Schools learn lessons of sporting world Illustration: Edd Aragon. IN CASE anyone thinks the ASADA investigation, the America's Cup and the (literally) priceless kerfuffle over GPS sport have nothing in common, let's spell it out. Five Great Public Schools have refused to play Macquarie Bank/Bing Lee Team Scots for the annual Fly Emirates Free Business Upgrades Basketball Trophy, alleging that Scots (hereafter known as "MacBank" or "Bing Lee") have stacked their deck with illegal - sorry, ungentlemanly - imports. Citigroup/Australian Wheat Board Team Kings have expressed dignified sorrow at the death of the amateur spirit. It is counteralleged, via an anonymous leak to the Old Scotsonian newsletter, that HSBC Team Newington has only one home-grown waterman in its rowing First VIII, the rest being the exchange-program offspring of reject American sailors punted by Australians from Oracle Team USA. Taking the high moral and intellectual ground, Investec Team Sydney Grammar have pulled out of all sporting competition. In retaliation, pointing out that Investec have stacked their four-unit maths team with cheap Chinese and Korean imports, MacBank Team Scots is boycotting this year's Higher School Certificate. Meanwhile, some of the biggest, muscliest and strangest-looking schoolboys have emerged from the Nubodi/Michelle Bridges And The Other Guy From The Biggest Loser gymnasia of the north shore and eastern suburbs to contest the Combined Associated Schools' rugby competition. Few of these beefed-up freaks make the top grade, their entitlements having been usurped by bearded, road-train-driving, 120-kilo Polynesians, blessed with heightened singing voices and human growth hormone levels. This year, for the record, Suisse Team Barker College edged out Crown Entertainment Team Cranbrook. Dean "The Drink Drive Bloody Idiot Weapon" Robinson and Darren "The SportingBet Gazelle" Hibbert have kept a watchful eye over all competitions, advising recruiters from the AFL, NRL, NBL, NBA, NFL and FFA. Danny Weidler hears whispers that Khoder Nasser has signed sponsorship deals for an enormous league/union/boxing/netball prospect recently recruited from Papeete into the Steggles/John Ibrahim/Crown Entertainment Cranbrook under-12s. Word is the kid's already huge in Japan. On the sidelines, the Australian Tax Office and a Mark Latham-led class action on behalf of taxpayers are taking the private schools to court to recover public moneys spent on hypoxic chambers, peptide-laced milkshakes and other inducements. Alternatively, the Commonwealth would settle for naming rights on the schools' state-of-the-art new grandstands. The beauty of an interconnected world is that nobody has clean hands. Wind back the clock, and it is those who opened the door to shamateurism who are complaining about it now. When I was at a proudly non-selective private school in the 1980s, we had an Australian under-17 rugby star and a national middle-distance champion turn up under our Christmas tree. Everyone else was doing it, why not us? Then there was the Scots Centenary Dream Team of 1993. All the current MacBank/Bing Lee regime can be justly accused of is taking schoolboy professionalism towards its logical endpoint. Eulogising the "amateur spirit" is not going to wash. The amateur spirit was a beautiful time for those born into it. That green and pleasant world was a time when amateurs upheld sport's right spirit (while slipping "expenses" into the back pocket), and the professionals, grubby types who debased games by playing them for filthy lucre, occupied the underclass of rugby league, fast bowling, and non-Olympic athletics and boxing. The rich travelled in first, the professionals in third, and the middle-class retired young. Little about glorious amateurism is worth mourning, and democratic, meritocratic Australia did much on the world stage to bring it undone. It took 80 years of Test cricket, 130 years of America's Cup sailing, a century of international rugby and Olympic Games for the fabric of amateurism to unravel. It has taken longer for it to come apart in schoolboy sport, but in a competitive world driven by new money and new merit more than the privileges of old family lines, it was bound to happen. If the end of amateurism is no bad thing, is it a good thing? Well, it's not good for the kids at MacBank, Crown, Suisse, Citigroup/AWB and the other schools who've been cheated of their dream to play in the Firsts. It's not necessarily good for the elite who are channelled into full-time commitment to one sport, their brains and bodies broken by repetitive stress before they're adults. It's certainly not good for wider Australian sports, as every kid who's forced to specialise at one sport at age 13 is a loss to every other sport. It can't be good for the Australian community to see $5 million a year of public money, which was meant to keep private school fees affordable for ordinary people, being spent on directors of sports science and the like. And it can't even be said that it's always good for underprivileged kids who get a boost up the social ladder. Kurtley Beale went to St Joseph's. The Ella boys went to Matraville High. But most of all, it's not going to be good for those thousands of schoolchildren who are right now chasing down their twelve Weetbix with the dubious products of quack apothecaries recommended by coaches selling a dream of "success." A successful organised criminal is one who sends his kids to private schools. The "links," a favourite word of ASADA and the ACC, are already there. If authorities want to be serious about coming dark days in Australian sports, they should go back to school.