Out of Bounds: A College Coach Pushed the Limits To Sign Top Talent
The Wall Street Journal April 7, 2003
By Stefan Fatsis and Rick Brooks
In the fall of 1997, as his first season as coach of the University of Rhode Island men’s basketball team was beginning, Jim Harrick had a problem: Luther Clay was failing sociology.
The 6-foot-9 center was the team’s only legitimate big man. And the Rams had high expectations; they were nationally ranked in preseason polls. Mr. Harrick needed the former high-school All-American on the court.
Mr. Clay — on academic probation and taking a minimum course load — wouldn’t be eligible to play if he either flunked or dropped the course, Sociology 238, “Population Problems.” But it would be different if the player had an excuse, the coach was told by an aide. “Like a doctor’s excuse?” Mr. Harrick asked, according to someone familiar with the discussion.
An assistant coach accompanied Mr. Clay to a doctor, who pronounced the player unable “to function effectively in his studies,” people involved in the case say. Despite that note, and steady pressure from several URI administrators, the professor gave the player an F. After the semester ended, however, an administrator changed the grade to a retroactive withdrawal.
The player kept his eligibility. The coach kept his center. And three months later, with Mr. Clay averaging 12.5 points a game, Rhode Island made a dramatic run to the quarterfinals of the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament. It was sweet redemption for Mr. Harrick, who had come to “Rhody” after being fired as coach of powerhouse UCLA — where he’d won a national championship — for fudging an expense account and lying about it.
Tonight another NCAA tournament concludes with Kansas playing Syracuse in the title game. Mr. Harrick, whose success at Rhode Island vaulted him to the head-coaching job at the University of Georgia in 1999, was hoping to make another charge for the championship this year. Instead, he resigned under pressure 11 days ago. School officials determined that three of his players had received A’s in a basketball-coaching class they seldom if ever attended. The class was taught by a son of the coach. Georgia dropped out of the tournament.
Mr. Harrick isn’t the first college basketball coach to bend the rules. Almost from the moment James Naismith hung peach baskets in a YMCA gym in 1891, the game has been pocked by tales of academic fraud, under-the-table cash and unholy alliances among players, coaches, shoe companies and alumni. This season alone has seen academic scandals involving players at St. Bonaventure and Fresno State, and Michigan forfeited 117 wins from the 1990s because a booster had paid players.
But Mr. Harrick’s ability to move from job to job in the upper echelons of coaching offers a revealing look inside the system. Among other things, it shows how colleges, in their zeal to field teams that win games and draw in big money, are tempted to look the other way when it comes to enforcing academic standards. “Their whole interest is to maximize the revenues by pushing the letter of the law and ignoring the spirit of it,” says Linda Bensel-Meyers, a University of Tennessee professor who has alleged extensive academic fraud among athletes there.
The 117 Division I-A schools last year raked in $454 million of revenue, or $219 million after expenses, on men’s basketball. CBS is paying the NCAA $6 billion over the next 11 years to broadcast the men’s basketball tournament, money that is shared among NCAA schools.
Rhode Island’s president justified hiring Mr. Harrick, despite the UCLA infractions that got him fired, by citing Euripides, Sophocles and the Judeo-Christian tradition of redemption. When Mr. Harrick departed Rhode Island in 1999 after two seasons, he left behind embittered faculty and a team in academic disarray. Rhode Island is investigating allegations that surfaced in recent months, making a total of three universities where his coaching tenure has come into question.
Mr. Harrick, who is 64 years old, declined requests for an interview. The coach “feels that it would be inappropriate” to comment while investigations are under way at Georgia and Rhode Island, said Anthony Rizzotti, one of his lawyers. Another lawyer who is a longtime friend, Robert Tanenbaum, calls Mr. Harrick a victim of “academic McCarthyism.”
Mr. Harrick began coaching in the early 1960s in Southern California, where he was teaching junior high. At Morningside High School in Inglewood, Calif., the boys’ varsity averaged a sparkling 26 wins a year under the coach. From there he rose steadily: assistant coach at Utah State, assistant coach at UCLA, then head coach at Pepperdine. There, his teams got into the NCAA tournament four times in nine seasons, and seven of his players made it to the National Basketball Association.
In 1988, Mr. Harrick reached the big time: head coach at UCLA. He posted a 191-63 record over eight seasons. In 1995 he coached the team to its first NCAA championship since the days of the legendary John Wooden.
