“The law makes no distinction between icons and the rest of us, and neither do I.”
– Kentucky Auditor Adam Edelen

As the University of Kentucky was rolling to its eighth NCAA championship, Richie Farmer should have been playing the role of elder statesman and resident icon, recounting over and again a storybook career that ended in 1992 when Duke’s Christian Laettner hit one of the greatest clutch shots in NCAA basketball tournament history.

Instead, the former Wildcat legend was in seclusion, awaiting the result of a state audit of his eight-year tenure (2003-’11) as the commonwealth’s Commissioner of Agriculture. It finally was released on Monday, April 30, and Farmer’s legions of fans, especially in the eastern Kentucky mountains from whence he sprang, were saddened and shocked by the results.

“The report,” said Edelen in a press conference, “paints a clear picture of an administration that had no qualms about treating taxpayer money as its own. It was a toxic culture of entitlement and self-dealing at the Kentucky taxpayers’ expense.”

The report accused Farmer, who played in five State High School tournaments (1984-’88) during his career at Clay County High, of myriad ethical and legal violations. Edelen said he would send the the report to the state attorney general’s office, the Executive Branch Ethics Commission, the Kentucky Personnel Board, the IRS, and other agencies, any or all of which could conduct their own investigations.

Among the findings:

* Farmer used state employees to build a basketball court in his backyard and failed to report accepting $900 worth of concrete for the project. He also once shot a deer while riding in a state vehicle and ordered an employee to “field-dress” it on the spot to get tenderloins.

* Two laptop computers assigned to Farmer were missing, as were six Remington rifles, valued at $449 each, that Farmer had ordered as gifts for a convention.

* Farmer’s relatives used state-rented hotel rooms at the Kentucky State fair at$4,257 cost to taxpayers. In addition, Farmer twice had staff members give family members Christmas baskets that were filled with items purchased by the department or donated to it.

*Farmer put his girlfriend on the payroll in a $70,457-per-year job, but no documentation could be found that she had done any official work. In addition, a friend of Farmer’s was paid $70,457 for work and travel that could not be documented.

Farmer’s defense?

“What the auditors failed to recognize is that much of what he (Farmer) receives along these lines doesn’t have to do with Richie Farmer, Commissioner of Agriculture,” said his attorney, Guthrie True. “They have to do with Richie Farmer, Number 32…Richie Farmer, member of the ‘Unforgettables.’ Richie Farmer has been receiving gifts that you and I might not receive — whether it be sweatshirts or tennis shoes or whatever — for years.”

In other words, Farmer is a victim of the cultural of entitlement that envelops young basketball players the first time their names appear on a blue-chip recruiting list, and, if they’re good enough, becomes a way of life that lasts far after their playing days are done.
[Read more →]

From 1947, when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke major-league baseball’s color barrier, to 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act, sports and rock music – rock n’ roll, as we called it then – did more than anything to change America’s culture and its attitude toward race.

That’s why Dick Clark, who died last week at 82, deserved all the tributes that came pouring in from the entertainment world and aging teenagers from the 1950s and ‘60s. Whether he intended it or not, Clark was an important soldier in the battle against racism.

Had that proposition been put to him, Clark probably would have demurred. He probably would have said that all he cared about were America’s teenagers and the music they loved. He never talked about social issues or politics. All he did was show us, by example and through music, how to get along.

To understand Clark’s importance, some context is necessary.

When American Bandstand made its network TV debut on Aug. 15, 1957, the country was brimming with unprecedented confidence, prosperity and growth. The boom began in the wake of World War II and grew steadily under the benign leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who oversaw the beginning of the interstate highway system.

Everybody seemed to have an automobile made in Detroit, and that – along with the growing popularity of commercial air travel – led the creation of a tourism industry that shrunk the country. Suddenly we had “motels” (short for motor hotels) and fast-food restaurants and even two new states, Hawaii and Alaska.

