Editor's comments.  A subtle commentary on ethics and deconstructionism

                                                                                           By Robert Isham Auler

PROLOGUE

Baseball  - Baseball is more than a game.                          

Greatness and mediocrity,integrity and compromise; they all emerge in the players. Does the game develop these qualities or merely reveal them? Over the past century or so, sophisticated cheatin’ has infiltrated the game, along with the rest of America.

       It was a meaningless Tuesday, late in the reign of Bush The First. A day game in September against Philadelphia, the end of another lost season. The Cubs were sliding down the left ankle of the bell-shaped curve toward their ancestral home at the bottom of the league.

Down Five could have been their mantra.

Sisyphus should have been their manager.

Sartre might  have been the  sportswriter.

Blonde, six-foot-three Glenn Ritter, up from Triple-A, was pitching in the bottom half of the sixth. The appearance was a mop-up with a towel that had already been thrown in an inning earlier, but this was his audition. Get three outs and chase a dream.

         Glenn’s parents had talked him into finishing college. That had seemed pointless because his wicked breaking pitch had made him a fifth-round draft choice. After three years of bus rides and McDonalds, despite the handicap of an average fastball, he had racked up winning seasons and solid statistics. He was a prospect.

Now it was the real thing, The Show.

        But on this day his slider, his ticket to the Bigs, was as hard to control as a snake, stranding him on the mound with only a mediocre, high-eighties fastball as a weapon. For a breaking-ball pitcher, this was big trouble.

     Glenn worked carefully to the first two hitters. A strikeout and a ground ball to the third baseman. Two out. A spurt of confidence. Only one more out and his showcase inning would sparkle in the scouting reports.

The number-three hitter, after two fouls, was protecting against a waste pitch on the outside corner. He golfed a lazy fly to right. It should have been an easy third out, but the sun blinded the over-paid right fielder who had been too lazy to flip down his sunglasses, and the ball went right over his head for a triple. Right over his head. Just like some of the names and ironies in this book will go over a few heads. Keep your eyes on them. You’ve got to concentrate or they might get lost in the sun.

Nevertheless, it was two out and a man on third. Nobody had scored. At the end the inning Glenn would be coming out for a pinch hitter. Now was his last chance to impress.

The next batter was Ron Zwierzatski, a massive left-handed rookie first baseman just called up by the Phillies. Glenn had faced him four or five times in Single A ball, with mixed results.

Zwierzatski's career, too, was at stake.

     Each of them needed to defeat the other or risk fading back into the minors while youth slipped away.

Glenn hooked his toe over the rubber. He leaned in for the sign. The catcher flashed several signs and ended by wiggling his index finger against his left inner thigh. Sinker, outside corner, away from the batter’s left-handed power.

Zwierzatski guessed the pitch and leaned over the plate to claim the far edge of the strike zone.

Glenn took a deep breath and tried to ignore the sonic clutter of beer vendors and the chatter from the sparse crowd of baseball junkies. He visualized the ball smacking the catcher’s mitt behind the outside corner.

Two fingers along the narrow seams. Check the runner at third. Wind up. Lean back. Think of a good push-off, good follow-through. Let the body do the work, not the arm.

But Glenn’s last thought was tinged with the fear of throwing the ball wide of the plate and pitching from behind in the count. Adrenaline put extra zip on the ball. When the instant came for it to swerve down and away, it floated, passing through the outer third of the strike zone, six inches above Zwierzatski’s knees.

     The pitch, they said later, had been clocked at 90 on the Jugs radar gun, a record for Glenn Ritter. The unexpected speed mis-timed Zwierzatski’s swing by a microsecond. The ball collided with the far end of the sweet spot of his bat.

     Glenn’s follow-through left him overbalanced, falling toward first base with his glove finishing behind his thigh. Maybe if he’d thrown it without the grunt, maybe the ball would have faded and dropped a few more inches. Maybe it would have hit the end of the bat, robbing it of power, resulting in a grounder to an infielder for an out to end the inning.

But the ball sucked up energy from the Louisville Slugger and traced a laser beam directly into Glenn Ritter’s right eye.

       The last image he saw was the horseshoe of stitches. The last sense datum from an eye crushed in a blowout fracture.

It took almost a year and three surgeries, then another year of depression and nonstop drinking before he tumbled into the sub-basement of self-disgust.

