(10-11-2013 11:15 AM)Wedge Wrote: (10-11-2013 09:58 AM)adcorbett Wrote: If we are going to place blame on Wooden for what Gilbert did, then we have do blame Rupp for his players being in with gamblers. If we say it wasn't Rupp's fault, then the same can be said for Wooden with Gilbert. Especially since by all accounts Gilbert was involved with players only after they got to campus, not before.
Both Wooden and Rupp were very good at looking the other way and keeping their distance from those "outside influences" so that they could maintain deniability.
Bill Walton is right, though, that Tarkanian was held to a higher standard and vilified for taking pretty much the same approach to those "outside influences".
Yes, I agree. Wooden's reputation has gone untarnished in a way that he never could have sustained had Walton's suggestion come true that multiple championships be vacated.
The same defense made for Wooden could be made for Calipari. He had nothing to do with the gifts given to Camby nor with the academic fraud perpetrated by Derrick Rose, but Calipari's reputation has bee sullied nonetheless.
I'm a huge admirer of John Wooden and wish that more of today's coaches conducted themselves as he did. But Walton's comments make it impossible to ignore the fact that UCLA was a dirty program regardless of who was to blame. I knew about Gilbert but didn't appreciate the scope of what he did until Inread what Walton had to say about it. Tarik won only one title and Calipari didn't win any at UMass and Memphis. But with UCLA we're talking about an enormous number of titles that should have been wiped out. That's a scandal almost unfashionable in scope. It makes the current Miami scandal look amateurish by comparison.
To defend Wooden on the basis that he didn't know about it is stunning. It went on under his watch for over a decade. How could he not know? Was he living on another planet and just showing up for basketball practice? It's like absolving Joe Paterno of the Sandusky mess because he didn't know about.
And to claim that it wasn't a factor in recruiting because Gilbert didn't get involved with the players until after they showed up on campus is to ignore the length of this fiasco. It might be a legitimate defense in the first few years, but once it was established practice, incoming recruits would obviously have learned about this practice from the players already on the team. Kids talk to each other - especially when the incumbent kids want to keep the string going by helping to convince top recruits to join them. They certainly would have told the new kids how good they had it at UCLA.
In fairness to Wooden and UCLA, this practice was certainly not isolated to them. My next door neighbor, when I was a kid, married the brother of one of the players from the 1957 North Carolina national championship team. Another kid from the neighborhood, Billy Cunningham, later of Philadelphia's NBA championship team, also played at North Carolina some years later. It was common knowledge in the neighborhood that these guys had everything thrown at them when they were recruited - girls, cars, money, etc. - and that stuff was part of the deal when they got there. These were the days do politicians receiving bags of undocumented cash donations in enormous amounts. It was certainly a different era.
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The dirtiest program in college basketball history?
