There was a lot more in that investigation than that one package being sent to that one recruit. You can find more details here:
Kentucky could have received the death penalty for - 05.29.89 - SI Vault
Cover your eyes and ears, because here comes the truth:
Of Kentucky's many sins, the two gravest were
academic fraud and sending money, in effect, to a recruit. But the seriousness of the violations and the scope of Kentucky's blatant disregard of the rules do not show up so much in what the NCAA did to Kentucky as in what it didn't do, as cited in paragraph 15 of the report on infractions.
"Because of the nature of the violations," reads the report, "...the committee seriously considered whether the regular-season schedule for the men's basketball program should be curtailed in whole or in part for one or two seasons of competition. In the judgment of the committee...the violations found would justify such a penalty."
In effect Kentucky basketball has been on the lam for four years, or since the
Lexington Herald-Leader won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1985 investigation that exposed widespread corruption in the program, ranging from boosters' "$100 handshakes" with Wildcat stars to free meals for players and other unseemly perks. At that time the NCAA's crack investigative force, presumably made up of Geraldo Rivera, Inspector Clouseau and Roger Rabbit, failed to develop enough evidence to prosecutealthough Kentucky-was cited by the NCAA for a lack of cooperation.
Some excerpts about the late 1980s investigation:
This time the violations were brain-bogglingly loud and sorrowfully clear.
For starters, former Kentucky assistant coach Dwane Casey, Manuel and sophomore forward Chris Mills all took heavy shots from the NCAA. Casey was found to have sent $1,000 to Mills's father, Claud, in an Emery Worldwide package in March 1988.
The NCAA found that Manuel, a high-school All-America,
committed academic fraud by cheating on his college entrance exam, reportedly by copying answers from the test of another student in the Lexington school where the test was administered. That strikes at the heart of a university's integrity.
What about the Wildcat fans? "They won't change," says Phelps. "They'll just be mad at the NCAA. Some of them are part of the problem. I don't think that money [in the Emery envelope] came out of Eddies [Sutton's] pocket."
Here's an ode from the same article to your idol from the 1950s:
Cheating is nothing new to the pages of Kentucky's basketball scrapbook. Adolph Rupp's 1952-53 team was nailed with what amounted to the NCAA's first death penaltythe Wildcats had to sit out the winter playing intrasquad exhibitions
because of payments to players, which came to light during an investigation into a point-shaving scandal involving several Wildcat players...Rupp swore that someday the NCAA would hand him another championship trophy, which it did after his Fiddlin' Five won the 1958 title in Louisville.
So your idol wasn't exactly playing with a fair deck when he hung those early banners. Good thing you got to play the entire 1958 NCAA Tournament, all three games of it, in your home state (1 game in Lexington and 2 in Louisville).
Moving on to the Hall and Sutton eras...
Hall's detractors say he was insecure in Rupp's shoes, and afraid of failure, and by 1976 he had other concerns as well. That year, the NCAA announced that the Wildcats' scholarships would be limited for two seasons because of
recruiting violations. Still, Hall gave the fat Cat boosters among the horsemen and coal-mine operators in the commonwealth access to practices and the locker room, even at halftimes of games. That stopped in 1985, when Hall retired and Sutton, practically begging for the jobwho can forget his declaration that he would "crawl to Lexington" from Arkansas to coach at the University of Kentucky?replaced him. When Hamilton left to coach Oklahoma State in '86, the word was that Kentucky retained a toehold on big-city recruiting by replacing him with Casey, who had played for Hall between 1976 and '79.
Bad as the situation in Lexington may be, it could have been worse. Still, the call-in shows are humming with vilifications of (
then-UK President) Roselle for giving in, rather than with hosannas for having saved basketball from imminent demise. In January, Roselle said privately that he was taking the biggest gamble any Kentucky president could imagine by cooperating with the NCAA. "If I fail," he said, "no future president will have a chance to do things right."
Instead, thanks to Roselle, the Wildcats have another chance to do things right. One final chance.
And then your prayers were answered with Rick Pitino. You can open your eyes and ears now.
