Kentucky Waiting for Other Sneaker to Drop

Eric Osburn of Redondo Beach, Calif., punched in at the Emery Worldwide air freight warehouse in Los Angeles at his usual time, 5:30 a.m., last March 31. As a “territory representative” for Emery, Osburn’s first order of business that dawn was to sort packages that he and other Emery workers would later deliver in the Los Angeles area. Known as “picking,” the job requires opening crates full of packages and sorting the packages by address and zip code.

On the morning of March 31, Osburn was going through crates that had arrived from Emery’s Dayton, Ohio, hub when, he said, he found a package with its flap open, exposing the package’s contents. “I saw a videotape saying Kentucky versus some other university,” Osburn would state later in a deposition, “and I saw some bills behind up in the sleeve of the videotape. It was Kentucky versus something at some dome of some kind.”

The addressee was Claud Mills, the father of Los Angeles high school basketball star and University of Kentucky recruit Chris Mills. The return address bore the name of Dwane Casey, an assistant basketball coach at Kentucky.

The cash, tucked neatly between the videotape and the cardboard sleeve, was $1,000 in crisp, new $50 bills.

Osburn’s discovery became hot gossip among Emery employees, one of whom, a forklift driver named John Zaverl, had a brother-in-law working as a clerk at the Los Angeles Daily News.

Two weeks later, the saga of Emery air waybill No. 043365177 was reported by the Daily News, touching off an NCAA investigation that, Kentucky basketball being Kentucky basketball, has shaken the Bluegrass State to its roots.

The school is currently preparing a response to 18 allegations lodged by the NCAA, the most prominent being that Casey sent $1,000 to Claud Mills. Among the others are charges that Casey offered another recruit cash and cars, that a Kentucky player -- sophomore swingman Eric Manuel -- committed academic fraud and that Casey lied to NCAA investigators. Casey and Mills have denied the allegations. Manuel has declined to comment.

The investigation has already cost the school an athletic director (Cliff Hagan) and, for this season at least, a star player (Manuel). When it is completed -- next April at the earliest -- it could result in bans on postseason play and television appearances for the Wildcats and cuts in the number of scholarships they can award. The NCAA could rule Manuel and Mills, now in his freshman season, ineligible and force the university to take action against Casey. And while head Coach Eddie Sutton has not been directly implicated, he could lose his job.

School officials emphasize that none of the charges has been proven, that the case must be heard by the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions. Still, a huge shadow has been cast on the college basketball program with perhaps the richest tradition and most passionate following in the nation.

“There’s never a day that I don’t wake up and think about what’s going on and what might happen,” said Sean Sutton, the coach’s son and the Wildcats’ sophomore point guard.

Kentuckians’ feelings were gauged recently in a poll conducted by The Cats’ Pause, a weekly newspaper devoted to Kentucky sports. More then 600 of the paper’s subscribers responded to the survey, and their comments were spread across 12 pages of the Dec. 10 issue. Among the findings: Nearly 57 percent said university President David Roselle should remove Sutton and his staff if the school is found guilty of violating NCAA rules, and nearly 97 percent said the integrity of the Kentucky athletics program has been damaged by the NCAA investigation.

Noting that his readers tend to be Kentucky’s most zealous supporters, Oscar Combs, editor and publisher of The Cats’ Pause, said, “When you get 96.9 of these readers to say the integrity of UK and the program have been damaged, it’s got to be bad. You would expect 10 or 15 percent of these people to stonewall it through hell.”

In addition to the Mills allegation, the NCAA has charged that:

--Casey made improper recruiting inducements in 1986 and ’87 to Sean Higgins, a teammate of Mills’ at Los Angeles’ Fairfax High School, including offers of a monthly allowance of $300 starting when Higgins signed a Kentucky letter of intent, a car upon signing and the opportunity to get a different car upon enrolling at Kentucky. Higgins signed with UCLA but enrolled at Michigan last fall.

--Manuel committed academic fraud in 1987 and the university violated NCAA rules in certifying his eligibility. Those allegations come from questions surrounding a dramatic improvement in Manuel’s scores on college entrance exams last year. Manuel, Kentucky’s only returning starter, is sitting out practices and games this year until the matter is resolved.

