The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (45 page)

Adding to the confusion and frustration was a brewing disconnect between Emmert and the enforcement staff, sources said. Here he was, still pushing his reform agenda in public, while inside investigators were being told it was best to “lie low” for a while in hopes that the erosion of trust at the heart of the Miami case would heal over. Meanwhile, the 7-on-7 world was only getting bigger and a national football playoff was looming. If cheaters wanted to prosper, they could not have picked a more opportune time.

No two ways about it—the monumental screwup in the Miami case had come at the worst possible time for the big-game hunters at the NCAA.

T
he black-and-white photograph is of a young African-American basketball player sitting on a bench. His head is down with a towel over it. You have to look close to see the caption. It reads: “Images are sometimes deceiving. This isn’t a picture about defeat, it is about dedication and being tired.”

Larry James had put the picture in a prime spot—eye level, as you exit his office—because he wanted to remember its subtle message, one he delivered in speeches to civic groups and scholarship winners all over town.
What they call you is one thing, but what you answer to is so much more important
.

In May 2012, James was sixty-one years old and, from the look of things, a young and highly successful sixty-one. He was a partner in a prestigious downtown Columbus law firm, a trustee of the Kenyon College board, a community leader and a country mile from his dirt-poor southern roots. The oldest of seven children from five fathers, James was raised on welfare by his single mom. His sport was basketball. By the time the family moved north to Elyria, Ohio, young Larry had got himself some game. But Ohio in the early 1960s, not long after
Brown v. Board of Education
, wasn’t all that different from Alabama in the 1950s. But as he liked to say:
It’s not where you start in life, it’s where you finish
.

So, head down, he kept dribbling. Kept working. The first in his family to graduate from college, he later earned a law degree from Cleveland-Marshall in 1977. Thirty-five years later he was general counsel to the national Fraternal Order of Police and to USA Track & Field’s board of directors. Earlier that May, James and his wife, Donna, had been honored as Humanitarians of the Year by the Greater Columbus chapter of the American Red Cross.

Three weeks after that award luncheon James was thumbing through
files in the first-floor conference room of his firm’s elegant South Front Street office. Dark wood walls were filled with arresting African-American art. Photographs depicting “colored only” take-out joints and white-only pools gave a sense of history to the halls. For his part, James was immaculately dressed in a blue-and-pink-striped shirt and matching tie accented with stylish horn-rimmed glasses. A visitor was on hand to talk about his role as lead counsel for Ohio State University and the sixteen football players he ended up representing on appeal to the NCAA. His assistant slipped in with an important file. “Oh, yes, yep, yep, I think we got it,” James said. The legal juices had begun to flow. It had been a long, hard fight against a system at work.

“You start out with the lack of due process, a lack of notice of what it is you’re accused of doing,” he said. “A lack of adequate preparation. A lack of any rules to govern the process or procedure. So it just lends itself to abuse.”

James, of course, was talking about what critics argue is the NCAA’s often heartless, capricious enforcement process. James’s specialty was administrative appeals, civil rights, labor/employment contracts and business and professional ethics, so he was up for a fight. Truth be told, he saw something of his own struggles in the Ohio State athletes.

James had originally been hired to represent the five OSU football players—Terrelle Pryor, Mike Adams, Daniel “Boom” Herron, DeVier Posey and Solomon Thomas—caught up in “tattoo-gate.” Eventually there would be eleven more players. Some were part of allegations involving overpayments by longtime booster Robert “Bobby D.” DiGeronimo from his Cleveland-based companies. Others had been caught up in the aftermath of a scathing
SI
cover story.

James quickly found himself “spinning plates,” frantically trying to meet his clients, gain their trust, gather information and make sense of the far-flung charges—memorabilia sales, free tattoos, the questionable use and sale of automobiles, extra benefits, cash payments, even a questionable round of golf.

He quickly cleared nine players suspected of selling their Big Ten championship and Rose Bowl rings, game pants, helmets, jerseys and Fiesta Bowl watches to tattoo parlor owner and suspected drug dealer Eddie Rife and others. The players still had their gear. Pictures were taken and placed into an annotated binder and delivered to OSU and the NCAA. Done deal.

At the same time the NCAA was poking into wide receiver Posey’s bank records, wondering where some deposits had come from. “They [the NCAA] were saying you’re selling something, you’re selling photographs, jerseys,” said James. So he and other lawyers in his firm put together a
spreadsheet detailing the source of the deposits. They obtained an affidavit outlining the family’s relationship with a friend who had provided some of the money, Jeffrey Xavier, explaining his relationship. Then James dug even deeper to prove Posey’s innocence.

