That's pretty good writing for a lawyer, I think; most of them favor technical writing. Yes, of course I agree with it, but there is a point on the opposite side of the fence that needs to be made as well. There may be a place in the world for amateur competition. If a group of people get together and decide to organize competitions among, let us say, chess players who are not at the moment being paid to play chess, do they have the right to do that? It would seem to me that they do, and this would not seem to me to be "flatly illegal", I don' think.
The issue arises in two separate cases. First, it is an issue when others are making large amounts of money to stage these "amateur" chess competitions, but the chess players themselves--key to the project--are uniquely banned from earning income for participating. And second, it is an issue when the claim that no one is being "paid" to participate in these competitions is a sham and a fraud, when everyone knows that the chess players ARE being paid and there are all sorts of carve-outs and exceptions to the "no payments" rule.
The issue is whether money is central to the undertaking. If, let us say, your local Chamber of Commerce wanted to stage a Chess Competition for those who volunteered to play, that would be legal and appropriate, I would think, if:
THe Chamber of Commerce was paying the costs of staging the event,
The rights to televise or cover the event were not sold, and
Tickets to the event either were not sold or were sold for moderate amounts of money.
They would be presumptively illegal if:
A profit-seeking company was staging the event,
The rights to televise the event were sold for a million dollars, and
Seats in the auditorium were sold for $100 a seat.
When I was in college (1967-1971), most games were NOT televised. When they were televised, no one had paid for the "rights" to televise the game or the rights to broadcast the game. As late as 1965, you might have two or three different radio stations broadcasting the same event, none of them paying for the right to do so.
Those things are still the rule today at small colleges with only a local following. That's a different situation. Thus, it would seem to me that if those small colleges want to say, "No, we don't WANT to go down the road of paying athletes to compete in our leagues", it would seem to me that they have every right to do so. The only thing is that if they do that, then they have to adopt rules saying "You can't sell your broadcast rights. You can't sell tickets for more than $10. You can't pay your coach or any other involved person more than a reasonable living wage. . .let's say $70,000 a year. You can't sell advertising in the arena. If you want to be an amateur, you have to be an amateur on both ends."
Too many people are talking about this problem in absolutes. Too many people are saying things that seem to amount to "You can't run an amateur competition." I am saying you CAN run an amateur competition; it just needs to be amateur on all sides.