NCAA Won’t Let Common Sense Get in Way of Business

John Matthews seems innocent enough. He’s a liberal arts major at a California junior college, where he sports a 3.5 grade-point-average. He is 6-feet 8-inches tall from sole to scalp and happens to be able to do wondrous and magical things with a basketball. He is flat broke and wants a diploma very badly. Currently, he has offers from dozens of major colleges to get just that, free of charge.

So why has the NCAA blackballed him?

Growing up in Clareton, Pa.,--40 minutes from Pittsburgh--Matthews did not have the money nor the grades nor the precedent to go to college out of Clareton High School. Matthews wanted only what his father and uncles and brothers and most everybody else in town wanted--a union card and an 8-to-5 at the steel mill.

And so that is what he got. “Never really thought of anything else,” Matthews will tell you.

For eight years, he was happy loading iron ore for U.S. Steel. But three years ago--on account of the economy, they all said--U.S. Steel shut down in Clareton.

“President Reagan was saying guys like us had to get ourselves retrained,” Matthews recalls. “He said the government would help pay to retrain you, but when I went to do it, they said the money had run out.”

So Matthews looked for jobs during the day and played city-league basketball at night, just to get out his frustrations. Though he could always dunk, he never played high school basketball (“Nobody asked.”). But now, with so much time on his hands, he discovered he was pretty good at it.

By 1982, Matthews became adroit enough that recruiters began hanging around the Connie Hawkins League playground games in Pittsburgh--ranked as the fifth-best city ball in the world by people who know such things--to see him. Soon enough, John Matthews had been discovered.

He accepted a full-ride, two-year scholarship to Taft Junior College, where he discovered that not only was basketball tolerable, college wasn’t so lousy, either. “I found out that if I applied myself, I can . . . well . . . I can do pretty well.”

Matthews wasn’t bad when he applied himself to the boards, either, and Taft started winning basketball games. By the end of his first year, Matthews was leading the team in rebounding and scoring and was on his way to becoming the team MVP.

If that didn’t bully your belief in the American Way, this year was going to. Midway through the season, Taft was 16-1 and leading its conference. Not only that, but at least a dozen Division 1 schools were wooing him, not the least of which was Nevada Las Vegas, where Coach Jerry Tarkanian offered him a full-ride scholarship.

All of which seemed perfectly blissful to everyone concerned--Taft, UNLV and Matthews--until the whole lot of them ran smack into the idiocy that is the NCAA.

Now, with all the plagues, famine and pestilence the NCAA has to fight in this age--pervasive cheating, under-the-table payoffs, over-the-table payoffs, the glut of televised football, the movement afoot by some large schools to secede from the union--you might think the hopes and aspirations of one John Matthews would be too minute to bother the NCAA’s daily calendar of crises.

But nooooooooo. That is not he way the NCAA works. The NCAA did not major in minoring for nothing. The NCAA knows who it can pick on and who it can’t. The NCAA picks on the John Matthews of the world.

The NCAA kiboshed John’s scholarship to UNLV by digging up a quite unknown but no less nasty little rule that penalizes John for being too old.

Yes, folks, John Matthews’ felony is that he is 28 years old. Guilty as charged: reckless birthing.

But isn’t that age discrimination, you say? Ah, that is the kicker. To get through that little hairpin turn, the NCAA wrote the rule cleverly. It insists age does not matter. Experience does. After the age of 21, the rule reads, any year spent in any “organized activity,” counts as a year of NCAA eligibility used. This means that every church basketball group, every flag-football league, every Elks lodge ping-pong tournament counts and counts big.

John Matthews, of course, had been playing city-league ball for eight years. That’s eight years of Division 1 eligibility down the drain. Hope you had fun, John.

“To me that’s unbelievable,” he said. “I was using up my eligibility in city-league ball? We didn’t even have uniforms .”

Kicker II: The rule was never intended for basketball. Pushed through by ex-UCLA track coach Jim Bush, the intent was to keep U.S. colleges from bringing over 747s full of experienced, African distance runners to win NCAA track championships, as Texas-El Paso did for umpteen years.

But John Matthews is from Clareton, Pa., you say? The NCAA doesn’t hear so well sometimes. All it knows is a rule is a rule. The NCAA may come out in favor of exhaling, but inhaling may be a different matter entirely.

“At first, I was shocked,” Matthews says. “I had no idea. It’s unfair. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’d like to challenge it in court if I could afford it. But it’s hard going up against the NCAA. They’re the almighty power. Who am I? The little guy going against a big bureaucracy.”

Fact is, the rule is being challenged in court by an athlete who would like to attend LaSalle. But until the courts rule, John Matthews gets to sit and worry and hope he doesn’t have to go home to Clareton, where “things aren’t so good. There aren’t any jobs.

“It’s kind of disillusioning. Here I am at Taft, working really hard on my grades, helping to give Taft a winning team, playing hard, trying to get a diploma, and it’s all so futile. I can’t go where I want to go.”

Welcome to the big-time world of college athletics, John Matthews.

Ain’t it grand?