In the United States, sports teams and athletes are revered as some of the most influential and idolized people in the country. Some fifty years ago, the biggest celebrities around were Albert Einstein, Clark Gable, and Frank Lloyd Wright. These aforementioned people were all from backgrounds outside of sports and this fact sheds light on the inner workings and normative behaviors of contemporary American life. From looking at this list of famous celebrities around the 1950's one could deduce that Albert Einstein's fame could lead to children developing a fascination for physics and/or a number of different scientific fields. A famous actor during his time, Clark Gable's popularity might possibly be commensurate with the amount of movie enthusiasts at that time in the United States and could ignite a fire for drama in many youths from coast to coast. Finally, a famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright is popular due to his unprecedented style in building design and is unmatched (perhaps only Frank Gehry could be construed as his opposite number), to this day in the field. The famous celebrities of old now hold no apparent similarities with celebrities of the modern United States. Today, the most popular Americans (at least for me) are mostly all professional athletes which shows unequivocally how society has changed in the past fifty to sixty years, and I am not sure it is for the better. Our society, now places professional athletes on the same pedestal as some of the greatest minds in history and the question now is whether college athletes, who are still categorized as amateur, should be paid for their efforts on top of full scholarships.
             To start, fifty years ago scholarships were not yet in existence. My grand father played Football at University of Southern California, which today is one of the most expensive schools in the world. During his duration at USC he never once received any kind of scholarship from the school itself, ho...