Just like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who in his heyday would pick which Moonies would marry which Moonies!

Things are getting weirder and weirder at Oklahoma State University – not just pimping coaches, but matching coaches.

OSU does their schoolwork for them, escorts them to class, lets them have their drugs, and takes care of their sex life. Football players might not have gotten any money (oh wait a minute; they did get money) but when it comes to being radically, totally, amazingly infantilized UD doesn’t think you can do better than being admitted to Oklahoma State University. Did Les Miles change their diapers for them too?

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Oh, and while the OSU admissions office is scrutinizing the academic qualifications of recruits, is it also reviewing the tits of female applicants… I mean, hostesses?

Hostesses: If you want to be admitted to OSU, you know what to do.

On a mild sunny Saturday morning, UD has gone out to her deck to discover a two-foot long, fully intact (except for a vertical rip near the head) garter snake skin.

Looks kind of like this.

I found the image here.

She’s drying it now (big storm yesterday) on the same outdoor table that holds a massively thriving spider plant UD picked up hours after it had been abandoned at Garrett Park’s last plant swap. She had no idea what it was – just a sad green potted thing – but she thought she’d haul it home and water it and see what happened. Five weeks later it looks like this. (Scroll down to the fourth photo.) Or, you know, not quite that amazing, but getting there. And of course UD is particularly solicitous of this plant because she rescued it, because it was a foundling.

… this! After all, Zygi is trustee of a university! A religious university!

Next up, on the Sports Illustrated hit parade:

Around 2007, Joel Tudman, an [OSU] assistant strength-and-conditioning coach who is also the team’s chaplain and carries the title of Life Issue/Social Development Counselor for the football program — a mentoring position that has become more common within athletic departments — was put in charge of the drug counseling program for football. Tudman is also founder of Net Church, which he started in 2006. The congregation has grown quickly, and Sunday-night services were moved from Bennett Chapel to a student union auditorium, where Tudman’s sermons are delivered to an audience that often includes 40 or more football players.

Tudman, however, has no formal training in drug counseling. While Tudman’s bio on the athletic department website indicated that he had received a “double masters in health and counseling” from Texas A&M-Commerce, he in fact has only a single master’s degree, in Health, Kinesiology and Sports Studies. (Tudman’s bio on the Net Church website also erroneously stated that he had master’s degrees in Health Promotions and Counseling. After Tudman was interviewed by SI the bio was corrected.) His Oklahoma State bio said that he was twice honored by the Lone Star Conference as a running back and was a “3 time All-American sprinter.” In fact, that conference recognized him once (honorable mention in 2003) and he was an All-America sprinter only in 2004. (After SI began investigating Tudman’s background, the school pulled his bio from its website.)

Tudman says because he took courses in health and counseling while at Texas A&M-Commerce he “thought it was a double masters.” He produced a transcript that showed he completed five counseling courses, but none of them dealt with substance abuse and he never enrolled in the two courses Texas A&M-Commerce offered in that area. Tudman concedes that his athletic accomplishments were also embellished. “That’s [a mistake] on my part,” he says. “I take full responsibility.”

… (Tudman remains unlicensed to treat drug users.)

When asked about Tudman’s qualifications and background, [OSU] athletic director Holder said, “I didn’t look at Joel’s résumé” …

What Holder looked at was whether Tudman was a sufficiently pathetic blowhard to be controlled by Holder. Answer: Yes.

The school superintendent who plagiarizes, word for word, his heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year is never embarrassed. He explains that he happened to have found on the web a heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year that said exactly what he wanted to say, so he used that. If you insist he contact the original author, he’ll do that, but he assures you that the guy’s gonna be flattered; what he has done, after all, is an homage.

The poet who plagiarizes the work of better poets who say exactly what he wants to say but say it ever so much better so why not take their words is similarly shocked when people act as if he’s some sort of villain. It’s a postmodern pastiche, for fuck’s sake, an appropriation art comment on the death of originality in our time. If you’ve got a corncob up your ass and can’t get with the program it’s not his fault.

… have been announced.

UD‘s favorite:

Probability prize

Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan, for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Reference: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

Mr UD liked this one:

Psychology:

Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah, for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.

Reference: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

… has died. Here’s a good remembrance.

“[W]hy should a people want to know modern art?” Berman asks in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. “What can it give them? Pamuk doesn’t offer a single ringing answer, but here’s a start: A global horizon and an expansive flow of empathy, a feeling for irony and complexity, a capacity to embrace contradictory ideas and believe and love them both.”

