The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  He was having fun, easing his way into campus life and already feeling comfortable. His parents were nearby. Just as they had moved nearly two decades ago from Saginaw to East Lansing to follow his cousin Jason Richardson, the future NBA player—and later to Indiana to be near Bowen’s prep school—now they moved to Louisville and into a downtown high-rise called the Galt House. It was both a residence and a hotel—in fact, the official hotel of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby.

  Among coaches and other college basketball insiders, it is viewed as a red flag when players’ parents relocate to the college town, especially when they do not take jobs there. The obvious question is: How are they supporting themselves? It’s not at all uncommon, but it advertises possible irregularities.

  Tugs’s family found him a lawyer—Jason Setchen, of Miami, who specializes in representing athletes in disputes with the NCAA. He had represented current NFL quarterback Cam Newton when his eligibility was under threat at Auburn because of money his father had allegedly accepted from an agent. This, however, was different and more serious. Brian Bowen Jr. was being interviewed as a witness in a criminal investigation. On the way to New York, Setchen told him: We’re taking a trip. Let’s make this as fun as we can. They walked all over the city. They went to sneaker stores. To Chinatown. To Ground Zero and the 9/11 Tribute Museum.

  The next day, Tugs was sitting in a conference room full of FBI agents and prosecutors. What did he know? Did he personally take any money? Why had he delayed his choice so long? What did he know about conversations between his father and Pitino? Between his dad and other Louisville coaches? How about other kids in his recruiting class? Did he have information on how they made their choices and why? Had he ever heard of Jim Gatto or Merl Code?

  Every person in the room was white. There was a picture in the room of some old-timey New York scene, of aristocratic types in top hats. They were all white. It was all unfamiliar, disorienting, and terrifying.

  Tugs told the federal agents that he had not received any money. He had not been part of any conversations about bribes to influence his decision. Whatever his father had or had not done, he didn’t know anything about it.

  He flew back to Louisville. His teammates started practice without their head coach, Pitino, who had been suspended and then terminated; without Jordan Fair and another assistant coach, Kenny Johnson, both of whom were ultimately also fired; and without him. With Tom Jurich also fired, Louisville’s new interim athletic director told Bowen he could not practice or compete with the team, pending further investigation.

  He was allowed to use the weight room in the basketball center, but not under the supervision of the team’s training staff. He felt like an intramural player. He worked out five days a week at a gym in a Baptist church a few miles off campus with a private trainer, Derek Anderson, a former player at Kentucky, because he needed someone to “kick him in the butt,” as Setchen said. But the workouts were lonely and, over time, they felt pointless.

  He had wanted to gain weight and muscle, but if anything, he was going in the wrong direction. His shot was going flat. “I’m doing drills to keep my handle tight,” he said at the time, meaning his ball handling, but that was hard when he was on the court alone instead of dribbling in traffic against defenders.

  In early November, Setchen met with Louisville’s NCAA compliance staff and other administrators to try to persuade them to let Bowen play. The FBI, he said, had cleared Tugs. With all that material gathered in wiretapped phone calls and secretly recorded hotel-room meetings, and all the discussion over money and where to make the handoffs, his voice was not on any of the recordings and he wasn’t in any of the rooms. Setchen argued that it was his father’s deal, not his.

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  Walter Byers became the NCAA’s first executive director in 1951 and stayed in the job until 1987, and for most of that time he was the apostle of amateurism in college sport—a powerful and persuasive voice for keeping the competition pure, as he defined it. Under his leadership, and to the current day, the organization has had a zero tolerance policy with regard to athletes or their families taking even small sums of money, and its measures in response to perceived violations are punitive and often breathtakingly heartless.

  In 2011, the NCAA’s enforcement division discovered that the mother of a Baylor basketball player, Perry Jones, had accepted a fifteen-day, $1,195 loan from his AAU coach to avoid being evicted from her apartment—a loan which at that point she had already paid back. She was battling a heart condition and was unable to work, and the family at times had stayed in hotel rooms they paid for by the week. Her son did not know about the loan, but the NCAA ruled him ineligible for his postseason conference tournament and for the first five games of the next season. “Basically, I got suspended because we were struggling, and my mom didn’t want us to live on the streets,” Jones said. “We were down to nothing and someone helped us out.”

  As he neared the end of his tenure, Byers began to express doubts, and by the end of his life he was a harsh critic of the organization he built. In 1984, he said he believed that up to 30 percent of the major universities were cheating (an estimate many would say was way too low), and he proposed creating an “open division” of semiprofessional programs. Later that year, he told Sports Illustrated, “I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that there has to be a major rearrangement on the part of the institutions of higher learning as to what they want to do with their athletic programs. I think there’s an inherent conflict that has to be resolved. I’m not prepared to go into how an open division would work. But we’re in a situation where we, the colleges, say it’s improper for athletes to get, for example, a new car. Well, is that morally wrong? Or is it wrong because we say it’s wrong?”

