A Losing Record for NCAA Whistle-Blower

Jan Gangelhoff found her conscience. In the process, she lost everything else.

Two years after her confessions of academic cheating brought down the University of Minnesota basketball program, she is still struggling to piece together her life. She’s living in a casino motel on an Ojibwe Indian reservation in northwest Wisconsin and working as a teacher at a nearby tribal school.

The motel is a five-hour drive from Minneapolis, which hosts the NCAA tournament’s Final Four this weekend, meaning it’s the temporary center of the college basketball universe. But Gangelhoff has no plans to make the trip south. She has tried to keep a low profile since telling a St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter that she wrote some 400 papers, take-home tests and other assignments for 20 Gopher players from 1994 to 1998.

It started innocently enough: Gangelhoff, an executive secretary in the athletic department, was asked to tutor players during study hall. Over time, she became more involved, often assisting in writing papers. Eventually, to save time, she began writing some of the papers herself.

Over a five-year period, she wrote or assisted in writing papers for 20 players--on subjects from acid rain to Native American relations to premenstrual syndrome. She got help from her sister, Jeanne, who wrote more than 50 papers.

Gangelhoff, 52, has paid a tremendous price. She underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery last March and has lost 68 pounds in two years, although she jokes about still being overweight. Her once-black hair is now more salt than pepper. By the end of the school day, her dark eyes are tired.

She keeps her motel room tidy but can’t do much about the musty red carpet or 1970s drapes. Her chain smoking doesn’t help the ambience, nor does it do much for her chronic asthma.

In the corner of her room is a small outdated computer she uses to devise lesson plans. Her window looks out onto a construction site, with patches of snow covering large piles of dirt. The Ritz it is not.

“If I had it to do over again, I really don’t know whether I would do it,” she said during an interview Wednesday. “That’s pretty selfish of me, I know. . . .

“But I’ve survived. There are probably a lot of people who wish I never existed, but that’s too bad. Because I’m still here.”

She agreed to be photographed for this story but asked to have the pictures taken inside her room. She prefers to keep her exact location a secret.

“It’s so peaceful here,” she said.

Her life was anything but peaceful the day before the Gophers played Gonzaga University in the first round of the 1999 NCAA tournament, when the Pioneer Press broke the cheating story. Gangelhoff had been gone from the university for a year--she resigned in 1998 because of stress--and was working as a finance manager at the Hole in the Wall Casino in Danbury, Wis.

She had had a series of conversations with Pioneer Press sports writer George Dohrmann, who was working on a story about discrimination in the university’s athletic department. The two developed a trust, and Gangelhoff decided to come clean about the cheating.

“I didn’t want Clem Haskins to ruin any more lives,” she said, referring to Minnesota’s basketball coach at the time. “When I spent all of those days and sleepless nights trying to decide what to do, he really didn’t enter into it. What’s going to happen to Clem? Is he going to lose his job? That wasn’t part of the equation at all. It all boiled down to two things: Why aren’t those kids getting an education, and why is any system allowed to bring kids in, then throw them away if it wants to?”

She never anticipated the personal toll it would take.

“George kept saying, ‘This is huge, Jan, it’s huge. You’ve got to tell your family. You’ve got to tell your friends,’ ” she said of Dohrmann, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the story. “But ‘huge’ meant nothing to me. I didn’t know reporters would be crawling all over my apartment and my family and my town.”

The day after the story was published, the casino was overrun by reporters. Satellite trucks lined the main street of Danbury, her hometown. A TV producer offered a casino security guard “three bills” simply to pass to her a note requesting an interview.

The story led to investigations by the NCAA and federal government, the firing of several members of the athletic department--including Haskins and Athletic Director Mark Dienhart--a scholarship reduction and four years’ probation by the NCAA. The university, after its own investigation, had already imposed a one-year ban from the NCAA tournament on its men’s basketball team.

Gangelhoff has lost touch with the players she risked so much to help. They don’t call her anymore. They no longer think of her as a combination tutor, confidant and den mother. Some of them said she was lying. Others admitted to having her do their work, then retracted those confessions when the pressure intensified.

Players used to bake her cakes, remember her birthday, send her Christmas cards, bring home tournament T-shirts for her. But that feels like another lifetime.

“They trusted me,” she said. “I thought I would have those relationships forever, and now I don’t have any of them. That’s been incredibly difficult. That’s been the biggest regret that I’ve had about coming forward.”

Since the scandal, she has made other headlines. She has been fired by a casino and a convenience store in Wisconsin on what she considers trumped-up charges. The casino fired her in September after video cameras showed her removing a stack of documents from the premises without permission. She claimed they were only newspapers.

According to a complaint in Burnett County Court, Gangelhoff also was fired on Dec. 10 from Wild Bill’s--a gas station and liquor store in Webster, Wis.--after an employee said she saw Gangelhoff register something on the till and remove some bills from the cash drawer then reach into her right pocket. Gangelhoff told the co-worker she was checking the cash register tape for a gas mistake that had happened earlier in the day on a previous shift, the complaint said.

“I never stole anything,” Gangelhoff said. “That’s what I said. I said, ‘I’m going to go down fighting on this one because I didn’t do it.’ I was raised better than that. I wasn’t destitute--not until they fired me.”

Also, in September, she agreed to a felony plea of misappropriating federal Pell Grant money--she kept players eligible, thereby maintaining the grants. A Minneapolis judge threw out the plea agreement, however, leaving everyone waiting for the next step.

Jim Lord, Gangelhoff’s attorney, agreed to allow an interview with his client provided she did not get into specifics about what she did for Minnesota players. Lord declined to comment about the possibility of federal charges.

“There’s no doubt she did the wrong thing by writing the papers,” he said. “She knows she shouldn’t have done that. But the consequences of what she did have been awfully severe.”

Gangelhoff worked closely with Alonzo Newby, then the academic counselor for the basketball team.

“I did not wake up one day and say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll write all these papers today,’ ” she said. “It was more like an evolution of getting to that point.”

A report by the NCAA’s infractions committee said Newby and Haskins were aware of the academic fraud.

“The accuracy was I typed every single paper that I had, and the players were involved to differing degrees,” Gangelhoff said. “Some, not at all. But the majority were involved.

“It hurt me when everybody in the country started calling the players cheaters and when Gonzaga had all those signs up saying, ‘We do our own homework.’ It really wasn’t the players’ fault. Well, it was, but to a much lesser degree than it was my fault.”

Minnesota, reeling from the scandal, lost to Gonzaga in that game. Many, including Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, complained about the timing of the story’s publication, blaming Gangelhoff and the newspaper for creating a distraction for the Gophers.

For the most part, Gangelhoff said, people who recognize her have said she did the right thing. The supportive letters have far outweighed the hateful ones.

“I still like to see the Gophers play,” she said. “I want them to be successful. I want them to get an education. They all come in thinking that they’re going to the pros. I don’t tell them, ‘No, you’re not.’ But I tell them that if you want to play basketball, you’ve got to hit the books.”

She says the same thing to the high school students she teaches in the 34-pupil tribal school. She has been invited to teach there again next year. She understands some people consider her the most celebrated cheater in Gopher history. She doesn’t try to argue the point.

“Just because I cheated doesn’t mean my students are going to, or that I’m going to let them,” she said. “For me, the key is to not put them in that situation. I haven’t and I won’t.”