GLOBE TROTTERS
YEARS ago, when Frank McLaughlin, then Fordham AD, attended one of those feckless NCAA reform conventions, he was stunned to see and hear Jerry Tarkanian, basketball coach of notoriously lawless UNLV, support the most stringent rules and punishment proposals.
He later asked Tarkanian how his reputation as a renegade was in such defiance of his law-andorder positions. Tarkanian, leading with his inscrutable facial expression, explained that he hoped his competitors would take the new rules seriously, because he wouldn’t.
McLaughlin never knew if Tarkanian was busting his chops. But he didn’t think so.
With the NCAA Tournament, a billion-dollar TV property, back in mass view, a look at the college basketball coaches enshrined in halls of fame finds many who ran far afoul of NCAA rules as a means to their NCAA Tournament ends, and reveals their schools’ willingness to play their kind of ball. The repetitive play of both parties was the wink and nod.
And early on in this tournament it seemed that significant, whatever-it-takes recruiting truths were evaded.
Utah State, losers to Texas Tech on TNT on Friday, had two players from Poland, one each from Canada, Portugal, Australia and Ukraine. Was that so irrelevant — or damning — that it was ignored by announcers Carter Blackburn and Debbie Antonelli?
It might’ve been fascinating to learn that the Ukrainian, Max Shulga, attended high school at the Basketball School of Excellence in Torrelodones, Spain, just a short bus ride to a state college in Logan, Utah, 5,200 miles away. Or did he ship from Kiev, 5,700 miles out?
Jim Valvano, now ESPN’s sanctified version of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was available to star on ESPN because his operation and operatives were caught cheating too many times while he coached North Carolina State. Its 1983 national championship aside, by 1990 the state school could no longer indulge the scandals on his watch.
Soon, big-name college coaches who were fired for running runaway programs found TV networks to be eager and enriching, no-questions-asked, easy-money employment havens.
Not that the schools found religion. NCAA investigators were hired, and for bigger dough than they were making, by big-time sports colleges to serve as specialists in recruiting and eligibility loop holes.
Many athletic departments already were in the habit of assigning easily compromised rah-rahs as academic advisers to best ensure sustained eligibility while sacrificing academic integrity in “service” to players who soon returned from where they came, unable, despite their collegiate scholarships, to read, write, balance a checkbook or speak functional, discernible English.
Now the NCAA, via its basketball tournament, has been returned to the men and women of TV, those who know better but say the opposite.
Jim Nantz, Clark Kellogg, Grant Hill, Kevin Harlan, Tracy Wolfson and others will line up to tell us that the coaches are special humans, all great men, when the one thing they have in common is doing whatever it takes to win a basketball game for the colleges that serve as their teams’ fronts.
More than 40 years ago, Arizona State football coach Darryl Rogers spoke an unfortunate and lasting truth: “They’ll fire you for losing before they fire you for cheating.”