by Kent Sterling
The New Times published an article yesterday that reveals an investigation into the eligibility of NBA bound Eric Bledsoe. He was a poor high school student until he switched schools prior to his senior year, and three months rent was reportedly paid by the high school coach at Bledsoe’s new school.
For the entire article, click here.
Bledsoe will be a first round pick in next months NBA Draft. He is lightning fast, and is going to make a lot of money playing basketball because he had a successful freshman year at UK. Without finding a way to gain NCAA eligibility, Bledsoe would likely be a cautionary tale for kids taking school seriously. Instead, his future is secure.
So who do you blame for the kid’s issues. The high school coach who paid the rent to lure him into his district after the Mom told anyone who would listen the day before that Bledsoe was headed to California. That same high school coach told a college coach that the school who signed Bledsoe would need to reimburse him for the $400 monthly rent he paid for the the Bledsoes.
The mom, according to the NY Times article, worked as a custodian and in an adult book store. No shame in that. A parent does what she has to do. If that’s cleaning floors and selling porn to degenerates to put food on the table, that’s what you do. If a coach says, “I’ll take care of the rent,” you say thanks.
Does blame exist for Maurice Ford, the high school coach who paid three or four month’s rent for the Bledsoe’s, according to the landlord? No doubt he used Bledsoe for his talent and was rewarded with a trip to the state finals.
How about the often-accused, never convicted Kentucky coach John Calipari? Bledsoe’s transcript was in order and the NCAA Clearinghouse signed off on Bledsoe’s application. Ford demanded cash for the rent money he advanced to the Bledsoes, but that is easily handled without any overt complicity from Calipari or anyone else wearing a UK logo.
A kid gets to play in the NBA. A mom gets out of the custodial/adult retail publishing industry. A high school coach made it possible by reportedly pealing off some Benjamins to cover rent for a place in his district. A college coach brings a kid to Lexington, and for the privilege someone reportedly reimburses the high school coach for the cake he slipped the landlord. Now, the kid will get checks bigger than he has ever seen.
The percentage of NBA players who return to poverty within a couple of years after leaving the NBA is horrifying, so who knows whether Bledsoe will reap meaningful benefits from being the second best point guard in this draft after being the second best point guard on his Kentucky team. There is no doubt though that a kid who, according to the NY Times, lived in squalor in Birmingham.
Someone smarter than the people in charge at the high school associations, NCAA, and NBA needs to invest some serious brainpower in determining what’s best for the kids. On the list of priorities, the welfare of the kids doesn’t seem to be a priority for anyone. The New York Times found the information about Eric Bledsoe moving from a near lost cause because of academics to NBA first round draft pick so intriguing that they sent a reporter to Birmingham, Alabama, to unearth some dirt.
Honestly, who cares if kids bounce from high school to high school because of athletics? Who does that harm? No one wants a bidding war for high school athletes, but why is it my business or anyone else’s where a kid goes to high school?
In 2008, NCAA President Myles Brand made $1.72 million is salary and benefits. Meanwhile, the basketball players like Bledsoe who do the work get squadoosh other than a free education that is meaningless to many of them.
It’s time for basketball to create a place where kids 16-18 can go to make some money playing basketball. The NCAA does nothing for a kid like Bledsoe. There is no point for that kid to spend a year in high school breaking rules or benefitting from others who break the rules. Bledsoe, John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, and Daniel Orton gained no NCAA approved benefit from spending nine months in Lexington.
The NCAA just signed an obscene $10.8-billion extension to its college basketball agreement with CBS. That agreement requires players to play for nothing. The answer isn’t paying the players to toil for the NCAA and their university. The answer is to allow the kids who need money more than an education to go do that. Let kids like the four freshmen at UK to go to the NBDL. Teach them about money. Try to end the cycle that leads to NBA players to incredible wealth and back to poverty. Lead them away from Bentleys and toward smart investments. Make the NBDL something more than a repository for basketball players dreaming of signing a ten-day NBA contract, and toward a product that will sell tickets and give kids some cash before being drafted into the NBA.
This system is weighted so heavily toward the rewarding of corruption that there is no other way to succeed. It’s time for grown-ups to put on their big boy pants and do what’s right for the kids so they don’t start their careers complicit in corruption. If Mark Emmert is going to justify his enormous salary as the new head of the NCAA, he needs to show up wearing his big boy pants and make meaningful changes to reset the system that fails kids on a daily basis.
It’s time kids who have no business being in college stay out of college. There are plenty of young men and women who would kill for a chance at the free education these scholarshipped athletes rarely value. It’s also time coaches like Calipari quit leaving the NCAA clearinghouse responsible for weeding out the kids who can’t make the grade.
Allowing freshman to play Varsity football and basketball in 1972-73 started this whole ball-a-rollin. Forget about concentrating on academics, maturing and acclimating oneself to the campus; if you’re a stud, you’re playing right now. Coaches will find ways to cheat, manipulate, and con to keep their “athlete-students” eligible.
Kent,
Despite your anti-UK bias (one that no doubt grew with years if pro IU sympathies), you’ve written a great article here. I will not be a homer and say UK isn’t complicit in this system, hell, we helped build it to give us what we want, the collegiate equivalent of a professional sports franchise. To that end, we use the kids who come to our program as much as anyone. We just don’t give them a paycheck, that can be proven and traced back to the university.
Here are some other good articles for you and your readers.
http://www.bylawblog.com/2010/05/slamming-the-door/
http://www.aseaofblue.com/2010/5/30/1493516/kentucky-basketball-the-tie-that
Right now perhaps our greatest calling card is that unlike Jim Calhoun, the NCAA has never been able to link Calipari to the infractions. Not something to crow about.
