Motives Are Unclear in Rush Investigation

The JaRon Rush saga has become quite a head-scratcher. For Christmas, most people are getting gifts. Rush, a UCLA basketball player of some note, may be getting the shaft.

Even for those who have followed this closely, it has been a difficult story to track. A few weeks ago, amid the usual vague spins of university public relations departments, Rush was suspended from the Bruins’ team. It was made to sound temporary, developing. More venial than mortal sin.

But Rush still sits, home in Kansas City, Mo., for the holidays, and UCLA goes to Hawaii and loses a game to Colorado State and wins two against Maine and South Florida. Suffice to say none of UCLA’s opponents will be around at Final Four time, nor will the Bruins without Rush.

On the surface, it is such a simple story, so easy to accept because we see this sort of thing all the time in college basketball, by far the sleaziest of collegiate athletic endeavors outside of football handicapped parking. The stories you have read tell about Rush--and eventually his brother Kareem at Missouri--taking money from an agent. That’s against NCAA rules, so penalties are needed. The money talked about is in the range of $200-$300, but breaking a rule is breaking a rule. Kareem has already been assessed half a season of sitting on the bench, and JaRon awaits his sentence while already having missed five games.

But what got us to all this remains, as Lewis Carroll would say, curiouser and curiouser.

At UCLA, Missouri and Oklahoma State--the latter involving a player named Andre Williams--the flag went up when officials from the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City showed up to chat with athletic department officials. In the case of UCLA, this was shortly after JaRon Rush had gone to Kansas City to testify about a former youth league coach named Myron Piggie. When the U.S. attorney’s group showed up, you might suspect it got some attention.

Put yourself in Peter Dalis’ shoes. You are the athletic director at UCLA, with huge fiscal and moral responsibility to a high-profile public institution. You are told, or at least led to believe, by very official-looking-and-sounding government guys that one of your players said something in testimony that might violate NCAA rules. You do the obvious thing, the prudent thing. You suspend the player. You avoid the risk of game-forfeiture. You buy time to look into this. That’s just good, smart management.

Nobody can fault Dalis, or Missouri Athletic Director Mike Alden, or whomever had to sit with the government posse from Kansas City in its visit to Oklahoma State.

But now, time has passed and questions continue to arise that don’t seem to have any easy answers.

Such as:

* Why would a U.S. attorney in Kansas City, a man named Steven Hill, spend taxpayer money to fly around to various schools--sometimes he went with staff, sometimes just his staff--to inform on college basketball players who may have stuffed a couple of hundred dollars into their pockets from people that the rules say they can’t take from? Bigger question: Aren’t there any rapists, robbers or murderers in Kansas City?

* If this entire thing is about a youth basketball program run in Kansas City by Piggie, and is an attempt to bring him down, is not the previous “bigger question” in play again here: Aren’t there any rapists, murderers or robbers in Kansas City?

* If this entire thing is about Piggie, what is the real agenda? Can a youth basketball coach in Kansas City be that dirty, that vile, that threatening to the public good that he becomes a priority with a U.S. attorney’s office? And how creative is that line of pursuit, anyway, since it is pretty well known in collegiate basketball ranks that there is a huge scarcity of altar boys and missionaries among AAU and youth coaches.

* Is it possible that the presence of the Rush brothers, high-profile college payers, as part of this story makes it a page-one offering, whereas, the mere pursuit of Piggie would make it Page 39, if that? But that would only matter if those pursuing Piggie were also pursuing something else. Mayor Steven Hill? Congressman?

These are all just questions. They could be off base.

They, sadly, are also the product of a judicial system that, necessarily, leaves itself open to speculation while it secretly does its job. A call was made to Steven Hill, but no response was received, nor expected. There is something called the Federal Rule of Criminal Evidence, Rule 6E, that says those investigating a grand jury case cannot talk about that investigation, nor even acknowledge that it is going on. In private legal groups, it is known affectionately as the “don’t ever talk to those newspaper creeps” rule.

So we are left to raise questions. That’s called freedom of the press.

Perhaps Hill and his team are after something so big that none of us could even imagine, and that our tax dollars are being well spent to rid our world of some really bad guys or bad things.

The Kansas City papers have speculated that the real interest in this investigation is to put a stop to athletes signing letters before they get their scholarships, acknowledging that they have not been in violation of NCAA rules. If those letters cross state lines, it can be categorized as some sort of federal fraud. (Wow, what a scandal!) Or, if the letters are just signed, never cross a state line but result in a scholarship, that scholarship would have been acquired fraudulently. (Another biggie!)

Maybe the target is Nike, which funds many of those AAU and youth basketball programs and has taken a rap for a long time for peddling its considerable influence among 10-year-olds in some kind of never-ending search for the next Michael Jordan and the corresponding lucrative endorsement hookup. That’s a pretty big target, maybe not even a fair one. But who knows? It’s just another question, another possibility.

Maybe the target is not so much Piggie as sports agents in general. Jerome Stanley of Los Angeles has been implicated, much to his anger, in the JaRon Rush case. Stanley has denied impropriety, but his name, much like JaRon Rush’s college career, is out there now, kind of twisting in the wind, while investigations and testimony and clandestine meetings go on.

Maybe the Kansas City officials are seeking sports-agent reform. (And for their next act, anti-snake-biting measures?)

Questions, questions, questions . . .

JaRon Rush will probably know soon how long his suspension will be. And when that is made official, it will be an end of sorts to this, at least to the part of it involving UCLA. But there still will be at least two questions remaining even then:

Why did this even start? And what was the big deal?

Special correspondent Mike McKenzie in Dallas contributed to this story.