Journalism did, however, and a handful of investigative pioneers on the sports desk built the template for the Scandal Beat, establishing the methods (hanging around parking lots to find out what cars athletes drove, for instance), the patois (“in violation of NCAA rules”), and the general disposition of the scrutiny. The work, done with great ingenuity and often at great risk—reporters faced death threats while their employers endured lawsuits and subscription cancellations— won its journalistic stripes. Within the decade, two mid-sized newspapers would win Pulitzers for their investigations of athletic departments: The Arizona Daily Star in 1981 and the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald Leader in 1986.
Still, one of the salient points of Jack Scott’s “radical athleticism” movement begun a generation earlier, that the rule-breaking that plagued college sports is intrinsically tied to the commercialization of the enterprise, tended over time to get lost in the cataclysm of corruption that toppled heroes and humbled great universities. “We operated under, ‘Here are the rules and if people are breaking those rules we’re going to report on that,’” says Elliott Almond, an investigative sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times back then who now covers Stanford for the San Jose Mercury News. “We were never entirely reflective.”
The Coach Killer
George Dohrmann’s career provides an instructive illustration of the Scandal Beat’s allure as well as its limitations. Dohrmann, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, started in 1996 as a part-timer answering phones on the Los Angeles Times’s sports investigative desk. Among his first story assignments was to co-author a series that explored the matrix of conflicted interests that suffuse elite amateur basketball in talent-rich Southern California.
While doing those stories, Dohrmann got a tip that Baron Davis, a highly-rated point guard who had recently committed to play at UCLA, was driving around in a suspicious car. Dohrmann went to Davis’s high school to poke around, where he spotted Davis pulling out of a parking lot in a black 1991 Chevy Blazer. As Dohrmann soon reported, the Blazer originally belonged UCLA coach Jim Harrick, who sold it to Davis’s sister two days after Davis signed his letter of intent with the school. Despite what seemed a clear violation of NCAA rules, the Pac-10 Conference (now the Pac-12), of which UCLA is a member, failed to find any wrongdoing on the part of the coach or the school, ultimately accepting their contorted explanation of how the transaction was aboveboard.
“That shaped everything that I have come to understand about how the NCAA works,” says Dohrmann. “We found something that anybody with healthy common sense would say was a quid pro quo and the school managed to explain it away.”
Nevertheless, a month later, Harrick was fired. The official explanation was that he had falsified expense reports to obscure the fact he had taken recruits out for dinner, but it is hard to believe that Dohrmann’s revelations had nothing to do with the decision.
Not long after, Dohrmann left the Times to cover the University of Minnesota for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “You walk in and you assume that the school is cheating,” he says, describing his mindset at the time. In 1999, Dohrmann, then just twenty-six, found the dirt in the Golden Gophers’ athletic department, reporting a series of stories that detailed an academic fraud operation in the men’s basketball program. The revelations won Dohrmann a Pulitzer, and a job at Sports Illustrated, while the school was hit with serious sanctions and its coach, Clem Haskins, received a seven-year ban.
Ohio State’s Jim Tressel would be Dohrmann’s third scalp, though he had more than a little help in taking it.
In March of this year, three months after the press conference announcing the player suspensions at OSU, Yahoo’s Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel broke the story that Tressel had known for months about the gear swapping by members of his team. This touched off a feeding frenzy by other outlets, notably the Columbus Dispatch, ESPN, and the OSU student newspaper, The Lantern.
On the subject of watchdog journalism, Bob Gibson, Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, recently said: “If we don’t have a watchdog function, then we have a lapdog function, and that doesn’t serve the voter very well. We need journalism that goes out and challenges what is being given reporters as the facts. We need to look behind the facts and find out where they’re coming from, and what the interests are of the people who are giving us those facts. Local government and state government and the federal government today are even more than ever in the news business themselves. They are putting out news as if it was the entire package and expecting people to buy it and I think Americans have to be a little bit skeptical and have to look behind where those governments are putting out facts.” (Gibson appeared on the Charlottesville, VA, interview program Politics Matters with host Jan Paynter discussing journalism http://bit.ly/pm-gibson)
#1 Posted by Politics Matters, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 01:25 PM
I believe you incorrectly characterized the Ohio State investigation. There were allegations of sweetheart auto deals, but they were disproven. Most of Dohrmann's supposed allegations of more players being involved were directly refuted, with Dohrmann clinging to an anonymous source that wouldn't even talk to the NCAA. Since when is one anonymous source without corroboration sufficient to verify a story that drags people through the mud?
Your story here is part of the problem. One media outlet just repeats what another says without fact checking of their own, and false allegations become the accepted "truth" of the situation. Everybody is so anxious to get a scoop that nobody seems to care if it is actually true. Web site hits and copies sold have replaced journalistic ethics.
#2 Posted by Brian, CJR on Tue 13 Sep 2011 at 05:42 PM
The University of Wisconsin football "program" has always congratulated itself on developing its own players but this fall the Badgers' starting quarterback is a 22-year-old college graduate and professional baseball player who was developed somewhere else. Russell Wilson bailed out at North Carolina State University, where he starred for three years and earned a baccalaureate degree, with one year of football eligibility left. Effectively a free agent, he was hotly recruited by both Auburn and Wisconsin, which got the nod largely because Wilson was awed by its imposing offensive line. The Wilson situation is a breath-taking example of the cynicism and hypocrisy of big-time college football but since it involves no infraction of NCAA rules, not an eyebrow has been raised by the sports press in Madison--or anywhere else, for that matter. It may be true that the Scandal Beat reporters you write about focus on crumbs and ignore the muffin, as Rick Telander puts it, but an even bigger problem is that the football-crazy public in general and alumni fans in particular think the muffin is finger-lickin' good. The commercialization and corporatization of college sports, the huge amounts of money involved and the slick marketing campaigns have made athletic departments bigger than the schools they represent. The tail is wagging the dog and except for a few spoilsport jounalists hardly anyone sees anything wrong with that. Just win, baby! Wisconsin's hired gun from North Carolina will play only one season in Madison but if he takes his fellow "student athletes" to a big bowl game or, who knows, a national championship, he'll go down as the greatest Badger athlete who never set foot in a UW undergraduate classroom.
#3 Posted by Jim Doherty, CJR on Wed 14 Sep 2011 at 03:06 PM
I have known several world-class musicians who have been recruited to university music schools with offers of full scholarship plus expenses (essentially the same deal that scholarship varsity athletes receive).
These young musicians are not only allowed, but encouraged, to take as many outside, paid performance jobs as they can handle. Indeed, I knew some who played in the local symphony, at full wages, while they were in school.
Why is it acceptable for an oboe player but not a football, basketball or tennis player, who is not allowed any outside income, even unrelated to the sport, while making considerable income for the university?
Never made any sense to me.
Why is it alright for the oboe player to
#4 Posted by efgoldman, CJR on Sat 17 Sep 2011 at 10:26 PM
Thank you for questioning Dohrmann and his ridiculous reporting. SI treats him like Woodward and Bernstein when in reality he totally misses the real story.
#5 Posted by Richard verbit, CJR on Tue 20 Sep 2011 at 07:41 PM
Well this wasn't the first coincidence of scandals in football history. Just lately we had the president and head coach of a school get fired for something as such. It makes you think twice about putting on their football uniforms.
#6 Posted by Kelly, CJR on Tue 3 Jan 2012 at 12:25 PM