Tacit? Thundering. It’s UD‘s Donald Trump point again (see this post). He’s doing brilliantly because lots of people in this country like despicable people and despicable business practices. Gordon Gekko’s an American icon, and so are all the despicable coaches that earn by far the highest salaries at our universities. The genius who came up with “Hostess 5.0” at the University of Louisville will be immortalized in case studies at business schools all over the country.

As Dave Zirin points out, it’s not the pimping; it’s the hypocrisy. Katina Powell readily admits to being a whore; why won’t Andre McGee and his boss admit to being pimps?

Instead of writing corporate how-to books, Rick Pitino and his ilk should be delivering seminars in Big Pimpin’. Katina Powell isn’t close to being on his level.

As for the NCAA:

[O]ne wonders why NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t elicit cries of “stranger danger” when he enters a room.

****************

No one who has, like UD, followed events at the University of Louisville over the last few years, can be surprised that the first longterm official trade in women at an American university was uncovered at that school. Its board of trustees is cretinous, catatonic. (The only trustee with guts – Steve Wilson – has begged the governor to let him quit, and the governor has obliged.) Its president – who keeps getting immense raises onaccounta he’s doing such a bang-up job – is a fully owned subsidiary of Richard Pitino and Bobby Petrino. Its student body and faculty has responded to the brothelization of their school with silence, or with rage at outsiders kicking over the stalls at the meat market.

The eminently fuckable University of Louisville continues to thrill. The latest chapter in Whormitory Nights features a lawsuit against Katina Powell for writing that mean book.

The student would do better to direct her lawsuit against the UL trustees. They are the long-time proprietors of Mustang Ranch. And they’ve got far more money than that book’s ever going to make.

*************************

UD is told by reliable sources that a consortium of UL fraternities is planning to sue Andre McGee and Rick Pitino for copyright infringement.

*************************

UL’s in-dorm brothel contributes to the decline of an entire industry.

Today, pornography is free, and finding real people who are into exactly what you’re into has never been smoother. It’s not that we’re living in an unprecedentedly immoral age, but that we no longer need to drive to seedy brothels in rural counties to procure our poison.

[Rick] Pitino still has a job because he’s one of the best coaches in college basketball history. Bobby Petrino was hired — actually, re-hired — because his brilliant football mind takes precedence over an extensive list of despicable acts away from the field, capped off by that Evel Knievel impression with his mistress along for the ride.

Throughout his tenure as president, [University of Louisville president James] Ramsey has deferred to [vp for athletics Tom] Jurich in all athletics matters. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep Pitino, without punishment, after the Karen Sypher scandal. He supported Jurich’s decision to give football coach Bobby Petrino another chance despite the sex scandal that got him fired at Arkansas. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep football recruiter Clint Hurtt even after he was tainted by his involvement in the recruiting sex scandal at Miami… Already national commentators have lumped together all of Jurich’s controversial personnel decisions and concluded that UofL is guilty of condoning sexual misconduct for the sake of winning.

Talk about rushing to conclusions! Does that seem to you the record of a university that condones sexual misconduct for the sake of winning? Whoa, Nellie!

*******************

But look. Louisville’s is not the record of a university at all, is it? The opinion writer I quote above argues that universities are about this and universities are about that and the University of Louisville has to toss out all its pimps and whores and remember it’s a university yadda yadda.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this picture. Think about Donald Trump’s huge success so far in the presidential campaign. The more Trump behaves in a way diametrically opposed to presidential, the more votes he gets. Because a lot of Americans loathe government and love people committed to trashing it.

In the same way, a lot of people loathe academic institutions and love people committed to trashing them. Bring in squads of scummy coaches to run your school, give them complete freedom and the highest salaries in the state, and they will of course run your university into the ground.

To the cheers of thousands of onlookers.

***************************

Where’s UL’s faculty? Have you heard a peep out of any of them?

***************************

The University of Louisville has a permanent hard-on. It’s difficult to think when you’re like that.

But that’s the whole point.

