If college sports were ever subjected to racketeering laws, college presidents would have to get in line to take the fifth.
The latest sow, reap SUNY Binghamton basketball scandal — last week’s arrest of star point guard Tiki Mayben, charged with felony sale of drugs — is just another entry in another one of those sick, win-at-all-costs tales, this one in large part funded by New York taxpayers.
Having been successfully recruited to Syracuse, Mayben could not enroll because of academic deficiencies. He next went to UMass, where he played one year, then transferred to Hudson Valley Community College, then to Binghamton, which was happy to have him help win basketball games.
Last year, Binghamton, for the first time, made the CBS-underwritten NCAA tournament. Sure it did. Over the last five years, the college repeatedly demonstrated that its primary mission is to win basketball games, even if it meant recruiting from Serbia Miladin Kovacevic, who beat a Binghamton student, half his size, into a coma.
Kovacevic previously was used as bait, a two-for-one, to recruit Lazar Trifunovic, also from Serbia. He transferred after the Kovacevic episode. Since 2004, Milos Klimovic, from Bosnia, Moussa Camara, from France, Canadians Chretien Lukusa and Jaan Montgomery, and Giovanni Olomo, from Cameroon, have been recipients of Binghamton/New York State basketball scholarships.
Then there was the shoplifting arrest of guard Malik Alvin, recruited to Binghamton after flunking out of Texas-El Paso. And then there’s star guard D.J. Rivera, who came to Binghamton when St. Joseph’s no longer could suffer his academic and social issues. Recently, Binghamton signed guard Corey Chandler after he was thrown off the Rutgers’ team for violating rules.
On and on, and on and on. Oh, and in March, two Binghamton assistant athletic directors were sued by a female Binghamton administrator for physical and verbal sexual misconduct.
So how can Binghamton be slapped by the NCAA for “loss of institutional control” when it’s clear that the school traded its institutional control to construct a winning basketball team? How can you charge a parent with not paying attention while his kids wandered into traffic when the parent dropped them off in the middle of the highway?
Postscript: Friday afternoon, clearly under mounting pressure, Binghamton released — essentially tossed — five players, including Rivera, Alvin and Chandler. A sudden flirtation with integrity by a school that never should have abandoned its integrity in the first place. Yeah, it was all the players’ fault.
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Social studies pop quiz: Over the last 25 years, who has had the better chance to be hired for positions as TV commentators, those ex-players and ex-coaches known as sportsmen — gentlemen — or those known as cads, for dirty play, antisocial behavior and even lawlessness?
That’s an easy one.
Every time Jimmy Johnson appears on Fox’s NFL pregame show, I’m left to wonder exactly what made him attractive to Fox, and what sustains that attraction. It’s not as if he has all kinds of neat things to tell us every Sunday.
Last Sunday, I tried — hard, too — to hear something significant spoken by Johnson. The best he could do was tell us that “I love the swagger” displayed by Rex Ryan. Oh, great; just what the NFL needs, another bumptious dude, another guy at the top eager to gut the sport from his sport.
Johnson’s University of Miami teams used to play with a swagger — the kind that would lead to brawls and over-the-top hassles on and off the field, not to mention arrests and academic, financial and drug scandals.
By the time Johnson, in 1989, left Miami to coach the Cowboys, Miami football was notorious, known to the nation as a whatever-it-takes program. In 1995, the NCAA sanctioned Miami for a decade of violations, back to the Jimmy Johnson years.
Nevertheless, Fox thinks so much of Johnson it hired him twice — after he coached the Cowboys, and again eight years ago, after he coached the Dolphins. Fox’s great regard for Johnson persists because, well, because why?
Johnson was the moderately successful head coach of a suspect program at Oklahoma State, then the highly successful head coach of a highly suspect program at Miami, then the head coach of a Dallas Cowboys team that was packed with highly suspect suspects.
And during his first stay with Fox, Johnson drew widespread and highly deserved condemnation for having classless on-air fun as a self-promoting candidate for NFL head coaching jobs — jobs that belonged to other men.
And now, when not watching Johnson say nothing of great importance or even passing profundity on Fox, we can see him on many other channels, all times of day, starring in a highly suspect, get-rich-quick-in-the-stock-market infomercial that seems designed to target suckers while allowing wiser viewers to figure that either Jimmy Johnson will do anything for a buck or he’s starving to death.
Whatever, he’s obviously indispensable.