Monday, October 05, 2015

Univ. of Louisville Basketball

As Dirty as It Gets

So...a former stripper/prostitute who doubled as an apparatchik in the University of Louisville Athletics Department a few years ago has written a tell-all book about the perfidies of the wicked sports clambake and her equally wicked enhancement of them, even to the point of selling the bodies of her own daughters along with hers. This elicits a yawn/ho-hum if even more than a fraction of what she writes is true. Nothing new. The book has been thoroughly vetted.

The University of Louisville has been plagued for decades by shenanigans that would make decent people blush if they bothered to pay attention. The lurid actions noted in the book were designed apparently to lure high-schoolers to UL on fully paid scholarships to run fast, jump high, and knock the opponent senseless if possible, depending on the “sport.”

The basketball coach's drunken intimacy with a woman not his wife on a restaurant backroom floor a while back raised a few eyebrows not because it happened but because it got reported...vividly. Ho-hum. The woman later accused him of rape (charge went nowhere) and then tried unsuccessfully for extortion...wound up in jail.

The UL football coach was sacked at Arkansas a while back after sharing a motorcycle wreck with a woman not his wife—no one killed. By way of Western Kentucky University, he's now back at Louisville. The surprise is that he was ever fired, but Arkansas does have a lot of Baptists. In Bowling Green and Louisville, that's just par-for-the-course stuff.

You can see where this is going. Seducing teenage kids to the school by giving them stripper-shows and (for maybe a little extra charge to UL) a romp in the bedsheets with whoever is available was just common procedure. Predictably, alcohol (for minors?) played a large part in the sexual chaos/ecstasy. The basketball coach (same guy now as then) says he knew nothing about it and was SHOCKED to learn of it. Ho-hum. Recruiting is the name of the game and he's the recruiter-in-chief.

The period covered in the book was 2010-2014. The author is 43, so one wonders how old her three daughters and other girls were when all this enhanced recruiting took place. Were laws broken? If so, will the university ignore them perhaps like Penn State did a few years ago regarding a former coach's pedophilia, with some top Penn State officials severely punished (multiple charges and indictments) when their perfidy was outed? Not likely at Louisville, though if criminal activity was involved...maybe gangbusters.

The most recent pooh-bah involved, responsible for basketball operations (whatever that is), departed UL in 2014 to hire-on as a lowly assistant coach at a school nowhere near the rarefied sports strata occupied by UL . Why would he do that? Was he pushed? Who knew what when? The fun took place where most of the basketball players lived and the fun was shared by the recruits' fathers as well as UL players. Just one big happy orgy...and in a taxpayer-owned Playboy Mansion masquerading as a dormitory.

Since the most sought-after basketball athletes are black—also true at the University of Kentucky—this whole affair is a slam on African Americans...the notion that sex will attract when nothing else will. This implies that they mostly function on animal—rather than human—instincts. Build an athletic whorehouse and they'll come, and the dormitory-as-whorehouse remains open after they come, according to the author...disgusting!

Is UL an exception? The thinking here is that this goes on at most if not all major universities, with both the athletic gurus and coaches involved, just part of the game. Winning (all that matters + huge salaries) is not premised on actual coaching but on recruiting. At Kentucky, the recruit expects to be in school for only one year and then transported to basketball heaven, the NBA, his skills noted by the scouts during that year. The same is true to a lesser extent at UL. This minor-league system stinks and trivializes academics.

No UL employee is likely to be sacked, certainly not the basketball coach or athletic director. If anything substantive happens, it will have to do with girls being “used,” their ages being the determinant. That says it all concerning integrity in the corrupt sports-systems on the high-profile campuses, but if abuse of minors is determined, then look out! The sexual shenanigans can lead to prison.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

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