“I created a family tree,” said James. “Went down each deposit, where it came from. They didn’t find anything beyond the tattoos. I put to bed the memorabilia. The car situation goes to bed. I stop that investigation. The golf? Posey played nine holes. Put to bed. I take care of the money. That’s put to bed. I put everything to bed.”

Everything, that is, except the allegations involving DiGeronimo’s overpayment of a total of $1,605 to four players for manual labor at his construction company and car wash between 2009 and 2011. The first player interviews took place in the spring and summer of 2011. They turned out to be textbook NCAA. Its interviews. Its rules.

“If you’ve got a day’s notice, you’ve found heaven,” said James. “Lawyers can’t do anything. We can’t talk. We can’t ask questions. We can’t speak. So all you can do is try and dress rehearse these kids and try to prepare them for the process.”

A tape recorder was out. Forms allowing investigators access to bank records, phone records, family records, girlfriends and so on were signed. Refuse and you ran the risk of losing the one thing that mattered most—your eligibility.

“I grew up in the Jim Crow South,” said James. “There is nothing you can throw at me I haven’t heard. This process is sheer terror for the athletes. I was just so frustrated I couldn’t do anything.”

Under the NCAA’s system of justice there is no discovery, no legal obligation to share any information. It’s a one-way street. In this case, one built around hours of questions to eighteen- to twenty-year-old kids pressed to remember specific times and dates one or two years earlier. The object for NCAA investigators: to uncover “inconsistencies” in testimony. Trapdoors—and sometimes trap questions—that, over the years, have tripped up countless athletes and universities trying to cover up the truth. Here is an example of a typical “inconsistency” exchange between NCAA investigator Chance Miller and OSU running back Daniel Herron.

“Let’s assume they’ve interviewed you one time, two times, three times, four times,” said James. “Some of these kids were interviewed four times. They say, ‘Okay, what did you do on February 8, 2010? Did you go to work that day? Well, we have here you went to work. What time did you leave Columbus?’ ‘I don’t know, eight or nine.’

“One kid said I worked two hours, another said four hours, another, six hours. Two of the kids worked side by side; they say they don’t remember. And they [the NCAA] get pissed. And [with] the egos and they [the kids] want to reach across the table and beat the crap out of them. Not just because ‘I don’t believe you.’ It’s ‘I think you’re lying.’ ‘Look, you’ve got one chance if you want to play.’ ”

What really upset James was this kind of cheap gamesmanship—the shell game NCAA investigators tend to play. Before he left for the USA Track & Field finals in Eugene, Oregon, James said he wrote a letter notifying the NCAA he would be out of town for a few days. He asked that his clients, several of whom he had yet to interview, be left alone during this brief period. Just as he was boarding the plane out west, James said he received a call from Miller. Interviews with Melvin Fellows and Marcus Hall were set for 9:00 a.m. the next day.

You can’t do that, said James.

We’re doing it, said Miller.

“I hadn’t talked to either one of these kids. I couldn’t get to them,” said James. “So I got on the phone, the three-hour time difference, and they’re the ones who started the inconsistencies because they were upset.”

James repeatedly argued the players never knew their precise hourly wage or filled out time cards. They were performing yard work and hauling material and washing cars. They had no reason to believe their wages were being miscalculated or overpaid. In short, they were doing what thousands of athletes have done before—do the work, take the money and don’t ask a lot of questions.

In the end this is what the NCAA alleged were the “overpayment” violations:

For Fellows and Hall, the NCAA said, the overpayment charges were based on “inconsistencies between the student-athletes” and figures in a letter DiGeronimo’s company had sent to James.

As for Herron and Posey: “The staff and institution analyzed cell phone records to determine the dates and times [student-athletes] were not at the employment site and compared that information to the hours provided in DiGeronimo’s letter to estimate the number of hours the student-athletes likely worked each day.”

It’s important to note that in the space of two paragraphs outlining its charges against the four football players, the NCAA used the word “estimate(s)” twice, along with “likely,” “around” and “near.”

James didn’t need a map to know where this road ended. So, quietly, he reached out to DiGeronimo through Posey’s mother. For his own reasons DiGeronimo didn’t trust the NCAA. After initially saying yes to an interview, he refused to cooperate. But he told James he’d have someone go back through the books. In addition, James had his people pull bank records and research cell tower technology.