Was U Conn so desperate to recruit a new member for its ski team (the dude skis) that it accepted a drunk and disorderly shitski from famously drunk, disorderly, and riotous Zoo Mass? A student who was arrested twice at that fabled campus?
Was the guy expelled from U Mass? Is that why he transferred to U Conn?
By which UD means: Did U Mass, crawling with foul drunks just like this foul drunk, actually find Luke Gatti behaviorally unworthy of that puke- and booze-soaked campus?
*************************
Guess it’s all relative. In the case of U Conn, when the highest paid, highest profile, most beloved person at your school produces viral videos like this (when U Conn coach Jim Calhoun retired, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house), little Luke’s viral video maybe fails to impress.
It has certainly impressed everyone outside of U Conn… Proving once again that it’s true what they say: Sports really are the front porch of the American university.
Rarely anything surprises me in college sports anymore but the massive recruiting scandal brewing near Churchill Downs may just replace the Albert Means story as the biggest recruiting scandal ever…
What has allegedly transpired at the University of Louisville in its storied basketball program truly stands out even in the ugly seamy world of college athletic recruiting.
… photographed this incredibly sunny
and beautiful afternoon during our
walk at Brookside Gardens, in Wheaton,
Maryland. As you know, UD is
growing from seed both Black Olive
and Black Pearl varieties of
ornamental peppers. She discovered
these plants at Brookside.
The question now becomes whether or not the NCAA is able to prove any of what [Katina] Powell alleges happened in her book, and I think they have a pretty good chance of making that happen. What they’ll likely do — and what they have probably already begun doing — is to interview players that were recruited by [the University of] Louisville but that ended up at other schools, threatening ineligibility while offering immunity for the truth.
The University of Louisville has inspired the current number one bestselling sports memoir on Amazon. Katina Powell’s detailed account of her Dance Appreciation course at the school (or was that Rutgers?) has clearly touched the hearts of sports and dance fans everywhere.
… nobody came?
(I know, I know. They came like mad at the University of Louisville.)
So here’s the deal. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni is still carrying around campus a monastic model of the university. Haven! Really? From what? The University of Texas is a massively profitable sports empire with classrooms.
“All this marketing and globalization of big-time sports entertainment based at public universities has invaded and transformed the whole politeia of the university,” said UT classics professor Thomas Palaima. “Students come to campus now not feeling awe at the prospect of learning and investigating truths about our world and ourselves but to get ready for game day and have a ‘college experience’ and then get a job.”
Palaima said he had recently walked past the University Co-Op, a campus institution, and thought the storefront an apt metaphor for what critics believe are the school’s misplaced priorities. “(It) was entirely given over to images of footballs and Longhorns souvenirs,” he said. “Not a book in sight or any suggestion that there was a center of learning across the street.”
You wanna watch out for that politeia. Once you hand it over to yahooiae, you can kiss your theater of ideas goodbye.
And Texas is ground zero, ain’t it? Know how Baylor University families celebrate graduation? Dodging bullets at the local war zone. Hard keeping the noise down in the library.
Almost the exact same story as Adam Lanza, including knowing your son has mental problems and blasting and stockpiling away with him anyway.
It started with Coach Pitino himself, who said that in the aftermath of charges that his University of Louisville assistant basketball coach hired prostitutes over a number of years for some of his players (festivities took place in the athletes’ dorm), he felt
… heart broken… My heart is just taken out of my body and broken.
It continues with this remarkable essay, which argues that Pitino himself a few years ago had sex on a restaurant table (some reports say it happened on the restaurant floor, or in its bathroom) because of 9/11 (RICK PITINO AND THE SHADOWS THAT NEVER LEAVE):
[Pitino’s] descent into a dark place [so maybe it was the bathroom] happened no more than two years after 9-11. The idea that tragedy and loss [a close relative of Pitino’s died] did not have anything to do with a flawed man’s attempt to fill those voids with something adventurous (and highly inappropriate) seems unconvincing.
Plus even the Pope, man…
In keeping with the Golden Rule Pope Francis invoked when he spoke to Congress, none of us would ever want the past — something 12 years ago — to be held against us.
The whole essay’s really weird because few people so far have anything to say at all about whether Pitino knew his lads were double teaming (or so the exposé claims) in the dorm … It’s as if the writer – given Pitino’s own sex scandal background – assumes we’re going to go there and we’re going to assume Pitino must have known all about the McNasty…
I mean, he might have. Who knows? We’ll find out. But that’s not what most people are thinking about right now. Right now we’re thinking about whether the claims are true, what exactly happened… It’s early days. Yet here you’ve got this guy anticipating a general belief that the slimy Pitino (as the essay goes on to note, he’s paid an outrageous fortune, is a really unpleasant human being, is a hypocrite – all those motivational books about how you can be as great as he is – and is an inveterate breaker of rules, athletic and otherwise) must have known about the sex. So right there I’m not sure the writer is accomplishing his Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if at this late date you need a definition) goals by going out of his way to remind us that Pitino’s a shit.
After a long detailed recounting of Pitino’s grubby past, the essay ends in this way:
[We need to] recognize the fragility of life behind (and beyond) the public persona of someone who has won multiple championships and earned a boatload of money.
You know, there’s one thing Scathing Online Schoolmarm will say for Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t say I’m a shitty person because of 9/11. He doesn’t say under all my greed and cruelty I’m fragile and you have to be nice to me. Nor does he have admirers who say these things for him.
[T]his scandal, if the allegations are true, reveals a sordid underbelly to college recruiting which is not altogether shocking yet may nevertheless be altogether damning for the university IF (a) parents become leery of sending their kids to Louisville…
**********************
And remember Cam Newton’s dad! Another model for the big-time university sports family.
This advice, culled from one of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s many motivational books, seems to have been taken to heart by Katina Powell:
Powell kept five journals with details of her escort escapades, sexual encounters, murdered relatives and activities at the University of Louisville. Most of the U of L services she provided took place in the men’s dormitory where basketball players reside. Her main contact and the man who paid for her services–the school’s former director of basketball operations and former graduate assistant, Andre McGee–kept Powell and her girls busy from 2010 to 2014. She has hundreds of text exchanges with him to set up her services as well as pictures of her girls with players and recruits.
She seems to have recorded everything.
One other note of interest as we begin to, uh, bone up on this story, is the fact that the journalist who first reported the story, Pat Forde, co-wrote a book with Rick Pitino and is (was?) apparently his buddy. Hm.
I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me, as Lady Bracknell says… Is attendance at games, as this University of Virginia student editorialist argues, really a reflection of any kind, poor or rich, on a university? You could argue that the school in question here, UVa, should be proud of its low football turn-out, suggestive as it is of things like independent mindedness and studiousness. Perhaps some UVa students don’t like thinking of themselves as subjects in a long-running experiment on how to stimulate your rats into finding boring bone-crushing sports events interesting.
[UVa needs to be] building new stadium video boards … enhancing sound systems….
Buy a state of the art Adzillatron to shriek car dealership ads at them! Trap them in a stadium for hours, unable to turn off, or even turn down, incessant messages!
But UD says: Nothing will work without liquor. Only schools willing to soak students in booze are going to get anywhere with the national nightmare of tanking game attendance. Once your students are really shitfaced, they’ll do anything.
*******************
Now with university players, it’s different. If you want to motivate them, try Coach Kermit Blount’s approach: starvation.
