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Saturday, November 20, 2004

UD SALUTES ... The University of Missouri


In naming its new basketball stadium - the Paige Sports Arena - the University of Missouri has really done itself proud. The stadium's name honors a woman whose own undergraduate experience is a kind of paradigm for the experience of so many university athletes in America:



"[Paige Laurie], the daughter of Blues owner and University of Missouri benefactor Bill Laurie, paid her roommate at the University of Southern California about $20,000 over three years to write papers and complete other class assignments for her, according to a report on ABC's news- magazine 20/20.

Elena Martinez said she was Paige Laurie's roommate freshman year at the school in Los Angeles. Martinez said it wasn't long before she was writing reports and papers for the daughter of businessman Bill Laurie and Nancy Laurie, an heir to the Wal-Mart empire. In return, Paige Laurie paid Martinez hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars at a time.

'I was Paige ... short of going to class,' Martinez told 20/20 in the show, which aired Friday night. "I learned a lot in her classes."

Martinez showed 20/20 lists of dozens of papers and projects she said she had completed for Paige Laurie, noting that she had received A and B grades on them.

Paige Laurie's name graces her father's Paige Sports Entertainment, which in turn owns the Blues and runs Savvis Center. It's also been planted on Paige Sports Arena, the new basketball arena at the University of Missouri at Columbia."