  Byers, a native of Kansas City who was an assistant sports information director for the Big Ten Conference before taking the top job at the NCAA, well understood the power of words. The most shocking aspect of his late-in-life conversion was his disavowal of the term “student-athlete,” which he had coined, and which remains the organization’s mantra—its rationale for existing and what allegedly distinguishes college from professional sports.

  In his 1995 memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, Byers wrote, “We crafted the term student-athlete, and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for such words as players and athletes. We told college publicists to speak of ‘college teams’ and not football or basketball ‘clubs,’ a term common to the pros.”

  Byers admitted that “student-athlete” did double duty: It was the phrase that evoked the NCAA’s myth of amateurism, and it also helped to shield the organization from having to pay for athletes injured during competition. In the mid-1950s, a football player named Ray Dennison died from head injuries suffered while playing in a game for Fort Lewis A&M in Colorado. His widow applied for workmen’s compensation benefits but was denied them by Colorado’s Supreme Court, which ruled that he was not an employee “since the college was not in the football business” and had not fielded a team “for the purpose of making a profit.”

  Even though the ruling was in favor of the college, NCAA lawyers continued to be spooked by the implications of its players being categorized as employees, and they considered the term “student-athlete” to be legally protective. And it has been, in numerous cases in which the NCAA and its members prevailed in legal battles against severely injured athletes. In one, a running back for Texas Christian University, Kent Waldrep, was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1974 game against Alabama after being hit by multiple tacklers, then fought a marathon legal battle against TCU for benefits. It ended in 2000, when an appeals court ruled that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on his scholarship.

  Referring to the Ray Dennison case, Walter Byers wrote, “I wonder what that same court’s decision would have been if [Dennison], r
eceiving a Big Eight Conference full ride, had died in the 1990 Orange Bowl, as Colorado lost to Notre Dame in a game sponsored by Federal Express for a rights payment of $2,035,411, televised by NBC for $6,150,000, watched by 74,705 spectators who paid $2,140,870 for tickets. The gross take split among the not-for-profit colleges and Orange Bowl committee was $10,765,859.”

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  In bringing the current NCAA basketball case, Joon Kim, then the interim U.S. attorney in New York, said the defendants had “sullied the spirit of amateur athletics.” In court documents, prosecutors quoted the NCAA rulebook extensively, and in doing so, they called attention to stated principles that sound antiquated if not outright absurd. “Among the NCAA’s core principles for the conduct of intercollegiate athletics is a directive that ‘student athletes shall be amateurs in an intercollegiate sport,’” the criminal complaint says, and that “‘student athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.’”

  The words read almost like a joke, considering that the NCAA itself is a commercial and exploitive enterprise. The indictment notes that the NCAA and its member institutions are in the business of making money: “The scheme . . . interfered with the universities’ ability to control their assets and created a risk of tangible economic harm” as it related to, among other matters, “the possible disgorgement of certain profit sharing.”

  In the fiscal year ending in 2017, the NCAA for the first time surpassed $1 billion in revenue. The majority of its income, $761 million, came from television rights for the season-ending basketball tournament, an annual payment that increased to $869 million in 2018. The contract with CBS and its partners stretches to 2032 and has an overall value of almost $19.6 billion.

  That money, though, is just a fraction of what is generated by college athletes in the sports of football and men’s basketball. Their labor is responsible for revenue that flows directly to their universities (not to the NCAA) from a range of sources, including ticket sales, donations from wealthy boosters, in-stadium advertising, conference broadcast rights, and money from the shoe companies.

  The newest moneymaking gambit is conference-specific TV networks that broadcast games, highlight shows, coaches’ shows, and sports talk, feeding the unquenchable appetites of college sports fans for content. They will generate additional billions of dollars in revenue.

  The schools cannot directly market the images of the players, but they find ways around it. Before superstar prospect Ben Simmons played his one season at LSU, the university paid for billboards around Baton Rouge that said “25 Is Coming,” a reference to his uniform number. (Simmons later said he regretted that the NBA’s age limit prevented him from going straight from high school into the pros. At LSU, he said, “I’d have class, go lift, go to practice, and ‘Oh, Ben, you’ve got to stay and do media and the photo shoot.’ So I’d be kind of annoyed, like, ‘What am I getting out of this?’”)

  Universities reap tens of millions of dollars in student fees—taxes charged on their students solely for the privilege of attending institutions with big-time sports programs, regardless of whether they care about the games or can secure a ticket to attend them. In addition, the effort and sweat of college athletes throws off money in many other directions—to the NCAA’s broadcast partners, to gambling interests, to hotels and restaurants that fill up when they play. CBS, TNT, and other outlets that televise the NCAA tournament gross more than $1 billion in advertising over the course of the three-week event. In March 2017, $422 million was bet on basketball at Las Vegas’s legal sports books—with the bookmakers reaping $21.5 million in profits—compared to $138.4 million bet on the Super Bowl. In total, an estimated $10 billion is wagered on the tournament, some of it legally in the United States, but the vast majority going to offshore sports bookies and local bookmakers, according to the American Gaming Association.

