He Gets a Chance to Prove Self : UC Irvine: As athletic director, Ford finally can escape scandal that followed his tenure at University of Houston.

Tom Ford sent his resume to such schools as Minnesota, Missouri and Utah, and it arrived with all the others from people wanting to be the next athletic director.

Ford’s credentials: For two years, he had been athletic director at a Division I institution, a school with a big-time basketball program that had made it to the Final Four shortly before he took over.

But Ford had a red-flagged resume. He didn’t even get an interview--until UC Irvine came along.

Ford had been athletic director at the University of Houston for two years before resigning abruptly in June of 1986. The school and Ford had been under scrutiny. Among the problems:

--There were newspaper reports that football players and recruits had received cash and other favors from coaches, including Bill Yeoman, the head coach.

--The athletic department, in the red for years, had a deficit that had reached $3.1 million under Ford.

--The Houston Chronicle was preparing a story detailing Ford’s use--or alleged misuse--of expense accounts. Ford says now he later repaid the school “about $600” because of inappropriate accounting of his expenses.

--Ford’s professional ability was being questioned. One member of the university’s board of regents said after Ford’s resignation that Ford lacked “the skills and background necessary to do the job,” and that his contract, due to expire in three months, would not have been renewed.

Houston’s football program eventually was put on three years’ probation with stiff penalties. Most of the violations Houston was cited for were committed between 1978 and ‘82, well before Ford became athletic director, and Ford was not implicated in any specific violations cited by the NCAA. However, the school was cited for failing to exercise institutional control over its football program.

For the next four years, Ford’s career as an athletic director was dead.

But Irvine not only interviewed Ford, it hired him after a six-month search for a replacement for John Caine, who was reassigned as Irvine reorganized an athletic department that was facing serious budget problems.

So why did Irvine hire Ford, when no other school would?

Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor for student affairs and the acting athletic director before Ford was hired, said the school was convinced of Ford’s integrity, and that his background had been thoroughly investigated by a Beverly Hills executive-search firm.

“We looked into the issue very thoroughly and we were satisfied that Tom took a position of integrity with respect to the investigation and we feel very comfortable,” Mitchell said. “For any of the candidates we were looking at, if there were any special items we asked (the search firm) to take a look. In this case, it was a question of the NCAA investigation and to what extent he was involved and how he responded.”

Mitchell said Irvine did not look into the financial situation at Houston in the same detail, nor investigate the use of expense accounts.

“We certainly were satisfied in talking with Tom about his integrity,” Mitchell said, adding that the financial situation at Houston had not been a major concern because it was in part an inheritance from earlier administrations and because Irvine is “a different situation.”

Mitchell said that if Irvine had known about the controversy surrounding Ford’s expenses, it would have sought an explanation. But Mitchell also said that inaccuracies of expense reporting of less than $1,000 could be caused by accounting procedures and were “not of a nature to be problematic.”

Another member of Irvine’s search committee said he felt comfortable with Ford in regard to the NCAA investigation, but that the committee had not been aware of the financial issues, which might have been cause for some concern at the time.

Ford has new problems to deal with at Irvine. He is seeking donations for an endowed scholarship program, planning to improve Irvine’s inadequate weight-training facilities and hoping that the school’s basketball teams can recover from a disastrous season in which the men and women together had a record of 6-50.

He is back at work in his chosen field after his career as an athletic director was nearly scuttled by his brief tenure at Houston.

“It was a great opportunity for professional growth,” Ford said, laughing.

But whether it was his misfortune to be associated with the Houston program, or whether he was an administrator unable to control it, is not completely clear.

Not surprisingly, Ford had critics in Houston. He was seen by some as a poor manager who contributed to the school’s money problems by keeping vague records and misusing his own expense account.

But others saw him as a young administrator whose first job as an athletic director offered a minefield of problems that weren’t necessarily of his making.

