… the filthiest of all the Bowls, the very deepest bowel of the Bowls (scroll down for BCS details), has sent a letter out to a bunch of politicians. Over the past few years, the Fiesta people have given these politicians free game tickets.
The letter asks the politicians why they – the Fiesta people – did that.
You read that right. It’s a letter that says you tell us why we bribed you. Turns out it wasn’t a tax exempt sort of thing to do! Who knew? … But … well … maybe it was a tax exempt sort of thing to do only we’re too stupid to figure out how it was tax exempt. Will you tell us?…
Or… maybe if we write this letter to you we’ll transfer the guilt to you! You took the money after all! It wasn’t me, Mom! It was him!
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Answers to the Fiesta letter are starting to trickle in, and so far it doesn’t look good.
Senator Rich Crandall:
“I don’t have to prove to you it was a benefit. …Your board and directors said it was a benefit… You need to go back to them and ask them how they felt it was a benefit. I don’t have to justify anything to you.”
Senate President Russell Pearce:
The request is “outrageous.”
Looks like the Fiesta guys might have to go back to the drawing board and figure out all by themselves why they’re a tax-exempt organization. For some reason, the beneficiaries of their payoffs aren’t cooperating.
Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.
Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.
Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…
Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.
And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.
… has made for great UD viewing. It’s as if the people running the most corrupt of the spectacularly corrupt Bowl Championship Series games said to themselves What sort of writing can we produce to make UD optimally happy?
Put aside the alliteration-extension clever writers chronicling fiestal filth have already put into play. That’s a fun, but rather thin, amusement.
Look instead at the sudden renaming of the “Fiesta Frolic,” a golf junket for the NCAA (you wouldn’t want these guys actually overseeing what you do), to “Valley of the Sun Experience & Fiesta Bowl Seminars.”
MAKE MY DAY.
I mean here you get not only the gravitas of ancient history and myth (Valley of the Sun), but intellectual seriousness (seminar)… Frolic? Who said frolic? Did you say frolic? We speet on your frolic!
Then there’s this amazing bit of prose from the head of the Fiesta Bowl’s board of directors – a man who, fittingly, also runs an outfit called Waste Management. It’s one thing to underground diapers; it’s another thing to shovel this much shit.
Duane plucks real hard on our heartstrings throughout his defense of the sublimity of the Fiesta Bowl. I’ll let you read for yourself his sobbing insistence that they’ll come out of this better men. But I do want to reproduce Duane’s final lines.
… I received [an email] last week from Air Force Lt. Col. and Fiesta Bowl Committee member Bob Whitehouse, stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq.
Half a world away, in the midst of an armed conflict, Lt. Col. Whitehouse sounded a rallying cry for his beloved Fiesta Bowl.
“In the face of adversity,” Whitehouse wrote, “We can either crumble and fail, or we can rise above it and reach even greater success.”
Our choice is clear.
Dr Johnson! Thou should’st be living at this hour.
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Update: They’re canceling this year’s event.
Requiem for a Frolic.
You are going to love this account of life at a modern American university.
The piece is a review of a documentary about the amateur sportsmen at the University of Miami, and it touches on many significant aspects of contemporary American higher education. Some highlights:
…There are four main periods of time (with some overlap between sections) that the documentary deals with: (1) the Pell Grant Scandal and rebuild under Butch Davis through the beginning of the Coker Era, (2) the decline under Coker post Fiesta Bowl, (3) the Nevin Shapiro Scandal, (4) the continued malaise under Shannon and Golden…
[T]here was foreshadowing of tragedy a decade in the future, when … one of [football coach] Butch Davis’ disciplinary measures was to force players to give up their guns…
[The team’s downfall] started on the field with multiple brawls, and tragically spread off the field, with the murder of Bryan Pata.
One of the more chilling moments was Randy Phillips recounting the Pata murder, where he nonchalantly says that if he was there, things would have gone differently because he was always armed, and would have engaged in a gun battle with the attacker. It’s a stark reminder for sheltered fans that these players came from a different place. They moved to Coral Gables, they became Canes, but their past often followed them. This discussion is in stark contrast to Butch Davis’ disciplined approach where he tried to disarm, literally, the Miami players…
The severity of the Pell Grant scandal, with players being arrested, and an administrator being sent to jail for three years, with the loss of scholarships amounting to 31 is put up against a scandal that was all hat and no cattle, ultimately resulting in a loss of only nine scholarships…
Because they (theoretically) serve a charitable educational mission with their respective schools, college athletic departments … are considered nonprofits — a major reason the NCAA clings to the outdated, immoral concept of amateurism, and that big-time football coaches such as Texas’s Mack Brown earn $5 million-plus per season. (When you don’t pay the workforce because you’re technically not a business, all that television money has to go somewhere.) Postseason bowl games enjoy the same hands-off treatment from the IRS, with predictable results: Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earns $645,000 in total yearly compensation; Outback Bowl — Outback Bowl! — CEO Jim McVay eared $808,000 in 2009; former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker collected a $592,000 annual salary before the fallout from a scandal involving a $33,188 self-celebrating birthday party, a $95,000 round of golf with Jack Nicklaus and $1,200 strip club visits on the company’s (tax-deductible!) tab led to his firing.
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UD thanks Daniel.
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…
Yes, yes, that’s how it’s gone, and no one’s surprised that John Junker, someone affiliated with universities and their use of public money, is now routinely referred to as a “kingpin.”
Criminal, university-affiliated, public money gangs being what they are, we shouldn’t expect only game fixing, gun violence, DUIs, theft of public funds for running decades-long pretend-class scams, and all the other low-level stuff to be the only news we get out of big-time university sports in America, the place where Richie Incognito got his education. We should also expect, at the highest level, at the level of the most powerful men in college football, to hear about bribing politicians, breaking campaign finance laws, diverting millions of dollars of public funds for strip clubs and all that other sex stuff that Nevin Shapiro made even more famous than it already was. As all of these guys will explain to you if you’ll only sit down and listen, there’s a certain culture associated with university football, see… A certain world that’s being admitted to the country’s universities… And coaches and boosters and university presidents (here’s looking at you, Graham Spanier) have to play to it.
Junker will go to jail for a bit, but don’t make no nevermind.
… upon the magic of big-time university sports. For when we do… oh, when we do…!
And verily it is as Bagehot wrote – for when you pull one kingly thread from the sunny jacket of John Junker, well, the whole fabric of the thing comes apart, don’t you see:
Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it… Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic…The existence of this secret power is, according to abstract theory, a defect in our constitutional polity, but it is a defect incident to a civilisation such as ours, where august and therefore unknown powers are needed, as well as known and serviceable powers.
This is why I say to you: Let him be. Let his princelings be. Let the Bowl Championship Series be. Its powers are august and therefore unknown; unknown and therefore august. Reverence them.
The Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship Series.
Until he was fired, Junker “was paid $592,000 to stage either two or three football games a year.” In 2008, Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earned $645,386 “for staging one football game.”
“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”
