The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  But Pitino said he had no intention of traveling to Louisville to watch the race. He put conditions on what could change his mind, as if the people of Kentucky were clamoring for his return and might meet his demands. The current chairman of the university’s board of trustees, which he referred to as “the board of traitors,” would have to step down. And the vice chairman. “I will not go,” he said, without the retirements of “David Grissom [the board chair]—and the pizza guy.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE SPOILS OF UNCOMPENSATED LABOR

  Prosecutors filed new charges in April 2018 that tied two more major basketball schools to the scandal—North Carolina State, a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and Kansas, a perennial Final Four participant and three-time national champion. The superseding indictment, as it is called, sharpened the connection between the shoe companies and alleged bribes paid to induce recruits to attend certain schools.

  Jim Gatto, the Adidas executive, along with an unnamed consultant for the company (and presumably a cooperating witness), funneled money to the father of a high school star to get him to enroll at N.C. State, an Adidas-sponsored school, according to the government. The player was not named, but the description of him—“widely regarded as the top recruit” in North Carolina in the class of 2016—and the details on when he formally committed indicate it was Dennis Smith Jr., who played a year for the Wolfpack and now is a member of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

  Gatto and the consultant were also alleged to have paid two different recruits who signed with Adidas-sponsored Kansas. In the case of all three players—the two at Kansas and the one at North Carolina State—the money was drawn from Adidas by Gatto and his cohort, paid to the accounts of the nonprofit AAU programs, and then redirected to the players’ parents or guardians. In “sham invoices,” as prosecutors described them, the payments were labeled as “travel expenses,” “tournament fees,” or “tournament activation fees.” Gatto and his colleague were said to be working with Christian Dawkins and Merl Code to get the money to the families. Prosecutors said that the mother of one of the Kansas recruits was “personally delivered” a payment on October 31, 2016, in a New York hotel room—$30,000, in cash.

  Notably, money paid to one of the Kansas recruits was needed to get him “out from under” a deal he had made with a rival shoe company—one that had already paid his family in order to direct him to one of their sponsored schools. Published reports said the rival athletic company was Under Armour. That, along with subpoenas reportedly served seeking information on Nike’s grassroots program, further fueled suspicions that federal investigators will move on to the other shoe companies.

  What, if any, of the activities described by the prosecution amount to federal crimes must still be determined, but no matter what, the government’s case, if viewed in a different way—solely as a narrative that exposes the real deal of what takes place on the recruiting circuit—is thoroughly convincing and dovetails with long-held suspicions. The payoffs. The heedless exploitation of young athletes. The mélange of shady characters. The use of AAU teams as conduits for payoffs—essentially, pass-throughs in a money-laundering scheme. It all rings true. There are no insiders—coaches, parents, athletic directors, agents, recruiting gurus, NBA scouts—who can honestly express any shock.

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  When news broke of the arrests in the fall of 2017, prominent college coaches attempted to walk a fine line between not wanting to seem naïve (of course they knew some bad things took place out on the recruiting trail!) and not seeming to have direct knowledge of wrongdoing. “Any coach in this business that tries to act like there weren’t some shenanigans going on . . . they’re not being honest with you,” said Frank Martin, the head coach at South Carolina.

  Martin led his team to the Final Four in 2017 and is widely admired for his no-nonsense, streetwise manner. He once worked as a bouncer at a nightclub, and he came up from the bottom in the coaching profession, getting his first head coaching job at a high school in Miami only after eight years running the junior varsity. One of Martin’s former assistants at South Carolina, Lamont Evans, is among those charged in the NCAA case, for alleged crimes that occurred at Oklahoma State after he left Martin’s staff. Martin said he was “heartbroken” over Evans’s arrest. When a reporter for the Associated Press asked him why, if he suspected that schools were breaking rules, he did not report it to the NCAA, he said, “There’s no snitching within your family.”

  Other coaches expressed sadness and regret over what their business had become. The notion that they are “fishing in polluted waters”—recruiting kids who have become accustomed to receiving material benefits from middle school on up—was echoed by, among others, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. “The grassroots culture of basketball has changed dramatically,” he said. “We are not the only ones recruiting these youngsters. Talent is being recruited all the time in every shape and form.”

  Mark Fox, then at Georgia, was the rare coach who publicly alluded to having failed to sign players he coveted because some other school paid for them. “We’ve had some situations where we didn’t get players because of that reason, and other teams have, too,” he said, adding, “I’m disgusted with how people have treated our game. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

  Fox’s team had a disappointing year and Georgia fired him in March 2018, after nine seasons and just two appearances in the NCAA tournament. Rick Pitino was the only head coach fired in direct response to the federal case, and even that was related in part to his past transgressions.

