THE SCANDALOUS SOUTHWEST : Some May Call It Indecent Exposure, but in an Area of the Country Where the ‘Politics of Football Are Probably More Important Than the Politics of Politics,’ Recruiting Violations Have Schools in the Southwest Conference Pointing Fingers

DALLAS —  The first thing you have to know about the Southwest Conference is that every school hates at least one other school, and they all hate the University of Texas.

Four years ago, when SMU’s Mustangs were beginning yet another probationary period and blaming Texas for turning them in, bumper stickers began appearing on the cars in the SMU student-parking lots, which closely resemble the parking lots around Rodeo Drive, that said, “My Maid Went to Texas.” When confronted by Mustang preppies, Longhorn followers would respond: “Of course. So did your doctor and lawyer.” But the best bumper sticker the students at Texas could produce said, “SMU: The Best Team Money Can Buy.”

SMU students didn’t mind. On the contrary, they adopted the theme and improved on it this fall, when the Mustangs went on probation for the fourth time since 1974 and the sixth time since 1958. New bumper stickers on SMU’s campus say, “Ponies, Porsches & Probation, Nowhere But SMU.”

Ponies and Porsches, maybe. But as you will see later, probation is not likely to remain the exclusive property of SMU.

The second thing you have to know about the Southwest Conference is that nothing in Texas is held in more reverence than football except for religion, and sometimes the lines between those two get crossed. Most of the time, this is in regard to T.L.’s Team. Insert either Tom Landry or The Lord. In Texas, it’s the same difference. Ministers who normally don’t mind keeping their parishioners until long past lunchtime routinely cut off their sermons before noon during the football season so that no one will miss the Cowboy kickoff. Likewise, there isn’t a Baptist or a Methodist preacher in Texas who hasn’t stood in the pulpit on some Sunday morning and said a prayer of thanks for a Baylor or an SMU victory the day before.

In itself, that’s a powerful combination, everybody loving his team and hating almost everybody else’s. But that’s not what makes the Southwest Conference unique. Every conference has its share of loving and hating, although there is less fervor in other conferences than in the Southwest Conference. USC and UCLA are kissing cousins compared to Texas and Texas A&M.; What makes the Southwest Conference unique is that eight of the nine schools are in the same state. Now Texas is a big state, but not so big that everybody doesn’t know everybody else’s business. That’s true whether we’re talking oil, real estate or football recruiting.

When Billy Sims was a high school senior at Hooks, Tex., a spot in the road in the northeast corner of the state, his grandmother, with whom he lived, reported him missing to the police. She said he had been kidnaped, but, as it was only 48 hours before the day when high school players could sign national letters of intent, most people assumed he had been stored in a place for safe keeping by the University of Oklahoma, which is in the Big Eight Conference but is guilty by association with its neighbors from the Southwest Conference. Members of the Southwest Conference will tell you it’s the other way around, that it’s they who are contaminated by having to recruit against “The Evil Empire.” More on that later.

Baylor Coach Grant Teaff had no clues as to Sims’ whereabouts, but he reported that the last time Sims had been seen in Hooks he was carrying around several crisp, new $100 bills.

“How do you know that?” Teaff was asked.

“We have some good Baptists up there in Hooks,” Teaff said. Considering all of these factors, there had to be a major scandal sooner or later. Most people would have bet on sooner. But when it finally hit the sports pages this fall, it was nasty enough to cast suspicion on more than half of the schools in the conference and maybe even alter the course of the state’s political future. There was a time when only LBJ could do that.

All of this started in August, when the NCAA found SMU guilty of 36 violations, most of them involving recruiting. The Mustangs were placed on three years probation, in which they are banned from bowl games in 1985 and 1986 and television in 1986. More damaging to Coach Bobby Collins’ program, they had to forfeit 45 of a possible 60 scholarships over the next two years.

SMU Athletic Director Bob Hitch set about to clean up the mess. He placed one assistant coach on probation, made SMU’s athletic facilities off-limits to nine boosters, who also were ordered to discontinue recruiting athletes for the university, and then proved he meant business by firing another assistant coach for associating with one of the nine blacklisted boosters. At the same time, he and other SMU officials accused the NCAA of selective enforcement, which is the defense every school uses when it gets caught cheating. (For reference, see USC.) It means: Everybody’s doing it. Why pick on us?

