What's It Like To Be the Target of an NCAA Investigation?

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from the prologue of the new book I wrote with Ben Strauss, "Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA."  It was about a UConn freshman named Ryan Boatright, and the hell he and his mother were put through by the NCAA.  I thought readers might like to hear the details of the investigation, and how it all turned out for Ryan.  Here is a second excerpt from the prologue:

It was Boatright’s new coach, UConn’s legendary Jim Calhoun, who first informed his mother Tanesha in November 2011 that her son had been declared ineligible by the school because the NCAA had some questions “about his recruitment,” as he put it to her.

Within a day or two, members of the NCAA’s enforcement staff began calling her at work on her cell phone. They didn’t even attempt to make an appointment; they simply started asking questions. She would try to answer a few, but then she would have to tell the investigators that she had to be back to work. The fact that her son was being held out because of an NCAA investigation was all over ESPN. “It was embarrassing,” she said. “I had to tell my supervisor that this was the reason I was on my cell phone all the time. It got to the point where it was a real problem at work.” Because she couldn’t drop everything and answer their questions, the investigators reported back to their supervisor that Tanesha was not being responsive. This went on for several weeks. She would go home and cry herself to sleep. “You’re so paranoid,” she said. “Your son’s future is at stake, and you don’t know what you can say that will satisfy them.”

Finally, someone at UConn told her to set up a meeting with the investigators. She did; it was to be held in a nearby hotel. But instead of meeting her there, the investigators showed up at her office, dressed in ties and jackets, looking as though they belonged to the FBI. More humiliation. They arrived at the hotel around 5:30 p.m., where Tanesha was grilled until 1 a.m. She still had no idea what wrongdoing she was being accused of—or who had made the allegations against her. And the NCAA investigators refused to tell her. Instead they asked the same set of questions again and again: “How did you pay for your visit to UConn? Who got you your tickets? Who gave you the $3,000?”

Tanesha says they kept referring to secret deliveries of money she was supposed to have gotten. She had no idea what they were talking about. They refused to let her use the phone to call her parents, who were taking care of her other three children. They told her they thought she was lying. She was a single black woman alone in a room with four white men she had never met. She had no one to help her or represent her. She wasn’t just embarrassed anymore. She was terrified.

What Tanesha had done that violated NCAA rules was accept money from Reggie sRose, Ryan’s AAU coach—who was also a long-time family friend—so she could accompany him on four recruiting visits to different universities. (He also helped her buy a car, which she needed to get to work.) By the NCAA’s own rules, that money shouldn’t have been a problem. The rules state that a player or his family can’t take money from someone trying to steer him to a particular school, or from anyone fronting for a professional agent. Rose was neither of those things. But the NCAA harbors a deep suspicion of father figures of talented athletes, especially when those athletes are African-Americans who come from disadvantages families. It also intensely dislikes AAU basketball, viewing it as a cesspool of corruption full of hangers-on, a netherworld where money exchanges hands, and basketball players are steered to schools by coaches who are on the take. And it was particularly suspicious of Reggie Rose, who was a peripheral figure during the NCAA’s investigation of his younger brother Derrick after the 2007-08 season when he was playing for the University of Memphis. Without the slightest proof he had done anything wrong, the NCAA would later describe Rose as a person “linked to nonscholastic basketball and professional sports”—as if that description were somehow damning.

As her ordeal continued, Tanesha couldn’t eat. She started losing weight. Unable to concentrate on work, she lost her job. When the NCAA made its ruling in December, it took the position that Rose’s financial assistance was an “impermissible benefit.” It ruled that Boatright would have to sit out six games, and pay $100 a month until he had repaid $4,100, which the NCAA calculated was the cost of the impermissible benefit. NCAA investigators even told Tanesha that she should “stay away” from Reggie Rose, as if controlling her relationships was somehow within its purview. Finally, in late November, Boatright was cleared to play in his first game for UConn.

By then, Tanesha had figured out who had tipped off the NCAA. It was her ex-boyfriend,. In addition to telling the NCAA about Rose, he is also the one who alleged that she was getting secret payments. The man, who had seen Boatright as his meal-ticket, was extracting revenge now that that was no longer the case. Did it give the NCAA pause that its star witness was an angry ex-boyfriend with questionable motives? It did not.

Tanesha had also finally hired a lawyer. His name was Scott Tompsett, and he had spent most of his career defending clients who had gotten crosswise with the NCAA. He harbored a deep cynicism about the NCAA’s brand of justice, and was appalled by what Tanesha had been put through. What he quickly realized, though, was that her ordeal wasn’t close to being over.

In mid-January 2012, for reasons that have never been clear, the enforcement staff decided to reopen its investigation—which meant that, once again, Boatright had to be declared ineligible by UConn. The investigators could not have chosen a more humiliating moment for the young freshman. He had flown with the team to South Bend, Ind., where UConn was scheduled to play Notre Dame that evening. South Bend is only a few hours from Aurora, and some 300 people from his hometown had bought tickets to the game. It was snowing, and they drove slowly, with Tanesha’s car in the lead, as they approached South Bend for the game. At 5:00 p.m., Calhoun got the call from a UConn’s compliance official telling him that he would have to sit Boatright again. Calhoun was enraged.

When Calhoun conveyed the news to Boatright, the player collapsed, weeping, in Calhoun’s arms. Then he called his mother, whose car had just turned onto the street where their hotel was located. “I started screaming and crying,” she says. “I couldn’t drive. I’m thinking, what do you want from me?”

Tanesha pulled over to the side of the road and let someone else drive the rest of the way. She walked into the lobby of the hotel “still screaming and crying,” she says. She ran into her son; they hugged and he told her they would get through it, but she wasn’t inconsolable. “I kept saying, `Why do they hate me? Why do they want to embarrass me and destroy me?’ I don’t understand.”

It’s hard to know, even now, what the NCAA was trying to pin on her, but the pressure its investigators put on Tanesha was unrelenting. It demanded that she account for every deposit from February 2009 to October 2011. It then extended the demand to Jan 2012. For some of that time, Tanesha hadn’t used a bank, so the NCAA demanded to see all her money orders and other non-bank transactions. At one point, she explained, family and friends and given her money so that she could buy her children Christmas presents. The NCAA investigators then went to her friends’ workplaces, and demanded that they confirm her account. It demanded to see the paperwork for the Impala she had bought, even going to the dealer to obtain it. Until Tanesha could account for every deposit, the NCAA would not allow Ryan to play basketball for UConn.

As for Ryan Boatright, he did get back on the court eventually. Even then, though, the NCAA couldn’t resist heaping a final dose of humiliation on the Boatrights. The NCAA’s public relations staff issued a lengthy—and malicious—press release, laying out its skewed version of events in a fashion designed to put Boatright, Tanesha, and Reggie Rose in the worst possible light. It made it sound as if Boatright had been given a car, that Tanesha had refused to cooperate, and that Rose had an ulterior motive for befriending the player. It also included material that the NCAA had told Tompsett would remain confidential.

Furious, Tompsett sent out a press release of his own, accusing the NCAA of violating his client’s confidentiality and invading the Boatright’s privacy. The Boatrights, he said, would consider their legal options. But of course Tanesha was hardly in a position to sue; she just wanted to get her son back on the court. And the NCAA knew it.

Even so, the NCAA had to take one last shot. “Had Ms. Boatright cooperated fully from the beginning,” its next press release stated piously, “this matter could have been solved months ago.”

(Boatright’s story has a happy ending: Ryan played four years for UConn, helping the team with a national championship in 2014, and graduating with a degree in sociology. He now plays professional basketball in Italy.)