Tuesday, December 31, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt fifteen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I went back to the States, but it wasn’t long before I got in trouble again. On May eighteenth, I was with my barber friend Mack chilling at Cheetahs strip club in Vegas. Back then when I wanted to get my head clear, I went to a strip club. That’s just what people did back in the early 2000s.



Monday, December 30, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt fourteen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

My dad drove out to Ohio a few weeks later with my sister’s two kids. He was a very interesting man at that stage of his life. He’d stay in church all day. He’d be there from nine in the morning until five at night, then come home and eat something and then go back to church until eleven.

He seemed to like my lifestyle. After a few days he got comfy and invited one of his preacher friends over—another guy who dressed real sharp. They’d be sitting around talking sh*t. I would just watch him, study his characteristics. I saw that he loved candy. He was a sixty-eight-year-old man and he was just loving eating his candy. I thought, Wow! I’m a candy guy. That’s where I’m getting it from.

In a way, I envied the way he had all these relationships with women. I was just miserable with relationships, but he had to beat women away. My father was a very successful pimp, but I couldn’t get two dogs to fornicate. My father had seventeen kids and they all became awesome people. Later on I met some of them and none of them were crazy like me.



Sunday, December 29, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt thirteen)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I talked to Camille later. She had been at the fight watching from the front row and she thought that I looked like I was in a daze.

“You didn’t throw any vicious punches,” she said. “You looked like you wanted to lose. Maybe you just got tired of it.”

She was probably right. I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.



Saturday, December 28, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt twelve)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I went back to my hotel room. There was no maid there. It was weird not being the heavyweight champion of the world any longer. But in my mind it was a fluke. I knew that God didn’t pick on any small animals, that lightning only struck the biggest animals, that those are the only ones that vex God. Minor animals don’t get God upset. God has to keep the big animals in check so they won’t get lofty on their thrones. I just lay on my bed and thought that I had become so big that God was jealous of me.



Friday, December 27, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt eleven)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

I really believed that I was the baddest man on the planet. I was kicking Don’s ass thinking I was f*cking John Gotti over here. Don used to try to get me to go see a doctor. He’d say, “Mike, you need to go see a psychiatrist, brother. Something ain’t right here.” He actually got me to see Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Bill Cosby’s guy, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He was a real erudite didactic guy. Poussaint asked me what my problem was and I starting saying crazy sh*t to him. “F*ck it. I don’t care about living and dying, I don’t give a f*ck.” That guy was so bourgeois and regal he made me sick to my stomach. He got the f*ck away though. He ran out of the house and never came back.

When I think about all the horrific things that Don has done to me over the years, I still feel like killing him. He’s such a liar and betrayer. He’s not a tough guy. He’d never been a tough guy. All the tough-guy things he’s done have been through him paying someone to do it for him.



Thursday, December 26, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt ten)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

When Don King came to New York on August sixteenth, he dropped the bomb that I had signed an exclusive promotional contract with him. Bill went ballistic and threatened to sue. The women were pretty much out of the picture by now. They had lost their bid to take over my business. So they were continuing their Plan B—paint me out as some kind of monster and get a great divorce settlement. Throughout the summer, Robin kept giving interviews claiming that I was violent with her. But when the reporters would ask for documentation, they couldn’t back up her bullsh*t claims. I really don’t like to talk bad about people, and for all I know they both could have changed now, but back then they were the lowest serpenty bitches in the galaxy.



Tuesday, December 24, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt nine)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

In her book, Robin implied that we hadn’t slept together, but I actually nailed her the first or second night when she came to my hotel. Instead she claimed that we strolled through the mall and played with puppies at pet shops for hours. Can you see me in a mother*cking mall, the heavyweight champion of the world? What the f*ck am I doing in a mall?