The NCAA has also asked the university to provide information about “unusual” cash payments made by the relative of a recruit soon after the relative received parcels via Emery from a member of the Kentucky basketball staff. According to published reports, the relative is the mother of Shawn Kemp of Elkhart, Ind., the 6-11 prize of the Wildcats’ ‘88 recruiting class, and the staff member is Casey.

Although Kemp did not meet Proposition 48 eligibility requirements, he enrolled at Kentucky. But he departed for a junior college, Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, the first week in November, shortly after it was disclosed that he had pawned two gold chains that Sean Sutton had reported missing from his dormitory room. Sean Sutton declined to press charges.

Without Manuel, Kemp and Rex Chapman, who moved on to the NBA after two college seasons, Kentucky has seen the makings of a Final Four team reduced to ashes. The Wildcats have already lost to Northwestern (La.) State and Bowling Green at Rupp Arena, the 23,000-seat palace where Kentucky had lost a total of 18 games in the previous 12 years. This could easily be Kentucky’s first losing season since 1927.

If nothing else, the Wildcats will play every game against a backdrop of controversy. “This team just hasn’t had a chance to play basketball,” Sean Sutton said. “It’s always something.”

The whisper in college basketball has long been that Kentucky operates outside NCAA rules but somehow avoids detection or, if detected, punishment.

The NCAA’s last investigation of the program, prompted by a series of stories in the Lexington Herald-Leader in October, 1985, did nothing to discourage such talk. The Herald-Leader interviewed 33 former Kentucky players, 26 of whom said they received improper benefits ranging from “$100 handshakes” to free meals. But the NCAA was unable to develop similar information during its investigation -- concluded only six weeks before the Emery story came to light -- although Kentucky was cited by the Committee on Infractions for a lack of cooperation during the investigation.

Nevada-Las Vegas coach Jerry Tarkanian, who has been taking shots at Kentucky for almost 20 years, recently told The Louisville Courier-Journal: “I still don’t think Kentucky will get anything more than a one-year probation. Then when it’s over, they’ll throw them an honors banquet, have a parade and get ready for next year ... You just don’t mess with the Big Blue.”

However, many of the Big Blue faithful seem resigned to the fact that the program will be nailed by the NCAA this time.

“I think the last problem, compounded by this one, compounded by the national publicity involved has created a situation where the NCAA intends to penalize Kentucky in a major way,” said Larry Forgy, a Lexington lawyer who is a member of the UK Board of Trustees as well as the UK Athletics Association’s Board of Directors. “There has been no change in the infractions committee since the university was in front of it the last time. It’s my understanding that there was some bitterness last time. I think if we were picking a jury, this wouldn’t be the jury we would pick.”

D. Alan Williams, the University of Virginia history professor who chairs the Committee on Infractions, said he could not discuss the Kentucky situation because it is a pending case “except to say we are not a jury. We are a group of administrative judges. There lies a considerable difference.”

Perhaps more to the point is the fact that the current case is quite different from the last one.

“The former case was a difficult case and not like this case at all,” said Kentucky’s acting athletic director, Joe Burch, who previously served as deputy general counsel for the university, “and one has to understand the distinctions between the two cases to understand how they might be looked at differently. There was no evidence in that other case that anyone was able to develop, including their (the NCAA) staff. We worked cooperatively with their staff on that case. It wasn’t confrontational. Their staff was not able to develop the information, nor were we, because the information was totally based on newspaper reports. Reporters had talked to persons, and the persons were either unwilling to talk to us or said different things. There wasn’t any independent evidence to go out and find.”

While many believe the Emery package has given the NCAA a smoking gun -- “People around campus are saying, ‘Ah, we probably did it,”’ student body president James Rose said -- the charge has been vigorously disputed by Casey, a member of Kentucky’s 1978 national championship team who joined the school’s coaching staff in 1986.

Casey has filed a $6.9 million lawsuit against five Emery employees and Security Experts Inc., a New York-based firm that provides security for Emery’s Los Angeles facility, and his attorney, Joe Bill Campbell of Bowling Green, Ky., has threatened to sue the NCAA and the university if they take action against Casey. Campbell says he would sue the NCAA for “breach of contract” on the premise that NCAA rules require the Committee on Infractions to base its findings on credible and persuasive evidence.