But there was an unseen cancer eating away at America’s soft underbelly – the cancer of segregation. What came to be known as the “civil-rights” movement began on May 17, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, mandated the integration of public schools.
[Read more →]

The day after Western Kentucky dropped a two-point overtime decision at home to Louisiana-Lafayette on Jan. 5 – a game in which the visitors inexplicably had six men on the floor for the last 20 seconds – Ken McDonald was fired as the Hilltoppers’ head coach and replaced by Ray Harper, a native of nearby Bremen, Ky., who won five national titles in a phenomenal run at the NCAA Division II and NAIA levels.

McDonald wasn’t fired because his staff didn’t notice the extra man on the floor. That was just the final straw in the downhill spiral that came to exist during McDonald’s three-plus years in Bowling Green. The important stat of the Western-Lafayette game wasn’t the final score, but the almost 6,000 empty seats in E.A. Diddle Arena, which can accommodate 7, 635 for basketball.

Heck, the divide between McDonald and Western’s fan base had grown so huge that only 3,845 showed up to see the Hilltoppers play host to Murray State on Dec. 1. It was the 149th meeting between the neighbors and erstwhile arch-rivals, but apparently the Hilltopper fans just didn’t want to measure their program against the Racers, who succeeded WKU as the Ohio Valley Conference’s dominant program after the Hilltoppers left for the Sun Belt Conference in 1986.

In their first year under Steve Prohm, who was promoted from the staff after Billy Kennedy took the Texas A& M job last spring, the Racers were one of the nation’s surprise teams in the early going. As of press time for this issue of Basketball Times, Murray was 16-0, ranked in the nation’s top 20, and dreaming of denting the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 for this first time in Murray history.

The Racers are built around Isaiah Canaan, a 6-foot junior guard who shoots the three as well as anybody in the nation. On Jan. 7, the same night that Harper was making his debut (a loss to 67-65 loss at home to Troy State), Canaan nailed all seven of his first-half trey attempts on the way to a 35-point night and a 87-75 win over Austin Peay in Clarksville, Tn.
[Read more →]

“If you look closely at the various forces at work in basketball at every level of the sport—the AAU programs that funnel players to college programs, the agents looking to land players as early as NBA rules allow, the shoe companies, coaches, franchise owners, front-office executives, players—it eventually dawns on you that they have one thing in common: William Wesley.” — Sports writer Henry Abbott

You may think you’re watching a basketball game between Louisville and Kentucky at high noon Saturday in Rupp Arena, but you’re really be watching a battle between the highest-profile programs for the dominant shoe companies, Nike and adidas. Yes, it’ll be Team Nike Big Blue against Team adidas Cardinal Red for bragging rights in the netherworld of college commercialism.

Team Nike Big Blue’s only loss this season came to Team adidas Cream-and-Crimson — that would be Indiana — in Bloomington so there will be a sort of revenge factor at work Saturday that nobody but people such as William “Worldwide Wes” Wesley, the nefarious and mysterious Nike-linked flesh peddler, will notice. But make no mistake, shoe-company money and ESPN money drive big-time college sports these days far more than any coach, athletics director, or university president is willing to admit.

When I read that more than 9,000 consumers had stormed the Jefferson Mall to get their hands on a new brand of sneaker, I assumed that maybe LeBron James, Nike’s No. 1 endorser not named Michael Jordan, had released a public version of the special sneaker with which he has blessed the basketball programs at Akron (his hometown), the University of Miami (the site of a monster football scandal this fall), and, of course, Nike Big Blue.

But, no, it was only a new, $180-per-pair version of Air Jordan, the shoe that put Nike on the footwear map, so to speak. When Michael Jordan played at North Carolina in the early 1980s, Converse pretty much owned the franchise on shoes. But then Jordan signed with Nike, came out with his own shoe, and Converse soon found itself as a wholly-owned Nike subsidiary that today only makes retro shoes that aren’t even good for playing basketball.

