The shoe companies also engage in another way to get money to the families of sought-after high school players, one that, at least technically, does not seem to violate NCAA rules: Rather than secretly funnel it through a third party like Christian Dawkins, they just fund an AAU team that is operated by a top prospect’s parents. Marvin Bagley III, who played the 2017–18 season at Duke before turning pro, competed for the youth team Phoenix Phamily, which was started by his father, Marvin Bagley Jr., when his son was in his mid-teens—and funded by Nike. His father told Sports Illustrated in 2016 that the Nike money was helping his family “make ends meet.”
Apples Jones, the mother of 2016–17 Kansas player Josh Jackson, founded the 1Nation AAU program at the same time that her son was the object of intense recruiting attention. It was funded by Under Armour, and her son signed on as an endorser with the company just before the 2017 NBA draft. “I am thrilled to officially be a part of team Under Armour as I start my professional career,” he said. He praised Under Armour as “a leading force in basketball today.”
Steve Haney, the lawyer for Christian Dawkins, is a former college basketball player whose son played AAU and Division I basketball. Of all the lawyers involved in the federal case, on the prosecution or defense, he is the most well versed on the grassroots scene. “You’ve got these companies funding whole AAU programs run by kids’ families,” he says. “It’s at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars. It could be more. I honestly don’t get it. Can anyone tell me the difference between that and what my client is accused of?”
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The shoe company money is intended to buy fealty to the brand. The hope is that a young player will progress from one of their AAU teams, to a college program they sponsor, and then, if they become a pro, to wearing their gear in the NBA. In 2014, Rick Pitino lamented that he had a smaller pool of prospects to recruit from because of Louisville’s connection to Adidas, which sponsors fewer grassroots programs than Nike does. When he was asked if there were other coaches who did not like the system, he said, “I’m sure the Nike coaches don’t feel that way because they’re winning the battle.”
Players often, but not always, choose a college team that wears the same shoes as their grassroots program. “It’s what the shoe companies want,” Konchalski said. “But it depends on the leverage their AAU coach has on a player.”
The veteran assistant coach says, “If the family needs money, the sneaker companies are going to offer. If it’s offered, the family is going to take it. Is that clear enough? As a coach, you have to ask, ‘What river am I fishing in? What lake?’ Some of the fish in there are polluted. Do you want to eat that fish? Are you going to get sick if you do? Is the program going to get sick? This is the scene. You can’t change the scene. You make your little choices within it.
“The head coach says to you, ‘Who the fuck do you have for me today? Go get me players.’ But at what cost? My job? Your job? Do I go to the sneaker guy? The boosters? To you? There’s a middle ground between what you do and what the head coach does—what he knows about what you’re doing and what he doesn’t want to know. A lot of them want that middle ground to be as big as possible.
“Sonny Vaccaro is the godfather of all this. He didn’t intend what happened. It got out of his control. The shoe companies are recruiting kids just like the college programs are, but they’re in there first. That’s the underbelly of this thing. The PC term is ‘grassroots’ basketball. It’s really a hunting ground—a hunting ground for street agents and leeches. The money has floated down to younger and younger kids and created expectations, and we’re the bad guys either way. We’re either the cheaters who pay kids or we’re the guys saying to families, ‘We want your kid but, no, no, the spigot just stopped. We want him for free.’”
FBI investigators, armed with court-ordered wiretaps, listened in on exchanges that coaches and others assumed were private, about two hundred hours of recorded phone conversations taken from some thirteen hundred calls that were deemed “pertinent,” meaning the participants were talking about matters the FBI considered relevant to its probe. In addition, undercover agents and cooperating witnesses secretly videotaped more than two dozen meetings in hotel rooms, restaurants, and airports. The highlights of these—enough to support the indictments—have been revealed, but much more is coming.
The day the FBI arrested the coaches and others, the veteran assistant said, was a moment of extreme panic across the college basketball landscape. As he put it, “There’s what, 350-some Division I programs? Believe me, at least half of them had staff meetings that day because they needed to find out: Who’s the touch? Who’s the guy on our staff that mixed with some of these people? Where’s the one degree of separation? College basketball is a small world. I’m talking about the coaches, runners, kids, uncles, agents, scouting gurus, financial advisors, you name it. Everybody knows everybody. We all live together in a broom closet, so there’s always that touch.”
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The lucrative salaries paid to college coaches are probably not news to most people who closely follow sports. Coaches are often the highest-paid public employees in their states, with salaries dwarfing those of governors, college presidents, deans of medical schools, renowned researchers, and all other top talent at their institutions. At least fourteen head college basketball coaches earn more than $3 million a year. The total is likely higher, because salaries are reported in various ways in different states and at private and public institutions, and add-ons like life insurance policies and various bonuses are not always revealed. According to numbers compiled by USA Today, Rick Pitino, before he was fired, was the top-paid basketball coach in 2016–17 at $7.8 million annually. In the newspaper’s last survey of salaries, pay hikes had elevated two coaches above that figure—Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was making $8.98 million and Kentucky’s John Calipari $8 million. NCAA football coaches make even bigger salaries, with Alabama’s Nick Saban, who made $11 million in 2017, leading the pack.
