Sports Scandals

by Laura Finley; Jeffrey J. Fountain Peter Finley

  The cover-up of this case is significant in that it is yet another indicator of the lengths people will go to ensure ''their team'' keeps its best players active. It highlights the immense support for high school athletic teams in some communities, and it raises important issues of where to draw the line when assigning punishments.

  THE LA SALLE UNIVERSITY RAPE COVER-UP

  In 2006 La Salle University faced fines and other sanctions for violating a federal law, the Clery Act, requiring universities to report sexual assaults and other crimes that occur on campuses. La Salle officials failed to report alleged sexual assaults perpetrated by members of the men's basketball team in 2003 and 2004. The U.S. Department of Education claimed La Salle should have informed the entire campus community of the assaults. In its report, it alleged La Salle had been negligent in reporting other crime statistics as well. Spokespersons for the university denied any wrongdoing and planned to appeal the department's findings. This would be the first time the Department of Education cited a college for failing to warn students of an acquaintance assault, and only three colleges have been fined in the fifteen years since the Clery Act was passed. The Clery Act, named for Jeanne Clery, requires colleges and universities receiving federal funds to report most types of campus crimes. It was passed after the 1986 rape and murder of Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Clery.

  In April 2003 a female student on La Salle's women's basketball team reported to men's basketball coach Billy Hahn and women's coach John Miller that she awoke in her bedroom to find male basketball player Dzafio Larkai sexually assaulting her. The basketball coaches did not report her claims to anyone in the athletic administration, and she claimed they discouraged her from telling anyone else. The reaction she received from the coaches, she claimed, made her wait fourteen months before she reported the rape. The coaches later claimed they didn't tell anyone because they were honoring her wish that this remain private.

  In 2004 a counselor with the university's summer basketball camp told the coach she had been sexually assaulted by two players on the men's team. She claimed La Salle stars Gary Neal and Michael Cleaves sexually assaulted her at a party. Men's coach Billy Hahn investigated the incident and spoke to all parties. He then claimed to have reported the incident to athletic director Tom Brennan late the next afternoon. This time, La Salle alerted the campus community of the assault four days later. The students alleged to be involved were placed on interim suspension. When the alleged victim in the April 2003 case became aware of this incident, she came forward.

  In a trial the following fall, Cleaves and Neal were acquitted on all eight counts.34 The prosecution claimed the woman was sexually assaulted while she vomited in a sink after drinking eight shots of high-proof alcohol. Neal and Cleaves claimed the sex was consensual. The jurors rejected the prosecutor's claim that the woman was too drunk to consent to sex. Defense attorneys argued the woman had made up the charges because she was embarrassed about what she had done. The Philadelphia district attorney dropped the charges against Larkai the following week. In that case, the nineteen-year-old accuser decided she did not want to go forward with the case.

  Neal went on to play for Towson State (Maryland) and was the fifth-leading scorer in the nation, averaging more than twenty-eight points per game.35 Larkai played for Bellarmine University in Kentucky. Cleaves sought reinstatement at La Salle, but was denied. He went on to substitute teach in New Jersey high schools.

  In spite of La Salle being sanctioned for failing to report the crimes, Joseph Donovan, a spokesperson for the school, claimed he still believed the school was not required to alert the community in the cases in which the alleged perpetrators were placed on interim suspensions. ''We are obligated to let people know if we think there is a danger to someone else. Our contention is, there was no danger to anyone else in the cases where we didn't.''36 Hahn, who had been with La Salle since 2003, resigned after the charges were announced.

  John Miller, who had been at La Salle for eighteen years, also resigned. Hahn initially found it difficult to get hired as a coach again, but in spring 2007 he signed on as an assistant at West Virginia University under the controversial head coach Bob Huggins.

  DUKE LACROSSE PLAYERS FALSELY ACCUSED OF RAPE

  Three Duke University lacrosse team members, Colin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans, were indicted for raping a twenty-seven-year-old black female who had been hired to strip at a party in March 2006. The story made national headlines, and the players and team were vilifled. Duke cancelled their season, and the coach resigned. By the end, however, it would be the local district attorney, Michael Nifong, who would pay the price, as it became clear that the charges were false, the investigation was a sham, and the players were completely innocent.

  The woman claimed three white men pulled her into a bathroom and raped her at the party. DNA tests were run on forty-seven team members.

  One team member was black and was thus excluded from testing. All the tests came back negative. Prosecutors threatened to press charges for aiding and abetting against the others who were present, hoping to prompt them to provide information.

  The lacrosse coach, Mike Presler, who had led the team to the NCAA championship game in 2005, in his sixteenth season at Duke, was forced to resign as the media pressure on the school became suffocating. ''It was mass hysteria. People prejudged us, the players, the program. Everybody rushed to judgment that this was true with absolutely no evidence.''37 The media ran with stories about the players and their prior arrests, noting that more than a dozen players had previous convictions, although most were for underage drinking. On April 5, 2006, the Duke Lacrosse season was cancelled. Five days before hearing that there was no DNA match to the players, the coach was gone and the season was over.

