Caught in an Irish stew

Sporting News, The, August 23, 1999 by Dave Kindred

The NCAA's infractions committee this fall will drop the hammer on Notre Dame's football program. There will be a finding of major infractions, and there will be major punishment of the no-bowl, lose-scholarships kind. These are opinions delivered with certainty because the case is strong. The case is also so public that NCAA pooh-bahs dare not indulge in wrist-slapping lest they be accused of blinking when stared down by Golden Dome elitists.

Notre Dame's defense has been that coach Lou Holtz and his staff, on whose watch the violations occurred, couldn't be everywhere every minute of every day. The argument is that what players do privately is beyond a school's control. So the program shouldn't be punished for violations by players in the company of people not connected to the program, people such as the South Bend bookkeeper Kimberly Dunbar.

The trouble is, Dunbar was linked to the program in the way thousands of people are connected to big-time football schools--by disorienting ties of emotion. She signed up with a university boosters club on June 22, 1995. She went to Las Vegas eight days later. She says she took along Notre Dame wide receiver Derrick Mayes. Uh-oh.

Her boss, Connie Dominiack, says Dunbar's desk at work was heavy with newspaper and magazine clippings on Notre Dame football. Her office conversations often turned to happy talk about the Irish. From time to time, a Notre Dame player met Dunbar at Dominiack Mechanical, Inc., a purveyor of air conditioning units and heat pumps.

Dunbar's visitors prompted office gossip familiar to every office gossiper who has seen a 25-year-old woman in the company of a college football player. In tins case, though, Connie Dominiack says Dunbar did the talking about "going off for the weekend," or going on "vacations. Few people believed Dunbar, and her Notre Dame pals went away to discuss the engineering of fine heat pumps.

Then one day in 1996, Connie Dominiack asked the bookkeeper for the company's bank statements. Well, Dunbar said, they're at my house. The air went heavy with suspicion, and Jerry Dominiack told his bank to change the mailing address and send the company statements directly to him. Uh-oh.

An investigation showed that in five years at Dominiack's, Dunbar had chiseled, weaseled, embezzled, carted off in wheelbarrows and otherwise stolen more than $1.2 million. "And we'll never get it all back," Connie Dominiack says, "unless Kim wins the lottery."

Dunbar claims to have spent as much as $35,000 on those Notre Dame football players who dominated her conversations in the last year of Holtz's tenure. To read Dunbar's sworn testimony and diaries is to recognize her as Notre Dame's hostess with the mostest

Of Mayes, she says she paid for the Vegas weekend, bought him a video camera for his 21st birthday, bought plane tickets to Minnesota, provided a chauffeured limo trip to a Valentine's dinner in Michigan, paid for a weekend at the Chicago Hilton and kept him clothed, fed and flush with walking-around cash.

Maybe a dozen Notre Dame players found Dunbar to be an angel of generosity. Jerry Dominiack filed a suit against Dunbar, Mayes and four other players, trying to recoup his $1.2 million.

Such a tangled web we weave in college athletics. Rather than fight the suit, Mayes paid the Dominiacks maybe $10,000. But even as attorney Gregory Hahn says Mayes steadfastly denies "any wrongdoing," the player admits Dunbar spent money on him--which is as wrong as it gets under NCAA rules. But then, NCAA rules are not law, and maybe Mayes' idea of "wrongdoing" concerns laws, not rules. There's certainly no law against having a good time in Vegas with your favorite bookkeeper.

Also curiously tangled is Notre Dame's response to this mess. The Chicago Tribune has reported Notre Dame will accept major punishment without appeal even after arguing its people did nothing wrong. The school insisted that neither players nor coaches knowingly violated NCAA rules, that it had gained no advantage through Dunbar's gills and that it had shown no failure of institutional control.

So Mayes says he did nothing wrong; yet he pays $10,000. Notre Dame says it did nothing wrong; yet it will take the hit. But just when you think no one today accepts blame for any improper act, you remember the one person who admitted doing wrong.

It wasn't Holtz, who skipped town ahead of the NCAA posse. It wasn't Mayes, who's now a Green Bay Packer. Only Kimberly Dunbar stood up and said, Yep, I did it.

She pleaded guilty to two felony counts and began serving a four-year sentence last September. With time off for good behavior and academic work resulting in a college degree, she will be released October 17. That's a Sunday-- or, as Dunbar probably would put it, the day after Southern Cal comes to town.

I asked Connie Dominiack if everyone in South Bend is a Notre Dame fan. "Yes, they are," she says, only to add with a sigh, "Well, I used to be a Notre Dame fan."

Dave Kindred is a contributing writer for THE SPORTING NEWS. Look for additional commentary from Dave weekdays at sportingnews.com and on AOL (keyword: TSN).