There was a time when we thought we knew what an amateur is.

He is the guy who doesn't get paid. Or, more accurately, the guy who isn't supposed to get paid.

When I was at Louisiana State University in the 1970s, we knew about the running back who drove a Corvette and the point guard whose father had somehow acquired a job at the university. Maybe there were innocent explanations. Certainly there was plausible deniability.

The modern amateur ideal came down to us largely from 19th-century Britain, where gentlemen played games for love while grubby professionals played for money. The distinction was supposed to be moral, though it helped enormously if the gentleman possessed enough money that he didn't need any more.

By the time I arrived at LSU, we had democratized the hypocrisy. Big-time college athletics preserved the appearance of amateurism while accommodating the inconvenient fact that talented young athletes possessed considerable monetary value. Boosters found jobs. Cars appeared. Envelopes changed hands. Rules said one thing. Reality dictated another.

What's happened since is that we gave up pretending it isn't there.

Now my old school is involved in an argument that would have been difficult to explain to us then.

Two former Ole Miss football players, Zxavian Harris and Dae'Quan Wright, tried professional football after last season. Harris signed as an undrafted free agent with the New Orleans Saints; Wright signed with the Philadelphia Eagles before being claimed by the Cleveland Browns. Both were waived. Both then sought to play college football again at LSU for their former Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin.

A Louisiana judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing the NCAA and Southeastern Conference from blocking their return, but the SEC has its own rule prohibiting players who have signed NFL contracts from returning to conference football. The dispute escalated until the SEC threatened to expel LSU from the conference. Kiffin left both men off the roster, and LSU has since filled its last two spots with other players, ending Harris' and Wright's chances of playing for the Tigers this season.

It hardly mattered. LSU beat Clemson 51-10, prompting Kiffin to joke, "Imagine if we had pro players."

LSU President Wade Rousse now calls the issue "moot." As a football matter, it is. But Harris and Wright said they would repay the money they earned during their brief professional careers, leaving us with a wonderful 2026 question: If you give the money back, were you ever really a professional?

Or should you even have to give the money back?

Colt Knost was once one of the best amateur golfers in the world. In 2007, he won the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Amateur Public Links championships and played on the victorious American Walker Cup team. Then he turned professional, played 199 PGA Tour events, and made more than $4.3 million in official prize money. Now a CBS commentator, he wants to be an amateur again.

Knost applied to the USGA for reinstatement last year; his application is on hold while the organization reconsiders its policies. Former professionals have lately become conspicuous in elite amateur golf: Six of the eight quarter-finalists at last year's U.S. Mid-Amateur were former pros; at this year's U.S. Senior Amateur all four semifinalists were. One can understand why the genuine amateurs might feel misused.

The LSU players and Knost are coming at the same problem from opposite directions. Harris and Wright want to go from the NFL back to college football; Knost wants to go from the PGA Tour back to amateur golf. All three accepted over-the-table money to play their sports, which once would have settled the matter. Not any more.

College athletes may now receive NIL compensation, and schools share millions in athletic revenue with their players. A college quarterback can make considerably more playing football than a marginal NFL player. Yet one is a "student-athlete" and the other a professional.

Part of the problem is that amateurism has always been unnatural in a capitalist society. Once enough people become interested in watching somebody play a game, ability acquires economic value whether the rules recognize it or not. Tennis learned this before college football did.

For much of the 20th century, professionals were barred from Wimbledon and other great championships. The best amateurs traveled internationally while officially not making their living from tennis, and officials found ways to pay expenses and allowances while maintaining the distinction. They had a word for the result: "shamateurism."

Rod Laver won all four major championships as an amateur in 1962, then turned professional and became ineligible for them. For five years, one of the greatest players ever couldn't play Wimbledon. In 1968, tennis surrendered and admitted pros to its championships. Wimbledon remained Wimbledon. Centre Court stayed green. The product got better. And nobody had to participate in silly fiction.

College sports held on longer because the athlete was supposed to be a student who happened to play football. And to be fair, that's what most of them were. We shouldn't sneer at the ideal simply because big-time college sports failed so conspicuously to live up to it. Student-athletes exist--they just don't tend to play in nationally televised games.

The fiction became harder to sustain once the student-athlete became the reason millions of people were watching. Coaches negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts. Conferences sold television rights. Universities sold tickets and luxury boxes.

The player got a scholarship and was warned about accepting lunch.

The Corvette in the LSU parking lot wasn't evidence that money had invaded college sports. Money was already there. It was Adam Smith's invisible hand dangling the keys.

"Amateur" comes from the Latin "amator": someone who does something for the love of it. We turned it into an economic classification and now, apparently, an administrative one.

If Harris and Wright have college eligibility remaining, why should a few weeks in an NFL training camp make them permanently different from teammates who may receive substantial compensation? And if Knost no longer plays golf for a living, at what point does he become one of us again? He reportedly plays game-improvement irons now, but I still wouldn't give him strokes.

I don't miss the hypocrisy of the old system, or pretending a scholarship was adequate recompense in a sport generating billions in revenue. What I might miss is the pleasant idea beneath the hypocrisy: There might remain a small territory in American life where being very good at something didn't immediately require us to determine its market price.

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What does ‘amateur’ mean in the age of NIL and college sports revenue sharing?