Could it be that one of America’s sleaziest coaches, at one of America’s sleaziest schools, will have to leave? Lots of people are saying that the University of Louisville‘s basketball program has tipped over into Too Sordid Even for Division I and will have to sacrifice its coach, Rick Pitino.

*******

Louisville’s problem is not that it turns its dorms into whorehouses. Big deal. Recruiting 101. Athletics is the university’s front porch. And back room.

“You’re not gonna get players by doing those types of things,” [said Pitino] … what was behind this? What was the reason? An educated person can’t think you’re gonna get a recruit with a stripper coming in. This is University of Louisville, you don’t need any artificial help.” Funny, because you know what the rest of the world assumes? That free, naked, older women in the dorms would be exactly the type of thing that may interest 17 and 18-year-old boys. Why would Pitino staffer Andre McGee set up hooker parties with recruits? To bore them?

No, Louisville’s problem is that the university’s tell-all madam turns out to be a pleasant, articulate, believable person. UL’s last hope was that this woman would be a raving slut rather than a research and publishing genius who could teach UL’s tenure track cohort a trick or two. That strutting pious fraud Pitino will have to go.

The great Sarah Vaughan ushers him out.

Perdido, we look for our coach he’s perdido
We misplaced our coach Rick Pitino
While chancing a dance fiesta.

He’s perdido!

*********

UD thanks John.

… as Tom Lehrer calls the south, and ain’t it the truth. UD loves her a good university sports scandal, and aint nuthin like a southern university sports scandal.

And hell. Even by southern scandals, the cast of characters at the University of Louisville, known to one and all as the U of Smell, is way past southern gothic.

UD’s own name for UL is Mount Louisville onaccounta most of its troubles got to do with men mounting women. Bobby Motorcycle Petrino, Rick The Table Pitino, Andre Dorm Couch McGee…

And now we can add the procurer’s procurator, the lawyer hired by Katina Powell, Counsellor Larry Wilder. Larry’s interior of choice, if you will, is a little different: He likes trash cans.

It happens. When La Kid graduated from George Washington University, now-disgraced honorary degree awardee Brian Williams gave an address in which he lectured UD on personal ethics.

UD‘s kinda hurt because Williams lied to her in his speech: He said it doesn’t pay to cheat, but it does pay to cheat, and he knows it cuz he’s back at his old job after suffering only un p’tit peu for being a cheat.

University coaches are of course – if they’re any good at all – cheaters. Americans know this and love them for it. Coaches do what they have to do to get ahead, just like Brian Williams.

It almost always does pay to cheat in college sports. Wins matter more than integrity. This isn’t exactly a revelation. As Jerry Tarkanian used to say, “Nine out of 10 schools are cheating. The other one is in last place.” …Cheating pays. We’ve learned this from roided-up baseball players who walked away with tens of millions of dollars, and from white-collar criminals whose sentences paled in comparison to those of small-time crack dealers.

You can blame it on a toothless NCAA, or on a college sports system that values the almighty dollar over platitudes of integrity, or on an American culture that values winning over all else.

I’ll call it something else: The fact that schools cheat – and that they get away with it – is a natural result of the odd marriage in America between big-money athletics and academics.

The reference up there to white collar criminals reminds me of one of my all-time favorite commencement speeches, from Allen Greenspan to the young eager hedgies of Wharton. It’s a fascinating address rhetorically. Greenspan knows he’s talking to many of the most-honed, highest-level cheaters America has to offer the world, people who can barely stay seated in their chair before peeling off and starting a Ponzi scheme; and indeed he knows that the background of his talk is the most recent immense number of immense American corporate scandals… So what’s he going to say? Isn’t it all rather… futile….?

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

All the herbal viagra in the world won’t make this less limp.

Just as it’s especially amusing to watch the winningest coaches shovel the moral shit in their books and speeches, it’s a special treat to watch income inequality’s biggest boosters dish out the do-goodery.

