Hold on, I’ll get to O.J. Mayo in a second. First, let me tell you a story:
I’m sitting in San Antonio on the Sunday after the first Final Four games. I check my e-mail and see a message from NBA Commissioner David Stern and NCAA President Myles Brand; they’re having a press conference. So, like every other journalist in the area, I trot on over to listen.
The overwhelming assumption is that Stern and Brand will announce plans to raise the age limit for the NBA Draft, forcing college players to stay in school for two years. Instead, Stern and Brand smile into the cameras, and, flanked by a row of sports agents and shoe company representatives, outline an initiative to overhaul youth basketball in America.
At the time, I felt a little hustled. But I couldn’t help but give Stern and Brand props. On the biggest weekend in college hoops, they’d successfully diverted the spotlight to a story most media members wouldn’t otherwise care about.
Until now, anyway. Which brings us back to Ovinton J’Anthony Mayo.
On Sunday, ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” broke an extensive story detailing how Mayo allegedly had received guidance, money and gifts for upward of five years from a man named Rodney Guillory. Guillory was in turn being bankrolled by Bill Duffy Associates, a sports agency, with the understanding that Guillory would make sure Mayo signed with a BDA agent when he turned pro. He has.
The details of the investigation are a lot more complicated and sordid than that, and involve, among other things, a bogus sickle-cell disease charity.
But the biggest revelation from the ESPN investigation shouldn’t be that Guillory is a sleazeball or even that Mayo’s time at USC was pockmarked with NCAA violations. It should be that this example of corruption in America’s youth basketball is only the tip of the iceberg; there are numerous other people like Guillory lurking on the sidelines.
Don’t get me wrong ““ USC’s athletic department needs to be pummelled. At best, USC is guilty of gross negligence, an area in which it has a history: Unresolved allegations stating that tailback Reggie Bush and his family had received close to $300,000 in benefits from would-be agents have haunted Heritage Hall for some time.
But the larger problem is that Guillory and Louis Johnson ““ a former Mayo confidant whose information provided the backbone of ESPN’s investigation ““ are part of a growing presence in the basketball world: “runners.”
Runners function as go-betweens for prospective stars like Mayo and the money ““ most notably agents and shoe companies. The idea is that a runner will befriend a player when he’s an amateur and then steer that player toward signing with a specific company or agent when he goes pro.
Because NCAA rules are particularly lax about the relationships a player had before coming to college, there’s an added emphasis for getting a player when he’s young: It raises considerably fewer red flags if someone like Guillory were to simply remain a presence in an athlete’s life than if he were to have shown up suddenly after Mayo arrived in college.
It also doesn’t hurt that an average eighth grader probably isn’t savvy enough to question why someone is buying him new Jordans or paying for his mom to fly to all of his Amateur Athletic Union games.
Brand and Stern need to find a way to cut down the influence of go-betweens, which is tough since they can’t mandate who a player hangs out with. But they can put added pressure on member schools to watch their players.
It would also help if the NCAA had a little more investigative muscle. Right now the NCAA can compel those affiliated with a college to talk, but it has no jurisdiction over agents or runners.
If the NCAA can stretch its sphere of influence to include anyone affiliated with a player ““ holding the eligibility of players such as Mayo hostage to secure the cooperation of people such as Guillory ““ then it would be much more effective in conducting its own investigations.
Now, the problem is, as Johnson told ESPN, “Runners, agents, shoe companies, other elements ““ this is the game. … Once you’re in the game, you’re in the game. There’s no turning back.”
So while Mayo is guilty of playing along with that game, the greater responsibility lies with those other elements that have changed the rules.
If Stern and Brand are serious about cleaning up their game, they need to find a way to keep the pawns safe from the vultures.
E-mail Lampros at nlampros@media.ucla.edu.