Stan Geiger

Cheating in Athletics: No Surprise

Not long ago, Jenks High School was in the headlines for, in essence, getting busted for recruiting football players. It started with one star player. The head coach went on “self-imposed suspension”---whatever the hell that meant. Then the scandal expanded. There were issues of residency, and issues of boosters actually passing out cash. The head coach was benched for the year, in conjunction with other penalties imposed on the school’s program.

The Jenks story came as no surprise to me.

A few years back, before I got this blog, I was a bit of an annoying serial emailer. I put out a piece that suggested both Jenks and Union were recruiting football players. I argued it was highly unlikely those schools could dominate the way they were dominating without recruiting players.

No word, as yet, on Union.

However, the high school one would have to call the top athletic school in Tulsa Public Schools, Booker T. Washington, just got clobbered. It started with some residency issues surrounding half a dozen football players. The latest news says another 37 players in several sports have been ruled ineligible due to poor grades. This case has reached even into administration, as the principal has been removed. He hasn’t been fired, mind you. He’s just been removed as principal of BTW. I’m sure he’s still getting paid.

This news doesn’t come as much of a surprise, either. I’ve seen this grade thing in action. It’s nothing new.

I was a senior at Tulsa Central High in the ’75-’76 school year. I played a little basketball. My contemporaries would, no doubt, agree with my phrasing. I played very little basketball. The head coach was a fellow named Myrle Calmus. That name might ring a bell with Jenks boosters of recent times.

The basketball season began in the fall semester, but most of the games came in the spring semester. Our team’s top player was pretty darn salty on a basketball court but not so salty in the classroom. He was ruled ineligible for the fall semester due to grades. He was reinstated when January rolled around. Somehow I doubt the then-young man made some kind of miraculous turnaround as a student in the space of weeks.

A little later in life, while attending Oklahoma State University, I was enrolled in a business law class. One of my classmates was a fellow named Dexter Manley. Dexter was a star defensive lineman for OSU at the time. One day, a test day, Dexter took a seat next to me. The test was multiple choice. I caught Dexter staring at my paper out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to piss him off. I had little interest in creating the possibility of physical confrontation with a guy that had over a hundred pounds of muscle weight on me---if ya know what I mean.

Dexter went pro, signing with, as I recall, the Washington Redskins. At some point during his pro career, news broke that he couldn’t read. The guy couldn’t read, but somehow, miraculously, he was able to get accepted into a university and make grades good enough to keep him on the football field.

With athletic success comes prestige, and with prestige comes money. That’s what it’s all about.

Certainly it is thus at the college level. Big money flows to college athletics---football in particular. OU has one of the golden football programs; OSU is seeking to join the club. The more money that flows to the institution the more the coaches, administrators and professors get paid. They are all in it together; they all want those trophies.

Athletics pays public school districts, too. The proceeds aren’t as grand as those in college athletics, of course, but they are there. An excited fan base can produce a good chunk of change through ticket sales; an excited booster base can produce donations. But it goes beyond that.

Jenks, in the days of my youth, was a sleepy little town outside of Tulsa. It became a boomtown. It became a boomtown because it successfully marketed to the middle class. The middle class moved to Jenks, for the most part, because of Jenks Public Schools. Jenks schools are perceived to be the best in the area by most. Middle-class parents want their kids in the best schools. Success in athletics---especially football---bolsters the perception that a given school district is better than the rest.

When a town goes boom a lot of people make a lot of money. Developers make money; local businesses make money; homeowners prosper as property values increase. The money that flows to the local school district grows with the town. Property tax revenues skyrocket. The greater the enrollment the more the district gets from the state. And that takes us back to coaches, administrators and teachers getting paid more.

Educators like to say our kids are our future. So what are they teaching our kids? Forget about math and science for the moment, what are they teaching our kids when it comes to ethics and values? What is the example? What is the message?

It appears to me it goes like this: Lie, cheat and steal if you have to, just win, baby. The end justifies the means. It’s all about you. It ain’t illegal if you don’t get caught.

Take a look around. Take a look at our current crop of “leaders” in everything from education to corporate management to the halls of government. It’s easy see what happens when a nest of vipers reared with no sense of right and wrong grow up to take control of things. We can’t afford another generation of crap leadership.

---