GLENDALE, Ariz. — We love the madness. Winning shots at the buzzer. Bracket-busting upsets. All the shining moments at the Final Four. But pull back the curtain on college hoops at your own risk, because the stench can slime anyone.
Now it’s the turn of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun, one of the good guys of the NCAA Tournament, to go on trial in the court of public opinion, facing allegations his staff improperly recruited a player who never sank a basket for the Huskies.
“All I know is to go forward, stand up and be counted,” Calhoun said Wednesday, after a report by Yahoo! Sports alleged the Huskies violated NCAA rules to attract 6-foot-7 guard Nate Miles, expelled from UConn in 2008 before playing a game.
College basketball is fun-loving $5 office pools and a ruthless, multimillion-dollar business.
The tourney serves as inspiration for 10,000 beautiful hoop dreams. But the reality is that, far too often, there is the hand of an agent or a coach reaching into a young athlete’s pocket to exploit that dream for profit.
As Calhoun tried to do the impossible and portray himself as a sympathetic figure while also being careful to say nothing to incriminate UConn basketball, the flustered 66-year-old coach stammered, stumbled and tried to change the subject.
Can you blame him?
“We can’t do anything about it,” Calhoun said on the eve of his No. 1-seeded team’s game against Purdue in the West Regional semifinals. “The only thing we can do is play basketball.”
While talking X’s and O’s, Calhoun confidently made reference to Chip Hilton, the morally upright protagonist of adolescent novels with titles like “Buzzer Basket” and “Hoop Crazy” that were published from 1948-65.
While dancing around the topic of recruiting violations, however, Calhoun professed difficulty in identifying Yahoo!, an extremely popular Internet site he insisted is “something I probably couldn’t get ahold of.”
Is the World Wide Web really so big and daunting that the coach of an elite hoops program cannot get his arms around it?
With a 40-13 record in the NCAA tourney, Calhoun obviously understands what it takes to win.
But here’s betting all his Huskies could find Yahoo! with one click of a computer mouse, while it would be zero surprise if not a single player has read a word from any of those classic, old Clair Bee sports books.
In the span of a single championship season, Hilton could star on the hardwood, chop firewood to help a buddy raise money and patch a rift between coach and teammates.
The story of Miles is a more complicated, sordid tale, involving allegations of hundreds of improper phone calls, spiced with the juicy subplot of how a former UConn student manager who grew up to become the agent for NBA star Richard Hamilton might also have influenced a highly touted prep player to join the Huskies.
It’s no longer easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys in sports, even with a scorecard.
Were the Huskies used by a slimy agent? Did UConn cross the line in the wooing of a recruit? Are there too many rules in the NCAA’s book of sins? If playing basketball in 2009, would Hilton be tempted to reach under the table for financial favors?
In college hoops, the line between right and wrong has grown wide and gray.
So I asked Memphis coach John Calipari, one of the most engaging personalities in the game but sometimes perceived as too slick to be trusted, if he was familiar with Hilton.
“No,” Calipari said. “I know Clair Bee wrote the basketball books. But I don’t know the stories.”
Is the spirit inspired by the love of the game and playing fair alive in this NCAA tourney, or is it a hopelessly naive take in an era when winning is the only thing that really matters?
“One of the things we are all trying to do is give kids an opportunity, creating life skills. In my case, I’m trying to get my kids to change all the time. I’m talking to them about the mental image they have of themselves, which is created a lot by how they grew up, where they went to school, how their family was, the socioeconomic background. So we are trying to do things to get kids to have success not only in basketball, but off the court,” said Calipari, proud of a high graduation rate by his players.
“I think that all of the coaches I know have their kids at heart. I really believe that.”
With all my heart, I want to think Calipari is correct.
Nobody begins the road to the Final Four looking to cheat.
But the shortcuts are way too tempting.
We all want to believe the basketball madness of March is pure magic.
If you don’t want to see that some of that magic is the result of dirty tricks, better close your eyes.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
