Just-fired Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker explained to a group of investigators that the $1,241 he charged the bowl for “a visit to a high-end Phoenix strip club” was a legitimate business expense:
We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments… It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.
Sports Illustrated lists Junker’s activities as CEO:
[F]unneling money to politicians through bowl employees; coaching witnesses, and altering documents during [an earlier] investigation … taking junkets to college football games with politicians and their families — all on the bowl’s dime. On page 210 is a charge that the bowl footed the $33,188 bill for Junker’s 50th birthday party, a four-day bacchanal in Pebble Beach that had, according to one attendee, “absolutely no business purpose.”
But they’re all like that: “The Sugar and Orange Bowls have also recently come under withering criticism for the excessive compensation of executives and extravagant expenditures.”
You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to follow all the sleaze in big-time university sports. Here at University Diaries, we do our best…
March 30th, 2011 at 10:28AM
This is GREAT!
“It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.”
To this day, the woman cherishes the memory of the guy who gave her $1000 for the lap dance.
March 30th, 2011 at 11:06AM
[…] Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship […]