In 2013, during a reporting assignment that took me to Baruch College’s Manhattan campus, I did not happen to bump into George Santos. Which was not unusual at a school with almost 20,000 students. And anyway Santos, the recently elected Republican Congressman from a district near mine, has said he graduated three years earlier from Baruch. Summa cum laude and in the top one percent of his class.
Santos has said he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance there, an area of study with only a glancing relationship to the presentation I was attending on the occasion. The topic that day, addressed by Baruch law professor Marc Edelman, was the legal and ethical issues surrounding the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s adamant, ongoing stance against sharing its enormous profits with its athletes.
“Not every criticism of big business is right,” Edelman, whose writing on sports and law included The Sports Judge column for Forbes, argued then. “But, in the context of the NCAA, it is very difficult to sympathize with the association.”
Of course Baruch, then and now, hardly was in the class of colleges Edelman cited for funding quasi-professional sports operations in which the workers were not compensated and which therefore encouraged the unseemly practice of loyal alums at big-time athletic factories helping to recruit prominent jocks with under-the-table money. “Maybe,” Edelman proposed, “it makes sense if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.”
Not an issue at Baruch, existing at it always has in the NCAA’s lowest rung of Division III, without access to massive TV rights deals or even the benefit of income from ticket sales. So there logically is no record that George Santos had been lured to the school by a volleyball scholarship, as he claimed, because Division III schools do not grant athletic scholarships to anyone. Or that Santos, as he described himself in a 2020 radio interview, was a star on the 2010 Baruch men’s volleyball team that really did win 33 of 39 matches.
But, then, there is no evidence that Santos was even a member of that team. Or that he attended Baruch that year. Or any year.
Though George Santos regularly has noted his Brazilian roots, it also would be dangerous to assume that he might be the same Santos who was a member of the 2012 Brazilian Olympic volleyball team that won the silver medal in London. Fact check: That was Sidnei Santos, known as Sidao, with whom I also did not cross paths since the last of 11 Olympics I covered was the 2006 Turin Winter Games.
I can attest that George Santos did not compete in any of the Super Bowls, NBA Finals, World Series, NHL Finals, soccer World Cups, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, Indianapolis 500s, college football bowl games or thoroughbred Triple Crown races I chronicled in my half-century of sportswriting.
I must acknowledge that the first time I was aware of Baruch fielding athletic teams, however humble the circumstances, came years into reporting local, national and international sports for Newsday—and only then because Roy Chernock, whom I knew while he was building a track and field power at Long Island’s C.W. Post College (now LIU-Post), was hired in the mid-1970s to coach Baruch’s track team.
OK. Back to that early Fall day in 2013 when I was on the Baruch campus. I recall enjoying a cup of coffee on the school’s recently opened pedestrian plaza—the block of 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues—surrounded by young Baruch scholars and, surely, several true Baruch student-athletes. As I said, it was not unreasonable that I didn’t come across George Santos then, beyond the fact that he never had been a Baruch student nor an athlete.
That day, Professor Edelman was predicting that increasing litigation against the NCAA was “lurking very, very closely on the horizon.” And, sure enough, a decade later, the NCAA indeed is faced with its former sins, trying to get a handle on the recent NIL policy that allows its athletes to bank on the “name, image and likeness” established by their athletic accomplishments. Technically, even at the Division III level, George Santos would have been allowed to leverage his Baruch volleyball stardom to be paid for hawking beer or crew neck sweaters or horn-rimmed glasses. If he had been a Baruch volleyball star. Which he wasn’t.