The shoe-company wars may be waged mostly behind the scenes, but don’t make the mistake of believing they aren’t an essential part of today’s basketball culture. As exhibit A, I give you Marquis Teague, the true freshman point guard for Team Big Blue Nike who was once thought to be a mortal lock for Team adidas Cardinal Red.
[Read more →]

As he begins Year III in his reign over Big Blue World, King John is a wonder to behold. He’s easily the most popular and powerful ruler the kingdom has seen since Adolph The Great, who built the empire a zillion years ago. His style is a wondrous admixture of arrogance, charm, defiance, imagination, and audacity. He is everywhere you go, much like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, inescapable and relentless and right in everybody’s face.

Indeed, there now is a sort of Forrest-Gump-like quality to John Calipari’s overweening presence in Kentucky. Look closely at the renderings of Daniel Boone surveying Cumberland Gap, the young Abe Lincoln splitting logs, Col. Harland Sanders peddling fried chicken in a white suit, the young Cassius M. Clay Jr. sparring in a boxing ring. Isn’t that Calipari in the background?

“Kings think differently than we think,” says Calipari. “When I talk about ‘The Kentucky Effect,’ that’s thinking like a king. I told my team that we want to compete on all levels…the highest grade-point average in the country…the national title…let’s see if we can get six guys drafted. Why don’t we think like kings?”

Well, actually, the ‘Kentucky Effect’ is really the ‘Calipari Effect.’ The bigness and growth of UK basketball has been well-documented from the days of Adolph Rupp. But no coach has ever exploited it, examined it, expanded it, and extolled it quite like John Calipari. He feeds the needs – pathological needs, critics might say – of the Big Blue Kingdom and his subjects, in turn, roar with approval every time he re-enforces their notion of their own superiority.

On Oct. 12, King John appeared before a packed room of devout subjects at the annual Wildcat Tip-Off Luncheon in Louisville, the part of his realm where former king Richard the Lion-Hearted lives and works in exile. Every chance he gets, either directly or indirectly, King John tries to bewitch, bother, and bewilder Rick Pitino, who left the University of Kentucky after eight glorious years in the 1990s to crusade in the NBA. That did not work out so well, so he came back, battered but unbowed, to lead the merry band of rebels at the University of Louisville.

Last spring, when Pitino announced he would coach the Puerto Rican national team in the world championships, his media conference was barely over before Calipari announced he was going to coach the Dominican Republic team. When Pitino eventually wriggled out of his Puerto Rican commitment, Calipari pressed on, going so far as to take the Dominican team into Pitino’s castle – the majestic KFC Yum! Center in Louisville – for an exhibition game against an all-star team of former UK and U of L players.
[Read more →]

As a player, coach, parent, student, alum or just plain fan, this is the best of times to be involved with the Trinity High School football program. Even with six – six! – KHSAA classes, the Shamrocks are in a class by themselves. They are well on their way to an unbeaten – no, make that unchallenged — season that may stamp them as the best high school team ever produced in Kentucky.

Heading into Friday night’s game at Male, the Rocks have cracked the Top 10 of some national rankings. They have a bunch of big-time college prospects, mostly in the junior class, but they also have the discipline, motivation, and execution that happens when good coaching intersects with intelligent players.

But take a snapshot of them as they are now because the worst of times may be coming. Already the Trinity stars – James Quick, Travis Wright, Dalyn Dawkins, Garrett Sauer, and others – are being idolized as rock stars by the young Catholic kids who mob them for autographs before and after games at Marshall Stadium.

But this kind of adulation, fanned by media hype, is relatively harmless compared with the sinister specter of the recruiters who represent, either legally or illegally, the universities who covet the Trinity players as commodities necessary to perpetuate the disgraced state of big-time college football.

