There should be no surprise about the stuff on the other shoe that might drop on North Carolina State. When you muck about in the slime that surrounds college sports, you can`t keep feet, or noses, clean.
The impact will be greater this time only because of the size of the shoe of the 6-foot-11-inch player at the center of the controversy and the pungency of the odor coming from it.
The previous charges leveled against N.C. State involve two-bit stuff such as tampering with grades and violations of NCAA rules, for which that organization slapped the school`s basketball program with a two-year probation on Dec. 11.
The latest allegations involve big bucks and big-time crime, for that is what point-shaving is all about. It is also about prison, ruined lives, exploitation of athletes and all those other things that are part of the deal when a university sells its soul to turn an extracurricular activity into a gold mine.
These charges are being investigated not by the friendly NCAA but by folks such as the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the district attorney`s office in Wake County, N.C. They are trying to find evidence, as suggested by ABC News, that four North Carolina State players conspired with gamblers to hold down the scores of games in the 1987-88 season.
The NCAA doesn`t even punish members for point-shaving, but the federal government might. Sports fraud became a federal crime in 1964.
Shocking? Nah. Just more of the same in college basketball.
There have been five point-shaving cases exposed since World War II, the first three involving several colleges, the last two each affecting one school.
The most recent blackened the good name of Tulane, which, when it received any attention at all, had been known as one of the South`s most distinguished academic institutions.
In that case, five former Tulane players and six nonplayers were indicted in an alleged point-shaving scheme. Six of those indicted, including three former players, testified to shaving points in two games in late 1984. The most prominent of those implicated, John Williams, was said to have received $5,400 for the fix.
Williams was later acquitted of the charges, but Tulane stuck to its decision to shut down the basketball program because the point-shaving scandal was only part of the mess. Tulane began playing again this season.
Boston College was the notorious university before Tulane. In 1981, one of its former players, Rick Kuhn, and four other men were found guilty of having participated in a gambling and bribery scheme involving Boston College games in 1978-79. Kuhn, who received a sum only identified as ”several thousand dollars” for fixing the games, also got a 10-year prison sentence.
Like Tulane, Boston College received no NCAA punishment for the point-shaving.
The two blockbuster cases involved events in 1961 and from 1947 to 1951.
In the earlier case, the Manhattan district attorney showed that 90 games played in 17 states had been influenced by gamblers who paid bribes estimated at more than $70,000. At least 30 players from at least six schools, including Kentucky, Long Island University and City College of New York, which had won both the 1950 NCAA title and the National Invitation Tournament, were involved. Soon after the district attorney moved in early 1951, CCNY canceled its eight remaining games that season and gave up big-time basketball. It now plays in Division III.
In 1961, the scandal involved 47 players from two dozen colleges, including, coincidentally, North Carolina State. All the players were granted immunity to testify against the gamblers, several of whom were found guilty and imprisoned.
The temptation that lures players to fix games has only grown with the explosion of college basketball. A player looks at the revenue he is helping earn for the school and wonders why he isn`t getting anything except a scholarship. That discrepancy can only seem greater when the NCAA signs a $1 billion deal for TV rights to its basketball tournament over the next seven years.
The argument that an education is enough doesn`t mean much at schools that recruit virtual illiterates and don`t make a real attempt to educate many of those who can learn.
Many of these players are, as UCLA coach Jim Harrick once said,
”extremely poor, very susceptible and grossly naive. We`re pitting young men against street-smart adults (the gamblers), and it`s no contest.”
Some of these young men have already been given money, directly or indirectly, from supporters of the university`s athletic program. Most know accepting the money is against NCAA rules, but they take it anyway, for reasons involving both greed and need.
The offers alone create the feeling that rules are made to be broken, so there isn`t such a long way from there to shaving points. After all, what difference does it make to anyone but gamblers if State U. beats Pushover Tech by 6 or 26 points?
Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, a moralist of the highest order who was president of Notre Dame for 35 years, is also enough of a realist to understand that reducing the temptation might help. Hesburgh proposes paying athletes for the hours spent on practice and games at the same rate other students are paid for bursary jobs on campus.
If each player on a 15-man basketball roster were paid $4 an hour for 25 hours of work each week, the entire cost for a 25-week season (Oct. 15 to April 1) would be $37,500. That amounts to the sale of just 3,750 tickets at $10 apiece-small change. The NCAA`s $1 billion contract could cover that $37,500 at each of its 293 Division I basketball schools for the next nine years.
Each player would get $2,500, not enough for a Mercedes, but enough not to have to beg for pizza money. And maybe enough not to violate NCAA rules by taking loans, such as the $65,000 former N.C. State player Charles Shackleford has admitted getting from two businessmen. One of those, Robert Kramer of New Jersey, has admitted lending Shackleford $19,000 to $21,000.
Those dealings led to the allegations of point-shaving involving Shackleford and others. Whether the gambling links are ever proved, the loan admissions could cost N.C. State more than its already battered reputation. The NCAA could ask N.C. State to return 90 percent of its tournament earnings from 1986-88, or some $1 million.
The allegations could also finally cost coach Jim Valvano his job. He has now presided over a program that recruited a player such as Chris Washburn, whose college board scores were revealed to be painfully and laughably low during his trial for an on-campus theft; a program that involved the school`s former chancellor in charges of academic tampering; a program that is on probation for illegal sale of complimentary tickets and shoes; and a program that has now been implicated in point-shaving charges.
Even if Valvano couldn`t see or hear that evil, he should have smelled it.
