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So paint me underwhelmed at the news that former Maryland basketball star Angel Reese, now known also as Bayou Barbie, tweeted last week about a Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 — which retails at roughly $130,000 — that was gifted to her by a dealership near LSU, where she transferred her talents last season, gifted her. It was for her 21st birthday and, undoubtedly, for delivering the Tigers a national championship last month. Good for Reese, of course. She deserves it.
But the practice is permissible now. There’s no longer any disingenuous NCAA regulation against so-called extra benefits for college athletes, which forever read something like “any special arrangement by an institutional employee or a representative of the institution’s athletics interest to provide a student-athlete [or a student-athlete’s relative or friend] a benefit that is not generally available to other . . . students and their relatives and/or friends or is not expressly authorized by NCAA legislation. This includes but is not limited to the use of a car.”
But with the new name, image and likeness regulations, which allow college athletes to cash in on their celebrity, the beneficiaries can now freely share photos of themselves with the public, admiring their endowed new whip, as Reese did.
Car-for-play no longer taunts jeopardy or pokes the bear, as a onetime basketball player named Dillon Brooks uttered before he was mauled. It doesn’t generate rumors like, if memory serves me, that silver Chrysler Cordoba with a Terps-red vinyl roof that John Lucas rolled around College Park in during the first half of the 1970s while starring for Maryland’s basketball and tennis teams. A teammate of his told me recently that Lucas’s ride wasn’t procured unscrupulously but by Lucas’s dad. Oh well.
There is no longer the audaciousness of hiding in plain sight. The thrill is gone, the threat of sanction assuaged.
Kansas wasn’t so lucky even after one of the greatest college basketball players was gone from Allen Fieldhouse and in the NBA. Someone found out and decided to tattletale to the NCAA that some Jayhawks boosters gave Wilt Chamberlain a “plush red,” some said, 1956 Oldsmobile when he played there. The NCAA responded in 1960 by putting Kansas basketball on probation for two years. It wasn’t allowed to play in any postseason tournaments except the Big Eight’s.
If there is one thing NIL gets right, it is that it allows the laborers to make some financial deals on the side as well, particularly with car dealerships for which the coaches toil to cut deals for low-cost or no-cost rides fresh off the lot. It has just taken the conniving out of it all.
The NCAA case files are full of car-for-play schemes from coast to coast — South Carolina men’s basketball, Cincinnati men’s basketball, Auburn men’s basketball, Arizona State football, Nebraska football, Ohio State football — and all the way to Hawaii.
The saintly John Wooden had his team pinged by the NCAA in the early 1970s after a booster arranged “for a person to co-sign a ‘Security Agreement and Promissory Note’ dated May 15, 1970, in the amount of $1,767.12 in order for a then prospective student-athlete to borrow money to purchase an automobile.”
Before the unsaintly Rick Pitino became the persona non grata in college basketball he should be, he was part of a coaching staff at Hawaii that swapped basketball tickets with a local dealership for cars for players. The program was slapped with two years of probation, and Pitino, who the NCAA said lied about it, slinked into hiding for a year before resurfacing at Boston University.
Even little University of Mary Hardin Baylor had to vacate its 2016 Division III football national title because its coach at the time was discovered to have lent his wheels to a couple of players. The players’ identities were protected — probably because the car was a 10-year-old Subaru.
Dickerson long denied the tale of his Trans Am. He held it was a gift from his grandmother — until his memoir, “Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story,” was published last year.
“I mentioned to my stepdad in passing that I really liked the new Pontiac Trans Am,” Dickerson recalled as an 18-year-old, “ … the bird on the hood, the fins on the side, how sleek it was. It was an innocent comment. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have remembered even saying it. But recruiting isn’t a normal circumstance, and before I knew it, I was talking to [Clarence] Shear, the big A&M booster in town. ‘We can make that happen, he said.’
“Then he told me to go to the dealership, and all of a sudden I’m there with my mom and my grandma, then the staff is telling me to pick any car on the lot. I had my pick of a Corvette and three Trans Ams: black, silver and gold. I liked the gold one.
“The dealership guy said he’d be right back, that he just had to make a phone call. When he returned, he gave my grandma the paperwork to fill out. But behind the scenes, A&M had agreed to reimburse her.”
Dickerson signed with SMU instead — and didn’t return the Trans Am. For three seasons, A&M paid its note as Dickerson carried the football in Dallas. And several years later, A&M was put on probation.
The good ol’ days are gone.
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