Walter Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, who became the most powerful figure in college sports while leading his organization to unprecedented wealth and unassailable authority, died May 26 at his ranch near Emmett, Kan. He was 93.
He had complications from a urinary tract infection, said a son, Fritz Byers.
Mr. Byers took charge of the NCAA in 1951, when it was a largely ceremonial organization with no full-time employees except himself. Although he neither played college sports nor received a college degree, he guided the NCAA for 36 years and was the principal negotiator of the lucrative television contracts for football and basketball that have enriched colleges throughout the country.
Mr. Byers helped shape modern college football and its postseason array of bowl games and was a principal designer of the NCAA’s annual basketball tournament, which has become one of most popular annual events in sports.
At the same time, he was the chief enforcer of the NCAA’s sometimes arcane rules regarding recruiting and amateurism.
“The NCAA prospered, in my opinion, because of three factors,” Wayne Duke, a former NCAA official who later became commissioner of the Big Ten conference, told Sports Illustrated in 1986. “Enforcement, football on television and the basketball tournament. And Walter was the architect of all three.’’
Throughout his tenure, Mr. Byers led the NCAA with a combination of secrecy and iron-fisted control that often drew comparisons — from supporters and detractors alike — to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
Even as the commissioners of professional baseball, football and basketball leagues became well-known public figures, Mr. Byers stayed in the shadows, despite running an organization of broader scope. He had hundreds of schools and dozens of sports under his purview.
He rarely appeared in public and seldom attended the games that brought the NCAA to prominence.
“The members didn’t run the NCAA, Walter did,” Donna Lopiano, a past president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, said in the 1991 book “Undue Process: NCAA’s Injustice for All” by Don Yaeger. “Whoever has all the information can run the beast, and Walter ran the beast.”
The NCAA was founded in 1906 but for decades was little more than a loose confederation of college athletic directors. When Mr. Byers started in 1951, he had one part-time secretary. Because the NCAA had no central office, he opened one in his home town of Kansas City, Mo.
As he pushed the NCAA into the public eye, he battled stronger organizations such as the Amateur Athletic Union and the U.S. Olympic Committee for pre-eminence.
There were some setbacks, including a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the NCAA’s TV contract for football violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, major athletic conferences and individual schools were free to negotiate their own contracts.
A 1985 Washington Post investigation found that Mr. Byers and several of his top officials received no-interest loans through the NCAA’s bank. Otherwise, he was untouched by scandal.
Under Mr. Byers, the NCAA continued to grow into a behemoth. Now based in Indianapolis, it supervises nearly 90 sports and has more than 1,100 member colleges. Its revenue approaches $1 billion a year.
The NCAA became so large that, after his retirement in 1987, Mr. Byers became one of the sharpest critics of the organization he built. He believed that30 percent of all colleges were violating the rules and that illegal payments to players were rampant.
He began to criticize a system in which coaches and college presidents were growing rich off the labor of unpaid “student-athletes,” a term he was credited with coining.
“The colleges have expanded their control of athletes in the name of amateurism — a modern-day misnomer for economic tyranny,” he wrote in his 1995 book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct.”
As early as 1984, he said, he proposed that athletes receive stipends, workmen’s compensation and other benefits. The college presidents who were members of the NCAA’s governing council would hear none of it.
“I can still see the unsmiling faces of the NCAA Council members in 1984 as they waited for me to defend my suggestion that collegiate players should share in the money,” Mr. Byers wrote. “It was as if I had desecrated my sacred vows.”
Walter Byers was born March 13, 1922, in Kansas City, Mo. His father worked in real estate.
At Rice University in Houston, Mr. Byers failed to make the football team. He then attended the University of Iowa, leaving several credits short of a degree.
Discharged from the Army because of poor eyesight, he worked for the United Press wire service in St. Louis, Madison, Wis., Chicago and New York. In 1947, he became an assistant to the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, Kenneth L. “Tug” Wilson, who was also secretary-treasurer of the NCAA. Mr. Byers then created his niche at the NCAA.
At the office, Mr. Byers wore sober suits, cowboy boots and a toupee. On weekends, he went to his ranch, where he raised registered Hereford cattle. Otherwise, he was a mystery to most people he encountered.
“I couldn’t tell you who his closest friends were,” his second wife told Sports Illustrated. “I’m not sure there were any. I don’t think Walter would let anybody get that close.”
His marriages to Marilyn McCurdy, Betty Sooby and Ruth Berkey ended in divorce. Survivors include three children from his first marriage; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In retirement, Mr. Byers stayed at his ranch and occasionally commented on what he saw as the harmful effects of big money on college sports, fully aware that he was responsible for building the NCAA into a giant money-making machine.
“I was charged with the dual mission of keeping intercollegiate sports clean while generation millions of dollars each year as income for the colleges,” he wrote in his book. “We proved barely adequate in the first instance but enormously successful in the second mission.”