If these individuals are allowed to get their hooks into the players, nothing good will come of it. Harmony could be replaced by dissension, unselfishness by jealousy, honesty by deceit. Sad as is to contemplate, the truth is that many universities have sold out academic integrity, not to mention business integrity, for the sake of money, money, and more money.

These are not the values the Trinity players are being taught by their coaches, their teachers, or their pastors. But they are the values that predominate in big-time college sports. As Exhibit A, consider the recent orgy of conference “realignment” (a nice word to for pure greed) that has, at bottom, absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of the student-athlete and EVERYTHING to do with money.
[Read more →]

It was John Wooden who said, “Sports do not build character…sports reveals character.” That being the case, it’s fascinating to look at the growing list of university presidents, athletics directors, and conference commissioners who have revealed their character – or, more accurately, the lack of it – during the current orgasm of greed in big-time college athletics.

Let us be clear about one thing: the bottom-line culprit here is ESPN. As the source known as “Deep Throat” told the reporters Bernstein and Woodward in the Watergate scandal, “Follow the money.” In this case, the money always leads to ESPN, which has come to have so much power that it no longer reports on college sports as much as it dictates policy and competitive balance.

So when you hear the Army of ESPN analysts moaning about the shocking display of selfish and unethical behavior now on public display in the college sports world, feel free to giggle. They are the straw stirring this particular drink. When they threw money at Texas to start its own TV channel, it was the spark that ignited the current revolution against decency and integrity.

As more and more college administrators are exposed as frauds and charlatans, Tom Jurich looks better and better. The University of Louisville’s vice-president for athletics – the man single-handedly responsible for all the state-of-the-art facilities and winning teams at U of L – has stood almost alone as an example of loyalty and honorable behavior.

Jurich, who will be a guest on Georgetown College’s “Conversations with Champions” series in April, always has been a champion for academics, non-revenue sports, and NCAA compliance. He played college football at Northern Arizona and was A.D. there and at Colorado State before coming to U of L in 1998.
[Read more →]

It was on the afternoon of Dec. 23, 1978, that I met Dave Gavitt for a cheeseburger at the Executive Inn near Freedom Hall. In a few hours, his 10th and last Providence College basketball team would play the University of Louisville. At the time, U of L belonged to the Metro Conference and Providence to the Eastern College Athletic Conference.

I was curious about why Gavitt, at the peak of a splendid career that had earned him the privilege of coaching the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, had decided to leave coaching so he could concentrate all his energy on being Providence’s athletics director.

He gave pretty much the stock answers I had expected. Both jobs had grown to the point that he couldn’t do both satisfactorily. Scheduling and recruiting were growing problems for a tiny Catholic college in Rhode Island, the nation’s smallest state. He had scratched the Final Four off his bucket list by going there with his 1972-’73 team, built around Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin Barnes.

But then he said something that didn’t grab my attention as much as it should have.

“I’ll probably spend a lot of time the next couple of years studying the possibilities of whether we should think of joining a new conference or fulfilling our traditional role as a national independent, like a Notre Dame or Marquette.”

Less than a year later, Gavitt left Providence to become the first commissioner of the new Big East Conference. Providence, naturally, was a charter member, along with Georgetown, Boston College, Connecticut, St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Syracuse.

The Big East was Gavitt’s baby, pure and simple, and under his leadership it grew into the nation’s most formidable basketball conference, a 16-team conglomerate that stretched from Providence to Philadelphia to Louisville. When it got to eight football-playing members, it was able to grab an automatic berth in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the cartel that controlled the major leagues and bowls.

But last weekend, in a sad and cruel twist of fate, Gavitt died and the Big East suffered a near-fatal assault from two of its oldest members. Gavitt, 73, died of congestive heart failure. The Big East, 32, was on life-support after it was learned that Syracuse and Pittsburgh had betrayed the league by secretly negotiating moves to the Atlantic Coast Conference.
[Read more →]

I don’t know about you, but, frankly, I’m thrilled that the national basketball team of the Dominican Republican is training in Lexington for the FIBA Americas Tournament Aug. 30-Sept. 11 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. I am not sure what this tournament is all about, but I think it has something to do with the Olympics, in which the Dominican Republican has never competed in basketball.

