SIDE DOORS

 

               The two-year-old saga about rich people trying to buy their kids’ way into high-toned colleges now is playing out in the courts, with predictable results. A number of the 50 or so people charged with giving or receiving bribes have pleaded guilty and been handed prison sentences measured in months instead of years. It’s no news that our courts treat upper-class criminals more kindly than less-favored ones, and the trials now in progress in Boston should have similar outcomes.

               The connection with sports is that most of the finagling that was done involved phony athletic credentials that allowed bribe-getting coaches to sneak academically unqualified aspirants past their school’s admissions officers. This is a familiar feature of American academe, so familiar it has a name-- “side-dooring.” That entrance portal is available to jocks of many stripes with no criminal involvement. Ivy League schools routinely bend their admissions standards to improve their teams and so do other NCAA members that claim not to award athletics scholarships. That also goes for our national military academies, which additionally will arrange prep-school rides for the athletically talented who haven’t made the grade in high school.

               It’s been noticed by some that the Government minions behind the current prosecutions had to stretch to identify a victim in the frauds. That issue also arose in a 2018 episode in which an FBI “sting” operation netted some coaches and middlemen for funneling under-the-table money from the shoe-company Adidas to A-level basketball recruits being wooed by schools affiliated with the company. The immediate parties in that one (the kids, coaches and Adidas) all stood to benefit from the schemes so it was decided that the universities involved had been defrauded, even though their coffers would have swelled had they succeeded in landing the kids in question. If they were capable of doing so, prosecutors might have blushed advancing that theory.

               College-sports revenues didn’t much come into play in the present cases because its side-door portals were connected to such “minor” (i.e., non-revenue) sports as tennis, soccer and water polo. That was because sought-after football and basketball recruits tend to be so well known that unfamiliar names can’t be slipped into the mix. In the minor sports admissions people tend to take the word of coaches for who should and shouldn’t be given special treatment, thus opening the way to manipulations.

               About $25 million was said to have changed hands in the deals, funneled through William “Rick” Singer, a former basketball coach who ran a firm that facilitated college enrollments. One of his biggest conduits was Rudy Meredith, a one-time soccer coach at Yale who pocketed $400,000 in one admissions scheme and lined up $450,000 in another before investigators stepped in.

But while corrupt coaches got most of the money some went to the supposedly victimized schools. A case in point involved Stanford U and John Vandemoer, its former sailing coach. A September 27 story in the New York Times, by Billy Witz, tells how Vandemoer turned over to the university the $770,000 he received from Singer to help gain entry for two students. The story said he pocketed nothing but was fired nonetheless and spent a day in jail and six months in house arrest after a felony guilty plea for racketeering conspiracy he says he entered because he couldn’t stand the expense of a criminal trial.

Putting aside the question of why any university save the Naval and Coast Guard academies needs a sailing team, the episode sheds light on the role in the bigger college-sports picture of men’s non-revenue sports and just about all of those for women. Begun to create recreational outlets for students, they now are maintained in part to enable the big-timers to claim they’re not just football or basketball factories. They survive because of small but dedicated alumni factions and, since the 1972 enactment of the so-called Title IX, the need to satisfy a government requirement that women and men have equal access to athletics scholarships.

 Except for a few places like Eugene, Oregon (for track and field) and Iowa City, Iowa (wrestling), the teams don’t pay their own way and depend on various kinds of charity to continue. They live precarious existences, always waiting for the axe to fall in the next economy wave. Revenue losses from Covid-19 brought wholesale slaughter to the minor-sport ranks; by one published tally 35 NCAA Division I schools alone cut 112 such teams between January and June of this year.

The Times story made clear the ties between Singer and the august institution in Palo Alto, California. It said that when Vandemoer turned over one Singer check for $500,000 to Bernard Muir, Stanford’s athletics director, he was met with warm congratulations. When the coach tried to explain the source of the money Muir cut him off, saying “we know Rick.” The piece said Singer was known to other Stanford coaches and sometimes entered Vandemoer’s office unannounced even though a key card was needed for access to the athletics-department building. Stanford’s “side door” also included a front door, it seemed.

The list of colleges with which Singer did business was long, also including Georgetown, the U. of Texas, UCLA, Cal Berkeley and Southern Cal. One female student he “helped” was a family friend of a USC trustee. Far from being victims of the frauds, the universities involved were beneficiaries. The corruption that sustains their entertainment enterprises runs deep. At the least it should spur Congress to take a critical look at the tax-free status their athletics revenues enjoy.

 

 

 

LUCK

 

               Of all the adages swimming around in our heads maybe the dumbest is the one about how it’s better to be lucky than good. It’s a common one in sports, trotted out every time an errant play turns a game. Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and no-nonsense guy, wrote it off rightly as ridiculous. Said he, “In any competitive endeavor you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you.”

               This is not to say that luck plays no role in sporting outcomes—far from it. Every day a bloop hit or phantom pass-interference call decides a contest, to the glee of some and despair of others, and having money on the game multiplies the hurt to losers. Every gambler can regale you for hours about the “bad beats” he’s suffered, more than anyone else has had, for sure. The good breaks he’s received usually are forgotten in the recitation.

