Wonders never cease, and nothing succeeds like the hiring of an attorney at $240 per hour to do most anything that has to be done, no matter how bizarre the circumstances or the behavior of those involved in same. Just the other day, it was announced that a lawyer had set out to retrieve the collegiate eligibility of a University of Kentucky player who, by all accounts and just plain common sense, had forfeited his amateur status, even to the point of allowing a sports agency to represent him and accepting more than $7,000 from National Basketball Association teams (strictly professional) as expense money ostensibly for tryouts that would enable him to escape the rigors of the classroom and introduce him to the millions of dollars that folks like LeBron James could claim right out of high school.
Notwithstanding the initial NCAA ruling that the player had forfeited his college career, the organization then allowed that…well… he could sit out a year and return for two more seasons, then all of a sudden decided that he could just get back in the game on January 10 next. And what did the $240-per-hour lawyer accomplish? Strangely, it seems that he did nothing lawyerly…or that he did nothing at all, even though it was announced that up to $10,000 could be spent on his services.
Reminiscent of an event that helped precipitate the last major basketball scandal at UK, in the late 1980s, a long lost document, a fax from the player to the coach, was simply delivered to the coach’s house (not his office) by someone he didn’t name. He seemed to remember losing a file on a plane somewhere along the line that possibly included the long lost fax from the player, but then, according to him, “he threw papers everywhere,” as noted in the Lexington Herald-Leader. In the other incident some 15 or so years ago that cost an assistant UK coach a great deal, $1,000 was somehow detected hanging out of an envelope (FedEx?) headed for the father of a player the assistant coach was trying to recruit in California. H-m-m-m.
The long lost fax in the instant matter was dated 09 May 2005 and included the player’s claim that he meant to “test the waters” for the NBA draft but not get an agent, thus destroying his eligibility. Does anyone believe a college freshman or sophomore jock would use the phrase “test the waters?” This is laughable. A copy appeared in the paper, with some lines blacked out. He proceeded then to work directly through an agent. So…was he ignorant of the rules? Well, all the documents just delivered to the NCAA have not and will not be made public, despite their being the critical evidence allegedly exonerating the player. The nagging question, of course, has to do with what happened to the original from which the fax was copied and sent along to the coach. Surely the player or his family or somebody who might have helped with the project kept the original, just plain common sense and ordinary practice in the handling of important documents. It could have been made available to the NCAA or the university at any time in the process, along with information about the originating machine and possible witnesses, including the recipient (perhaps a secretary) at UK. If such information wasn’t advanced, why wasn’t it?
This is not a big deal and there’s no angst in this corner…but it stinks, and the university doesn’t need any more of this kind of stuff. As for Morris, the player, here’s wishing him good luck. The fact that this affair could be considered fishy shouldn’t matter, since collegiate sports is riddled with corruption…common knowledge often categorized in the media. Now…could one wonder if Dan Rather was engaged by that lawyer to…nah, a Texas Air National Guard typewriter probably wouldn’t do, even if it happened to be a modern model.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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