Monday, December 23, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt eight)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

The next day, I went back to Eddie’s house and Eddie and Charlie were marveling over the fact that Prince and his guys had kicked their ass playing basketball. Prince had on his high-heel shoes and he was still hitting every bucket. Swoosh. Swoosh.

But if I had to credit one person for mentoring me in the ways of celebrityhood it has to be Anthony Michael Hall, of all people. When I was coming up in fame, before I became champ, I’d hang with him a lot. He was the man. He was the first guy I knew who had celeb money. And he was burning it up, man, with limos everywhere. He was so generous. So when I crashed my Caddy, I went out and bought a limo because I had seen how cool it was when we’d ride around in Michael’s.

I used that limo to go to Eddie Murphy’s New Year’s Eve party in 1987 at his New Jersey mansion. It was a star-studded party with Al B. Sure!, Bobby Brown, Run-DMC, and Heavy D. I was cocky but I was still a little shy. But not too shy to pile three girls in the back of the limo and take them back to my apartment in Manhattan.

My days of abstinence were over. I was an extremist at everything I did, including sex. Once I started banging women, the floodgates opened. Short, tall, sophisticated, ugly, high-society, street girls, my criteria was breathing. But I still had no line and for the most part didn’t know how to approach women.



Sunday, December 22, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt seven)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

My next two opponents seemed to be going down in caliber. Maybe Jimmy and Cayton just wanted me to get some more one-round knockouts after those two decisions. I obliged them with William Hosea, but it took me two rounds to knock out Lorenzo Boyd. But my lightning-fast right to the rib cage followed quickly by a thundering right uppercut left the crowd wowed. Two weeks later I got everyone’s attention by demolishing Marvis Frazier, Joe’s son, in thirty seconds. I cornered him, set him up with my jab, and then finished him off with my favorite punch, a right uppercut. He looked severely injured so I rushed over to try to help him up. I love Marvis; he’s a beautiful person.



Saturday, December 21, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt six)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

“Cus is not going to make it through the night, Mike. They say he has a few hours to live.”

I just started crying like it was the end of the world. It was. My world was gone. All the girls at the bank were staring at me.

“Is there a problem?” The manager came up to us.

“We just heard that a dear friend of ours is dying and Mike is taking it very hard,” Jimmy said. He was cool and collected. Just like that, boom, no emotion, just the way Cus trained him to be. Meanwhile, I was still crying like a lost soldier on a mission without a general. I don’t think I ever went back to that bank, I was so embarrassed.



Friday, December 20, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt five)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the ring, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.



Thursday, December 19, 2013

Gary Larsen, the seventh interview from Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"There's a lot of guys that played, you know, the time I played, that have had a lot of serious problems, that have committed suicide or are in homes. You know, they don't know if they're on foot or horseback. They've lost it all."

I have been talking (including twice this morning) and will be talking (including this afternoon and twice more tomorrow) with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries.

today, one of the Minnesota Vikings' original Purple People Eaters, two-time Pro Bowler, and veteran of 149 regular-season NFL games, Gary Larsen.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt four)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

On June 10, 1984, I finally got a shot at the Olympics. My qualifying fight was against Henry Tillman, an older and more experienced boxer. In the first round, I knocked him almost through the ropes. Then he was up and I stalked him for the next two rounds. But in amateur boxing, aggression isn’t rewarded and my knockout counted the same as a light tippy-tap jab. When they announced the decision, I couldn’t believe that they gave it to Tillman. Once again, the crowd agreed and they started booing.

I hated these amateur bouts. “We are boxers here,” these stuffed shirts would say.

“Well, I am a fighter, sir. My purpose is to fight,” I’d answer.



Wednesday, December 18, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt three)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

In May and June of 1981, I went after my first championship—the Junior Olympics. I probably had about ten fights at that point. First you had to win your local tourney, then your region, and they you competed in Colorado for the national title.