According to Campbell, Casey put a package, an air bill and a videotape of one of Chris Mills’ high school games on a receptionist’s desk for shipment to Claud Mills last March 30 and then left on a trip to Louisville. Campbell says that Larnetta McDowell, a temporary employee who was working as a receptionist in the Kentucky athletic office at the time, has stated to him as well as Kentucky and NCAA investigators that she saw no money and that she put the tape in the package, sealed it and called Emery for pickup. “Her testimony is consistent and couldn’t be better for us,” Campbell said.

On the other hand, in depositions taken as part of a suit to perpetuate testimony filed by the university in anticipation of a suit by Casey, Emery employees have stuck to the essential facts of their stories. Both Claud and Chris Mills have denied receiving any money, but Emery employees testified that the package, with the money, was resealed and delivered to Mills’ apartment. Emery driver David Jones stated that he gave the package to a young boy, who took the package inside and emerged with a receipt signed “C. Mills.”

Equally significant, and almost as murky, is the case of Eric Manuel.

He reportedly twice failed to score above 700, the minimum standard for freshman eligibility under Proposition 48, on the Scholastic Aptitude Test when he took the test while attending high school in Macon, Ga. But when he took the American College Test in June, 1987, at Lafayette High School in Lexington, he reportedly scored a 23, eight points higher than the NCAA’s minimum standard for the ACT and roughly equivalent to a 1,100 on the SATs.

The NCAA has alleged that Manuel cheated by copying from the answer sheet of a student who sat adjacent to him during the test. According to the NCAA, a comparison of the answer sheets shows that 211 of 219 questions were answered identically. On seven of the eight other questions, the NCAA said, the spaces marked by Manuel were adjacent to the spaces marked by the other student, who, according to the NCAA, scored 24 on that test as well as a subsequent test.

According to the NCAA, Manuel lied to the NCAA and the university when questioned about the test and refused to sign a release form authorizing ACT officials to compare his test booklet with that of the other student’s when requested to do so by the NCAA and the university.

The NCAA has cited Kentucky for failing to question the validity of Manuel’s score based on his previous academic record.

Two days before officially receiving the charge of academic fraud, the school announced that Manuel had withdrawn from the team, a move that at least one trustee, Cap Hershey, owner of Hillbrook Farm in Lexington, has openly criticized. Hershey acknowledges that “statistical evidence” weighs against Manuel but says the school has uncovered no direct evidence of cheating and should allow Manuel to play unless such evidence comes to light. “Everybody’s taking the NCAA as the great word in the sky,” he said, “and, hell, I don’t think they are.”

Ultimately, the key player in all this will be Roselle, a mathematics scholar who became Kentucky’s president in July, 1987. When he took the job, he was expected to be more objective about athletics than his predecessor, Otis Singletary, “whose loyalty to his athletic department,” Herald-Leader columnist Billy Reed wrote last summer, “often blinded him to its shortcomings.”

Faced with crisis, that appears to be so. Hagan’s resignation Nov. 15, according to a source close to the matter who asked not to be identified, was forced by Roselle because the president felt Hagan, an All-America basketball player at Kentucky in the ‘50s, had shown too little interest in dealing with the NCAA investigation. According to the source, Hagan once thumbed through a copy of USA Today during a meeting to discuss the case and, on another occasion, did paper work while a deposition was being taken in his office.

Roselle is declining interview requests. Hagan has declined comment beyond his original prepared statement, in which he gave no reason for the resignation. Now working out of an office tucked away behind a copying machine in the administration building, he remains on the Kentucky payroll to “assist in the transition,” according to Roselle’s prepared statement on the resignation.

Next in line could be Sutton, whose contract contains a clause stating that any violation of NCAA rules is grounds for termination. “My thought about Mr. Sutton is that if these charges are ultimately found by the NCAA to be founded in fact, his job will be in serious jeopardy,” trustee Forgy said.

Before the season began, Sutton laid down new ground rules for the media to restrict access to his players, and now, stung by public cries for his ouster, he is refusing interviews unless they deal strictly with basketball. And so it goes: from the Fabulous Five to Fort Sutton.

A former member of the Republican National Committee who has been touted as a gubernatorial candidate in his state, Forgy believes the Kentucky situation can only be viewed fairly as a visible part of a national crisis. But, like many of his fellow Kentuckians, he believes some of the charges against Kentucky are serious and not likely to wash away. A visitor mentions that the Emery episode is, if nothing else, definitely bizarre. Forgy shrugs and says, “Well, a piece of tape started Watergate.”