Motivation Quote by Avery Brundage

Brundage draws a bright line that sounds principled but functions like a border checkpoint: amateurism is “sport,” professionalism is merely “entertainment.” The move is rhetorically sneaky. By redefining terms, he isn’t arguing about salaries or sponsorships; he’s deciding who gets to claim moral legitimacy. “Amateur” becomes a proxy for purity, discipline, and character, while “professional” is framed as a degraded cousin, closer to vaudeville than virtue.

The subtext is class-coded. In Brundage’s era, the “amateur” ideal effectively privileged athletes who could afford to train without pay, travel without wage loss, and compete under rules written by institutions that already had money. Calling professional sport “entertainment” doesn’t just demote it; it also implies that workers who monetize their talent are somehow less serious, less noble, less worthy of honor. It’s an argument that flatters the governing class of sport by preserving their gatekeeping power.

Context matters because Brundage wasn’t a neutral philosopher. As a former athlete and later a major Olympic power broker, he championed strict amateur rules at a time when international sport was colliding with mass media, sponsorship, and state-backed “amateurs” in name only. The line reads today like an anxious defense of an old covenant: sport as a temple, not a marketplace. What makes it work is its moral clarity; what makes it revealing is how much that clarity depends on ignoring who gets excluded when purity becomes policy.