TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.014

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 101 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.