The next year, though, Mr. Harrick’s relatively clean reputation took its first tarnish. First, the sister of a player he had just recruited managed to buy a car registered in the coach’s name at a very reasonable price. The university cleared him of impropriety, but then it looked into a $1,085 bill he’d submitted for a dinner for 13 people. It included three potential recruits and five players. That ratio is a violation of NCAA rules. An internal report said Mr. Harrick lied about who had attended, both on the reimbursement form and to officials.
UCLA fired him, then launched a wider investigation. It found other recruiting excesses, such as giving free tickets to a coach of high-school players.
Mr. Harrick spent the 1996-97 winter and spring playing golf and waiting for “hammer day” after the regular season ends, when some coaches get fired, creating job openings. In May, a call came from an alumnus and basketball booster at Rhode Island, whose coach had left to fill an opening elsewhere.
URI had a proud basketball history. It had fielded teams since 1903, and its coach in the 1930s, Frank Keaney, is acknowledged as the inventor of the fast break. But URI was in the second-tier Atlantic 10 Conference, and overshadowed by nearby Providence College. URI officials saw in a former national-champion coach such as Mr. Harrick a chance to generate excitement among alumni and fans, and raise money for a new arena on the Kingston, R.I., campus.
University officials say their background check — lasting less than a week — satisfied them that Mr. Harrick’s expense-account infraction was an isolated case. “He said all the things you wanted him to say,” says Rhode Island’s president, Robert Carothers.
The arrival of a big-name coach created buzz. URI was featured alongside Duke on ESPN’s “Midnight Madness” coverage in preseason. After the school’s NCAA tournament run, alumni began “dragging diplomas out of desk drawers and hanging them on the wall,” Dr. Carothers says. Donations surged, and the state gave URI aid for the new arena. State officials also waived antinepotism guidelines so the team could hire one of the coach’s sons, Jim Harrick Jr., as an assistant coach.
Mr. Harrick had few recruiting connections in high schools in the Eastern U.S. To compensate, he hired a prep-school coach with strong ties to New York City’s hoops scene. This pipeline produced promising players. But a lot of them were “suspect academically,” says Tom Konchalski, a veteran high-school scout. “They brought in some kids that weren’t there to get an education.”
At least eight of Mr. Harrick’s players at URI were academically ineligible at some point, according to people at the school. Only one of the nine players recruited under Mr. Harrick has graduated. Nancy Kelley, an academic adviser for athletes, says Mr. Harrick didn’t discipline players for missing classes or not doing course work. “There were no consequences to players’ behavior,” she says.
But Mr. Harrick had sway with the administration. Ms. Kelley’s department, after clashing with the coach, was stripped of responsibility for the basketball team. For the most part, the university admitted Mr. Harrick’s academically substandard recruits.
One of them was Lamar Odom. Sports Illustrated had reported there was evidence Mr. Odom had cheated on a college entrance exam. He denied it. Dr. Carothers personally interviewed the player, allowed him to spend a year as a nonmatriculating student and then gave him a scholarship in 1998. That season, Mr. Odom led Rhode Island to its first Atlantic 10 championship, and then dropped out to play in the NBA.
Mr. Harrick ultimately saw Rhode Island as a stepping-stone back to a bigger stage. When the offer came from Georgia, he waffled but finally accepted, alienating the Rhode Island community. “He talked about playing Kentucky and Florida,” athletic powers in Georgia’s conference, Dr. Carothers says. “He wanted vindication.”
Georgia’s athletic director, Vince Dooley, hadn’t put Mr. Harrick on a list of candidates. The reason was his “past transgressions” at UCLA, says Mr. Dooley, a prominent former football coach. But the university’s president, Michael Adams, knew Mr. Harrick from a time when both worked for Pepperdine. He said any sins by the coach at UCLA had been minor.
Georgia’s background check consisted of a handful of phone calls. Dr. Adams interviewed four people in California whose opinions he trusted, while Mr. Dooley contacted two. Neither quizzed anyone at Rhode Island. At a news conference, Mr. Harrick shrugged off questions about the past. “The first dunk we get, the people will come,” he said. He was hired at about $650,000 a year.
Georgia’s Bulldogs hadn’t gone to the NCAA Final Four since 1983, and games were drawing sparse crowds. But in his second season, Mr. Harrick took the team to the 65-team NCAA tournament. They lost in the first round.
Needing a point guard to get further in the 2001-02 season, he looked to a player he had once tried to get into Rhode Island, Tony Cole. While Mr. Harrick was at URI, he had helped place Mr. Cole in a community college in hopes the player, who came from a troubled family and school background, would qualify academically later. But Mr. Cole left that school before the 1999-2000 season ended after run-ins with authorities. He bounced to another community college before Mr. Harrick grabbed him again.
