They Can’t Let Victory Come Before Honor

George O’Leary had to resign as football coach at Notre Dame on Friday. He quit because he lied on his resume. He called the lies “inaccuracies.” That’s inaccurate. He lied.

He said he lettered three times while a football player at New Hampshire. He didn’t letter once. He also said he had a master’s degree from New York University. He attended the well-respected school. But he has no master’s.

On his new resume, he can legitimately say he was Notre Dame football coach. He won’t even have to lie.

And because Athletic Director Kevin White couldn’t figure out a way to check a resume, couldn’t find someone to make a couple of phone calls, that should make the president of Notre Dame wonder if he has the right man as athletic director.

For in making the O’Leary hire, for making it hastily, for rushing because it was a key time for recruiting and Notre Dame needed a coach now, at least in White’s mind, White shouldn’t be athletic director at Notre Dame.

In our sports, in this time, winning seems to come all too often at the expense of honor.

It was this feeling about college basketball that was the genesis of “Pursuing Victory With Honor, Game Plan for Amateur Basketball.” But even in this well-thought-out plan, the word “victory” comes before the word “honor” and isn’t that the problem?

The 18-page plan was put together at a conference sponsored by the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches (NABC) and Character Counts, a division of the Marina del Rey-based Josephson Institute of Ethics.

But it applies to all college sports, football included.

When was the last time a sports fan heard the word “honor” on “SportsCenter” for anything other than the Army-Navy game? When was the last time the honorable way to pursue victory was the topic of “The Last Word with Jim Rome?”

Notre Dame officials proclaimed last Sunday that they had the absolute right person for the Notre Dame coaching position and that they knew everything there was to know about O’Leary.

Yet besides the “inaccuracies” on his resume, O’Leary also was reprimanded at Georgia Tech for giving a player a loan. Because of that NCAA no-no, he was the first man with an NCAA violation on his record to be hired as Fighting Irish football coach.

If these are the values prized by the men at Notre Dame, what hope is there for other colleges, ones that don’t profess to be above all the ugliness too often found in college sports?

Forty-seven men and women--college presidents, athletic directors, coaches, game officials, politicians--are listed as endorsing delegates to the Game Plan. Coaches such as Stanford’s Mike Montgomery, Purdue’s Gene Keady, Kentucky’s Tubby Smith, Kansas’ Roy Williams. People such as high school coaching legend Morgan Wooten of DeMatha in Hyattsville, Md., and Carl Hawkinson, a state senator from Illinois. People such as Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten; Judy Rose, athletic director of UNC Charlotte; Marie Ishida, executive director of the California Interscholastic Federation, and Carol Cartwright, president of Kent State.

Men and women of honor have signed the document that asks that the coaches be viewed as teachers, that the importance of financial gain be de-emphasized, that unruly home crowds be controlled. One goal under the category of “Good Character and Sportsmanship During Practice and in Games,” -2.4 (g) -says “Demand Respect During National Anthem.”

There wasn’t a section on coaches telling the truth on a resume. There wasn’t a heading: “Thou shalt not lie.”

If a coach must demand that his players act properly during the national anthem, the job of teaching is already much too difficult. If a university of the stature of Notre Dame doesn’t find it important enough to make sure the man it hires to coach its young men is himself a man of honor, how will a new report make a difference?

A number of college coaches in football and basketball are getting paid upward of a million dollars a year. They aren’t being paid like that to make sure their players walk down the graduation aisle, and the firing of Bob Davie and hiring of O’Leary could make that no clearer.

The NCAA negotiates a billion dollar-plus college basketball television package and it is not the student-athletes at Harvard who get the TV games. Notre Dame has its own network TV deal. When you have your own network, that network wants a BCS-caliber team, not a no-bowl Notre Dame.

“This group wouldn’t have gotten together if a large number of people didn’t think there were serious problems,” Delany says.

“Maybe I’m gullible or naive,” Keady says, “but I think people are basically good and we have to trust them. I trust coaches.”

“Teacher-coach,” is how the Game Plan refers to all the coaches. “Teacher-coach” John Calipari of Memphis didn’t find it necessary to require a college degree of his newest assistant, Milt Wagner, who also happens to be the father of one of the best high school players in the country last season, DeJuan Wagner from Camden (N.J.) High. DeJuan chose to attend Memphis.

Today it’s not possible to say “Teacher-coach O’Leary” without giggling. Or crying.

Pursuing victory has never been the problem, of course. It is the honor part. Hiring honorable men and women to do the job of coaching and running athletic departments is the most necessary first step.

Jim Haney, executive director of the NABC, says that getting together the distinguished signatures on this proposal is a good start toward making changes. “People of influence who can impact change, that is important,” Haney says.

But he also says that “clearly, within college athletics, there is a line where basketball, football, maybe even some other sports, go from being an amateur competition to being a business. It’s about winning, about putting people in seats.

“On the other hand, if you have a Fortune 500 company making lots of money, it doesn’t mean that company shouldn’t, or doesn’t, behave ethically. But the money does make things more complex. A lot of people with a hunger or thirst for money let that hunger or thirst affect their bottom line as to whether or not to make an ethical decision. It’s a real challenge.”

Delany understands this, how good people will still protect their turf, how good intentions turn into good 18-page reports that go away.

“We’ve made lots of attempts to make things better,” Delany says, “and these efforts to change have not been successful. Maybe 20% of the schools aren’t graduating people. There is lots and lots of transience among both coaches and players.

“When you start talking about change, it becomes a real fistfight, about who’s in control. In the last 10 years I’ve talked to lots and lots of coaches who are really worried, really concerned about many things that are happening. Do I think this report will make a difference? Honestly? No, not really, no.”

It is this cynicism that will be the toughest challenge in making change work. Too many people involved in sports believe somebody else is doing things wrong. Too many refuse to step up and condemn one of their own.

“During my association with George O’Leary, which has been over the course of the last 15 years, I would characterize his integrity as unquestionable,” Maryland Coach Ralph Friedgen, a close friend of O’Leary, said Friday.

“He is one of the most honest people I have ever met and the friend who I would trust more than any other in my life. He may have made a mistake early on in his career, but that is certainly not the way that he leads his life.”

Friedgen is wrong. It was exactly the way O’Leary led his life. He knowingly falsified his resume.

That false resume was a living document, reprinted every year in a team media guide. It would have been nice to hear Friedgen say how wrong that was.

“The Game Plan is a wonderful idea,” Delany says. “I hope every coach, athletic director and university president reads it. It puts forth good standards. It is educational for people looking for a little bit of guidance. But when you put it up against the hard work of making changes on the regulatory side, to bring a little more balance into the game, then it becomes a contact sport. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who’s been there.”

Ask the men in charge at Notre Dame. It might have been a little harder, a little more work, to find a moral, ethical man to coach the football team.

In this case, looking back isn’t helpful. Neither is giving up. Not trying, that doesn’t work either, which is the first lesson of sports. If you need to improve your defense, you don’t necessarily do that with a blackboard session. You do it on the field and in the gym every day. You do it by doing it, not talking about it. You do it by hiring good people. You let those people lose some games. You never let them lose their ethics.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com