So far as I know, no foreign team has ever used the commonwealth as a training base so score another coup for John Calipari, the clever University of Kentucky coach who has agreed to import the Dribble Drive to the Dominican in exchange for Eloy Vargas and all the Dominican cigars we can afford to buy. No, check that. Vargas already is a member of UK’s team through an agreement worked out with NAFTA and the CIA.

Speaking of the CIA, I’m sure it had nothing to do with the 1961 assassination of Rafael L. Trujillo, the brutal Dominican dictator who ruled the mountainous little Caribbean country for 31 years. Happily, the government has been more or less stable since 1996 and probably will stay that way unless Calipari decides he’s tired of Lexington and tries to start an NBA franchise in Santo Domingo, the capital city that has a population of 2.25 million.

Don’t laugh. Anything is possible when Calipari is involved. Of course, the question remains as to whether he would actually want to live in a country where the economy is estimated at $45.6 billion a year, which is probably about what he will get from Mitch Barnhart the next time is contract is renewed.

So far the only connection I’ve been able to find between Calipari and the Dominican Republican is religion. He’s a Roman Catholic and so is 95 per cent of the nation’s population. The only other thing is that the Dominican shares an island with Haiti, the impoverished and ravaged country for which Calipari – in his finest moment as UK Coach – raised $1 million season before last.

The only reason I can figure that Calipari took the Dominican job is to help Joker Phillips, the UK football coach. Ordinarily, this is the time of year when everybody is talking about the upcoming grid season. But by bringing in the Dominican team and scheduling exhibitions against former UK players in the NBA, Calipari has managed to divert attention from football, for which I’m sure Phillips is very grateful.
[Read more →]

LEXINGTON, Ky. – A typist who lives long enough to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his high school graduation has earned a bit of slack, the way I see it, so I want to tell you now about the 1960-’61 Blue Devils of Henry Clay High School, a team that was pretty danged good, if I do say so, and which became at least a footnote in what turned out to be a historic season in Kentucky high school basketball.

I guess I should start with the summer of 1960, when I was part of the Henry Clay contingent that got on a Greyhound bus in Lexington for the short trip to Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College in Richmond, where we would be delegates to Boys State, a week-long convention, sponsored by the American Legion, that was devoted to teaching government to boys from around the state.

Shortly after we registered and unpacked, three of us – myself and varsity basketball players Bill Brooks and George Insko – sauntered over to the gym to see if we could find a pickup game of hoops. Much to our delight, we ran into three guys, obvious country bumpkins in T-shirts and jeans, who were happy to oblige us.

Well, suffice is to say that instead of showing these rubes how the game was played in the big city, we got clobbered in three straight games. It turned out that our opponents – and fellow delegates – were starters on the Ashland High team. Their names were Harold Sergent, Steve Cram, and Gene Smith. It was not to be the last we heard of them.

Our coach, Elmer “Baldy” Gilb, also taught a full load of mathematics courses and somehow found time to moonlight as a scout for Adolph Rupp, the legendary coach who lived only a couple of miles from our three-story brick school on East Main Street.

In those days before scouting services, videotape, and wall-to-wall ball on TV, scouting was as primitive as recruiting. Mr. Gilb actually had to travel to see a UK opponent play in person. He diagrammed plays on tablets that he brought back and turned over to Rupp. We all were terribly impressed that our coach had such access to the most important man in the state.

Mr. Gilb was an excellent teacher, both in the classroom and on the basketball floor. He spoke loudly, possibly to compensate for his poor hearing. Although he always turned out good teams at Henry Clay, he never won the state championship, meaning he suffered in comparison with cross-town rival Ralph Carlisle of Lafayette High, who won the title in both 1953 and ’57.
[Read more →]