SMU could either get mad or get even.

Some people will tell you the Mustangs did both.

A short time after the Mustangs went on probation, NCAA investigators visited the SMU campus to collect information about possible violations by other schools. Houston Coach Bill Yeoman later criticized the director of SMU’s Board of Governors, Bill Clements, for aiding the investigation. Clements is a former Republican governor of Texas who plans to run again next year. Clements denied any role in the investigation. But H.R. (Bum) Bright, a part-owner of the Dallas Cowboys and a former chairman of the Texas A&M; Board of Regents, made public a conversation he had with Clements. “Clements says the next one is TCU, then Texas Tech, then the University of Texas,” Bright said.

Clements also denied that, but political strategists said the damage may already have been done to his candidacy. It was as if he had come out in favor of Communism or against off-shore drilling.

“In Texas, the politics of football are probably more important than the politics of politics,” an unnamed Republican told the Dallas Times Herald. “People get very testy about football here. If people perceive that Clements is out pointing fingers at other schools just because he’s upset about what happened to SMU, he could be in for a lot of trouble.”

One thing for sure, every school in the conference was getting more exposure than it wanted. “It’s like a bad case of the chicken pox,” Clements said.

TCU wasn’t next; Texas A&M; was. A Dallas television station reported that a Dallas car dealer, a Texas A&M; alumnus named Rod Dockery, leased a white Datsun 300SX to Texas A&M; quarterback Kevin Murray, and then, according to a former Dockery bookkeeper, occasionally dropped $300 checks in the mail to Murray. The former bookkeeper turned the information over to the television station after Dockery granted her a maternity leave and then allegedly refused to reinstate her. When confronted with a copy of the lease by the television reporter, Murray said his signature was forged. He also denied leasing the car or receiving checks from Dockery. Texas A&M; requested an NCAA investigation.

Then came TCU. A little more than 24 hours after the allegation against Texas A&M; made the evening news in Dallas, TCU Coach Jim Wacker called a press conference to announce he had suspended six players, including All-American running back Kenneth Davis, for accepting money from boosters. Wacker later suspended a seventh player and said as many as 29 Horned Frogs might have been receiving payments before he became head coach in 1983. TCU requested an NCAA investigation.

Then came Texas Tech. According to a report last week in a San Antonio newspaper, a high school football recruit said he was given cash, a pair of cowboy boots and the use of a rental car and hotel room by a former assistant coach and three boosters in 1983. Also disclosing that the school responded in September to an NCAA inquiry concerning five other possible recruiting violations, Athletic Director T. Jones said Texas Tech has requested an investigation into the latest allegation.

Et tu UT? Thirty-seven Texas athletes, most of them football players, received a discounted group rate at an Austin apartment complex last summer. While other tenants paid $295 a month, the athletes paid $200. Two of the football players were incoming freshmen, who had not yet enrolled in classes. The apartment complex owner admitted the group rate had not been advertised, or had it ever been given to another group. Texas hasn’t requested an NCAA investigation, but, as the wily scatback Mick Jagger might say, you don’t always get what you don’t want.

Who’s next? Rice?

Don’t bet against it. This is the conference that Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles said coaches in other conferences call OPEC. That’s because the Southwest Conference supposedly establishes the going rate for running backs and wide receivers.

A couple of weeks ago, 10 years after Baylor lost Billy Sims to Oklahoma in one of recent history’s more interesting recruiting confrontations, Teaff was asked to estimate the going rate for a high school All-American running back. He said around $25,000, including upfront money and monthly payments through the player’s four or five-year college career, but, as chairman of the American Football Coaches Association Ethics Committee, he didn’t dwell on that line of questioning.

“Not one of us could stand up under full scrutiny of the NCAA,” Teaff said. “Everybody has broken a rule here and there. But if you’re talking about literally buying a player, I really don’t think the number of schools doing it is higher than 20 or 25%, if that many. That’s not rampant.”

What he was saying is that everybody is not doing it.

What he also was saying, without meaning for the emphasis to be on this point, is that one of every four or five college teams is doing it.

Asked if he were surprised to discover that TCU was one of them, Teaff said, “I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say I was surprised.” Maybe there aren’t as many good Baptists these days.

