Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday morning, which is a thing Ray does only when he has news, a death in the family, or a new grievance about his cable bill. This was option four, which I didn’t know existed.
Ray is now, and I am quoting the laminated card he was mailed, a ‘Founding Member’ of something called the Hoosier Vault Collective. It costs him $79 a month. He gets a quarter-zip, a window decal, a quarterly newsletter, and what the brochure calls ‘a seat at the table.’ I asked what table. He said he didn’t know yet but he was hoping it was the one with the buffet at the spring banquet.
For those of you blessed enough not to have a Ray in your life, an NIL collective is what happens when a booster club hires a graphic designer. It is a 501(c)(something) that exists to pay college athletes for the use of their name, image, and likeness, which is a fancy way of saying it pays them to play, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a booster club. We’ve made a full lap around the parking lot and ended up exactly where we started, only now there’s a logo and a podcast.
I asked Ray which Indiana athletes the Hoosier Vault is currently supporting. He paused for the kind of beat a guy takes when he’s about to make something up. Then he said, ‘All of them.’ I asked him to name three. He named two basketball players, both of whom transferred in January. The Vault, apparently, is not a subscription service that updates the roster in real time.
Coach DiMaggio’s idea of NIL, back when I was twenty-two and being paid $4,800 a year to coach a Pennsylvania high school football team into the ground, was slipping a kid a Sunoco gas card if his mother was working two shifts. He called it ‘helping out.’ Nobody mailed him a quarter-zip for it. Nobody made him a Founding Member. The transaction was that the kid got to school on time and didn’t tell anybody, and Coach got to keep doing the only thing he was qualified to do, which was yell at teenagers in a polyester shirt.
What gets me about the Vault, and the Forge, and the Crimson Collective, and the Bluegrass Reserve, and whichever one your school is leaning on you to join — and they are all named, I have noticed, like premium bourbons or off-brand cryptocurrencies — is the merch. Ray sent me a picture of his quarter-zip. It has a stitched logo that looks like a shield being struck by lightning over a wheat sheaf. I have seen actual Indiana athletic department gear that was less designed than this. The collective is outproducing the school.
My grandson Eli, who is fourteen and plays travel baseball for an organization that has its own Instagram strategist, came over Sunday and informed me his program is ‘in talks’ to launch what he called a ‘youth NIL pilot.’ I asked him what that meant. He said some of the kids would get small stipends if they hit certain Instagram follower thresholds. He said this the way I used to say I wanted to be a fireman. Calmly. Like it was a job. He is in the eighth grade, and the algorithm is now part of his swing.
And meanwhile the Sweet Sixteen kicks off tonight, and every kid out there is a millionaire, or thinks he is, or is about to be told he isn’t and should hit the portal. Petey Corrigan, the toughest pulling guard I ever coached, who pulled lake ice out of his pickup with bare hands in February of ’78, would have looked at a Founding Member quarter-zip and asked who he had to fight to get out of wearing it. Petey is now sixty-six and runs a hardware store in Altoona. Nobody has ever offered him a seat at any table.
Ray says the Vault is having a ‘members-only watch party’ at a Hilton ballroom outside Indianapolis tonight. He’s driving down with his cousin. There will be a cash bar, a step-and-repeat, and what the email promised is ‘a special video message from a current student-athlete.’ Ray is very excited. I told him to bring me back a window decal.
Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.