Berman’s one of those rare writers whose style, in almost everything he writes, is as much cheer-leading as arguing. You can always feel his tumbling excitement for the ‘sixties modernism he lived, his unapologetic nostalgia for the wraparound avant-gardism of post-war American cities:

As an ironic result of the flight of capital from American cities after World War II, every city gained grungy low-rent neighborhoods that could incubate bookstores and art studios and modern dance groups, experimental theatres, venues for jazz and folk music and performance, and the sort of shabby clubs and coffee houses and music stores and cabarets that nourished Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan. New York’s Village (first West, then East) is what I knew, but there were neighborhoods like this all over America. Late in the 1950s, they started to fill up with kids from all over metropolitan areas who could read the little magazines and the Grove Press paperbacks in the bookstores, hang out in streets and play their guitars in parks, hear sounds of music that carried from clubs they couldn’t afford to go to, find intense people like themselves to walk and talk with through the night, and maybe to grope and love.

Grungy, shabby, grope: This is the loose-limbed prose that accompanies Berman’s perpetual enthusiasm for the intense, generative, experimental life that modernity’s secularity and freedom, and urbanism’s moment-to-moment dynamism, allow. Few wrote as evocatively, as convincingly, as he did about the importance of cultivating a critical consciousness and a rebellious life (Isaac Rosenfeld could match him, I guess — though Rosenfeld brought much more jaded eyes to the scene; and there’s the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer…).

Like anyone writing with seriousness and commitment in this Blakeian tradition, he was easy to mock. But Berman held aloft a certain comprehensive modernist ideal, and it’s the same ideal that a postmodern writer like Don DeLillo, in a novel like Underworld, with its long Lenny Bruce soliloquies, is exploring. And pursuing.

Ed Keller, baseball player for Oklahoma State University back in the day, chairs the board of trustees there… The Board of Trustees! Where have they been during OSU’s long years of academic fraud, pimping of coeds to football recruits, money gifts to players, etc. etc.? What is a board of trustees? What does it do?

Okay, so the best answer to those questions is (see Penn State) nothing and nothing. We know this. Does it bother Yeshiva University that a man just found guilty of massive racketeering is on its board of trustees? Does Brown give a shit that Steve Cohen is on its board of trustees?

The best answer to these questions is no and no. Au contraire, if you’re a sports slut like OSU, you positively want a board of trustees made up of mindless jocks and boosters. In order to get to Number One, your coaches are going to be breaking a lot of rules, and the last thing they need is even one trustee with a conscience.

How do you keep all the trustees in line? If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know how the thing is done. All BOTs have one really well-connected bully (see Auburn’s Bobby Lowder) who controls everyone else on the board by withholding information, threatening to drop them from the board, whatever. This person takes advantage of the fact that for most university trustees the position is little more than something to boast about rather than a series of meetings one really means to attend, etc. Note that some universities have boards made up of thirty, forty, fifty people. You don’t have to be an expert in organizations to know that these groups are pointless, bootless, bogus.

Sports Illustrated is going after low-hanging fruit like this Okie joke first; expect more such multi-part investigations. And expect, in each case, that at some point someone’s going to say Hey doesn’t this school have a board of trustees? What does the board do?

Answers: Yes. Nothing.

…whether your favorite college football program is dirty.

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UD thanks Andrew.

But it’s here now, and it’s great. Enjoy.

Classy. The Oklahoma State University librarian who according to tons of former football players wrote all of their papers for them has counterattacked. They’re all demented, see. One too many blows to the helmet.

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OSU pushed “players into easier majors, notably sociology.”

It’ll be interesting to hear what professors in the OSU sociology department – handmaiden of the football flunkies – have to say in their defense.

… “You don’t have to do anything. If you go to class, they’ll give you a C because they care about Oklahoma State football.”

Former wide receiver Artrell Woods told the magazine he didn’t write “a single paper” while at OSU, but rather had completed work dictated to him by a tutor.

Said former defensive tackle Brad Girtman, “Are you kidding me? I didn’t go there to go to school. I went there to play football.”

One of the former players named among those who received improper academic assistance is all-Big 12 wide receiver Dez Bryant, currently with the Dallas Cowboys. Sports Illustrated quotes a former assistant coach, who said of Bryant, “He just wasn’t supposed to be there. There’s no way he could do the college work. Once he got there, he was connected with the people that would help him.”

Maybe they’ll say the same thing the librarian did. The many players making these accusations are hopelessly gaga after years of tackles.

But it would be more seemly for people at this prostituted school to be honest about it. There’s a Jacobean comedy called The Honest Whore, and it would be truly wonderful, a wonderful thing for the American university, if the current madam of OSU – the university’s president, I assume – would honestly admit that OSU has been a sports bordello. Professors and advisors there should emulate Sonia, the redeemed prostitute of Crime and Punishment, and pray for divine release.

Headline of the day, from Bloomberg.

… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.

UD’s enjoyed, over the years, following good ol’ T. Boone’s beloved Oklahoma State University (and – if you read that last link – T. Boone is so right that it’s a changed school!), and she’s certainly settling in to enjoy Parts One through All Our Coaches Are Pimps.

Hoo-wheeeee!

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.

Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…

(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)

But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.

There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.

Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]

Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.