I won all my regionals, so Teddy and I flew to Colorado and Cus took a train because he had a fear of flying. When I entered the dressing room, I remembered how all my heroes had behaved. The other kids would come up to me and put out their hand to shake, and I would just sneer and turn my back on them. I was playing a role. Someone would be talking and I’d just stare at him. Cus was all about manipulating your opponent by causing chaos and confusion, but staying cool under it all. I caused such chaos that a few of the other fighters took one look at me and lost their bouts so they wouldn’t have to fight me later on. I won all of my fights by knockouts in the first round. I won the gold by knocking out Joe Cortez in eight seconds, a record that I believe stands to this day. I was on my way.

I became a local hero after I won that gold medal. Cus loved the attention I was getting. He loved the spotlights. But I kept thinking how crazy all this was. I was barely fifteen years old and half of my friends back in Brownsville were dead, gone, wiped out. I didn’t have many friends in Catskill. I wasn’t interested in school. Cus and I had already established what we wanted to accomplish, so school seemed to be a distraction from that goal. I didn’t care about what they were teaching me, but I did have an urge to learn. So Cus would encourage me and I read some of the books from his library. I read books by Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dumas, and Adam Smith. I read a book about Alexander the Great. I loved history. By reading history, I learned about human nature. I learned the hearts of men.



Tuesday, December 17, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt two)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

After that first time, I was going in and out of Spofford like it was nothing. Spofford became like a time-share for me. During one of my visits there we were all brought to the assembly room where we watched a movie called The Greatest, about Muhammad Ali. When it was over, we all applauded and were shocked when Ali himself walked out onto the stage. He looked larger than life. He didn’t have to even open his mouth—as soon as I saw him walk out, I thought, I want to be that guy. He talked to us and it was inspirational. I had no idea what I was doing with my life, but I knew that I wanted to be like him. It’s funny, people don’t use that terminology anymore. If they see a great fight, they may say, “I want to be a boxer.” But nobody says, “I want to be like him.” There are not many Alis. Right then I decided I wanted to be great. I didn’t know what it was I’d do but I decided that I wanted people to look at me like I was on show, the same way they did to Ali.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t get out of Spofford and do a three-sixty. I was still a little sewer rat. My situation at home was deteriorating. After all those arrests and special schools and medications, my mother had no hope for me at all. But she had never had any hope for me, going back to my infancy. I just know that one of those medical people, some racist assh*le, some guy who said that I was f*cked up and developmentally retarded, stole my mother’s hope for me right then and there. And they stole any love of security I might have had.

I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally that would have no effect on me, but emotionally and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was fifteen, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.



Monday, December 16, 2013

the last book I ever read (Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth, excerpt one)

from Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman:

My brother Rodney was five years older than I was so we didn’t have much in common. He’s a weird dude. We’re black guys from the ghetto and he was like a scientist—he had all these test tubes, was always experimenting. He even had coin collections. I was, like, “White people do this stuff.”

He once went to the chemistry lab at Pratt Institute, a nearby college, and got some chemicals to do an experiment. A few days later when he went out, I snuck into his room, started adding water to his test tubes, and I blew out the whole back window and started a fire in his room. He had to put a lock on his door after that.

I fought with him a lot, but it was just typical brother stuff. Except for the day that I cut him with a razor. He had beaten me up for some reason and then he had gone to sleep. My sister, Denise, and I were watching one of those doctor-type soap operas and they were doing an operation. “We could do that and Rodney could be the patient. I can be the doctor and you can be the nurse,” I told my sister. So we rolled up his sleeve and got to work on his left am. “Scalpel,” I said, and my sister handed me a razor. I cut him a bit and he started bleeding. “We need the alcohol, nurse,” I said, and she passed it to me and I poured it onto his cuts. He woke up screaming and yelling and chased us around the house. I hid behind my mom. He still has those slices to this day.



