You don’t often get a college-sports scandal as juicy as this one, a big-time rodeo with all the ponies: bought star players, loose cash, sex and more sex, serious denials, terrific posturing, a slick Hall of Fame coach who doesn’t know anything and a championship program on the verge of moral and physical collapse.
We’re talking about the hoofers-and-hookers mess unfolding at Louisville on basketball coach Rick Pitino’s watch.
According to a report on ESPN’s ‘‘Outside the Lines,’’ the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Jefferson County, Kentucky, has begun issuing subpoenas to
people it thinks might have something to do with the case rising out of allegations from the wonderfully titled book ‘‘Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen.’’
According to the book, written by 42-year-old Katina Powell and published a couple of weeks ago, she and her troupe, which included as many as two dozen strippers and sex-for-hire ladies, laid waste to Louisville’s jock dorm — Billy Minardi Hall — from 2010 to 2014.
‘‘It was crazy,’’ one recruit, who didn’t sign with the Cardinals, told ESPN.com’s John Barr. ‘‘It was like I was in a strip cub.’’
Sex education at the doctorate level, folks.
According to Powell, a man named Andre McGee, a graduate assistant who would be promoted to director of basketball operations in 2012, arranged the strip parties and paid her $10,000 to bring the ‘‘dancers.’’
Louisville recruits were entertained in this intimate and thoroughly modern fashion, and a number of them apparently signed with the team because of it.
The strippers would do their thing, then they would come out in something like a Las Vegas-style lineup, one at a time, after which they could arrange ‘‘side deals.’’
Which were?
‘‘That’s what the side deals were — sex,’’ Powell explained.
OK, pretty basic stuff. Primitive. Against all NCAA rules and most every conference rule you could think of, not to mention against the law. And Pitino knew nothing about it. Nothing, dammit!
His style of outrage was displayed in a speech in which he bellowed: ‘‘If there was any wrongdoing — and that’s a big ‘if’ — people have to pay for their crimes. . . . I hope those ‘ifs’ are not true because that building means a great deal to me.’’
What?
Billy Minardi Hall was named after Pitino’s brother-in-law, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. If it strikes anyone as curious that a coach could name a college dorm after a non-blood relative, well, you don’t understand the power of basketball and Pitino at Louisville.
But back to the scandal. Allegedly, not only were the recruits taken care of, but so —sometimes, anyway — were their fathers or guardians, according to Powell. You know, father-son bonding. Activity-sharing. Playing catch in the backyard.
Now, again, everybody at Louisville — except a bunch of former players, anonymous recruits, several strippers and Powell — is denying this happened. Why, Pitino is about to choke to death on his own factual disbelief and ethical incredulity. He’s the guy, don’t forget, who had sex
with a woman on a restaurant table back in 2003.
At any rate, the part in this that really floored me and let me know this was a really modern deal was when Powell said she pimped out her own three daughters as part of the hookers-for-ballers deal. Indeed, her three girls talk, on camera, about how their mom asked them if they’d like to, you know, do the nasty for cash. They apparently said, ‘‘Sure, Ma.’’
This is the Kardashians gone way off the rails. Or maybe not that far, if you think about it.
And all of it came about
because Powell is a prostitute
and a madam, doing her stuff for the cash that the graduate assistant allegedly paid her, but also for the dear old Cardinals hoops program.
‘‘I did everything to make those guys sign,’’ Powell said into the
TV camera. ‘‘When you offer
what you offer, then, of course, ‘Hey, I’ll sign.’ ’’
Boys will be boys, you know. All that book-learning can be done by the women and nerds.
Follow me on Twitter @ricktelander.
Email: rtelander@suntimes.com
