This is the age of immediate gratification, the age of shrinking attention spans and a constricted sense of history, the age of instant oatmeal and instant stardom and instant outrage. But still, even in our highly amped and fully wired world, perspective can be important, and so we offer this.
In 1988, as it worked its way to the national championship, Kansas’ star was Danny Manning and one of its assistant coaches was his dad, Ed. He had been a truck driver back in North Carolina when he was taken on by Larry Brown, then the Jayhawks’ coach, and his hiring was widely believed to be the reason his son ended up in Lawrence rather than playing for the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill.
We can also refer to an enlightening book whose copyright date, 1991, seems like an eternity ago. “Raw Recruits” ends with a brief look at Illinois and Iowa and the imbroglio that arose over their recruitment of a Simeon High School star named Deon Thomas.
Involved here were surreptitiously taped phone calls and charges of illegal inducements and the long arm of the NCAA, and caught in this web was a player whose words conclude this book. “I got caught in the middle of big business, which I didn’t understand it was,” Thomas said. “I was just thinking, `OK, this is just basketball and a chance at higher education.’ I didn’t see it for the big business that it is.”
College basketball is a bigger business than it was many years ago, so we are left to wonder: Why? Why all the shock and moral indignation and seismic reactions to Eric Gordon’s jilting of Illinois and pledge of fealty to Indiana? This is hardly a tawdry tale unlike any ever seen before. It is, instead, the reality in a racket that can be as cutthroat as any other.
That was the truth driven home in “Raw Recruits” and it is naive or delusional or both to believe that it is not the truth now.
Yes, college basketball is a grand and glorious game, and it would be wondrous if it were pure and pristine, unsullied and unstained and bereft of an underbelly. But, just like all those games boys play, it is not. As in most corners of the sports’ universe, there are no saints.
That is what must be understood when considering the case of Gordon, the coveted guard out of Indianapolis who reneged on his oral commitment to Illinois and announced Friday that he would attend Indiana.
It does not matter if he did this on his own, changing his mind after the Hoosiers hired Kelvin Sampson to replace Mike Davis. (That is the story out of the Gordon camp.) Nor does it matter if he were wooed by Sampson, who went after him even though he had made that commitment to the Illini. (That is the story out of Champaign.)
What matters, really, is cutting through the pretense and recognizing reality and comprehending all the crosscurrents that cut through a game that should not be viewed through rose-colored glasses. The NCAA would like us to see it that way, to regard it as just another extracurricular campus activity. Countless coaches, when they climb up to their pulpits, would like us to do the same.
But by now we should all know better, know better about both college basketball and every sport we view. The headlines that scream out at us and the stories that come our way, the police blotters we must read and the laundry list of drugs we must master, the preening we must watch and the attitudes we must endure and the sense of self-importance that suffuses so many of our heroes . . . all of this should have educated us and left us immune to a tale like Gordon’s.
Yes, we can sympathize with Illinois coach Bruce Weber, who has had a prized recruit rudely yanked from his grasp. And we can question the actions of Sampson, who accepted a recruit who had committed to another school. But those mushroom clouds of outrage over the end to this story? They are the real wonder.
Perspective proves that. Perspective and those words of Deon Thomas, who long ago learned that college basketball is big business.
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