Sunday, December 15, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt fourteen)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Saban and his staff followed what defensive coordinator Kirby Smart called “the blueprint” for success. As detailed by Andy Staples in Sports Illustrated, that blueprint targeted high school athletes who fit certain character/attitude/intelligence criteria and position-specific height/weight/speed guidelines tailored to Alabama’s offensive and defensive schemes. Cornerbacks, for example, should ideally be between six feet and six feet two inches and about 190 pounds and run a sub-4.5 forty-yard dash; linemen should stand no less than six feet two because, as Smart drily noted, “big people beat up little people.”

One of Saban’s pet peeves was the gross expansion of the entire recruiting game and the overload of information. The recruiting Web sites and four- and five-star rankings held reduced weight inside the program. “We have player descriptions, player profiles,” added Smart. “Guys that don’t necessarily fit that description, they may be a five-star guy, we’re just not interested in [them] because that’s just not what we’re recruiting. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, but we don’t want a team full of exceptions.”



Saturday, December 14, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt thirteen)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

The arrests of four Alabama players after the 2012 season were indicative of a general problem that every BCS program confronts these days—student-athletes running afoul of the law. Research conducted for this book found that 197 players on BCS teams were arrested in 2012. That’s an average of 16 arrests per month. The SEC had the most arrests with 42, followed by 37 in the Big 12. Arkansas and Missouri led the nation in player arrests; both programs saw 8 players arrested in 2012.

Fewer than 25 percent of the 197 players who ran afoul of the law in 2012 were kicked off their respective teams. But virtually every player who was arrested more than once was dismissed or suspended. There was only one exception—Florida State’s star running back James Wilder Jr. Despite being arrested three times in 2012, he was not held out of any games. His first arrest occurred in February outside his girlfriend’s apartment. Police were there to arrest her. But Wilder intervened and was charged with battery against a police officer—a felony. Florida State’s head coach, Jimbo Fisher, indefinitely suspended him. But in early April, Wilder pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor—resisting an officer without violence. He was put on six months’ probation and required to take anger management classes. The same day that Wilder entered his plea, Fisher reinstated him to the team, enabling him to play in the spring game.



Friday, December 13, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt twelve)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

But Sam Jurgens and his family might not ever understand. The Jurgenses had family roots in Tuscaloosa stretching back five generations to 1840. Their ties to the university were deep. And Sam and his father had bonded by rooting for Alabama football. “Football in the South is like a civil religion,” Jurgens said. “A lot of people are very passionate about it and value it in ways not much different than religious congregations.”

The beating Jurgens took at the hands of Alabama football players certainly caused him to reconsider how much of an Alabama football fan he’d be in the future. But more troubling was the fact that he never heard one word of apology or concern from anyone associated with the program. “The university has been very supportive and reimbursed me for all of my losses and expenses,” Jurgens said. “But members of the football team sent me to the hospital and robbed me. But I’ve had no one from the football team—not a coach or anything—approach me.”

In the second week of April 2013—two months after the incident—Jurgens approached Alabama’s dean of student affairs and express a desire to speak to Coach Saban about his ordeal. “I still identify myself as an Alabama football fan,” Jurgens said. “I had so much fun with my father with it over the years. But no one should have to go through what I went through.”

Despite his ordeal, Jurgens said the athletic department informed him that no one from the football coaching staff would meet with him.



Thursday, December 12, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt eleven)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Jurgens thought the situation was odd. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”

He put his headphone back on and took a few more steps, unaware that a third man had come up behind him. The next thing Jurgens knew he was on the ground, fading in and out of consciousness, unsure how long he’d been there. His lip was split open. His left eye was swollen shut, and the entire left side of his face was numb, bruised and enlarged. He’d been struck with such force that he was knocked unconscious. Then he was kicked in the back and chest. But he had also sustained a concussion and had no memory of the attack when he came to on the sidewalk. All he knew was that his jacket and headphones were drenched in blood. The men were gone. So were his glasses and his backpack containing his Apple MacBook Pro.