  Elsewhere, at programs with head coaches who were tied to the federal case, universities appeared to be trying to wait the crisis out. Arizona’s Sean Miller, whose assistant coach, Book Richardson, was indicted in the scheme, sat out one game in late February after ESPN reported that he was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing a $100,000 payoff to a player. He disputed the report—other media outlets indicated it could be in error—and he was back coaching the next game. His university administration backed him, though provisionally, saying in a statement it would not rush to judgment but “continue to pursue every avenue of inquiry available to us” in the midst of an active federal investigation.

  The uncertainty seemed to damage Miller’s recruiting for a time, and there were concerns that Arizona might have to play the following season with just a handful of scholarship players. But memories are short in college sports, and optimism that issues will be papered over is usually rewarded. In the spring of 2018, the so-called late-signing period, Miller landed a six-foot-five guard from California by the name of Devonaire Doutrive. The sports site Arizona Desert Swarm predicted that “other dominoes would follow,” and they did. Miller secured commitments from two other top prospects. He was back in the game, and it looked like his team would be just fine.

  In October 2017, a month after prosecutors brought the charges, Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s president, addressed the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which for a quarter century has been trying to figure out how to fix college sports. His plain language was rare for an NCAA official, and it indicated that he understood that the real victims were not his member schools, despite how the government shaped its case. “It’s disgusting enough as it is,” Emmert said in response to a question about where he thought the federal investigation was headed. “And we ought to recognize that we own that. That’s part of us. When we see a coach, an assistant coach, making $200,000–$300,000 per year, taking a $10,000 bribe to throw some kid under the bus by steering him and his family to an irreputable financial advisor, you’ve got to be just sick to your stomach.”

  But he said he did not support decoupling sports from higher education, as is the case in most of the rest of the world, where professional sport is a career choice made by athletes in their mid- or late teens. They rarely go on to college. “When I travel around the world,” Emmert said, “they all want to emulate our model
, because they hate their model. And they all think that having education and athletics linked together is part of the secret sauce of America.”

  People may tell Emmert that, but the glaring contradiction of the NCAA is not the link between education and athletics—it’s the conscription of young, ostensibly amateur athletes into a multibillion-dollar, profit-seeking sports-and-entertainment empire. You can say they get the benefit of a free education, but their sport is their job. They practice, lift weights, watch film, travel for games. It is true of scholarship athletes in all sports and at all levels at the scholarship-granting Division I level. (Several years ago, I gave a talk at a midsized Division I school. A player on the women’s basketball team told me that she had hoped to major in nursing, but her coach told her she could not do the coursework and required labs and meet her team obligations, so she chose a less demanding major.)

  The current model of big-time Division I sports is built on a foundation of utter hypocrisy: that participants in the two revenue sports are “student-athletes” and the NCAA and their schools equally value the student and athlete aspects of them. It’s not true, and the athletes, their families, and any sentient fan knows it.

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  The two former players on the NCAA’s Commission on College Basketball, the panel appointed after the indictments, David Robinson and Grant Hill are both members of basketball’s Hall of Fame. They are estimable people, but neither is exactly representative of the kids emerging from the grassroots scene. Robinson is the son of a Navy engineer and the only NBA player ever to have graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Hill’s father is a former NFL player and Yale graduate; his mother was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley. The chairwoman of the committee was Condoleezza Rice, an ardent sports fan and the secretary of state in the administration of President George W. Bush.

  In its report, issued in April 2018, the commission demonstrated that it fully understood one of the NCAA’s critical defects: It does not—and possibly cannot—enforce its most cherished rules. When it tries, it does so unequally and, it often seems, selectively. “No stakeholder supported the current system for handling high-stakes infractions,” the report said. “Many informed us that when the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced the charges that led to this commission, the reaction was that ‘everyone knows’ that these payments occur. That state of affairs, where the community knows of significant rule-breaking and yet the governance body lacks the power or will to investigate or act—breeds cynicism and contempt.”

  The committee proposed a range of sensible and possibly helpful reforms, chief among them doing away with the prohibition against players entering the NBA right from high school, the rule that ushered in the one-and-done era. It is the NBA’s rule, however, part of its bargaining agreement with the players’ association, and the league and union are the ones who would have to agree to make the change. Ending one-and-done would probably help a little. Perhaps a half dozen of the best high school prospects might opt to try to go right to the NBA, so there would be less frenzy around their recruiting—at least once the players’ intentions were clear. But that would just take the top sliver of prospects off the market, and otherwise leave all the same temptations in place.