The generous deals given to assistant coaches may be a little more surprising. Lamont Evans, one of the four assistant coaches indicted in the federal case, was making $600,000 a year at Oklahoma State. Louisville’s Kenny Johnson was earning $550,000. The youngest of Pitino’s assistants, Jordan Fair, twenty-eight, who was just two years removed from coaching a high school team in Florida, was paid a $200,000 salary. (Fair and Johnson were fired in the wake of the federal investigation, but they were not among the coaches criminally charged. Johnson has been hired as an assistant coach at La Salle University in Philadelphia.) At Kentucky, assistant coach Kenny Payne makes $800,000 a year.
Assistant coaching jobs are hard to get and easy to lose. They are filled by former college players and, increasingly, by coaches who have come out of the grassroots scene and are valued for their recruiting connections. An assistant coach may get into the profession for all the right reasons—teach the game, mentor kids—but if he rises up to one of the top jobs and is making a half million dollars a year, he suddenly finds himself with a lifestyle and mortgage to match his salary. He has grown accustomed to the finer things his salary provides, and so has his family. When the head coach gets fired, the assistants in almost all cases are sent packing. The positions are so coveted that it is difficult to get back into the business, especially at the same level.
People cheat when they have powerful incentives to do so, and many such inducements exist in college basketball. One is the conviction that everyone else is doing it, so it’s necessary to break the rules just to keep up. The dirtier a sport or any endeavor becomes, the more rational this belief becomes. Think of international cycling over the last several decades. Who could blame a competitor for thinking he had two choices: cheat in order to survive, or quit the sport. An assistant college basketball coach is not a domestique—the term for the riders who serve the lead cyclist on a team, which translates to “servant
”—but they are not the Lance Armstrongs of the operation. The head coach is that, and they serve at his pleasure.
Job security—the fear of being fired—is another powerful incentive to cheat. Teachers and school administrators have been caught in recent years manipulating the results of standardized tests, a trend that only began after their raises, career prospects, and sometimes the survival of their schools began to be tied to student performance.
The careers of college basketball coaches rise and fall on the decisions of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds—and the influences, often hidden, of whoever surrounds those teenagers. “I don’t know how the assistant coaches sleep at night,” an NBA scout says. “Something happens with a kid you’ve been on since he was a freshman, or maybe since middle school. He told you he’s signing with you, and then all the sudden, he’s off in another direction. Did you just waste four years? Is that the end of your job?”
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Recruiting requires long days away from home and is labor-intensive and draining. Head coaches at some programs fly on private jets; the assistants, unless they are traveling with their bosses, normally do not. Even after a scholarship offer is extended and a player has made a verbal commitment but not yet signed a binding offer, coaches continue to call, text, and show up at games. This is known in the trade as “babysitting”—they don’t want some other coach coming in and poaching.
The major grassroots events of the spring and summer are massive affairs, with an annual July event in Las Vegas sponsored by Nike attracting nine hundred teams. Games take place in multiple gyms from nine in the morning until almost midnight. Coaches crisscross the city to check out prospects, and hotel lobbies are thick with players and their families. It’s like a giant trade show except that the product is young basketball talent.
Top college teams travel to games with their NCAA “compliance officers,” officials in the athletic department who serve almost as bouncers. They keep an eye on the traveling party and make sure that no agents or runners or other unsavory individuals make contact with players. The compliance officers handle the list of complimentary tickets to games and makes sure players are not gifting them to unauthorized individuals.
When a player travels with his high school team, it is likely to be a similarly controlled environment. (Assuming it is an actual high school and not a pop-up basketball academy.) He is with a couple of coaches, at least one of whom may be a teacher at the school.
Las Vegas is nothing like that. Many of the teams stay on the Strip because that’s where their coaches want to be. It’s summer in Vegas—the rooms are cheap—and besides, the shoe companies have generously funded their travel budgets. “I’ve got nothing against Vegas. I love Vegas,” a veteran coach says. “But think about this whole deal. You’ve got three thousand players running around the city with AAU coaches as their chaperones.”
The setting in Vegas, and at all the other big grassroots events, is ideal for people who want to develop relationships with players and their families. It is known where they are staying, what time the games are, when their downtime is. “You hang in the lobby and wait,” says someone familiar with the scene. “You say, ‘Hey brother, I know your dad’s cousin in Philly. He talks about you all the time. You on Instagram? You on Twitter? Can I DM you?’ Or better yet, ‘I got tickets for a hip-hop show tonight and I see you guys are done at seven. I could take your family if everybody wants to go?’
“I mean, it’s really that easy. Every one of these kids will say they have a tight group around them, but once someone penetrates it and works their way in, they are ripe to be taken advantage of. Think of it as one of those lazy rivers at an amusement park. Somebody jumps in and they’re just going around and around with you. Pretty soon, you don’t notice them. They’re just floating around with you.”