The only trouble mondo cheato ever runs into is when pesky university students decide to get all judgmental about some of the important inspirational people on their campus. It bothers Yalies that Bill Cosby has an honorary degree that their school refuses to revoke. Why does it refuse to revoke Cosby’s degree? Yale says two things in response to this question:

1. It’s never revoked a degree before. (And we all know that timid backwater places like Yale can never do anything new.)

2. It doesn’t want to talk about it. Shut up.

UD rather admires Yale’s unwillingness even to try to argue the point. (Northwestern, where UD was an undergrad, is also opting for silence.) Tons of universities have revoked Cosby’s honorary degrees, and they’ve stated their reasons, but Yale’s like eh I don’t know didn’t I tell you to shut up? It’s like Yale acknowledges what UD has been saying which is like Hello? Everybody’s an asshole and the biggest assholes get honorary degrees. Nuff said.

One university leader has, however, been willing to go there. One leader has ignored the wisdom of the keep-mum crowd and gone there. Let us consider Stephen Trachtenberg’s opinion piece in the campus newspaper. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his sentences with her commentary.

*******************

‘I was the GW president back in the day when we gave Bill Cosby an honorary degree. At the time, he was arguably the most popular Commencement speaker of my tenure. His remarks at graduation were received with an ovation. All attending cheered him. He was celebrated for his contributions to American culture and for his comic genius. [Spectacular dude. Was his dissertation majorly bogus? Should this matter to a university like yours as it honors him? Nah.]

It would appear, on the basis of information only now revealed, that he had, in addition to his artistic gifts, a dark and troubling and tragic hidden side. [Tragic. Da guy’s a regular Hamlet already!] Had we known of that we would not have awarded him plaudits. But we did not.

All today seem well-informed of Mr. Cosby’s seemingly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. His life and reputation lie in tatters. One can only speculate on the mental health issues that may underlie the behavior that numerous women have reported regarding Mr. Cosby. [There, there. It’s all about his tragic mental issues. Let’s not get all moral about this… But UD can’t help wondering: Why didn’t Mr Cosby, during the century or so during which he drugged and assaulted women, consult someone about his troubling behavior? I guess had he known that he had psychological problems he would not have attacked all those women. But he did not.]

People of accomplishment can, as we know, also have criminal or evil characteristics. I think of Ezra Pound, a man of towering poetic, artistic and critical gifts, and a fascist war criminal who lived out his life in a prison hospital. [Yes. Pound was punished for what he did. And again unlike Cosby, Pound was indeed clinically insane. That’s why he was in a prison hospital. His Bollingen Prize was so controversial that Congress ended – revoked, if you like – the involvement of the Library of Congress in that award program.]

What good would it do to void Mr. Cosby’s diploma? Who actually celebrates it today? He is revealed and reviled. I am not keen on trying to rewrite history. We must own our past and learn from it. There is no Platonic device for awarding honors. We do our best to celebrate the good. We work with the best information available. But being human, we have erred in the past and will no doubt do so again in the future. [Enough platitudes for you? Mr Trachtenberg needs to go back and think about the many forms of public rejection, retraction, and revocation which have been a feature of the moral life of this country – and this country’s traditions – from the beginning. It does a lot of moral good – by way of clarification of one’s principles, and official removal from the community of people who seriously offend it – to void awards whose conferral turns out to have been a sick joke.]

We need to redouble our efforts to avoid such failures of judgement in the years to come but must in humility appreciate our limitations and permit experience to inform our thinking. There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should recall our degree from Mr. Cosby, but it is a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge it seeks to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused. [How do you know? Have you heard what the abused have said? The obscenity of their attacker having been protected and even celebrated by the culture has featured prominently in their suffering. One of the reasons it took so long for law enforcement to catch up with Cosby was his many-laureled cultural identity, an identity to which GW contributed.]

Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out. The degree is as null and void as it can be. It is self-executing. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.’ [Oh yes, it’s just our virtue-narcissism at play. How contemptible of us.]

Whew! Finally a credible voice has come out to deny claims that the UL basketball program hired prostitutes to capture recruits. A former player sets the record straight:

Rick Pitino… don’t need to buy any kid pussy to get him to commit to the University of Louisville.

