‘Making the pros pay’ for amateur sports: the Ontario Athletic Commission, 1920–1947<sup>†</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The capitalist sports-media complex is heavily subsidized in many countries. Teams, leagues and their corporate partners enjoy state-donated land and stadia, favourable tax rates, legislative and judicial relief from antitrust requirements, the player and fan development systems of state-supported playgrounds, schools, colleges and universities, and the legitimation of public ceremonies. They claim these benefits on the basis of the economic spin-offs they generate and the ‘branding’ of cities and regions they headline. But in an earlier political tradition these expectations were reversed. Both sports entrepreneurs and professional athletes were expected to contribute financially to the development of amateur and community sport, on the grounds that it is these programmes that train the players and educate the fans on which capitalist sport depends. One such example was the tax on professional sport levied during the interwar years by the Ontario Athletic Commission (OAC), the subject of this paper. The OAC was the very first state sports body in Canada, and in many ways it set the mould for the state-directed and state-financed programmes of the federal and provincial governments today, although the tax on professional sports no longer exists. The paper was written in 1994, while I was still a member of the board of the publicly owned Stadium Corporation of Ontario, which operated Toronto's SkyDome.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".