And you can't do it any more in basketball, either -- LeBron's been around a long time as playing careers go. The rule changed before the 2006 season.

In football, nobody has signed a high school player since 1925. (Cute story, that one: teams scheduled their own games back then, and the Chicago Cardinals -- precursors to today's Arizona team -- needed another win to (arguably) win the league. (No league championship game or Super Bowl back then, but they'd lost a game against the prospective champion, the Pottsville (PA) Maroons, earlier in the season.) So Cards management convinced the owner of the Milwaukee Badgers to play a game against them that week in Chicago. Trouble was, the Milwaukee team, having finished 0-6, had called it a season and their players had gone home. They collected those who were still in the area and filled out the team with players from a Chicago high school. To no one's surprise, the Cardinals beat them, 50-0. Things got confused from there -- the Cardinals were eventually declared league champions -- but the guy who recruited the high school players was thrown out of the league and the Badgers spent their final NFL season of 1926 under new management. No one has signed a high schooler since; there have been formal rules against it during most if not all of that period.)

In baseball, nobody's done it with a non-pitcher from the U.S. or Canada (with no minor league experience) since the draft was created in 1964. So Don's father is an element of fiction also. I think you can still do it in ice hockey and soccer.

Eric

If he played a sport also practiced in Europe he could've been signed up Over There, as Over Here the attitude is "if they are good enough they are old enough". 17 year olds playing pro are far, far from rare.
Hokey, soccer, basketball, volleyball ... the money almost certainly would not be as good as in the Top Four leagues in the US, naturally. Not unless he was another Maradona or Fabregas or Messi

and rules were different then. During WWII, a pitcher named Don Nuxhall played a game for Cincinnati at age 15!

Eric

...and sign players when they graduate from high school. But since the draft began in 1964, only a few such players (three pitchers out of thousands of players drafted, all more than 30 years ago) have started their careers at the major league level after high school. (Reference is to U.S. or Canadian players, though very few high-school age foreign players have come up directly as well.)

The way the roster rules are written, it's in the major league teams' best financial interests to keep a player down in their minor league system for a few years (usually about three) before bringing him up. Outstanding players can make it up sooner, but the rules tilt the other way.

And of course none of this applies to pro football, and basketball changed the rules ten years ago.

Eric

...ar one thing. League rules are quite another, Professional sports organizations -- especially those who negotiate with players' unions -- can restrict eligible players by various methods. (Though not by race, religion, etc. I think age is at best an open question, which is why most leagues use level of school or the equivalent.)

League drafts and signing restrictions -- to say nothing of salary caps -- do represent combination in restraint of trade, for those leagues with independently owned teams. (In some cases, though not the NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB, the league technically owns all the teams.) But baseball, by Supreme Court decision, is exempt from antitrust laws, and other leagues with union representation have gotten the restrictions negotiated into the rules. In the NFL, a 1974 Supreme Court decision (Mackey v. NFL) established that while unilateral restrictions could violate antitrust, that wasn't the case as long as they were established through collective bargaining. (I've read that Congress passed a law some years back with a formal exemption from antitrust for player rules as long as collective bargaining is in place. But I'm unable to find the reference at the present time.)

An independent pro league could be formed with no age limit, or a floor of 18, or a high school graduation requirement. But none of the current major leagues falls into that category. (I believe some semipro leagues do.)

If the Steelers signed a high school player, they could be written out of the schedule or voted out of the NFL, assuming the rules read that way or give the commissioner the power to do it. (Ditto if they signed a college player as a free agent before he went through the draft.) A wild-west situation where anybody can sign anyone they desire is strongly opposed by team owners, since it decreases their stability and could potentially increase team signing expenses, or render a team unable to compete if it can't afford to match the wealthiest teams' offers for elite players.

On the other side, reps for league players prefer a scarcity situation when it comes to free agency, and a limited ability to sign people not yet in the league. It's in their best interests to have just a few free agents available to teams at a time, thus commanding premium prices, rather than an unlimited group of relatively indistinguishable players competing for a limited number of roster spots at minimal pay.

Accordingly, player unions, ever since baseball free agency went through in 1975, have negotiated terms that limit players' free agency rights and allow restrictions on high school and college player eligibility rules, as part of the collective bargaining process.

There's a further consideration in football: colleges willingly serve as a minor league system for the pros in exchange for the NFL not stealing their players early. If they had to compete with the NFL to keep their players, they'd probably have to start paying them. Ditto if they had to compete for high school graduates with NFL teams, as college baseball teams do with MLB organizations.

More than most of you wanted to know, I'm sure, about something very tangential to the story But I didn't feel I could let Jessie's assertions go unanswered.