Wednesday, December 11, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt ten)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Turnover among head coaches in college football is at an all-time high. Between 2009 and 2010, forty-four head coaches at major programs were fired—thirteen more got the ax in 2013. A cottage industry has cropped up to handle the high demand for new coaches. Most athletic departments now outsource the selection process to search firms that track which coaches are trending.

But Moos had no intention of turning this decision over to a group of headhunters who spent their days crunching numbers on laptops. Nor was he going to assemble an internal search committee—too bureaucratic. He preferred a one-man committee consisting of himself. Ever since his days at Oregon, where head coach Mike Bellotti was constantly a candidate to jump to the NFL, Moos had maintained a short list of potential head coaches. From time to time, he’d cross off one name and add another. But he always had a list. And he kept it in his desk drawer.

The short list to replace Paul Wulff consisted of one name: Mike Leach.



Tuesday, December 10, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt nine)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Saturday was game day. Pickens followed his routine. The morning was spent tooling around the ranch. While his guests shot skeet, played tennis and took a helicopter tour of the ranch, Pickens inspected the oil exploration project under way on the far corners of his property. By noon the televisions around the lodge were tuned to college football games on ESPN, ABC and CBS. Ohio State faced Michigan State in one room. West Virginia versus Baylor in another. By 4:00, Pickens had reappeared in the library wearing orange leather boots and an orange sweater vest. Everyone knew what that meant—time to head to the main event.

The Gulfstream engine purred on the ranch runway as passengers filed on board. Pickens sank into his seat and fastened his seat belt. Georgia and Tennessee were knotted up 30-30 on the flat-screen monitor at the front of the plane. Disinterested, Pickens glanced out the window at a herd of black cows grazing on prairie grass beneath a wooden windmill off the runway. The pilot invited everyone to relax. It was 178 miles to Stillwater: flight time, thirty-six minutes. At 4:30 sharp, it was wheels up.



Monday, December 9, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt eight)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

In the world of twenty-four-thousand-square-foot weight rooms and twenty-four-carat donors, there are few absolutes. But there is this: no mega-program can physically survive a dozen heavyweight fights a year. The players are just too young, the bodies too fragile, the depth chart too thin, to handle the load and still be fresh when it comes to crunch time late in the season. So a smart athletic director—in concert with his head coach—concocts a regular-season schedule peppered with a couple of patsies. More often than not the pain relief comes in the form of home games against lower-division opponents or “directional” schools. The various sacrificial lambs are lured to slaughter by so-called guarantees—payouts that run from a few thousand dollars to several hundred thousand or more.

Over the years these money games had served but a single purpose: the visitors take a beating, take the check and use the funds to help balance deep athletic department deficits. So if that means the Savannah States of the world become roadkill at Oklahoma State (84-0) or Florida State (55-0)—a combined score of 139-0—as they did in 2012, so be it. Or if Idaho State gets run through a 73-7 meat grinder at Nebraska, take heart in the news that the Bengals athletic department took home $600,000 for the mugging—or about 5 percent of its entire athletic department budget.



Sunday, December 8, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt seven)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

After an initial conversation with Charlotte Bingham, Liggett called Guy Bailey. They both felt they could resolve the matter and agreed to meet the following day—Christmas Eve—at Bailey’s office. Bailey said he’d make sure Gerald Myers attended, and Liggett agreed to bring Leach.

But a blizzard hit Lubbock on December 24, pushing the meeting to the day after Christmas. The delay gave Bailey plenty of time to think through the situation. Bailey liked Leach a great deal and admired the excitement his coaching style had brought to Lubbock. He and his wife, Jan, went to every home game. They had even gotten to know many of Leach’s players on a first-name basis. It was Bailey’s sense that Leach and his players had a strong bond and that the incident with Adam James was an isolated one, not a systemic problem.