A few days earlier, the same question had been put to Texas Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds. “I wish I could be surprised, but I’m not surprised,” he said. “I wish I could be shocked, but I’m not shocked. Some of the things we’ve seen, we’ve been hearing for the last three or four years.”

TCU Coach Jim Wacker said he was shocked. Indeed, only a couple of hours before six Horned Frogs came clean, Wacker told a Fort Worth television reporter he would be “the most shocked man in the world” if there were cause for the NCAA to look into TCU’s football program. Wacker since has admitted that he knew TCU players had been paid in the past. But he said that when he became the head coach in 1983 he had been assured in a meeting with prominent boosters that the payments would be stopped. One of the boosters, Dick Lowe, told him: “I’ll try it your way. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back to my way.”

Lowe is a Fort Worth oil man who played at TCU in the late 40s, when Coach Dutch Meyer’s Horned Frogs were more often than not competitive in the Southwest Conference. After Lowe left school, he became a “fringe player” in the oil business until the day he decided to go “elephant hunting” in Colorado and hit a big gusher. Suddenly, he was rich, as much as $13 million a day rich. That bought him entrance into Fort Worth society, if not the exclusive River Crest Country Club. But what’s a little thing like a membership card among the Texas rich? Sitting with a friend at River Crest one day, Lowe laughed and said, “I’m not a member here, but I’m worth so much they don’t know it.”

It isn’t difficult to figure why Lowe was driven to buying football players. Through the 60s, 70s and early 80s, TCU had only three winning seasons. As the losses mounted, so did the frustrations. In 1971, TCU’s head coach, Jim Pittman, died of a heart attack on the sideline during a game against Baylor. A couple of years later, his successor, Billy Tohill, was involved in an early-morning, one-car accident and had to have his leg amputated from the knee down. In 1974, one of TCU’s best players, Kent Waldrep, was paralyzed in a loss to Alabama. That was the year Jim Shofner became the head coach. He won two games in three seasons. One of Shofner’s losses was by 81-16 to Texas. A friend of Lowe’s said he had never seen him so despondent as he was that afternoon.

To make matters worse, TCU’s arch-rival, SMU, had begun to win. Even though they are only 30 miles apart, they are in different states of mind. Both are private schools with roughly the same academic standards, but SMU plays Scarlett O’Hara to TCU’s Melanie Wilkes. When former TCU Coach Abe Martin was trying to recruit Don Meredith out of Mount Vernon, a tiny East Texas farm town, he told the quarterback he could wear blue jeans if he came to the Fort Worth campus. “I’ve been wearing jeans all my life,” Meredith told Martin. “I’d rather go to SMU and wear a coat and tie.”

When the Mustangs began winning again in the early 80s, no one had to ask how they did it. The NCAA provided the answers. During an NCAA investigation in the 70s, SMU players said one coach, a religious zealot, was performing exorcism rites on them if he felt they were doing the devil’s business, while another was paying them for tackles and fumble recoveries.

So Lowe said he was eager to contribute in any way he could when he and three other boosters met with an assistant coach in 1980, three years into F.A. Dry’s stay as TCU’s head coach. In accordance with their scheme, Lowe said he and several other boosters, 20 or 30 as estimated by one person close to TCU, began giving money to assistant coaches, who distributed it to players. All seven players suspended by Wacker were recruited while Dry was the head coach. Now an assistant coach at Baylor, Dry has denied knowledge of the payments.

In his letter of resignation last month as a member of TCU’s Board of Regents, Lowe wrote, “ . . . everyone else in the conference was buying players and . . . the only way we could compete was to buy players also.”

That was not a philosophy shared by Wacker. A man who won two NAIA championships at Texas Lutheran and two NCAA Division II championships at Southwest Texas State, Wacker, 48, vowed he would win at TCU and win clean. After finishing 1-8-2 in his first season at TCU, his second team last season had an 8-4 record and played in the Bluebonnet Bowl. Unbeleeevable , as Wacker would say. TCU fans thought he had been sent by the Great Horned Frog in the Sky.

If you beleeeve Wacker, he didn’t know that he was winning with players who were still on the payrolls of Lowe and other boosters. If he had known, he might not have written the letter to other Southwest Conference head coaches that encouraged them to sweep out their programs. As most other conference coaches suspected the under-the-table dealings that were going on at TCU, you can imagine their reaction to that letter.