  The panel recommended that high school players be allowed to consult with agents while still retaining their college eligibility, and be able to play in college if they declare their intention to play professionally but go undrafted by the NBA. As a way of lessening the influence of the shoe companies, it suggested that the NCAA sponsor its own camps or tournaments for high school prospects in July and decree that they are the only events that coaches can attend that month.

  Their suggestions, however, are mostly around the edges and do not challenge the root cause of corruption: a structure that brings billions of dollars into the sport and richly rewards coaches and others within athletic departments. “We need to put the college back in college basketball,” Rice said on the day the report was released. “Our focus has been to strengthen the collegiate model—not to move toward one that brings aspects of professionalism into the game.”

  Those are worthy goals, but her statement misses the point by defining “professionalism” only as money paid to players. If you market college games as entertainment and enter into billion-dollar deals with broadcast partners—and accept billions more from the very shoe companies said to be eating away at the integrity of your sport—the game is already plenty professionalized.

  The eighty-page report has a great deal to say about cynicism in college sports, but it is silent on a major element of it: the high salaries paid to coaches and others in athletic departments. And all the profligate spending that is made possible by not paying the players. By not commenting, the commission missed an opportunity to point out the flip side of amateurism in college sport: coaches and administrators taking advantage of it to enrich themselves. Their silence implied they are fine with that.

  There was one other glaring omission. The commission is highly critical of the apparel companies’ practices on the grassroots circuit. They call them out by name—Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour—and identify them as “non-scholastic” influences that compromise athletes and their families. In the leagues they sponsor, the report notes, “many players and their families are accustomed to being paid before they attend college.”

  The commission wants the flow of money from the shoe companies to young players stopped. But what about the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from those same three companies directly to NCAA schools? How can the shoe companies funneling relatively small sums of money to teenage players and their families be a corrupting influence—but those very same companies committing more than a billion dollars to NCAA universities, in very large increments to individual schools, not be of concern? Someone on the commission with a little more street sense, who could see it through the eyes of players, might have seen that contradiction and asked: Wait a second. How is it okay for the NCAA to take the money but not a kid or his family who might need it to pay the rent or keep the lights on?

  In each case, the shoe money buys loyalty to the brand. The cost to players who take it is that they break NCAA rules. The cost to the universities is that they sell a part of their identity—an institution of higher learning becomes a “Nike school” or an “Adidas school.” It pimps out its bookstore in branded gear. It mandates what shoes its athletes must wear, even if something else might fit better.

  The members of the Commission on College Basketball may have believed they were thinking big, but their proposed fixes are small, and the scope of their inquiry was limited. The corrupting influences in college sports are not exterior to the system. The rot comes from the structure of college sport itself.

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  There is every reason to pay college football and men’s basketball players. It has yet to happen not just because leaders of the NCAA stubbornly hold on to an outdated model. That may not even be the biggest reason at this point. The bigger stumbling block is that no one has come up with a plan to pay them that seems to make sense.

  There are gender equity questions. Do you pay athletes on the women’s teams, none of which are revenue sports? (The term is a misnomer and really should be “profit sports.” Women’s basketball teams in Division I generally charge admission to games, as do some other women’s sports, and they benefit from TV money generated by their season-ending tournament. But their revenues do not exceed their expenses.)

  Do you spread the money around and pay men’s and women’s lacrosse and soccer players? Gymnasts, fencers, and swimmers? Field hockey players? They benefit from the money thrown off by football and basketball, which largely fund their sports, but they also bear some of the burdens. The configuration of conferences, designed for maximum TV exposure and revenue in the major sports, increases the travel across all sports. To give one example, teams in the geographic
ally scattered American Athletic Conference travel for games in a circuit that includes stops in Connecticut, Philadelphia, Wichita, Houston, and Orlando. Why, exactly? A college volleyball player could not get the same benefit from his or her sport by competing against rivals closer to home?

  If you only pay the men in basketball and football, because they’re the ones generating money, are they employees? Do you pay the five-star recruit more than the four-star? Can you fire the quarterback if he starts throwing too many interceptions? Cut his pay from his sophomore to junior years if you recruit a younger kid who becomes the first-string QB?

  Once you start paying, what is the rationale for not paying what they are truly generating in the market? NBA and NFL players get roughly 50 percent of team revenues. If you paid that to football and basketball players at the top programs, they would make millions. Can you effectively coach a team of late-teen millionaires? Should there be a salary cap, or could Duke and Kentucky have tens of millions more to spend on players than Wichita State and Butler?

  Is that model marketable—fans rooting for, say, a team from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose players are making peanuts, in a March Madness game against Virginia of the powerful ACC? (A replay of the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, only this time it would be pros against amateurs.) And should it be marketable, or is that the whole problem to begin with—college sports casting itself as big-money entertainment?