It is hard, as the parent of young boys, to feel any sympathy for the giant sports-apparel companies—Nike, Adidas, Under Armour—whose brands begin lodging themselves in four-year-old brains with the stickiness of cotton candy. But such is the position I nearly found myself in, last week, while listening to opening statements in the first of three trials in downtown Manhattan that threaten to expose “the dark underbelly of college basketball,” as federal prosecutors have put it.
The current trial, U.S. v. Gatto et al., has three defendants: James Gatto, a former marketing director for Adidas; Merl Code, a youth coach and onetime Nike employee turned Adidas consultant; and Christian Dawkins, an aspiring sports agent—a so-called runner, or “relationship guy,” in the words of his attorney. These men stand accused of defrauding public universities by conspiring to compensate the families of teen-age athletes, thereby compromising the boys’ amateur status and rendering them ineligible for their scholarships. Before jury selection, the judge actually referred to “the victim universities,” meaning Louisville, Kansas, North Carolina State, and Miami, all with athletic programs sponsored by Adidas to the tune of tens of millions of dollars or more, not to mention the free uniforms. If I can be sure of one thing about the moneyed mess that college sports in this country have become, it is that I don’t feel sorry for the schools that have willingly made basketball and football coaches the highest-paid public employees in thirty-nine out of fifty states while maintaining their showy convictions regarding the sanctity of amateurism. So, I suppose that puts me, however queasily, on the side of the defense.
This is a peculiar trial, in that both sides basically agree on the facts—not only concerning the covert passing of envelopes stuffed with cash but concerning who stuffed and passed those envelopes and to whom. Those facts were uncovered by a years-long F.B.I. investigation that involved wiretaps and an undercover agent. The two sides even agree on the purpose of the payments: to persuade teen-agers to play basketball for schools that wear Adidas sneakers instead of those made by Nike or Under Armour. The “shoe wars,” participants call it. The sides only really disagree about whether all of this was illegal or merely shady. Gatto viewed his efforts on behalf of Adidas as “win-win-win,” the lawyer said: more victories for the school basketball team, more money for families, more sneakers sold. Almost everyone seems to have been happy with the arrangement, or at least happy enough not to want to inspect it too closely. So what if it offends the National Collegiate Athletic Association? The N.C.A.A. is technically a nonprofit organization, one that happens to have revenues in excess of a billion dollars a year. That doesn’t give it any particular moral authority. As one of Gatto’s lawyers noted, the N.C.A.A. enforces rules, not laws. The phrase “student-athlete,” used unironically during the trial by the prosecutors—and said with reverence by many others—was a confection of lawyers in the nineteen-fifties, intended to shield schools from liability in workers’-compensation cases that could have resulted from on-field injuries.
As the Times noted recently, one obvious victim of the investigation, if not the system itself, is Brian (Tugs) Bowen, a prospect from Saginaw, Michigan, who is currently playing in Australia, for the Sydney Kings, because he wasn’t eligible to play this year at an American college. Bowen’s father is the trial’s star witness so far, testifying that he participated in a hundred-thousand-dollar deal to secure Tugs’s commitment to the University of Louisville, and breaking down in tears at the thought of the potential wreckage of his son’s future. He also testified that he accepted thirteen hundred dollars in cash directly from one of Louisville’s assistant coaches, and that he’s been receiving money on behalf of Tugs’s basketball development for years, long before college selection was at issue. Professionalism starts in the Amateur Athletic Union, or A.A.U., the private club circuit that absorbs sneaker money so that middle schools and high schools can remain relatively innocent.
The highest-profile casualty of the government’s investigation, meanwhile, is Rick Pitino, Louisville’s longtime head coach and an inductee into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was fired last year in the wake of the indictments, along with the school’s athletic director. Pitino, who is sixty-six, says that he will never coach again, because “obviously the system, the way it is now, is totally broken.”
“I despise some of these people that are on trial,” Pitino told me, on a recent morning, on the phone from Florida. He said that he’d been monitoring the events in the courtroom, at the occasional expense of his blood pressure. “They cost me a game I love. That being said, I mean, they’re not criminals. They’re not killing people. They’re not selling opioids.” He added, “It doesn’t matter who I think is corrupt and who I think is legitimate, because they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. The shoe companies, the Dawkinses, they think the N.C.A.A. is screwing the kids. That’s the way they look at it.”
I asked him how he looks at it. “Look, people have been arguing since I’ve been in coaching—forty-two years!—about the injustice of not paying athletes, and for universities to be making millions of dollars,” he said. “And I’ve wrestled with the subject over and over but I never can come up with a solution.”
He said that he used to think cheating was confined to fewer than ten per cent of the people involved in the sport. “What I find now, after this trial’s come out, is it’s much more prevalent than I ever imagined.” He continued, “I’m probably naïve when I say this. I never knew that shoe companies were giving money to families directly, trying to get kids to go to certain colleges. I knew they were giving the A.A.U. programs money. I knew they were giving the family members of A.A.U. programs money, so they could travel.” He would routinely see the parents of star players at tournaments “in Las Vegas, in Georgia—wherever they go, they’re there,” he said. You don’t have to be a cynic to recognize that plane fares add up. “But this is the first time I heard of a hundred thousand, fifty thousand. I think it’s fairly new.”