“Had Tom come into a normal situation, he would have been fine,” said Michael Johnson, a Houston law professor who formerly was the school’s faculty athletic representative and served as interim athletic director for seven months in ’86 after Ford’s resignation.

“I hope he’ll have a better chance for success at Cal Irvine. Here, he came into a crazy situation and became something of a scapegoat.”

Among those who preceded Ford at Houston were John Kasser, formerly athletic director at Cal State Long Beach and now at UC Santa Barbara, and Arizona Athletic Director Cedric Dempsey, who brought Ford and Kasser with him from the University of the Pacific.

Dempsey, who was athletic director at Houston for three years before leaving for Arizona in 1982, called Houston a tough job in an environment in which athletic directors had to contend with interference from outside the school.

Ford says he resigned because of interference by the board of regents with the school’s investigation.

One regent at the time, Debbie Hanna of Austin, Tex., told the Houston Chronicle that Ford may have simply been looking for a convenient excuse to leave before being fired. Hanna said Ford’s contract probably would not have been renewed because he lacked “the skills and background necessary to do the job.”

Ford said recently he had not expected that his contract would be renewed, and that he had resigned about three months before his contract was up for review.

He added that he resigned the week after the board of regents had met in a closed session and heard a report from the attorney hired by the school to investigate the charges of illegal payments and other violations, and that the board told the attorney to end his investigation, without making documentation available to subsequent investigators, such as the NCAA.

Walter Zivley, the attorney hired by the school to investigate the reports, said his recollection is that his investigation continued for some time after Ford’s resignation.

Stan Binion, the attorney who represented the university in the NCAA investigation, said the original investigation was terminated for financial reasons after it was found that violations had, in fact, occurred, and that no evidence uncovered by it was withheld from the NCAA.

The NCAA noted when it put the football program on probation that the school’s investigation had been impeded by false and misleading information provided by Coach Bill Yeoman and several of his assistants.

Ford also described a situation in which he said at least two of nine boosters acting as semi-official liaisons to the nine-member board of regents were themselves either “paying players directly or raising money for the coach to pay off the players.”

Binion said that those charges were not substantiated by the NCAA.

Another source, requesting anonymity, said that Ford and other athletic administrators had to deal with several regents who wanted the school to “stonewall” in its dealings with the NCAA over the football allegations.

Hanna, no longer a member of the board, still disputes Ford’s claim that regents had somehow interfered with the school’s investigation of the football allegations.

“I could not disagree with Tom more on that, and I would continue to do so,” she said. “Tom must know of something I don’t--or feels he does.”

Johnson, the law professor who served as interim athletic director, said there were conflicts about how to respond to the investigation.

“Tom stepped into a big mess, a whole swirl of accusations,” Johnson said. “There was a lot of hatred going in various directions. Although (then-Chancellor Richard) Van Horn remained constant throughout (the entire period), there were others around in power who had different ideas about how to approach the situation.”

Ford says he resigned shortly after the meeting at which he maintains the regents told the attorney to stop the investigation.

He said he then consulted Van Horn, now chancellor of the University of Oklahoma.

“He said, yes, (the regents) would fight the investigation and stonewall it and that they were going to make all the decisions and they were going to call the shots,” Ford said.

“Then I said, ‘What do you need an athletic director for?’

“That’s when he said to me, ‘Tom, both you and I could get killed in this thing.’

“He didn’t mean literally. He said, ‘If you have anything on the horizon, you might want to look into it, because it’s not going to be a good situation. They’re going to protect the football coach because of his years of service to the institution.’

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t think any one individual is bigger than the institution. I can’t go along with it.’ That was it in a nutshell.”

Ford’s main impact at Houston, at least at the beginning, was as a fund raiser.

Administrators figured they needed somebody to increase donations to the athletic department, and Dempsey brought in Ford, who had been executive director of the Pacific Athletic Foundation.

In stories published by the Chronicle after Ford’s resignation, questions were raised about both fund raising under Ford and his personal expense account.