Nonetheless, Bailey was uncomfortable with the way Adam James had been treated. After all, he had been diagnosed with a concussion. The dangers of concussions among pro football players were starting to attract national attention. That fall Congress had convened hearings on head injuries in the NFL. Public awareness around sports-related brain injuries were starting to pick up. Bailey felt it was only a matter of time before the NCAA faced similarly difficult questions about whether member institutions were adequately addressing the risks associated with concussions in football.

Less than two months before Adam James sustained a concussion, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine documented the first case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—better known as degenerative brain disease—in a college football player who did not play professionally. Mike Borich, a wide receiver at Snow College and Western Illinois University in the 1980s, died from a drug overdose on February 9, 2009. He was forty-two. During his college football career Borich sustained at least ten concussions. After college he had no concussions or head injuries. Yet by his late thirties he displayed many of the symptoms found in NFL players diagnosed with degenerative brain disease caused by head injuries. So Borich’s father donated his son’s brain for research. After diagnosing Borich with CTE, a leading sports concussion expert said, “Brain trauma in sports is a public health problem, not just an NFL problem.”



Saturday, December 7, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt six)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Hance ducked out of the reception and called Leach. He explained that the James family had made a complaint. The idea that Craig James had gone to the board of regents set Leach off. He decided he’d had enough of Adam James. “I’m going to kick him off the team tonight,” Leach said.

“You can’t do that,” Hance said.

Leach rattled off a series of issues with Craig and Adam James, including the time Adam broke a door at the coach’s office.

“Well, hell, you should have kicked him off the team back when he did those things,” Hance said. “But you can’t do it now.”



Friday, December 6, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt five)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

The jury acquitted Mathis and Rashada on all counts.

Mathis’s criminal lawyer, Jere Reneer, said, “I’ve never felt prouder to be a lawyer.”

Outside the courtroom, Mathis’s grandmother cried and shouted: “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

Brown was devastated. After leaving the courthouse, she collapsed and started sobbing. “They raped me. They raped me. They raped me.” She had to be carried to the car. Over the ensuing months, she became a recluse and gained seventy-five pounds.

The verdict stung Kelly, too. Despite her long career, she had never tried a case against college football players. She saw things in the BYU case that were completely foreign to her. “There was something obviously very different about prosecuting football players,” she said. “The football dynamic was an undercurrent to everything we did. And it was ultimately football that had a very big influence on the jury.”

After the courtroom cleared out, three jurors were still around. Kelly cornered them and asked why they had acquitted. “The jury said they had suffered enough,” Kelly said. “They lost their scholarships. They were kicked off the team.”

Kelly said it was the most bizarre thing she’d ever heard—the idea that the players had been sufficiently punished when they lost their opportunity to play football. “That’s the power of college football,” she said.



Thursday, December 5, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt four)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

Thirty institutions participated in the study. Information was gathered from twenty campus police departments and ten judicial affairs offices. In all, 107 cases of sexual assault were examined. The primary finding was that male student-athletes made up just 3 percent of the male student population yet were responsible for more than 19 percent of the reported sexual assaults on campus. Very few of these cases were publicly reported.

Subsequent research has suggested a range of factors contributing to why some athletes are more prone to abuse women, from a sense of entitlement to a higher frequency of casual sex with multiple partners to a warped sense of women as sexual prey. But the biggest factor may boil down to opportunity or access.

In the case of college football, there is no denying that just about everyone on campus is in awe of the young men who wear the uniform and fill the stadium on Saturday afternoons, including plenty of beautiful girls. The fact that some girls want to be seen with a football player does not, of course, necessarily mean they want to have sex with a football player. But the lion’s share of sexual assault cases against college football players—and athletes in general—usually involve a victim who willingly goes to an athlete’s turf—his dorm room, apartment or hotel—and later claims that something happened that she didn’t sign up for. In almost every instance, the accused played admits to sexual contact and claims it was consensual. It sets up the classic she-said-he-said scenario with a unique twist—when athletes are involved it is often she-said-they-said.