Mr. Cole met the entrance standards of the NCAA and Southeastern Conference, or SEC, but not Georgia’s. Its president, Dr. Adams, let him in. “If a young person is SEC and NCAA eligible, I will admit them,” Dr. Adams says. “Are we going to be in the SEC or not?”
The Bulldogs surged to a 22-victory season, beating top rivals and returning to the NCAA tournament. But they did so without Mr. Cole, who had been suspended after an incident in his dorm room. He was indicted for aggravated assault. The charge was dropped a few months later, and the university also cleared him of misconduct in the matter — which had resulted in a rape indictment, and acquittal, against another athlete. Mr. Cole did not play again at Georgia. Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.
Mr. Harrick also recruited Larry Turner, a 6-foot-10 center. The university rejected the player after a handwriting expert concluded that someone else had taken his entrance exam. Mr. Turner denied that.
Mr. Harrick pushed hard for five other recruits whom the university rejected on academic grounds. Six others who got in either quit the Athens, Ga., school or transferred elsewhere. Dr. Adams, the president, gave mixed signals about Mr. Harrick. “This is nuts,” he scribbled on a Post-It note stuck to one appeal letter. But he didn’t criticize the coach publicly, and three weeks later Mr. Harrick got a raise and a contract extension.
The coach’s behavior didn’t seem to change. Four months later, when one of the team’s highest scorers was trying for a fourth time to pass a basic math course needed for eligibility, Dr. Adams warned his coach in a memo: “I do not want to see a continuation of this pattern.”
As in Rhode Island, Georgia officials maneuvered around nepotism rules so the school could hire Jim Harrick Jr. as an assistant coach. The younger Mr. Harrick also taught a course at Georgia, “Coaching Methods for Basketball.” The university has said Mr. Harrick Jr. gave A’s to all 39 students in the course, including one basketball player who never showed up for class. Mr. Tanenbaum, the lawyer for both Harricks, says the son thought he could count team practices toward attendance requirements.
After Mr. Cole, who took that class but never went, was kicked off the team for other reasons, he went public about the class in an interview on ESPN in February. He also alleged that Jim Harrick Jr. had taken two college correspondence courses in Mr. Cole’s place.
The university launched an investigation. Mr. Dooley, its athletic director, says that, so far, it hasn’t found anything that “directly associates” the elder Mr. Harrick with “any major violation.”
The University of Rhode Island, meanwhile, is conducting its own probe of the Harrick era, looking at allegations contained in a sexual-harassment lawsuit against URI. The suit, in U.S. District Court in Providence, didn’t name Mr. Harrick, but a filing in the suit accused him of harassment. Mr. Harrick never had a chance to respond before the suit was settled, says Mr. Tanenbaum.
The plaintiff was a former secretary in the basketball office named Christine King. Before settling, she alleged in court papers 22 possible NCAA violations. Among them: that the elder Mr. Harrick and URI boosters gave money to players; that the coach paid basketball players more than other workers at his on-campus summer camps; that players were allowed to use university cars; and that Mr. Harrick had team managers write classroom papers for players, which Ms. King said she typed.
Ms. King also claimed she had seen Mr. Harrick try to influence grade changes for players. She asserted that he “was successful in doing so for Luther Clay” — the big center who was failing a sociology course.
The teacher who gave Mr. Clay an F, Gail Shea, declines to talk about his case, citing the confidentiality of student records. But she says, “I did have an experience when I was at the University of Rhode Island where the university pressured me to change a grade of a student athlete. And I did not do it. But the administration did it.” She says she retired in part because of the incident.
The grade-change case is now part of the university’s internal investigation, being conducted by a former NCAA enforcement officer.
URI officials say the Harrick-era tumult has had some positive effects. The office for advising athletes on their studies has been given quarters in the campus sports complex. The current coach, Jim Baron, has won praise for monitoring players’ classroom performance.
At Georgia, Dr. Adams no longer admits players who haven’t first been scrutinized by a faculty committee, and he has barred coaches from teaching classes attended by their own players. An outside firm has been hired to perform background checks of coaches being considered for Mr. Harrick’s old job.
Friends say Mr. Harrick wants to clear his name. “Jim is not one of the bad guys out there and never has been,” says former college coach Bob Gottlieb, who has known Mr. Harrick more than 30 years. “He just has not used good judgment.”
The coach’s defenders contend that, as long as he won basketball games, universities allowed him to operate as he saw fit. One former colleague, citing an old adage to depict university chiefs’ attitude toward academics and sports, says, “Presidents want you to be Harvard from Monday through Friday, and Kentucky on Saturday on Sunday.”