For example, the newspaper said the athletic department reported raising $1.2 million for the 1984-85 academic year, $489,874 of it in gifts in kind. However, the department’s records showed only $251,330 of the gifts in kind was used by the school.

Ford said the discrepancy was the result of confusing accounting procedures.

“There were times we would accept a gift of, say, a thousand dollars worth of Sheetrock. Well, we may not use that during the year. Somehow within our accounting procedure, it would be unclear. I think it was more the writer (of those stories) not understanding the accounting procedure.”

The newspaper also reported that Ford spent thousands of dollars on restaurant meals and liquor and charged it to the university, saying records show that during a four-month stretch in 1985, Ford billed the department for more than $4,600 in meals.

Ford defended those figures, saying they included bills such as those for entertaining large groups of prospective donors at the Astrodome.

According to a highly placed source formerly associated with the school, university accountants went back over Ford’s expense accounts when the university learned of media scrutiny of them, and some time after Ford’s resignation requested he repay about $600 for what the source called a “slight imbalance” in Ford’s accounts.

“There were times that I may have submitted the same thing twice,” Ford said recently. “That happens--although it’s not happening here now. When you turn in an expense, let’s say you pay for something with American Express and you come back with a slip and get a reimbursement. When the bill comes in and you’re trying to reconcile that, there could be double payments.”

The matter was quickly resolved, the source said.

“We found no reason to believe there was any kind of misuse of his (expense) account,” the source said. “We just found a lot of mistakes.”

Ford’s image suffered at Houston for other reasons--not the least of which was a habit of holding meetings at out-of-the-way places.

It was widely reported that he phoned in his resignation from a pizza parlor. Ford denies that, but says he did notify the athletic department publicist of his resignation from a pizza parlor after meeting some staff members there.

He also was ridiculed for meeting with Lamar basketball Coach Pat Foster at out-of-the-way places while negotiating to hire him as Guy Lewis’ replacement. Ford conducted a 70-day search during which he contacted such coaches as Jim Harrick, Gene Keady, George Raveling, Paul Evans, John Chaney and Mike Krzyzewski before finally hiring Foster, the obvious local candidate from nearby Beaumont, Tex.

Ford said he moved deliberately in trying to hire a coach with a national reputation for commitment to academics, and that he met with Foster in secret because of Foster’s concerns about publicity.

Ford was also athletic director when Houston was briefly involved in recruiting basketball star Tito Horford, whose recruitment was an ongoing scandal involving several schools.

“For some reason, I took the heat for that, too,” Ford said.

After leaving Houston, Ford worked as director of program development for Raycom, Inc., a Charlotte, N.C., television packager of college sports events. He also worked as a consultant to athletic departments around the country and was manager of the University of Arizona’s extended university in Phoenix when Irvine called.

Back at work in his chosen field, Ford looks back on Houston with a mixture of fondness and regret.

“That was one of those things, if you had to do over again, you wouldn’t,” he said. “But I accepted the position because I wanted to be an athletic director. The time was right for me. I had been at the institution and had a good feel for it.”

That meant he knew there were problems.

“You sometimes have a sense that there may be some things that were not appropriate,” he said, referring to the football program.

But when the scandal broke and reporters confronted him in his office with signed testimony from athletes, he said, “It was (news) to me.”

“I thought that if it was happening, it was so discreet,” Ford said. “I didn’t know there was an organized plan.”

But there were others, and Houston’s football went down as a violator of NCAA rules. Ford left before the penalties came down, but not before they affected him.

Until Irvine hired him, his name still was more closely associated with Houston than with any other school.

“I think (Irvine) took the initiative to do a thorough background check and visit with the people involved,” Ford said. “I think because of all the turmoil that was taking place and the bad image of college sports with things surfacing about illegal payments, inducements and academic scandals, that as positions became open and I might indicate interest, I think it had an impact on me by association if nothing else.”