Animosity between Southwest Conference coaches is nothing new. When Darrell Royal was at Texas, he used to make up scurrilous rumors about Hayden Fry, who was then at SMU. Call it barnyard humor. “But you know that’s not true,” Texas’ sports information director Jones Ramsey would tell Royal. “I know,” Royal would say. “But I want to hear him deny it.”

Taking particular offense to Wacker’s holier-than-thou attitude was Texas A&M;’s Jackie Sherrill, who referred to the TCU coach as “Elmer Gantry.” It was bad enough that Wacker told Aggie jokes at banquets. (Aggie jokes are Texas’ version of Polish jokes. Example: A lightning storm struck during a Texas A&M; football game. After the other team ran for shelter in the dressing room, it took the Aggies only three plays to score.) But Sherrill was really angry when he discovered Wacker was critical of Texas A&M; when he recruited. Negative recruiting is against Southwest Conference rules. Sherrill complained to the proper authorities, who reprimanded Wacker.

The irony was not lost on Sherrill last month, when Texas A&M;’s alleged transgression was knocked off the front pages by Wackergate.

On Tuesday, Sept. 17, NCAA investigators were on the SMU campus to meet with players about possible violations by other schools while they were being recruited. According to newspaper reports, the NCAA discovered information about Texas, Texas A&M;, Texas Tech and TCU. Concerned, Wacker called a team meeting at 5 p.m. on Sept. 18 to ask his players if there was anything he should know. About an hour after the meeting ended, Davis went to an assistant coach and confessed. Other confessions were forthcoming.

Davis since has said he received about $18,000 in three years at TCU, which he said is $20,000 less than he was promised by Lowe when the running back reneged on an agreement to attend Nebraska in 1981 and signed with the Horned Frogs. Davis told the Dallas Morning News he was sitting on the bench at practice during his freshman season when a TCU booster, pizza chain owner Chris Farkas, dropped an envelope containing $3,700 behind him. Davis said he went to an adjoining practice field and hid the money in a tire. Farkas, who reported he received a death threat after his name was linked to the scandal, has denied involvement.

Although he had promised Wacker in 1983 that the payments would stop, Lowe said they continued because a member of the former coaching staff convinced him that the players would become disgruntled after being cut off, transfer to other schools and then report TCU to the NCAA. Lowe said Wacker had no clue of the dirt in his program.

Collins, SMU’s coach, probably had to bite his tongue when he heard that. After Collins said he knew nothing of the goings on at SMU, Wacker said the head coach always knows. Collins’ revenge came in the form of SMU’s 56-21 victory over the Horned Frogs a couple of weeks later.

SMU’s next target is Texas. Even if Texas didn’t turn in the Mustangs to the NCAA, the Mustangs believe Texas turned them in. No one at SMU is attempting to discourage that feeling among the players, who are fuming. Those clever students are preparing more bumper stickers, these saying, “The Lies of Texas Are Upon You.” That could lead to a interesting confrontation on Oct. 26 at Texas Stadium. Down here, they call it a “Texas Death Match.”

This is nothing new for Texas, which has a blood feud brewing with Oklahoma almost every year. The Longhorns don’t like it that the Sooners recruit so many Texans; the Sooners don’t like it that the Longhorns seem to believe Texans wouldn’t agree to spend four years in Oklahoma unless they were bought. Royal once suggested that he and Switzer meet at a neutral site and take lie-detector tests about their recruiting habits, with Baylor’s Teaff officiating. They could have gotten a sponsor and called it the Pillsbury Lie-Off.

Switzer wouldn’t agree to that, if for no other reason than it might have eased Royal’s mind. I always thought Switzer enjoyed seeing Royal spew and sputter. That’s probably the reason Switzer got such a charge out of telling about Royal belching in Kenny King’s face during a recruiting visit to Austin in 1976 because King wouldn’t confirm that Oklahoma was cheating. King, who now plays for the Raiders, was also being recruited by the Sooners at the time.

When I brought that up in a conversation with Royal before the 1976 season, he seemed more sad than angry. He, of course, denied it. As a young reporter, I had second thoughts at that moment about whether I had chosen the right career. Would I spend the next few decades asking grown men whether they had belched in the faces of teen-agers? But I stuck with it. Royal didn’t. He retired after that season.