About a century ago, a young baseball player from Abilene, Kan., struggled with the distinction between professional and amateur sports. This was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the future World War II Allied supreme commander in Europe and two-term president of the United States.

Ike’s predicament has a distant contemporary echo in this year’s ruling by a regional director of the United States National Labor Relations Board that college students on athletic scholarships should be deemed school employees, which would enable them to join labor unions. This ruling, now being contested, has reignited a decades-long controversy over how exactly to define college and university athletes.

Growing up in a relatively poor family, born in 1890, the third of six brothers, Eisenhower, as a small boy, declared his ambition “to be a real major league ballplayer, a real professional like Honus Wagner.” In the early 20th century, Wagner was at the apogee of his career playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates; Ty Cobb called Wagner “maybe the greatest star ever to take the diamond.” (With uncharacteristic gushing, President Eisenhower wrote Wagner in 1954 on his 80th birthday, “You are truly one of baseball’s immortal heroes.”)

At Abilene High School, an almost swaggering Ike played center field while his brother Edgar, one year older, played first base. After graduation in 1909, Dwight worked in the town’s Belle Springs Creamery to finance Edgar’s education at the University of Michigan; Edgar had pledged to drop out later and do the same for him.