TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.014

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 43

"You Do It Until You Get Caught"


Rearmed by the law, the NCAA puts new pressures on venality

By Tom Callahan


    When the "disintegrating influence of money-mad athletics"
was first hot, Judge Saul Streit condemned the University of
Kentucky as "the acme of commercialism and overemphasis." That
was in 1952, after hearings on Kentucky's role in college
basketball's point-shaving scandal. Streit found "covert
subsidization of players, ruthless exploitation of athletes,
cribbing at examinations, illegal recruiting and the most
flagrant abuse of the athletic scholarship."  More than 30 years
later, the bill of particulars has hardly changed at all.

    The University of Kentucky is now preparing its formal
responses to a list of stark charges made by the National
Collegiate Athletic Association. They range from a falsified
entrance exam to a recruiting payoff that, in what a fan from
Indiana might call an act of God, burst in cash from a
defective airfreight package. Conviction would probably result
in probationary exclusion from tournaments and television. Then
Kentucky would be within one felony of the NCAA's newfound
"death penalty": a one- or two-year shutdown of the sort that
has reduced the football program at Southern Methodist
University to intramurals. Retribution is mine, sayeth the NCAA.

    Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court vouched for the
rulemaker's omnipotence, deciding against Nevada-Las Vegas
basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian in his twelve-year fight for
due process as opposed to arbitrary suspensions. It may be an
accident of timing, but almost from the moment of the decision,
the NCAA has seemed to flex its muscles with increased vigor --
and the college-sports lockup has swelled. Brooklyn College,
Illinois, Marist College, Minnesota, Texas A & M, Arizona State,
Cleveland State, Cincinnati, Houston, West Texas State, Kansas
and Oklahoma represent the year's catch in the NCAA's crusade,
according to its charter, to "retain a clear line of demarcation
between college athletics and professional sports."

    That qualifies as a quaint notion today. But not to Dick
Schultz, 59, a basketball and baseball coach for 25 years and
the NCAA's executive director for the past 16 months. He has put
the membership (800 colleges and universities) on plain notice:
"For willful cheating, severe penalties." Oklahoma's sentence
for being caught on 20 varieties of recruiting violations
includes a year's television blackout and two missed bowl
opportunities (consider the potential revenue lost: just one
Orange Bowl appearance is worth $2.75 million a team). The
punishment prompted Oklahoma athletic director Donnie Duncan to
blurt, "They wanted us, and they got us." Calmly, Schultz
replied that he sensed "a certain amount of paranoia there."

    As sure as the Sooners seemed of their own virtue, they
must have had a few inklings of mischief. In the pages of his
memoirs, flamboyant linebacker Brian Bosworth, class of '86, is
pictured astride a white Corvette above a caption that reads,
"Here I am at my $100-per-half-day college job watching an oil
rig go up and down . . .  and no heavy lifting." A more recent
alumnus, Philadelphia Eagles rookie Keith Jackson, thought he
was defending the program when he testified, "If a guy, an
alumni, comes to you and offers you money, you're going to take
it. It's happening everywhere. You can't stop it. You do it
until you get caught."

    The impoverished player's cry for a few extra dollars for
pizza does not particularly move David Berst, the NCAA's chief
investigator. "It's rich hearing Keith Jackson say that," Berst
told the Washington Post, "after the life-style that players
like him have had at Oklahoma -- private apartment, two
bedrooms, fireplace in the family room, gold chains and a
Porsche." Others, however, wonder about fair compensation for
college athletes in the bountiful age of television, whether
tuition, board and books don't represent a rather mean wage at
that.

    Under the cloud of an NCAA probe, Jackie Sherrill recently
resigned his Texas A & M job before the facts were in, but to
some the most telling points of information are that it was a
$1.6 million job and that a football coach was the highest-paid
higher educator in the country. From that perspective, there is
no perspective.

    To draw even an unclear line of demarcation between
professional sports and college athletics -- or any amateur
athletics -- might not be possible much longer. For good or
bad, the word amateur has nearly finished its long dissolution
into a completely derogatory term. Professional Olympians have
risen up to take extended possession even of those Games so
specifically intended for waves of youth. Imagining them to be
children is not exactly the same as requiring college stars to
be students. Could it be, as illusions go, the difference is
negligible? But some boundaries of fairness are essential to all
games.

    Despite the recent pinches and a few more shortly to come,
Schultz is disposed to imagine "we have turned the corner,"
that either out of fear or disgust compliance with the rules
overall seems to be up. Berst reports that coaches are
bad-mouthing one another a little less. Maybe the tortured look
of Kentucky basketball coach Eddie Sutton, bent over on the
bench beside his sophomore son Sean, 20, is the object lesson.
"I told the players," Sutton said, waiting for the gavel, "this
may be the greatest lesson they learn during the four- or
five-year period that they are at the University of Kentucky."
In the saddest circumstance of all, Sutton's son is charged with
lying to NCAA investigators.