The Honorable Tom McMillen Visits League of Fans' Sports Forum

Former All-American basketball player, Olympian, Rhodes Scholar and United States Congressman Tom McMillen chats with League of Fans' sports policy director Ken Reed in this episode. The two talk about Tom's decision to delay his NBA career by accepting a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University. The discussion then turns to the state of college athletics today, given the pressures of NIL, the transfer portal, sports gambling and huge media contracts. Reed switches the topic to the poor state of physical fitness our young people are experiencing today. McMillen provides great perspective on this issue given his long involvement with the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (now called the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition). Other topics include the "Jungle of Youth Sports," as McMillen has called them, the profit-at-all-costs nature of sports in this country; why we use taxpayer money to fund new sports palaces for wealthy owners, instead of funding programs that create broad-based sports participation in this country; the lack of a national sports commission or sports ministry in the United States; and why our National Governing Bodies (NGBs) for sports don't -- or can't -- fulfill their mandate to promote "sports for all" in America.