Too much money is flying around. Young kids with stellar talent should be pros, not college students, unless that is where they want to be. Right now the NCAA makes it impossible to determine what the players truly want. I would bet most want to share in the wealth they generate.
I love responses from UK fans that automatically infer an bias whenever anyone writes something negative about Kentucky. I never wrote a negative word about Kentucky when Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, or Billy Gillespie coached in Lexington. Was this bias against the Wildcats gestating like cicadas that come out every 17 years? Maybe this latent bias needed time to build to a breaking point, and then exploded all over John Calipari.
Everything else you wrote was exactly right – especially the “great article” part.
You couldn’t have written about Pitino or Tubby, because you didn’t have an outlet. So don’t pat youself on the back for that one. Gillispie almost singlehandedly destroyed our program, so anything you wrote would have been redundant. The perfect storm of Kentucky and Calipari and the eyes they will draw to your little blog create the focus for feelings you know you have long held. So suck it.
Not having a website didn’t keep me from writing. It kept you from reading. Gillespie was inept, but not a cheater (unless he was a really bad cheater). To be honest, fewer people read what I write about UK than almost anything else, but my moral outrage won’t let me stop. In this case, I never said Calipari and UK did anything wrong. I think the rules are ridiculous governing this kind of thing are crazy.
Hey, jackass, read your own posts. Time and time again, you accuse UK’s college program of institutional racism, full scale cheating (although the points shaving scandal can hardly be called a program decision) and downright ugly. You have said that since the invention of the game of basketball, UK has been a cancer. I paraphrase because I am not going to be bothered to reread your lambasts, BUT then I remembered…March 25, 2010. You wrote the following, “There are rumors everywhere that ESPN, Yahoo, and the New York Times are investigating a money and real estate trail between “friends” of Calipari and the three recruits.”
Is this it? Is this the fabled thorough investigation? Is this the much anticipated smoking gun that was so hot it was dumped by the New York Times online at midnight on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend? Wow, they must have a lot of confidence in how this will explode across the landscape, especially since the events all occurred before Kentucky got into the Eric Bledsoe business.
And when you read the story, you can see why it is a solid candidate for bullshit article. Nothing was proven in regards to academic irregularity or malfeasance. It was just improbable. Dare I say unbelievable. I mean I rented “The Blind Side” (Seriously? She won an Oscar?) and even I don’t believe you if give a sharp, young kid who’s realized all of the major university won’t look at him because of grades some dedicated teachers (as opposed to those who are on the faculty of a school scheduled to be closed) that you can see a real turnaround in performance. I mean by 16 or 17 years of age, you know if a guy is not just uninterested in crappy teaching and is truly un-teachable. Besides, he is poor, maybe ethnic. You know what that means, crooked, willing to cut any corner to make it. But UK is the racist. The NCAA even investigatyed this and apparently dropped it because they couldn’t maker anything stick. Now they have to drag it back up because the NYT saw fit to crap its pants Friday night in an effort to justify reimbursement for all the receipts to the Birmingham Holiday Inn and Hooters.
As to the rent, well, it seems the story is more on the side of a high school coach who only wants to win (feeling “The Blind Side” again) and has nothing to do with UK. I like though that you qualify it as a “real estate” transaction. Makes it sound like someone bought her a home. This was just covered on “Friday Night Lights”, and they didn’t even take away Coach Taylor’s championship ring. Maybe Buddy Garrity paid the rent, but it wasn’t a college, or I am sure that in 9 months of investigating by the New York Times, ESPN and whatever passes for a news outlet in Birmingham, AL that someone would have found something more solid than a landlady linking only a high school coach and probably a Parker booster and hearsay that said coach asked for reimbursement from some Division II school that tried to snag Bledsoe before Memphis, Florida, Alabama, Cincy and UK came calling. The BIGS interest didn’t start until after Bledsoe had turned his grades around.
Sadly, Eric Bledsoe was not adopted by a balding country singer and his fake movie wife who was really married to a cheating motorcycle mechanic (like there is any other kind). If he had, then all he would have had to answer to the NCAA is if the publication and theatrical release of his life story constituted an improper benefit to the careers of the actors involved.
I have always written that Kentucky was a bastion of cheating, scandal and racism through the Rupp, Hall and Sutton eras, but that changed with Pitino and Smith – at least that was the appearance in the cheating realm. Currently, if Pitino is cheating, he’s not as good at it as his Italian brother 70 miles to the east. I’m sure the reimbursement talk didn’t extend to Kentucky. The D-IIs are rolling in cash.
This might be the story, and it might not. There are kids and moms living in Indianapolis today under roofs provided by high school coaches, and there have been for years. I don’t hold universities accountable for that.
You have always written “cheating, scandal, racism”, but yet you hold no anti-UK bias. As Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler used to say, “Really?”
They cheated. They were and will be scandals, and they didn’t have a black player until 1969 or 1970. That’s not bias. Those are called facts. They are pieces of truth. They are unpleasant truths, but true nonetheless.
There are other truths. Oscar Robertson wanted to go to Indiana but didn’t because of what he perceived to be racist tendencies by IU coach Branch McCracken. Kelvin Sampson is a moral reprobate, and damn near brought an IU program without a hint of scandal to its knees. USC engaged in all kinds of nutty cheating to lure O.J. Mayo to L.A. There is a lot of bullshit that makes college hoops a seedy game. UK knowingly hired the author of two runs at different schools to the Final Four that have been stricken from the record books. They will get what they deserve – one way or the other.