One afternoon during a rain delay of the Cubs game on tv, Glenn was ingesting a Perry Mason rerun on Channel 9. His subconscious asked why not?

He mustered his courage and applied for law school and was accepted in the Chicago Kent Law class for the fall of 1994.

Cheatin’

By Robert Isham Auler

Chapter 1

The day I lost my eye

It hurt like hell, that’s no lie. But the worst part of it was I knew what was gone...the eye…the career...what I’d been working for all my life.

     See, I grew up in Northern Illinois, down on a farm. It’s an old story in baseball, the farm boy with a big fastball, but in my case it was a slider. I slopped hogs, walked beans, pulled volunteer corn in July heat that’d wilt your hair, but I always had the strength to take my dozen beat up baseballs out back of the machine shed and throw until the sideways light hit the top of the trees and the crickets started to chirp.

       My dad built me a backstop, like in some cornball black and white ‘40s movie, really just a stack of hay bales. I taught myself how to throw the shit out of the ball when I was about 12, mostly because there was nothing else to do but watch TV, and that was regulated by my mother who went to church about twice a week. She was the kind of woman who used to wash the aluminum foil and use it a couple of times.

     It’s a damn miracle I didn’t tear my rotator cuff, but what doesn’t kill you makes you strong. Who said that? He was one smart son of a bitch.

     When the ball hit my eye there was a sound like a combination of a smack and a bonk, the kind of noise that would make you numb even if it came from somebody else’s head. It still makes my sinuses drain when I remember that sound. I couldn’t have been conscious for more than a split second, but I knew. I knew it was all over before everything went black.

When I came to, there was blood, and the faces above me said the right eye was smashed, mangled, maybe hanging out, although nobody’s volunteered that, and I still don’t have the balls to ask.

They did all the medical things. Even saved the eye for a couple of days, although they said I’d never see out of it. The guys on the team came to the hospital even though I was just a rookie up for a September look.

The toughest part was the day the doctors came in with grim faces and told me about some kind of a sympathetic opth-something reaction that was gonna make the good one go blind, too. Unless I had the injured one removed.

Signing the consent to remove one of my eyes. That wasn’t easy. I saved up my pain pills in case it didn’t work and I went blind. But it did work and I can see just fine, except for no depth perception. The doctors asked me if I wanted a glass eye, but I thought that was a copout. If the eye wasn’t gonna work, the hell with it, I’d be honest and wear a black patch. Besides, everybody seemed to like Sammy Davis Jr. and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Cubs paid for it. The best of everything. No problem. Lots of visual therapy. I told everybody I didn’t need a shrink.

      A couple of months of sitting home, back on the farm, trying to get used to it, and I was sinking fast, rapidly becoming a lush. People where I grew up liked a beer now and then, usually beginning around 10 a.m., but I mean I was becoming a lush even by the standards of Marquette County, Illinois, and that was the majors for boozing. The only guys who understood my feelings about never playing baseball again were my good friends Jim Beam and Jack Daniels.

I guess most people would think I hit rock bottom the night they found me sprawled on the mound at the Little League park in Millington, where I once pitched a no-hitter. I guess I was a real mess, passed out, barf all over the place, lying there drooling on the pitching rubber. Probably should have taken the opportunity to develop a spitter.

     Most people would have taken that as splattering against the basement floor, but a few of my relations said it happened when I registered for law school. One blink from being a maybe in the majors to a being one-eyed future ambulance chaser in the Kent College of Law.

The bucks from the injury paid for school and a place to live. I negotiated the deal with the team myself, and the experience pointed the way to my future as an agent, which is now my present.

Three years later I made it through and passed the bar on the first try. The signatures on my law license were barely dry and I was out at Wrigley Field early on a Wednesday afternoon, catching a few rays before the shadow of the upper deck covered the seats behind the plate. The Brewers were in town and they were taking b.p. That’s batting practice in case you never heard. Guess who comes up? Ron Zwierzatski, the guy who hit the ball that put me back behind the screen. Philadelphia had traded him for two sore-armed right-handers, a really shitty trade which gave the Philly attack-fans something new to boo about when Ron became a legitimate superstar. He was big. Massive. Looked like a gorilla with Popeye arms. I didn’t remember him being that impressive. It sure explained how he could hit the ball hard enough to remodel my skull.