               In team sports as elsewhere, the role of luck can be quantified, more or less. The more games that are played in any competition the less luck figures into the final standings, and the more points that are scored the less it can determine any individual result. By those guidelines Major League baseball with its 162-game annual regular-season schedule, and NBA basketball, with its single-game point tallies of 200 or so, are the least luck-bound and low-scoring ice hockey and soccer are the most, with football somewhere between.  Hockey has a term to describe the games decided by fluke goals: “Puck Luck.” But even there random occurrences tend to balance out over an 82-game National Hockey League schedule and the best teams usually come out on top.

               Come playoff time, however, the leavening effect of the long run disappears, and randomness is magnified. Baseball’s post-season begins with a couple of one-and-done “play in” games that round out the final playoff fields of eight teams, four in each league. Those are total crap shoots.  The best-of-five games divisional series’ follow, then the best-of-seven league-championship and World Series rounds.  Taken together that’s a good chunk of starts, but sweeping one round doesn’t affect later ones, so survivors start from “go” each time.

               The subject of luck occurred to me because the Chicago White Sox, my No. 1A favorite team (the Cubs are No. 1), are in the playoffs. If luck in the broad sense really matters in baseball, then the White Sox are among baseball’s biggest losers.  But they recouped much of that in 2005 with a mind-boggling hot streak that resulted in their World Series victory.

               What the Irish call “bad cess” began for the Sox when they committed baseball’s all-time worst blunder by getting caught throwing the 1919 World Series, resulting in the lifetime suspensions of the heart of the roster that also had won the ’17 title. That would be their last championship in 88 years, a span of futility topped only by my Cubbies’ 108 years ending in 2016.   In that period the Sox won but one American League pennant (in 1959) and rarely challenged for another. Their best team in that era was that of 1994, when they led their division into August only to have the remainder of the regular season, and the playoffs, cancelled by a players’ strike. That never happened before and hasn’t since.

               Relatedly, the Sox have spent the last 40 years as the No. 2 team in a two-team market, trailing the Cubs in every financial category.  Bad management decisions contributed to that status, but so did geography, their South Side of the city trailing the Cubs’ North Side as an entertainment lure. That’s denied them the wherewithal to be regular title contenders in a money-driven game.

               As 2005 dawned few saw the Sox as world beaters, and man-for-man they weren’t. They wound up winning 99 regular-season games without leading any important league individual statistical category, taking a Golden Glove or Silver Slugger award or having anyone elected to play in that year’s All-Star Game. What they had was a group of solid veteran position players led by first-baseman Paul Konerko, outfielder Jermaine Dye and catcher A. J. Pierzynski, and that year’s best and luckiest starting-pitching rotation. Mark Buerhle, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland and Jose Contreras went through the season injury free, each making 30-plus starts and pitching 200-plus innings. If that wasn’t lucky nothing is.

               The Sox’s good fortune really kicked during the playoffs. They swept the Boston Red Sox in the Division Series, beat the L.A. Angels four games to one in the ALCS and eliminated the Houston Astros in straight sets in the World Series. Their 11-1 record has been matched only once, by the 1999 New York Yankees, in the extended-playoff era.

               This is not to say the wins were easy or without oddities. With his team leading 4-2 in game two of their series, Red Sox second-baseman Tony Graffanino muffed an inning-ending double-play grounder that set up the Chicagoans’ winning three-run home run. Scott Podsednik, a speedy but light-hitting White Sox outfielder who’d hit no home runs in 568 regular-season at-bats, hit one against the Red Sox and a walk-off shot that gave the team a 7-6 win in World Series game two.

 Buehrle, Garland, Garcia and Contreras pitched consecutive complete-game wins against the Angels, an eye-popping feat 16 years ago and just about impossible now. Game three of the Houston series was won in 14 innings on a home run by Geoff Blum, a backup who’d had just one previous post-season at-bat.

In a play that still amazes, game two against the Angels went into the bottom of the ninth inning in Chicago tied 1-1. With two outs, the canny Pierzynski swung and missed a low pitch for strike three but saw that the ball might have skimmed the dirt and took off for first base while the Angels were leaving the field. After extended and spirited discussion the umps let him stay there. His pinch runner stole second base and scored on a Joe Crede hit for a Sox 2-1 win. TV replays showed the ball was cleanly caught but they weren’t used to affect decisions until three years later. Bad luck, Angels.

The White Sox team that’s going into this season’s playoffs looks like better on paper than the ’05 edition.  It features a cast of flashy young hitters, a good starting staff and the baseball’s best 1-2 bullpen pair of Craig Kimbrel and Liam Hendriks. Alas, though, it so dominated its weak division that it played few regular-season games of consequence and often seemed uninterested as it plodded through a near-500 second half.  At their best the Sox can beat anyone, but they can lose to anyone, too. A little good luck wouldn’t hurt.