If you read Orlando Sanchez’s letter to the NCAA, the one in which he painstakingly lays out a life devoid of so many of the comforts we take for granted — such as not knowing if there was enough money to keep the lights on in his grandmother’s small house in the Dominican Republic — you can’t help but think that no human being could read this and not want to make things right.
Which forces us to ask, “Are there any human beings living in the red brick and glass building located at 700 West Washington Street in Indianapolis?”
That’s where the NCAA headquarters are located, where you can hear the thud of thick manuals being dropped on desks and the whir of computers, but the sound of a heartbeat isn’t audible through a stethoscope.
Sanchez, 24, didn’t take any money from a booster or an uncle or an agent. He wasn’t paid by a national team or a pro team or a soft drink company.
In other words, his case is not even remotely similar to the cases of UCLA’s Shabazz Muhammad or Myck Kabongo of Texas.
“Orlando’s situation is unique, but he has done nothing wrong,’’ said Robert Orr, the attorney retained by St. John’s for the Sanchez case, who previously won Muhammad’s case. “He really has done everything you want — young people to go back to school and get the education.
“Then when an opportunity presents itself to go to college he does that and essentially is being penalized because of the circumstances his family has found themselves in the Dominican.”
Sanchez grew up so poor in the Dominican Republic, his fractured family couldn’t afford his annual high school tuition. When he was 17, his family sent him to Spain to work with his estranged father and his father’s girlfriend, who wanted nothing to do with a son from another woman.
By the way, that high school tuition? Seventeen dollars per month.
It has never been easy for Sanchez, who is so easygoing, his St. John’s teammates have made his cause their cause, even though this fight is about next season. They’re thrilled the university brought in a hired gun.
“One of the nicest young men I’ve ever met,’’ Jeff Brustad, Sanchez’s coach at Monroe College in New Rochelle, said a few weeks ago. “He said ‘Thank you’ after every practice.’’
Sanchez has been denied eligibility because the NCAA has ruled he violated bylaw 14.2.3.1, which in this case they are treating as if it were one of the Ten Commandments. The bylaw states that a player 21 or over loses one year of eligibility for every year of organized competition in which he participates.
Sanchez played eight games for a Dominican club team in 2009. He played for Monroe College last season. Two years down, two to go — but not so fast. In 2010, Sanchez played three minutes and 23 seconds of mop-up time in a game for the Dominican National Team. Later that year, he enrolled and played at Monroe.
The NCAA essentially did a two-for-one, counting two years of eligibility for 2010. According to their fuzzy math — three minutes and 23 seconds, or less time than it takes to boil an egg — cost Sanchez his dream of playing big-time college basketball.
“Please consider my dream,’’ Sanchez wrote in his letter to the NCAA.
But the rule makers — the ones that happen to break their own rules, as in the Miami booster case; the ones whose president, Mark Emmert, slaps on makeup when sitting at the scorer’s table in case a TV camera should mistake him for a reformer instead of a blowhard — seem so caught up in procedure and bylaws they’re not seeing clearly.
St. John’s, with Orr packing some serious experience in these matters, will send another appeal to the NCAA today. It shouldn’t take the NCAA long to do the right thing and let Sanchez know his dream will come true next season.
“It simply boils down to what’s the right thing to do,’’ said Orr.
Surely there’s someone with a pure heart and a clear head at 700 West Washington, right?