FL GUV JB RLY KSES UP 2 YNG MR

MiamiHerald.com

'Jeb wants to hang with Myron.

When you come to Tallahassee again, let's hook up with each other, the Guv suggested.

It was something of a miracle that Myron Rolle even noticed Gov. Bush's text message, given that his cellphone was being inundated with scores of fawning missives every day, most of them from the 83 different universities recruiting his services.

Myron, you might suppose, is a highly regarded professor. No, you wouldn't suppose that at all. Not if you live in Florida, a state that pays state university football coaches 10 times the salary paid to a governor.

Not if you live in Florida and witnessed the signing-day announcements last week by local high school football stars, delivered as a high drama TV with kids offering cruel head fakes toward the losing universities before naming the grand winner.

The governor's new homeboy, of course, is a senior at a New Jersey high school. Myron's reported to be a very good student, but, more important to Gov. Bush, Florida State University and thousands of whacked-out Seminole fans, he's considered one of the best high school football players in the nation.

Naturally, the Guv wants to hook up.

RECRUITING FIASCO

The news that a governor had joined the unseemly solicitation of high school athletes came out during testimony last month before the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, when Rolle added his experiences to testimony describing mad, sleazy, expensive, out-of-control recruiting tactics.

The commission has been charting the corrupt morality of recruiting since 1989, charting how coaches and boosters ply schoolboys with flattery, lies, hookers, fake transcripts and cash money. But a governor joining the jock-sniffing sycophants was something new. It was almost startling. Almost but not quite.

…David Ridpath, professor of sports administration at Mississippi State University and director of the Drake Group, which seeks to replace corruption in college athletics with academic integrity, was stunned to learn that a governor had leaped into the recruiting muck. Bush, he told me, was using his prestige to reinforce that grand illusion foisted on young athletes: What they do on a playing field transcends academics and the other mundane pursuits that occupy lesser mortals. (The Guv knows that he won't garner much publicity by sending text messages to New Jersey's merit scholars.)

GAPING LOOPHOLE

The Drake Group, among other reforms, just happens to be pushing the NCAA to legislate limits on text- message recruiting. The rules limit coaches and their minions to one phone call a week but, the NAACP failed to anticipate the gaping loophole offered by cellphone technology. The governing body for college sports has no limit on texts.

Ridpath said high school athletes receive from 40 to 50 texts a day from coaches, who prove more faithful (unless a kid blows out a knee) than their girlfriends.

The University of Florida's success on signing day last week -- ESPN declared the Gators their official 2006 national champs of recruiting -- was credited in part to the coaching staff's celebrated proficiency with Blackberrys. They mastered that strange new language of single-letter abbreviations and clipped phrases scrolling down a cellphone screen.

But the Gators, who also coveted Myron Rolle, could hardly compete with a text message suggesting that the defensive back, between games of course, could hang out with the Guv. ''Doesn't a governor have anything better to do?'' Ridpath wondered.

"You wonder what's next," Ridpath said. "A message from the governor's brother?"

U want stop by Wite Hus next time in DC?'