“In a sense,” said Nevin Shapiro, “I can be looked at as a pioneer. I was way ahead of the curve.”
Well, yes, I suppose. In a sense. Two decades before the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling that college football players could receive money for endorsements and the like, Shapiro, then in his 30s, was paying University of Miami football players, under the table, to play football. And not only that: He was throwing parties for them at his lavish home in Miami. He was picking up the tab at strip clubs. He was taking them out on his yacht. He was providing them with women. Anything they needed, Shapiro took care of. “I spent millions on the team back then.”
Shapiro, who’d made millions through a business that distributed groceries, loved the team. And he hated the iron rule of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which back then held that, while coaches and administrators could get rich from college sports, any player who took money to play their sport would fry in hell. Or at least be banned from college sports if they were caught.
Shapiro made a mockery of these rules, and for a long time, he did not get caught.