These cases usually come down to the freshness of the complaint, the strength of the physical evidence and, most important, the credibility of the accuser.



Wednesday, December 4, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt three)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

The UT football program is the mother ship of money, generating $103.8 million in revenue during the 2011-12 football season—nearly $20 million more than No. 2 Michigan. Even more impressive, it produced a reported $78 million in profit. Not $78 million in revenue--$78 million in profit.

To behold the nature of the machine at work, take a walk around Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium on game day or, better yet, on a quiet Sunday morning after a game. But give yourself some time. It takes a good half hour to circumnavigate the stadium alone, all 100,000 seats of it. The stone columns resembling hundred-year-old oaks only add to a percussive sense of size and strength.

Just inside an east-end entrance stands a statue of Royal, the certifiable Texas legend who died on November 7, 2012, at the age of eighty-eight. During his twenty years as head coach in Austin (1957-76) he won 167 games, three national championships (1963, 1969, 1970) and eleven Southwest Conference titles. The Sunday morning after his death, orange and red roses lay fading at the feet of his statue, the lone sound a state flag flapping in the breeze, clanging against a pole. A video board the size of a strip mall filled one end of the stadium. The day before, the Longhorns had honored Royal with, in part, moving videos on the giant screen. A white DKR logo was affixed to every player’s helmet, and the marching band spelled out ROYAL during its halftime performance. The real tribute came on Texas’s first offensive play—a razzle-dazzle pass out of Royal’s fabled wishbone formation, players and coaches pointing to the sky following the forty-seven-yard gain. It marked the beginning of a textbook 33-7 blowout of Iowa State.

“A fitting way to honor him,” said head coach Mack Brown after the game.



Tuesday, December 3, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt two)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

“Bigger, stronger, faster,” said ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt as he hustled down the ‘Bama sideline. “I don’t know what planet [D.J.] Fluker’s from,” he said, referring to Alabama’s six-foot six, 330-pound apartment building at right tackle, “but I know it’s not one where you and I live.”



Monday, December 2, 2013

the last book I ever read (The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, excerpt one)

from The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian:

What kept Brandon—and so many other athletic directors up at night—was the razor-thin margin for error. Michigan’s overall surplus for fiscal year 2012-13 was estimated to be just $5.8 million. The athletic department needed rivers of cash to stay out of the red. More than 70 percent of that money—or nearly $90 million—flowed from a single source.

“Michigan athletics cannot be successful if Michigan football does not lead our success, because the revenue it creates is what we live off of,” said Brandon. “I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘If you put all your eggs in one basket, you better watch your basket.’ That’s our basket. It can’t get sick. It can’t falter.”

That’s where the number 22 came in. According to the latest NCAA figures, just 22 of the top 120 FBS schools had turned a profit in 2010-11. The average institutional debt of the other 100 or so schools was approaching $11 million each.



Sunday, December 1, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt fifteen)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

McKee and her colleagues had used their platform to become increasingly assertive about the dangers of football. One of their most ominous assertions was that full-blown concussions weren’t what was triggering the disease. Rather, McKee and her group believed that CTE was essentially dementia pugilistica—boxer’s dementia—now being found in other contact sports, especially football and hockey. As in boxing, it was the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of “subconcussive” blows that caused the damage, not one big knockout punch or open-field collision. “We don’t think it’s because of direct blows,” McKee said. “This is a very internal part of the brain. I mean, it’s really deep inside.” Cantu called CTE “a dose-related phenomenon” involving “total brain trauma.”

These assertions had obvious implications for the NFL. The league could change the rules to cut down on helmet-to-helmet hits. It could monitor the number of concussions in an effort to reduce them. It could put independent neurologists on the sidelines to look for concussions and try to end the culture of pain that pressured players to play through it. But if CTE was occurring at a deeper level, as the BU Group believed, that raised questions about the very essence of football.