Brian Ballarini, the youngest of four children, grew up amid affluence and wealth. His high school athletic career appeared to hold some promise for the future, especially when he landed a football scholarship to Northwestern.
But he never logged a minute of varsity time for the Wildcats, and according to federal authorities, his taste for illegal gambling triggered a four-year investigation that resulted this week in his own indictment on a variety of federal charges and helped build a non-related case against other ex-Northwestern athletes.
Ballarini, 25, was a standout football and basketball player at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, a private Catholic school known for its emphasis on academics.
In 1990, his senior year, Ballarini started at quarterback and completed 95 of 203 passes for 1,250 yards and 20 touchdowns. He was voted team MVP and named to the All-Catholic League team. Many of his most dramatic passes went to one of his best friends, Bill Boor.
Boor said he finds it hard to reconcile his knowledge of his friend with the person depicted in the indictments–a campus bookie accused of strong-arming fellow student Kenneth Dion Lee with threats of violence if he didn’t make good on gambling debts.
“He was a kid who went after what he wanted,” said Boor, 25, a clerk at the Chicago Board of Trade. “He was generous, good to his friends. He stayed out of trouble. No flaws. He was `The Quarterback.’ Everything about that (image) applied to him.”
But Ballarini was unable to build on his prep success at Northwestern. He did not play as a freshman or a sophomore, then injured a knee in spring drills in 1992 and left Northwestern after his junior year to transfer to the University of Colorado.
“(The injury) took away everything he loved, and he took it pretty hard,” Boor said.
At the same time that federal authorities charge Ballarini was running an on-campus betting service, accepting wagers on professional sporting events, his father, Donald, a Chicago stockbroker, was earning more than $600,000 annually, court records show.
The Ballarinis, who were divorced in a bitterly disputed case while Brian was still in college, owned a $375,000 home in LaGrange and three Chicago-area condominiums. “They were the type of people who would give their kids anything,” said one person familiar with the family.
Boor is still in shock over Thursday’s events. “He’s smart enough to stay away from that stuff,” Boor said.
KEVIN PENDERGAST AND BRIAN IRVING
Kevin Pendergast was a gifted mimic who broke up his teammates with dead-on imitations of then-Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz and folksy politician Ross Perot.
“His personality, the way he approaches things, his looseness is just an absolute riot,” Holtz said at the time.
But Pendergast was never more a center of attention than on Jan 1, 1994, when the soccer player-turned-football kicker sealed the 1994 Cotton Bowl by nailing a field goal with less than two minutes remaining in Notre Dame’s victory over Texas A&M.
Now he is back in the limelight for a far darker reason. He stands accused, along with 27-year-old San Francisco resident Brian Irving, of being the liaison between the athletes and the betting stake in the Northwestern point-shaving scandal. It is a sudden shift in what looked like a charmed life a few years ago.
Pendergast was a Parade magazine soccer All-American, Connecticut Player of the Year in 1988 and Notre Dame soccer MVP. But he got far more attention when he moonlighted for Holtz as the kicker on the 1993 Irish team that missed out on the national championship by losing to Boston College one week after beating Florida State in a showdown for the No. 1 ranking.
Pendergast told the Tribune he liked to visualize that the goalposts were as wide as the entire field.
“Your thinking has to be that no matter what, it’s going to go through,” he said.
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