lost in the second round of the Australian Open to Corentin Moutet. This is Zheng’s first time playing in a tennis major, although he has played in qualifiers for the US Open the last few years. But getting through Australian qualys then winning an actual first round match is an enormous step for the 21-year-old tennis player.
Note I didn’t say tennis pro, because technically, Zheng is a college athlete, a two time NCAA singles champion and the first Columbia title winner since 1906. He’s currently entering his final spring season for the Lions, when the NCAA play team competitions. Which is how he’s ended in a somewhat unusual predicament, one that could both cost him a considerable amount of money and also lays bare both the hypocrisy and chaos of the current moment in college sports. See, for making the second round of the Open, Zheng earned around $150,000. That’s by far the most money he’s ever seen for playing tennis, especially since he’s relatively new to playing even lower level challenger events. So before this payday, it’s maybe a few thousand here, a couple thousand there. Maybe enough to cover his travel expenses. But now, it’s real money. Only according to NCAA rules, he’s not allowed to accept it. Basically, college athletes are only allowed to make $10,000 a year from playing professionally in a sport like tennis. After that, you can only take what covers your expenses. That is the current predicament, an Ivy League NCAA tennis champion who’s actually going to graduate having to say no to a hard earned $150,000 while we’re literally in the afterglow of the College Football Championship game where star players were earning millions in NIL money to play for Miami and Indiana. I’ll save you the cognitive dissonance – none of it makes sense.
We know how we got here. Basically, the wheels of capitalism came off in college sports, and the courts effectively forced university’s hands to stop treating college football and basketball players as unpaid labor making coaches and administrators filthy rich. So some bizarre system was agreed upon where players could earn money for largely signing to play for a school, not for playing, but for their name, image, and likeness. Which has allowed for the emerging era of billionaires running college sports. But, and this is key here, players aren’t getting paid for playing sports outside of college. So the starting center for Alabama can’t do a spring season in the UFL in the offseason.
Which means that technically, Michael Zheng cannot accept $150,000 for winning a round of the Australian Open and continue to play tennis for Columbia, even when the quarterback of the losing team in the college football championships Carson Beck probably earned over $10 million last season.
There’s way more nuance than could be discussed in a single commentary. It’s why the NCAA rule book reads like War and Peace. But it’s also not as simple as just saying, let everyone make money however they want. Because at some point, the whole idea of college vs professional sports is impossible to decipher. Forget about the quaint notion that being a college athlete actually involved being a college student.
Perhaps the reality is that the confluence of unfettered capitalism and college athletics is an unsustainable cocktail. It’s one thing to try and maintain the beast that is the NFL. It’s entirely different when you do nearly the exact same thing, only under the charter of a university mission statement, where the pursuit of knowledge is still central, at least in some states. And when something as intoxicating as big time college football is truly unleashed, well, the law of unintended consequences takes over. Which leads us to a place when an Ivy League tennis player can’t take money for an outside job, but other college athletes can make multiples of that for working on campus.
That’s the bad news for Michael Zheng, who hopefully will find a loophole to get his rightful winnings. The good news is, if he hurries, he can still make it to class.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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