"You Do It Until You Get Caught"

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.