A chalupa-and-gold-ring world

Sporting News, The, Dec 6, 1999 by Dave Kindred

It's a curious world when an exiled pariah counts his filthy lucre while Austin Peay State University suspends two basketball players for three games, 10 percents of a season, because they used a university long-distance code.

The biggest lie in sports history? Easy. It's not Pete Rose's. It's not Latrell Sprewell's. Bigger by a mile is a lie told for 100 years. It's told by the folks who run college athletics. They say college athletes are amateurs and are treated fairly by the gift of a scholarship. When it comes to lies, that one tops any fable told by William Jefferson Clinton.

It's "amateur athletics"? Come on. The NCAA's professional marketers have sold for $6 billion the rights to televise March Madness basketball games. The average yearly payment to our shameless universities will be more than $545 million.

Of that money produced by extraordinary athletes doing dramatic stuff, the athletes will get the usual cut: a scholarship and a lecture on the evils of taking a nickel in payment for their work. This is fair?

It's an outrage, and only the latest in a century of outrages committed by universities practicing hypocrisy without a blush. So many outrages, so little column space, but let's go first to the University of Minnesota.

There the basketball coach was told to get out of town, and get out now. He was judged to have presided over the sort of big-time-athletics academic corruption often suspected but seldom documented. In most lines of work, the coach's behavior would have been cause for firing. But in the curious world of college athletics, he was allowed to take a contract buyout.

And what a buyout, so sweet as to smack of hush money: a lump-sum payment of $1,500,537, along with pension benefits, moving expenses (whatever happened to being ridden out of town on a rail?) and four season tickets to Minnesota games for the next three years.

Got that? The coach is a bad guy, did bad things, brought scandal down on his university and gets $1.5 million as a going-away present. It's a curious world when an exiled pariah counts his filthy lucre while Austin Peay State University suspends two basketball players for three games, 10 percent of a season, because they used a university long-distance code.

The players shouldn't have made the calls, but it's a penny-ante thing. Unlike the Minnesota coach, they didn't corrupt the academic process. Unlike the coach, they didn't cause the university president to call them a liar. Nor did they demand $1.5 million to shut up. But in their world, they're the exploited class and have no power. A coach gets $1.5 million; players get suspended.

Granted, they had no business using a coach's telephone code. But let's look at another telephone story, this one at the University of Memphis.

For more than a year, the Memphis basketball coach made about 1,100 cell phone/calling-card calls totaling nearly 140 hours of conversation with a female student, with whom he has admitted having an affair. Do you think the couple discussed basketball theory? If they didn't, the calls were a violation of university policy on phone use.

Only the coach's resignation made his phone habit news. A player can get suspended for penny-ante phone calls, but a coach might yak on for a year and--for all we know--be given a discount on cell-phone service because he's such a good customer. Again, there's a difference. As a member of the exploiting class, he has power.

Let's go to the heartland now, to the University of Kansas, where a chalupa-challenged football player was suspended. He'd been arrested at 2 a.m. for getting his hind end stuck in the drive-through window at a Taco Bell. It happened when a minimum-wage graveyard shifter forgot to give him his chalupa. The 270-pound defensive end tried to squeeze through the window only 14 inches wide to get his food.

Now, whether the Kansas football player had spent his last nickel on that lost chalupa, I have no idea. I do know this: He didn't have a nickel officially given him for his work in entertaining thousands of ticket-buying, donation-making football fans every Saturday this fall.

For those innocents who believe that in return for athletic performance, players get a priceless education at no cost, two words: Yeah, right. At Minnesota, a tutor wrote 400 papers for as many as 20 basketball players from 1993 to 1998. Those players are being educated? In what?

Do we imagine that this kind of "education" is limited to one university in one conference in one part of the country? Or do we think it might be going on at other institutions of higher learning that have sold their academic souls to the TV networks for a share of that $6 billion?

Speaking of exploitation, let's visit the University of Connecticut. UConn spent approximately $60,000 on rings and pendants given to 298 people in celebration of its 1999 NCAA men's basketball championship.

Rings went to President Clinton, Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland and CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz. UConn coach Jim Calhoun, his assistants, the school's president and its athletic director received gold-and-diamond rings valued at $495.50 each.