Sport: You Do It Until You Get Caught

When the "disintegrating influence of money-mad athletics" was first hot, Judge Saul Streit condemned the University of Kentucky as "the acme of commercialism and overemphasis." That was in 1952, after hearings on Kentucky's role in college basketball's point-shaving scandal. Streit found "covert subsidization of players, ruthless exploitation of athletes, cribbing at examinations, illegal recruiting and the most flagrant abuse of the athletic scholarship." More than 30 years later, the bill of particulars has hardly changed at all.

The University of Kentucky is now preparing its formal responses to a list of stark charges made by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They range from a falsified entrance exam to a recruiting payoff that, in what a fan from Indiana might call an act of God, burst in cash from a defective airfreight package. Conviction would probably result in probationary exclusion from tournaments and television. Then Kentucky would be within one felony of the NCAA's newfound "death penalty": a one- or two-year shutdown of the sort that has reduced the football program at Southern Methodist University to intramurals. Retribution is mine, sayeth the NCAA.

Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court vouched for the rulemaker's omnipotence, deciding against Nevada-Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian in his twelve-year fight for due process as opposed to arbitrary suspensions. It may be an accident of timing, but almost from the moment of the decision, the NCAA has seemed to flex its muscles with increased vigor -- and the college-sports lockup has swelled. Brooklyn College, Illinois, Marist College, Minnesota, Texas A & M, Arizona State, Cleveland State, Cincinnati, Houston, West Texas State, Kansas and Oklahoma represent the year's catch in the NCAA's crusade, according to its charter, to "retain a clear line of demarcation between college athletics and professional sports."

That qualifies as a quaint notion today. But not to Dick Schultz, 59, a basketball and baseball coach for 25 years and the NCAA's executive director for the past 16 months. He has put the membership (800 colleges and universities) on plain notice: "For willful cheating, severe penalties." Oklahoma's sentence for being caught on 20 varieties of recruiting violations includes a year's television blackout and two missed bowl opportunities (consider the potential revenue lost: just one Orange Bowl appearance is worth $2.75 million a team). The punishment prompted Oklahoma athletic director Donnie Duncan to blurt, "They wanted us, and they got us." Calmly, Schultz replied that he sensed "a certain amount of paranoia there."

As sure as the Sooners seemed of their own virtue, they must have had a few inklings of mischief. In the pages of his memoirs, flamboyant linebacker Brian Bosworth, class of '86, is pictured astride a white Corvette above a caption that reads, "Here I am at my $100-per-half-day college job watching an oil rig go up and down . . . and no heavy lifting." A more recent alumnus, Philadelphia Eagles rookie Keith Jackson, thought he was defending the program when he testified, "If a guy, an alumni, comes to you and offers you money, you're going to take it. It's happening everywhere. You can't stop it. You do it until you get caught."