Morse Master remembers his Olympic role

COURTESY YALE BANNER HE'S NO ROOKIE: Morse Master Stanton Wheeler draws on interest and experience in his class Sport and the Law.

By Melissa Barton

While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) continues to investigate the bribery allegations against the two host cities and 13 IOC members involved in the 2002 Olympic bidding process, Morse Master and Law School Professor Stanton Wheeler is paying careful attention.

Wheeler is quite familiar with the relationship between money and the Olympics. After the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, he took a two-year leave of absence and used the earnings from the '84 games as the first president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation (AAF). The Herald sat down with Wheeler to discuss his experience.

The Olympics, Wheeler said, "are fairly new to money": the '84 games were the first to have financial success. But since this success came to the tune of $230 million, cities have engaged in frantic bidding to host the games.

In explaining how he got involved in the '84 Olympics, Wheeler said, "The L.A. Olympics organizing committee had seen to it that 40 percent of those profits would stay in Southern California for the benefit of sports programs for kids in the area." Wheeler created a staff and a plan to determine how to spend the Olympic money.

The AAF, one of the largest private sports foundations in the world, is now worth over $100 million. Its programs boast such talented Yalies as women's fencing team captain Katie Zuckerman, JE '99, who had access to good coaching and fencing equipment thanks to the AAF.

Wheeler's interest in sports has increased ever since he worked for the Olympic Committee. He now teaches a course on Sport and the Law at the Law School. He added that the study of the relationship between sports and the law is a relatively new one.

"When I first began teaching sport and law about 25 years ago, the field hardly existed, either in practice or in other law schools," Wheeler said. "But law follows money, and the field has exploded with the growth of sport as entertainment."

Because of the liberal nature of Yale Law School's curriculum, Wheeler had the opportunity to design the Sport and the Law course based on his personal interests. "Our law school allows professors a great deal of freedom in their choice of courses to teach," he said. "Of course we cover the basic law courses found in almost all schools, but in addition we are encouraged to innovate."

In addition to his now well-established course on sports and the law, Wheeler created a similar course this semester on music. His interest in the subject is well-known to Morsels, who have been graced with his trumpet performances during Master's House events. He is also a member of the Yale Jazz Ensemble. His new course, Music and the Law, will address issues ranging from contracts and copyrights to municipal zoning laws.

"Something similar is now happening with music and the law as what happened with sports," Wheeler said. "Music and the law remains in many places just a small part
of intellectual property, which combines the law of patents, trademarks, and copyright. But American music has
grown to be a worldwide commodity, and there are now `boutique' law firms that specialize in music as a part of entertainment law."

Wheeler came to Yale Law in 1968 with a Ph.D. in sociology and a background in criminal law and justice. "I'm one of several faculty who bring skills other than legal training to the education of our law students," he said. "I've found that, as the years go by, I teach things that I really love. It's interesting to approach these areas through the institutions that are concerned. The field of sport and law is vast, and no one person can know everything there is to know about it." And, to be sure, Wheeler said that he'll "be dealing with the [2002] Olympic scandal" in his sports and the law course in future years.

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