Ain’t it the truth. At America’s football schools, we li’l ol’ instructors don’t count for shit, man. The person who really counts, far as UD can tell, is the assistant coach.

Not the coach. The coach is kinda above it all (‘cept for that dummy Kyle Flood). His job is to take millions in compensation and let the assistant coach(es) do … whatEVer… Coach don’t know. Coach don’t wanna know. They say Rick Pitino’s assistant coach turned the dorm for basketball players into a whorehouse … Rick’s far too classy a guy to know anything about that. They say an assistant coach at UCLA sat on academic support staff to get professors to change athletes’ grades. They say an assistant coach at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette worked out a little conspiracy with a friend of his who supervised ACT tests to toss the lads’ tests and substitute passing ones.

And you know what I bet? I bet Steve Sarkisian’s assistant coaches at the University of Southern California have been working their asses off to help him hide the fact that he’s running a big-time football empire while alcoholic.

I bet his University of Minnesota coaching assistants knew that AD Norbert Teague drank too much and pawed women and all.

Yes, over the years it’s become clear to UD that the fixer, the dirty-work-doer, the facade-maintenance-man in the vast theater of the absurd which is this nation’s effort to meld professional sports with (wait for it) universities is the assistant coach. The assistant coach is the guy who runs after the horse-drawn wagon picking up shit and trying to make it smell like roses.

************
UD thanks John.

“On the surface, it appears Louisville just skipped a sexy hostess program and went straight to the professionals,” [Armen Keteyian] wrote. “And given the high-stakes world of college basketball recruiting – and I’m not trying to be glib about this – it makes sense. This is like Hostess 5.0.“

It’s one thing when this or that fraternity pimps out women for itself (as when Indiana University’s already way-notorious Alpha Tau Omega hired women for one of its forcible-group-bonding sessions), or when this or that university sports team orders up prostitutes for itself, as the Duke lacrosse guys did (you remember how things got out of hand there). It’s another thing when the university pimps out women to recruits, as – allegedly – the University of Louisville athletic department did. With official approval and indeed organized by campus officials, the practice would tend, as the woman quoted in my headline suggests, to give teenage male athletes, uh, ideas about women.

***********************

These 17 and 18-year-old kids are making one of the most important decisions of their entire lives, and an adult is purposefully using sex to affect their decision making. These are not the actions of a shrewd negotiator attempting to gain an advantage over the competition, but a predator, manipulating a young mind into making a decision that would benefit himself.

*************************

If Louisville is guilty, the school has created a dangerous environment for women, and it has opened itself to lawsuits from all angles.

Yes, at a time when all American universities are pledging to act on sexual violence, you’ve got a school like Louisville – a school already as notorious as Indiana’s ATO for all sorts of officially sanctioned scummy behavior (put Louisville in my search engine) – acting, it seems, with a disregard for on-campus sexual behavior reminiscent of Sandusky’s Penn State.

Showers and dorm rooms and frat lounges oh my!

We’ll probably discover, pretty soon, whether Rick Pitino knew how his program recruited players. For the record, UD is quite certain he did.

[Pitino] did an interview today … that was really bizarre and ended up with him rambling about a lot of things and taking a subtle shot at the school president.

Yes now it’s every man for himself as the rancor’s wheeled out and the bloody civil war begins. Talk about an athletics arms race! The weaponry’s been redirected – from rival schools to your own evil meddling institution, which found your recruitment tactics perfectly okay until the evil media began paying attention and then it’s oh no we’re not pimps here we’re scholars and gentlemen and we have no idea who hired rascals like Rick Pitino and Bobby Petrino but we have nothing to do with them either…

As an extra bonus, watch for Pitino to go mad in public (rambling, bizarre) as his dictatorship begins to crumble…

*****************
Pitino’s buddy does a full Coacha Inconsolata on him.

*****************

Rancor, and sniping. This comes from a local comment thread:

I think if this was an institutionally sponsored recruiting tool we could have found a more upmarket supplier, maybe?

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.

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.

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.