  ''The laxers,'' as they were known in Durham, North Carolina, were young men known to be confident and among the most popular students on campus.

  While the incident prompted some protests, many on campus, including some females, expressed disbelief that the players sexually assaulted the woman.

  Rather, they relied on the age-old rape myth, ''they could have any girl they wanted, so why would they need to rape anyone.''38 Supporters of the players pointed the finger at Nifong, who they believed pursued the case to endear himself with the black community as he faced reelection.

  In spring 2007, after months of being vilifled in spite of unwavering claims of innocence, all charges were dropped against Finnerty, Seligman, and Evans.

  Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for violating rules of professional conduct. The committee found that his handling of the case demonstrated he was not seeking justice, but trying to boost his campaign for reelection. He did not appeal the punishment and resigned in June 2007.

  The NCAA granted an extra year of eligibility to the thirty-three team members whose 2006 season was cancelled. Finnerty decided to move on to Loyola College in Maryland and competes for the lacrosse team. Seligman is now enrolled at Brown, and Evans graduated last year and now works on Wall Street. Matt Danowski, who was on the team when the allegations occurred, was voted 2007 Player of the Year. In June 2007, Finnerty, Seligman, and Evans reached a settlement that eliminated the possibility that they could sue Duke University. The players received an undisclosed amount for the coverage of legal fees.

  Coach Pressler believed his players all along. Despite his tremendous resume, which featured three Atlantic Coast Conference championships and ten NCAA tournament appearances, he was rejected from several other coaching positions. On August 5, 2006, Pressler was hired as head lacrosse coach at Bryant University, a small Division II school in Rhode Island.

  This case was one of the most widely covered in 2006. It evoked a number of issues relevant in society, including race, social class, privilege, and criticisms of the judicial system.

  Chapter 5

  CHEATING, ACADEMIC FRAUD, AND BOOSTERS RUN AMOK

  From copying a classmate's homework to ste
aling corporate secrets, people of all ages and demographics cheat with regularity. One poll found 74 percent of high school students admitted cheating in the last year.1 This chapter includes a wide array of cheating that has occurred in sports, and is surely not indicative of the full scope of the problem. Sometimes it is one individual who violates the code of sportsmanship in his or her zeal to win, as in the case of Rosie Ruiz, who faked that she won a marathon after riding the subway for most of the race, or Sammy Sosa corking his bat to hit the baseball even farther.

  Cheating transcends the individual athletes, however. It often involves the exact people we entrust with the job of maintaining the integrity of sports, such as coaches, managers, and league or school officials. Illegal recruiting, payments to players, stealing other teams' signs to gain an advantage in baseball and football, and other examples clearly demonstrate that the stink rises to the top far too frequently. Unlike many other sports scandals, which are sometimes treated more lightly than if the same incident occurs outside of sport, the cheating that occurs in sports is often handled with severe punishment to dissuade others from trying to beat the system. Perhaps this is because the incidents are generally not violations of criminal law, but rather violate team, school, or league regulations. In a particularly egregious case involving Southern Methodist University football, a team received the NCAA ''death penalty,'' which set the standard for how significantly a program can be debilitated for trying to cheat to win.

  ACADEMIC CHEATING SHOCKS WEST POINT, 1951

  Earl ''Red'' Blaik was hired in 1941 to coach football at West Point. Prior to his hiring, the coach of the Army football team was always a career officer that was assigned to the team for a tour of duty. While Blaik was a former star football player for Army, he had resigned his commission in the early 1920s.

  Douglas MacArthur was so impressed with Blaik that he wanted Blaik to be his ''aide-de-camp'' in the Philippines, but Blaik had already resigned and gone into coaching, so MacArthur selected another Army football player, Dwight Eisenhower. Blaik was coaching at Dartmouth when Army enticed him to return to West Point. Blaik built Army into a national powerhouse because he was allowed to bring in a professional staff. Twenty of his assistants went on to be head coaches, including Vince Lombardi. Blaik became the athletic director and implemented a successful recruiting system. Between 1944 and 1950, the Army Cadets had amassed a record of fifty-seven wins, four ties and only three losses, and had won or shared the national championship twice.

  They were one game away from winning a third national championship in 1950 before suffering a loss to Navy in the final game. Al Pollard was a standout fullback, and going into the 1951 season Army saw him as its next Heisman Trophy candidate. The ''Black Knights'' (a nickname given to Blaik's football teams) were set to make another run at the national championship.

  It all ended in August 1951 when an investigation revealed massive cheating by cadets. Once it was concluded, ninety cadets resigned from the academy, thirty-seven of them football players, because they broke the honor code.2 The honor code was simple: ''A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.'' Members of Congress voiced their differing opinions, with Senator Fulbright of Arkansas wanting football at West Point suspended, whereas Congressman Potter of Michigan saw the ninety cadets as ''victims of athletic commercialism.''3 The system that opened the door for rampant cheating was created in 1947 when enrollment grew to over 2,500 students and cadets were split between two regiments. The school wanted to give each student the same tests, so one regiment would take the test first and then the other regiment would take the test later. This allowed for cribbing, the process of passing along questions or answers, because while the regiments were kept apart most of the time, athletics was one area that brought cadets from both regiments together frequently. When questioned, most cadets involved with the cheating scandal admitted their own guilt, but refused to name other cadets. In the end, for the most part, the only evidence against a cadet was his own admission.