The former Big Ten assistant coach says, “When you’re recruiting, there’s always that one guy, that cloudy figure who’s with the family and you can never figure it out. Who is he? Where did he come from? But he’s there. And one way or the other, you have to deal with him.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SAGINAW CONNECTION
Brian Bowen was considered by most talent evaluators to be a player who would start for a major college program as a freshman. His refined shooting stroke gave him a chance to average double figures in scoring, and he was projected to rebound at a decent rate. He handled the ball well, passed it okay, and defended like most kids coming out of high school: indifferently.
He would help a team but was not what scouts call “special.” That’s a word they attach to no more than a handful of players every year, and they are specific types: Point guards who combine speed, size, and uncanny court vision and are threats to score themselves or set up teammates for easy hoops. Shooting guards and small forwards with crazy athleticism who can “put their chin on the rim,” as it’s sometimes said, and can also rain down three-point shots when defenders back off of them. Big men, six foot ten and up, who move with swiftness and grace and can assert themselves near the basket or step outside and shoot from the perimeter. The special players have the potential to take over games for long stretches and to carry teams that make extended runs in the NCAA tournament. They are possible NBA all-stars.
Bowen was good, but he was more of a complementary piece—a second or third scoring option on a team stocked with future pros—than a superstar. “Pitino didn’t need Brian Bowen. He would have been fine without him,” an NBA scout says. “He’s not that special. Maybe he would have become that, but you could say the same about fifty other guys. He’s a good shooter, not all that athletic, not a good defender. He wasn’t a one-and-done. Maybe a two-and-done.”
Tom Konchalski saw Bowen play for MeanStreets, the Nike-sponsored AAU team in Chicago, which he jumped to after leaving Saginaw and his former club, the Adidas-backed Michigan Mustangs. “Did I think he was an NBA player? I don’t know about immediately,” he said. “But if he had been coached for a year or two by Rick Pitino, he would have been. Few are better at developing kids, really coaching them.”
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When Bowen finally visited Louisville in the last week of May 2017, he toured the team’s 60,000-square-foot, $15 million basketball complex—which includes a two-level weight and cardio center, massage and hydrotherapy areas, an amphitheater with plush leather chairs for film study, and a roomy, wood-paneled locker room with a lounge area and big-screen TVs. At the center of the locker room, inlaid on the floor, was a portion of the basketball court—the center jump circle—from the Georgia Dome on the night Louisville won the 2013 NCAA tournament.
The amenities were the equal of just about any in the NBA, which is de rigueur for top college programs. Much of the money spent at the elite levels of NCAA sports is to keep up appearances and not be outdone by the competition. That’s why the facilities are so gilded. It is where the players will all but live, and everything is built to impress. The “arms race” that administrators use as a rationale is a way of saying they have no control over the spending—but what it really amounts to is a competition to lay in expensive stuff that teenage boys will be impressed by.
From his spacious second-floor office, Rick Pitino could step out onto a balcony and look down on his practice court, where hanging against one of the walls were banners commemorating his Final Four appearances in 2005 and 2012 as well as the 2013 national title. A plaque was inscribed with Pitino’s “Cardinal Rules.” They were largely platitudes about hard work and no excuse making, but one also urged his young players to “treat all women with kindness and respect, just like you would your mother.” The walls of Pitino’s office and most of the flat surfaces were covered with pictures of his children and grandchildren and all the players from both Louisville and Kentucky whom he had sent on to the NBA.
Bowen had traveled to Louisville with his mother, father, and a man he refe
rred to as a family friend—Christian Dawkins. Just twenty-four years old, and always expensively and impeccably dressed, Dawkins had an air of confidence beyond his years. When they all sat down together in Pitino’s office, the coach was already familiar with Dawkins because he was the intermediary who had set Bowen’s visit in motion. A week earlier, Dawkins had sent Pitino a text that said, “Coach, this is Christian Dawkins. I dealt with you on Jaylen Johnson. Would you have interest in Brian Bowen or are you done recruiting?”
Jaylen Johnson was from Ypsilanti, Michigan, and played three successful seasons for Pitino, from 2014 to 2017, before passing up his senior year to take a shot at the NBA. (He did not stick for long in the league and was currently playing for the minor-league Windy City Bulls.) His mother, Janetta Johnson, has denied that Dawkins played any role in her son’s recruitment.
Pitino had also heard about Bowen from Jim Gatto, the Adidas executive, who called a few days before the campus visit and left Pitino a voice mail. “Coach, Jim Gatto with Adidas. Hope all is well. Sorry to bother you over the weekend, but I just got a call about a player I want to discuss with you,” Gatto said, according to a transcript of the voice mail. Pitino knew Gatto but considered it unusual for him to call about a particular player. When they talked on the phone, Gatto told him he could put in a good word with Bowen’s family. Pitino, in an interview with the Washington Post, said he already had a sense that Bowen was coming his way and thought Gatto was just trying to “take a bow, so to speak.” But it’s not clear how or why Pitino would have thought that.
The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino Page 11