Pitino insists that he knew nothing about the fishiness of Bowen’s decision to attend Louisville, which he once described as “the luckiest” recruiting success of his career. And he rebuts the common suggestion that he had powerful incentives for not wanting to know, by pointing to his old salary, which was nearly eight million dollars a year. (By formal arrangement, two million came from Adidas, not from the university.) He was paid so well, he stressed, that he had every reason to be concerned about anything that might cost him such a lucrative job. “People love to say, ‘How can you not know?’ Well, very easy. The last person that’s going to know is the head coach, because he’s the one that’s going to fire everybody. I had meetings with my staff and said, ‘If anybody gives ten dollars to a player, you will be fired immediately.’ I said that thirty times in their presence. Now, if you were making, maybe, two hundred thousand, maybe you’d say, ‘Oh, it’s really not that bad, the family needs it,’ or something like that.” (The logic may seem counterintuitive to those unfamiliar with making millions, for whom the loss of a job, in fact, brings greater immediate risks.)
Pitino said that only once in his four decades of coaching had any player’s relative ever asked him for anything off the books. “It was in my living room,” he said. “I immediately stood up and said, ‘Sir, this meeting’s over. I wish you luck wherever you go.’ That only happened one time in my life! Now, contrary to what has happened, I’ve had a reputation of not recruiting the high-profile person who may fall into that category. I just didn’t want to deal with any of that. I didn’t want to deal with a shoe company. So, I avoided it like the plague. But, as it turned out, it got me. It’s an ironic thing, it really is.”
You could argue, of course, that one reason Pitino’s salary was so high to begin with is that the industry’s profit margins are artificially inflated from all the virtually free labor. I was reminded during our conversation of the repeated instances in the elder Bowen’s testimony when he asserted that he had never involved his son in any of his negotiations, in order to shield him from the ugly reality. We all want the game to remain pure. Maybe the head coach and the players really are the last ones to know, whether out of willful naïvete on their part, or on ours.
“I’m just so bitter right now,” Pitino went on. “I sound it, probably. I’m very disappointed in myself that I won’t let this go. When I have an assistant coach look me square in the eye and say he would never do anything wrong, would never do anything to hurt me, and now I’m reading reports that he gave the father thirteen hundred dollars? I just want to put my head down and be able to sleep at night.”
Next week, Pitino is launching a podcast. And he has written a new book, “Pitino: My Story,” in which he says, “It may be helpful to think of college basketball as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are three companies: Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour.” Its release was timed to coincide with (or, rather, preëmpt) another new book, “The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino,” by the Times Magazine writer Michael Sokolove, with whom Pitino didn’t coöperate. Sokolove devotes ample space to another Louisville scandal, involving the hiring of prostitutes to entertain recruits in a dorm room; in a chapter of his book about that scandal, Pitino continues to deny that he had any knowledge that that was going on, either. “He’s King Lear down in his beautiful home in Florida having lost his empire,” Sokolove said, of Pitino, at a recent book signing, in Kentucky. Ostensibly amateur basketball seems to be as good for the publishing industry as it is for colleges, coaches, and apparel companies.
While following the trial and reading the Pitino books, I thought of an earlier entry in the hoops canon that deals with the competing pressures exerted by sneaker companies and the N.C.A.A.: “The Last Shot,” by Darcy Frey, which chronicles the 1991 high-school season of the Lincoln Railsplitters, on Coney Island, a team that featured the future N.B.A. star Stephon Marbury. In the prologue, Frey quotes another Railsplitter, Corey Johnson, observing one of his teammates practicing in a public park and mimicking an older white man’s voice-over, as if on television. “Work hard, play hard, buy yourself a pair of Nikes, young man,” Johnson says. “They get you where you want to go, which is out of the ghetto!” Later, Don Marbury, Stephon’s father, confronts Frey and demands compensation for his insights. “In certain circles,” Frey writes, “the Marburys are considered the avatars of all that is most unseemly about high school basketball.” Frey’s views are more nuanced, and he feels understandably conflicted about the accusation that he might be exploiting a poor community himself. (“I’m not like all them other Coney Island guys—too stupid to know the value of what they’re sitting on,” Don Marbury told him.) So, he eventually draws up a profit-sharing contract, through which to split some of the proceeds from book sales with his main characters—only to be informed by the N.C.A.A. that this could jeopardize their college eligibility.
I got to know Corey Johnson, in 2004, after Marbury was traded to the Knicks. Johnson and I watched Marbury’s first home game at Madison Square Garden together, in the housing projects where they had both grown up, and he talked about some of his frustrations with a system that had always seemed professional for those lucky or brazen enough to capitalize: the passing of envelopes, the limousine rides. Johnson wanted to be a writer, not a pro-basketball player, but he had been a victim of another of the N.C.A.A.’s regulations: the one requiring a score of 700 or higher on the S.A.T. to play in Division I. He fell ten points short and then grew dispirited by what he called the “meat market” of the junior-college circuit, eventually dropping out.
I spoke with Corey recently, and I was pleased to hear him say “Life is good.” He is doing freelance photography and is engaged to be married and looking to buy a house, in New Jersey. His fiancée, who is from Beijing, has got him involved in coaching Chinese-American kids. Working with people who don’t necessarily see themselves as future N.B.A. material has enabled him to love the game in a way he says he hadn’t been able to for a long time.
“By my sophomore year in high school, I was already looking at basketball as a business,” he said. “ ‘Student-athlete,’ that’s the principle, I guess. It never felt like that to me. Like the book company,” he said, referring to the negotiation with Frey from nearly thirty years ago. “Why should you guys benefit from my life, and I don’t get anything? It’s weird.”