  College football generates even more revenue than basketball, but the money does not flow through the NCAA because the top football programs essentially seceded from their longtime governing organization in 1998 when they came together to form the Bowl Championship Series. The schools in the BCS are now referred to as the Power Five conferences, and include traditional Southeastern Conference powers like Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Auburn; Big Ten behemoths Ohio State and Michigan; Stanford and Oregon in the Pac-12; and one independent, Notre Dame. But the players still compete under the NCAA’s student-athlete rubric, and their compensation is limited to the value of their scholarships and modest “cost of attendance” stipends intended to allow them to afford a trip or two back home, the occasional off-campus meal, and day-to-day incidentals. (The intent is for athletes from impoverished backgrounds to be able to live a little more like their wealthier classmates.)

  The current ten-year contract between the Power Five conferences and ESPN to televise bowl games is worth $7.2 billion but could go up significantly if the BCS expands to an eight-team rather than four-team postseason playoff. There is, as well, enormous money in college football’s regular season. The athletic departments at both Texas and Ohio State now surpass $60 million in ticket sales, most of it from football. At least ten university athletic departments exceed $125 million in total revenue, with Texas A&M first on the list, at $192 million.

  The Power Five schools are generally assumed to have a built-in advantage in basketball because of their enormous football revenue. However, relatively small Catholic institutions continue to compete at the top level, including Villanova, the national champion in basketball two of the last three years, and Xavier, a No. 1 seed in the 2018 NCAA tournament. Gonzaga, a Jesuit university in Spokane, Washington, is another perennial basketball power. It is an oddity on the college sports landscape, but also a hint of something larger: The money is not always about the pursuit of victory. The money, to an equal extent, is just about the money—and the ability of the people who raise it to skim off huge chunks of it to pay themselves big salaries.

  In 2013, the National College Players Association, a fledgling union of NCAA athletes, published a study in cooperation with sports economists at Drexel University in Philadelphia, titled “The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes Under the Guise of Amateurism.” Using the percentage of team revenues allocated to players’ salaries in the NFL and NBA, they calculated what NCAA athletes at the major programs would earn if they got the same share of revenue as the pros did.

  For the ten top-revenue teams in college football, their lost wages over a four-year period ranged from $1.6 million for a player at Arkansas to $2.2 million at Texas. In basketball, with far fewer players per team, the “heist” was much greater. The range was $2.7 million per player in uncompensated labor at Indiana up to $6.5 million at the top school—Louisville.

  As nonprofit entities, college athletic departments have an incentive not to reflect any substantial profit. The most obvious way they spend down their largesse is on the lavish salaries they award to coaches. The $11 million that Alabama football coach Nick Saban made in 2017, which included a $4 million “signing bonus” attached to his new, eight-year deal, was more than any coach in the NFL earned in 2017, including Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, who has led his team to five Super Bowl titles. Belichick made $7.5 million—almost $4 million less than Saban.

  You could argue that Alabama pays Saban his market value, but is there another university that would pay him that? Or an NFL team that would pay him $3 million more than its current highest-paid coach? (His record in two years as coach of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins was 15–17.) The better explanation is that his salary is a way to unload some of the cash his program brings to the institution. In 2017, Alabama football accounted for $108.2 million in revenue—and a staggering $45.9 million in profit.

  NCAA Division I programs also pay bundles of money for coaches not to coach—in buyouts after they have been fired before the end of their contracts. In 2017, the Power
Five football programs were committed to a total of $69 million to dismissed coaches, according to figures compiled by Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt. He calculated that if they spread that money around to their players, each would receive $10,000.

  The bloated buyouts even flow in the wake of disgrace. Baylor University paid its former football coach, Art Briles, $15.1 million after he was fired in 2016 following the revelations that numerous players were involved in sexual assaults, including an alleged gang rape. When Ken Starr, the former university president, left Baylor, he came away with a $4.5 million payout.

  More often, NCAA coaches are bought out for perceived underperformance and in the hope of bringing in a new man who can recruit higher-quality players and win more games. After the 2018 season, Memphis fired basketball coach Tubby Smith, whose career record includes 597 wins and a national title. In two years at Memphis he went 40–26, but his squads did not qualify for the NCAA tournament. The cost of buying out the remainder of his contract came to about $10 million.

  His replacement, Penny Hardaway, was a beloved former Memphis player and a four-time NBA all-star with one other significant attraction: He was the head coach of both a high school and a grassroots team in Memphis, and one of his players, six-foot-eleven forward James Wiseman, was ESPN’s top-ranked prospect in the class of 2019. There was no guarantee Hardaway could sign Wiseman, or any of the other top young prospects he coached, but he seemed like the best chance to make basketball relevant again and put fans back in the Pyramid, the 20,000-seat arena where Memphis games had been drawing puny crowds of 6,000 or less of late.