  The emphasis on both school and football created a system where upper-class tutors were extensively used. For example, Pollard needed so much help in math he was not allowed to practice until Thursday each week because he needed to spend time with a tutor. He said, ''If I hadn't received help I would've flunked out.''4 Bob Blaik, the son of Coach Blaik, was on the football team at West Point, and even though he was an ''A'' student and ranked sixth in his class, he too was caught up in the cheating scandal because he helped out fellow athletes.

  After losing thirty-seven players including a Heisman hopeful and his own son, Coach Blaik was set to resign. He was convinced to stay by MacArthur who, during a two-hour meeting, admonished him not to leave under fire.

  Blaik continued as Army's coach until 1959, leaving after eighteen years with a record of 121-32-10. Al Pollard went straight into the NFL, while other players enrolled in other universities. Gil Reich, another great player involved in the cheating scandal, enrolled at the University of Kansas and became both an All-American football player and a guard for the basketball team that lost by one point in the 1953 NCAA finals. Reich was drafted by both the Green Bay Packers and the Boston Celtics, but turned them both down and went into the Air Force. After one of the largest single team scandals of all time, Army football was never the same, and the days of Army competing for a national championship have long since passed. Especially significant is the fact that West Point is held up as a bastion of ethics and good character.

  THE GIANTS STEAL SIGNS TO WIN 1951 PENNANT RACE

  On October 13, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit one of Major League Baseball's most famous home runs. It was a three-run blast that has been baseball's most replayed moment, memorable for announcer Russ Hodges screaming, ''The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!'' as Thomson rounded the bases. The ninth-inning home run gave the Giants a 5-4 win in the deciding third game of the pennant tiebreaker against the Brooklyn Dodgers. It would be forever known as, ''The shot heard 'round the world.''

  Dodgers' pitcher Ralph Branca would be branded as the guy who gave up the monumental blast. As he watched it head for the outfield fence, he muttered, ''Sink! Sink! Sink!''5 It didn't. Thomson was carried off the field by ecstatic teammates. Footage of the aftermath shows Branca lying on the clubhouse floor, almost lifeless.

  The shot concluded baseball's most memorable pennant race. The Giants had trailed the Dodgers by thirteen-and-a-half games on August 11 and closed the gap at a torrid pace. The teams finished with identical records, and the representative to the World Series was determined by a playoff. The first two games were split, allowing Thomson to etch his name into baseball lore with his clutch hit in the deciding game. The Associated Press carried a story in 1962, citing an unnamed source with the Giants, suggesting the Giants' comeback had been aided by stealing the signs that catchers give to pitchers to indicate the pitch they want thrown. That information would then be signaled to the batters, indicating whether they were going to see a fastball or a breaking ball. The story was not accepted as fact for almost half a century.

  In January 2000 Wall Street Journal writer Joshua Harris Prager officially broke the story. Giants players Monte Irvin, Sal Yvars, and Al Gettel confirmed that the team stole signs. Coach Herman Franks was positioned in the clubhouse above the bleachers and used a military field scope to spot the hand signals delivered by the catchers. He relayed the information to the bullpen with a buzzer system. Backup catcher Sal Yvars then signaled the batters. After beginning to steal signs in late July, the Giants won twenty-three of twenty-eight home games, which, combined with a 29-13 road record over the same stretch enabled them to close the gap that had seemed insurmountable at mid-season.

  Yvars, apparently proud of the team's ingenuity, said, ''People are always thinking about us getting signs in the Polo Grounds [the Giants' home field]. We were stealing signs on the road. No one writes about that. We were thinking all the time.''6

  Branca rea
cted to the story by saying, ''I've lived with this the last 50 years … I think that's despicable.'' He continued, ''If you steal the signs on the field, that's fine. That's part of the game. But to go off the field, if you have access to something and nobody knows about it, I don't like that very much.''7

  Branca had heard that the Giants might have been stealing signs, but never talked about it. ''It would have tarnished Bobby's accomplishment, and I didn't want to do that. He still hit the ball. He still hit a home run. I don't want to be a crybaby.''8 Thomson, perhaps protecting his own legacy, claimed that he did not have any information in advance of that fateful pitch. Branca doesn't believe him; referring to the replay he said, ''He's like a lion jumping on top of a wounded antelope.''9 Thomson did show compassion for Branca saying, ''Years later, now this comes out, maybe this will take some of the pressure he's felt all these years.''10 Both players say they had become very good friends in the years after they were joined by fate, but the confirmation that the Giants had cheated strained the relationship.