'What traits can you inherit from a sugar daddy?

Inside Boone Pickens Stadium, on the Boone Pickens podium, in front of the Boone Pickens mike, under Boone Pickens light bulbs, Oklahoma State Coach Mike Gundy created a must-see YouTube episode last week in a clip off the old block.

He was the spittin’ image of his platinum donor. In an off-the-rails tirade, Gundy smeared Jenni Carlson of The Oklahoman over her column on the Cowboys’ demoted quarterback, Bobby Reid, during a 3-minute-20-second attack on her credibility, reporting skills and lack of Lamaze training. [See how the women, in sports stories, are the men? They're the ones touching base with reality.]

“That article had to be written by a person that doesn’t have a child and never has had a child that’s had their heart broken and come home upset,” Gundy shouted. And then, in need of a cleansing breath, he added: “Come after me! I’m a man! I’m 40.”

His midlife crisis aside, Coach Gundy called Carlson’s story line fiction but refused to point out the errors. He simply created his own truth by reversing reality. Did he swift-boat Carlson? Did he make his cash daddy proud? [I'm a kept woman and I'm loving it.]



Boone Pickens is the turn-around artist of oilman lore who once twisted John Kerry’s character as the lead financier behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign. Pickens has also been linked to the political group Stop Her Now.

Who knew he meant Carlson and not Hillary?

Was Pickens behind Gundy’s outburst? Or did Gundy simply snap as the picked man?



It isn’t a stretch to wonder how deep Pickens’s influence runs inside an athletic department awash in his cash. About 90 percent of the nearly $300 million Pickens has given to O.S.U. has been earmarked for sports. About 100 percent of the Cowboys’ coaching decisions are all but approved by Pickens. [See now, a university president with balls'd be able to keep ol' Boone back. But you got a girl running things at O.S.U.... I mean, not a real girl! A guy who's a girl.]

Gundy is his guy — one of the many. The size of Pickens’s tax-deductible love for his alma mater is historic but in lock step with every tycoon who has mistook [Mistook? Shouldn't that be mistaken?]a focus on education to mean high-def TVs for the team.

The math book doesn’t lie. The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report last week that detailed how gifts to 119 of the largest athletic departments in the country have, in some cases, tripled in recent years, but donations to academics have remained flat.

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Devotion to the fight song has devoured disposable income for the booster who charges every purchase of team spirit — from skybox views to seat licenses — on a Visa card with a team logo that puts cash back into the pocket of the program.

Nick Saban, alone, has Alabama donors emptying their houndstooth cookie jars and Roll Tide money clips to pay an eight-year, $32 million deal filled with the C.E.O. perks from a Jack Welch dream. All this after the public university laid out nearly $6 million to sack Mike Shula and his staff last year. [Do me again. Please.]

... Nothing can abate this warped priority spending — not even death. Last spring, Oklahoma State’s athletic department took out life insurance policies on more than two dozen aging boosters. As The Chronicle explained, when a donor passes on to the Cowboy ranch in the sky, the O.S.U. athletic department will inherit $10 million per participant in a plan whipped up by — who else?— Boone Pickens and labeled, The Gift of a Lifetime. [What's zat, honey? You want me to try necrophilia?? Um... okay...]

If not death, the tax man may be the only one to stop this eternal excess. In what constituted an ethics audit last year, the House Ways and Means Committee asked the nonprofit N.C.A.A. to justify its tax-exempt status given its membership in what the author Robert Frank might term “Richistan.”...'