Cash, check, or charge?

Sporting News, The, July 1, 1996 by Douglas S. Looney

That's because, says Chris Polnsky, an associate athletic director at Texas, "nobody trusts each other." For good reason. Rules work only when the governed agree to be governed. That is not the case in college sports. We're dealing with the '90s version of Prohibition.

And it is not just going on at the Miamis and Oklahoma States and Auburns and assorted other bad-boy institutions. Duke's DeVenzio admits to receiving tainted treasure. He was given a red Camaro convertible while playing for Duke, which prides itself as pristine; Duke athletic department officials told him they could sell his four basketball tickets for $1,000 if he wanted them to--and he did; and DeVenzio would get "$20 to mow somebody's lawn, even though (the man who owned the property had done most of it himself." Meals were always free at the Holiday Inn. (Vic Bubas, Duke's coach from 1959-60 through 1968-69 and who recruited DeVenzio, says of DeVenzio's accusations: "If that was the case, I never, ever knew about it. I think highly of Dick DeVenzio. He's an independent thinker and I respect his right to say it." Bucky Waters, who coached for DeVenzio's last two seasons and who now is vice chancellor at the Duke Medical Center, says DeVenzio's charges "absolutely shock me."

During the recent NCAA basketball tournament two Sweet 16 teams widely suspected of loose play with the regulations--Syracuse and Georgia--walked onto the floor. Said one onlooker, "Instead of starting this game with a whistle, they should sound a burglar alarm."

So how much should the players be paid? Whatever somebody wants to pay them; whatever they can make. The born-again Byers, in his book, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, writes, "I firmly believe in the incentives of capitalism, the freedom of private initiative, the human will to compete and a system wherein the more capable people receive higher rewards." Therefore, he asks, "Why not let generosity to college players happen wherever people want to be generous?"

In other words, let the cash flow begin.

Steve Ehrhart, managing general partner of the Liberty Bowl and former commissioner of the defunct USFL, remembers how people thought the early signing of Herschel Walker for big bucks by the USFL "meant the end of college football." So it will be, says Ehrhart, with getting proper compensation to the players: "It will be absorbed just as the signing of undergraduates has been absorbed."

DeVenzio says athletes simply "should be free to make whatever money they can; and there is no reason whatever that educational institutions should be permitted to suppress the earning power of their athletes."

Indeed, keeping athletes poor--or trying to--invites entreaties by shadowy figures, notably gamblers, who always lurk on the fringes of college sports.

Marvin Johnson was a star basketball player at the University of New Mexico in 1976-77 and 1977-78 and still holds the school record for points in one game (50). He also was immersed in the epidemic cheating: "I got crumbs. I'd say about $5,000. Sometimes I'd go by the coaches' offices and they'd give me cash." Once he got money when he told them his mother needed a new washer. Says Johnson, "I knew it was against the rules. I just didn't understand the rules. Any other student can get money. But with athletes, it's like we're second-class students on campus."