    Anyway, he’s getting his cuts in the cage on this particular day. That’s the right place for the guy, he’s an animal. Whack! Whack! Shots! Nothing but bullets! I was sitting there cringing. The bullpen coach, he’s thrown b.p. for thirty years, but I never saw him duck behind the screen like that. Like he remembered the day Ron took me out.

    I guess I don’t know the word for what I was feeling, sitting there watching Zwierzatski pepper Sheffield Avenue with baseballs. My mind's eye could still see him staring at me, coiled up and ready to hit. I could see him swing. Those quick wrists whipping the bat at me, hips rotating, the bat meeting the ball like it was hanging there on a thread instead of coming in around ninety miles an hour. Ninety exactly, I heard it was, on the day I got to see one of his shots real close up.

So, back to now.

     Zwierzatski's finished his cuts and he starts to walk toward the Brewer dugout. It must have been a slow day for black eye patches because he looks up and sees me. He waves. I wave back, trying to be casual, like ballplayers do. But he kind of jerks his head just a little, motioning me to come down to the field. I get up and wander down there. Zwierzatski’s leaning over the wall on those huge biceps…like hams, they were. He’s smiling at me like we're old buddies. No reason to be pissed at the guy. Hell, he was just doing his job, trying to make the show just like I was. But I’ll admit I wasn’t really feeling brotherly. More just curious to know what the hell he wanted.

      “How’s it goin’?” he asks.

I always thought that was a really bright thing to ask anybody even if you hadn’t knocked his eye out.        

“Not bad. I’m studying to be an umpire. Half way there.”

Well, Zwierzatski cracks up. I guess he didn’t know just how I’d react. He sent flowers to the hospital, and a letter a couple of weeks after I got home, but I was too drunk to pay much attention to it.

He says, “I hear you’re a lawyer now.”

Just matter of fact, but it surprised me that he knew about law school. Hell, I’d just taken the oath the day before.

      “Yeah, now I can lie about anything, not just baseball.” I didn’t know what he was getting at.

He looked right at me and asked, “You interested in bein’ my agent?”

He said it like he’d been thinking about it for a while. No hesitation.

It damn near floored me. I mean, I’d spent the last four years between AA and the law library, not that there’s that much difference. I had it in my mind to take a slot in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office that had been offered. That or maybe head back downstate and see if I could hook up with a guy back home in Millington who once hired me as a summer clerk.

Well, all I could think of to say was, “How can I resist, smooth talker?” I said it in a high pitched voice, like a woman, just to see if he was serious.

He laughed.

       “I know you never done no contracts before from the legal end, Glenn, but you got a ballplayer’s point of view, and you already know how them bastards squeeze a quarter. They used to squeeze a penny, but now that I got MVP last year, it’s gone up some.”

That’s right, he was the MVP, although the voting was kind of close. But here’s the National League Most Valuable Player asking me to represent him! That’s a grand slam in the agent business. As soon as the flush ran through me, I thought maybe he was just making a gesture, maybe just feeling sorry for me

I said, “Ron, that’s a nice thing to offer, but you got your choice of a lot of top agents you never blinded yet.”

He laughs.

“Yeah, but most of them I shoulda. No kiddin’, Glenn, I thought about this and talked to a lot of guys. They think you’re smart and you wouldn’t steal nothin’ much. You ain’t no good at bein’ crooked. Even down in A ball you never could hide it when you was gonna throw that pissant fastball that don’t move. “

Well, that was hardly news. If he wanted an honest lawyer, I guess I was qualified. Hell, I’d only been one for 24 hours and hadn’t had time to go bad. I told him, “You think about it today and keep your mind on it during the game so you won’t beat up on my Cubbies. We’ll have dinner tonight and talk about it. See you in the clubhouse after we chalk one up on you guys.”

He gazed out toward the Cubs’ bullpen. “You know any middle relievers out there? Say hello real quick, ‘cause tomorrow some of ‘em are gonna be in Triple A.” He stuck his hand out and we shook on it. Hell! Shook? He crushed my hand! He’s one strong son of a bitch! With that he disappeared into the dugout. There must have been three dozen young kids swarming around with pens. They didn’t want me. How quickly we breed a new generation with no memories to confuse it.

Chapter 2

Not-So-Secret Agent

Anyway, that was then. This is now, 2003.

Ron was my first client and still my best one. He’s punched out MVP once more but he’s never going to earn a Golden Glove. Even down in A-ball he was a horseshit fielder. But could he crush a baseball! Probably with his hands, too, not just with the bat.

The last few years he’s been well behind Sosa and McGwire and Bonds in homers and that’s where the endorsement bucks are. This year he’s already in the low forties, which for most of my life would have been among the leaders, but he’s a dozen behind the big boys. Ron’s runs-batted-in are probably headed for a hundred again. In other words, he’s having an off year for him, but a dynamite year for human-being type ballplayers

All this is just my way of trying to explain how I got into this mess. It wouldn’t do to just say I was a lawyer and I took a case that changed my life forever. You have to know about pitching my way into a look by the Cubs, even a short one in a bad September long ago. You have to realize that in my new life I had developed a damn good practice as an agent. Doing Ron’s contract opened the door. I had a half a dozen Cubs, the good ones. Well, maybe if you limit it to the Cubs a half-dozen good ones might push it just a little. But there were also guys from all over the league, mostly pitchers. See, us pitchers stick together. It’s a kind of a union. You don’t have to hit or slide, and if you pretend you can’t bunt, you don’t have to do that very often. My guys know an ex-pitcher like me will understand.

Well, back to how all this happened.

        I live across the street from Wrigley Field, on Sheffield, looking over the right field wall. Not one of the buildings with seats on the roof, but you’ve seen it a hundred times on TV. Red brick, with old-fashioned porches.

       My apartment is on the third floor, including my office, sort of sparse on purpose. I don’t want dates thinking it looks like a good place to sink down roots. I have this great secretary, Stella, who comes in and kicks the dirty shirts into a corner, answers the phone while I talk to players or management. She forwards calls when I’m at one of the coffee places in the neighborhood, checking out the new females. I’m not drinking these days, so coffee shops have taken over most of my socializing.

      Anyway, about twenty minutes before game time...the Pirates were in town...I’m sitting at my desk, setting up a zillion dollar Sony digital video camera with enough zoom to check the tonsils of the batters. I make tapes of my clients’ swings and the pitching motions of my hurlers.

I glance down at the street and in the crowd I see the face of Tom Granger, the Athletic Director of St. Bernardine’s, a big sports school just over the line in Wisconsin.

   Tom stops at my building, looks left, looks right, and scoots up the steps like he’s headed into a cathouse across the street from his mother in law. About 4 seconds later, the buzzer rings. I tell Stella to hit the lock release and let him in. Tom shows up out of breath, looking around like he’s not sure whether to come in or have a heart attack out in the hall. He needs some time on the bike.

“Tommie! You’re looking good! Did you ever figure out how to use that sand wedge?”

See, we once played golf in a charity fund-raiser for some disease almost nobody ever got, and in the sand traps he looked like he was digging for buried treasure on some Caribbean beach. Guys in sports always talk about golf instead of their real sport.

“Glenn...good to see you! I was kind of hoping you’d forget about that round.”

      He was grinning and glad-handing me like I still had some eligibility left.

“Come down for the game?” Always ask a jock about the obvious.

     “Yeah. With Stretch Snodgrass."

He looked at me like maybe I was kind of dumb about other sports. "You know, Stretch, our basketball coach. Stretch and I are gonna sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame in the seventh, maybe try to sell a few season tickets on the radio.”

“Yeah...Right! You guys really need to worry about selling tickets up there at St. Bernardine's. You got a full house even when you lose one or two. Hell, I tried to get a couple for the SMU game last fall and my scalper buddy, Zack, wanted a hundred apiece.”

Tom’s eyeing me, and I can’t figure out why. He looks like he’s deciding something. A look sort of like you see on your own face in the mirror behind the bar when you’re about to put the moves on some girl down a couple of stools. Anyway, he says, “Hey, if I can ever help you with a couple of tickets, that’s what I’m there for.” Now I’m really confused. What the hell does he want?

Well, he must have picked up on the vibe because he looks around the apartment, eyes Stella and says, “Got a place we can talk privately for a few minutes?”

Now I’m really curious. I don’t keep anything from Stella even though she’s just working for me, no personal stuff between us. After all, she's happily married to a really good person she talks about all the time. He’s a lucky guy. She’s got that dark look some Germans have, but her eyes are a stunning hazel color, sort of like that Middle East girl in the National Geographic. I sure don’t like treating Stella like help, since she’s a great friend.

So I say, “Stella, how about taking your lunch a little early? Maybe bring me back a couple Chicago dogs from the corner...don’t let him put those hot peppers on.”

“Right,” she says, slightly pissed. I hope she doesn’t start picketing my building. She’s so damn good at stuff, there’d be a female army out there.

So now Tom and I are alone. I go over and sit behind my desk because it’s good strategy to operate from a place where you’re in control. I lean back in the big leather chair and wait.

Tom slides his chair up to the desk. He makes a big thing out of examining a couple of baseballs in plastic holders. They’re mainly from clients, but there’s one Ernie Banks signed when I was about 6 years old.

     I wait through some idle chatter. I’ve got the strange feeling I’m ahead in the count, so it’s time to relax and psych out the batter. Then Granger looks up, leans back, and says, “Glenn, have you got any reason you couldn’t help a couple of kids who’ve got a problem with the NCAA? I got a call from their investigator, a guy named Wally Oosik. He’s making noises about violations by our point guard and our quarterback.”

     Now this is a new one. At this point I’d been doing professional contracts for several years. My experience in court consisted of negotiating a few little cases for my ballplayers, you know, DUI, Paternity...the bigtime criminal stuff doesn’t happen to baseball players as often as basketball. But I’ve never taken on a real lawsuit, and I always admired lawyers who could do one. I guess it showed on my face.

     Tom must have seen my uncertainty. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here instead of asking some alum of St. Bernardine’s law school to help. Believe me there are lots of them who’d give a gallon of blood to help these kids, both of them great players. But we can’t involve anybody too closely associated with the program. It’d look like the University set it up.”

“Wouldn’t it seem funny if a couple of amateur players show up with a lawyer who makes his living off professionals?”

Tom smiled. “No. That’s the charm of it. The NCAA rules say we can’t get them a lawyer...a bunch of bullshit about amateur standing and not giving them special favors worth money. The real point is to keep kids from getting competent legal advice. Keep ‘em dumb so they’ll blindly do whatever the NCAA says. But if a guy like you represents the kids, the NCAA will think you’re doing it on spec...like you had a secret agreement to do their contracts when they turn pro. They’d believe you’re cheating easier than they’d believe that a lawyer who’s a St. Bernardine’s grad isn’t.”

I could feel myself getting sucked in. “Just what are they’re accused of?”

Tom shook his head like a teenager denying that he’s the father of a baby on the way.

      “We don’t know! They won’t tell us. We just have to wait until they charge the kids with something or other.”

    The strange world of the NCAA wasn’t really new to me. I’d lived in it when I was a college pitcher. I’d thought about it often during law school when we got into all that civil liberties and constitutional stuff. It always seemed like the NCAA should be forced to give the jocks the same rights people had. I could feel my ears getting hot. “You know, somebody really needs to take the NCAA enforcement system to court, run a blitz on them before they start focusing on specific violations. Challenge the fairness of the rules and procedures. Sort of head ‘em off at the pass.”

A guy even wrote a book about how unfair those rules are, called Undue Process. I remember reading it and thinking how the NCAA was worse than the IRS.

Granger picked up on my comment, “And you’re the somebody, Glenn.”

But I was unsure of myself. I had never taken on something like this.

“I’m just an agent, Tom. These kids need a trial lawyer.”

      He swept his hands open, like he was about to reveal some great truth.

     “How hard can it be to go to court? Harder than dealing with those sharks that own teams? Plus you’re a former college athlete. You’ve got some appreciation of how unfair the NCAA rules are, and how much it would hurt a kid to lose his eligibility. All you’ve got to do is wait to get paid and you’ll get two grateful clients with big futures.”

    Cheatin’. That’s the name of the game, I guess. I should have seen where it was going if I was going to have to cheat just to take the case. But it didn’t bother me. The NCAA sucks. It’s just a bunch of un-elected hypocrites. It always pissed me off that the kids risk their knees and their pro careers and don’t get shit. Those NCAA hotshots live good, travel better, and end up with juicy pensions by forcing everybody else to pretend to be an amateur. It’s such bullshit. Pay the kids what they deserve. I always kind of wanted to get into one of these cases. I didn’t have any reason to tell Tom to take a hike apart from the fact that I’m just an agent, not real a lawyer, despite having a law license. Still, there was that feeling inside me that said, why not? A feeling like there was a train leaving the station and I’d regret it if I didn’t get on board.

       I said to Granger, “How does a strong ‘maybe’ sound?”

He looked at me like he knew he had me.

     “I can understand you need a day or two. I wish we could just write you a check. The kids are supposed to pay for their own lawyer, but think about it. Other agents cheat all the time. They offer players deals while they still have eligibility left. They give them coke, girls...whatever...just to represent them when they get drafted. This gets you two potential first-round clients for the rest of their playing lives. Gratitude, Glenn, that’s the thing that binds people. You do the right thing and save their college careers, help them live their dreams, harvest the plaudits...whatever the hell a plaudit is...and they are going to stick with you. It’s the right thing for the kids, the right thing for you as an agent. It’s a sure-fire major story. The press will be all over you like fuzz on a Bulgarian weight lifter.”

   Granger sure could get you to see things his way. I had obligations to pro clients to consider, but a college kid only goes around once. Who knows better than me about losing what you love? Money and fame are just the aftermath. They come and they go. The game is the thing. I’d give anything to be able to pitch just one more time. Maybe I could help these kids so that they would never have the frustration of an unfinished career.

     Maybe trying this case would also be a chance to use my law license to do something I really believe in. Like the man said, how hard could it be?

I heard myself say, “I’ll think about it, Tom.” But my plans were forming up pretty quick.

**********************

     if you're still reading,the next little snippet includes "wally oosik" an investigator for the hated National Collegiate Athletic Association (wally=walrus; oosik is the inuit word for the always erect walrus' penis. the two "judges" for the NCAA, Kramer and Sprenger, are reminiscent of the german witch hunters of the same names)

Chapter 21

Trade Rumors

If you’re a lawyer, one thing you always do is try to be realistic about your chances to win, or so I’ve been told by some of them who have had more than one case. Which is me, with one case, I mean, but I’m willing to learn.

Anyway, if you understood that, you’re ahead of me. So the uptake is I was thinking it was time to contact the other side to see if there’s a chance to settle without unrestricted thermonuclear war. Not that I lost my guts or became a shrinking violet about the major publicity that would come from going to trial.

Did you get all that? Believe most of it? Ok, maybe I was getting the shakes just a little, but I figured maybe I should see whether the NCAA was as bad as I thought. Maybe they wanted to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid bad publicity.

Stella dialed , waited through the recorded prompts, and got Wally Oosik on the phone. Guys like that don’t like to be gotten on the phone by a secretary and told to hang on for the boss. It seems like a mine’s bigger than yours game, so I picked up the call quickly and said, “Wally?”

     “This is Walter Oosik.”

“Sorry to keep you on hold there. You’re hard to get through to. This is Glenn Ritter.”

“Mmmm.”

     “You probably know we just filed an injunction suit against the NCAA. Well, anyway, I just thought I’d call and check with you as to the possibility of settlement before this case gets out of hand”

There was a pause of maybe four, five seconds.

   “Settlement?” He sounded kind of like he was expecting me to say something insulting. Wonder why he’d think that?

   “Yeah. Settlement. Maybe some way for everybody to come down off their high horse, that kind of thing. Find some way to come up with a compromise.”

    “Compromise?” He was apparently paying for answers by the word. It kind of pissed me off all over again. I mean, how far do I have to come to meet him half way? I figured I was already past the middle.

“Well, I use the term loosely.”

“I think you need to know that the NCAA is not inclined to compromise on its principles.”

“Wally...”

“Please! Let me finish! I’m merely trying to let you know what I’m instructed to do these cases. The limits of my authority.”

I held my tongue instead of saying what I think about guys who tell you they just work here. “Ok, Wally. I’m listening.” Red in the face, but listening. How does he get to me like that? The little prick always talks down to me.

     Next thing he said, he had all that smartass back in his voice.

     “I assume you don’t know the rules, since you spend your time with...other types of things...but the procedure we use with institutional responses is self reporting and voluntary penalties...usually loss of eligibility for a number of games, self-imposed restrictions on recruiting, even firing an offending coach. The infractions get referred to my superiors. It may make some difference when the committee considers sanctions. The bottom line is that I’m instructed to relay all institutional responses to Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer. They are in charge of compliance and enforcement policy. There are always alternate ways to look at penalties. Mr. Sprenger and Mr. Kramer have to say which.”

    He was a formal little bastard, but at least he wasn’t trying to bullshit me that it was his call. “Fair enough, Wally. Call me if you ever get any authority.”

“Goodbye [click].”

You know, there’s nothing like a good motivational speaker to get you fired up for a task. Wally’s my new champ for inspiring me.