Columnist Dean Juipe: ‘Boosters’ betrayed fans, UNLV

Dean Juipe

Friday, March 17, 2000 | 10:55 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@vegas.com or 259-4084.

What is it about grown men, many with successful careers, feeling the need to cavort and gain favor with young athletes?

If he were alive, perhaps Freud could enlighten us on this modern, if slightly detestable, phenomena.

Here's what he might surmise: The older men in this equation, who supply the athletes with cash and perks, ostensibly participate to feed some macho inklings, but, in truth, it's their insecurity that draws them into these inappropriate -- and sometimes illegal -- relationships.

Yes, this is directed at the men who helped put the UNLV basketball team back in hot water with the NCAA. Perhaps the sanctions will be minimal when they're announced this summer, yet the Rebels are in this bind at least in part because of overzealous boosters who clearly knew what they were doing was wrong.

Of course the coaching staff has to take part of the blame for its failure to effectively oversee its players.

And the players have to be held accountable to some extent, given that they know receiving gifts from outside sources clearly violates school and NCAA policy.

But the real culprits are those who clandestinely slip handouts to a favored school's players and potential recruits. And in the case of the Rebels and the current, detailed investigation conducted by the NCAA and released this week, those handouts allegedly were coming from a lawyer, a dentist and a political consultant.

This qualifies as conjecture, yet it's likely that each of those guys did what they did not because they're hooked on benevolent gestures, but because it made them feel like a big shot. They did it to bond with the player in a manner in which the player would always feel a sense of gratitude, if not indebtedness.

They did it in spite of potentially negative repercussions.

And the fact that there was an abundance of similar stories in the old days means nothing today. Yes, there's no doubt boosters have slipped C-notes to football and basketball players since organized sports began, but in this day and age -- especially at UNLV, where any indiscretions are magnified by the NCAA's omnipresence -- it is totally irreconcilable behavior.

So why does it persist?

Obviously, the act of secretly giving an athlete money or gifts allows the giver to feel a sense of power. For whatever purpose, it's done with the intent of cozying up to the recipient.

But why does that need exist?

Why can't even the most ardent fan of a given program, such as UNLV men's basketball, see that the risk of giving extra benefits to a player is almost never equal to the reward? The proof of that in the Rebels' situation is that in at least one instance the money was directed to a recruit who never played here, Lamar Odom, and that came on the heels of the program's earlier troubles with the NCAA pertaining to another recruit who never actually played here, Lloyd Daniels.

It's as if it's a game with these would-be philanthropists: See who can be first to slip a hundred bucks to the program's most recent recruit, as if to show him that's the way we do it at UNLV.

Referring to the offenders as "overzealous boosters" is actually too magnanimous. They're really self-serving idiots.