Almost 40 years have passed and Andy Coats still remembers the conversation, however brief it might’ve been, that he shared with Supreme Court Justice Byron White in the midst of perhaps the most important legal case in college athletics history.
Coats was the mayor of Oklahoma City, and the lawyer who in 1984 successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the NCAA’s control of football television rights violated federal antitrust law. And White, once a Heisman Trophy runner-up and top NFL draft selection who attended Yale Law School in his earliest years in the pros, sat on the nation’s highest court.
White’s words still play over in Coats’ mind. Decades later, Coats recently recited them like this:
