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The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 2001 In Memphis, Top Athletes Leave Town Fast By WELCH SUGGS By mid-morning, Park Avenue is desolate, but not deserted. Park is the main drag through one of Memphis's oldest and poorest neighborhoods, Orange Mound. Except for the old "hooptie" sedans with the bass thrumming, cars and trucks pass through here quickly to get into the slightly nicer parts of East Memphis. Middle-aged and younger men stroll down the street or sit stooped on porches, crinkled brown bags and quart malt-liquor bottles at their feet at 10 o'clock in the morning. The traffic speeds and the men saunter past the football fields at Melrose High School, where kids fly. Some can even fly right on out of here. Not necessarily because of what they've got between their ears, though. College recruiters came after Mario Robinson and nine of his classmates for their other talents -- namely, pure speed and athletic ability, which earned them sports scholarships and a ticket out of Orange Mound. "Everybody got what they came for," says Mr. Robinson, now a freshman running back at the nearby University of Memphis. Melrose may be on Tennessee's watch list for failing schools, but the Golden Wildcats are a city power in football and basketball. State-championship trophies crowd a case in the principal's office, and Mr. Robinson and other Melrose alumni brag about the big-time-college coaches who came to their school to recruit them. They're not coming around anymore, though. Tim Thompson, Melrose's football coach from 1993 to 2000, is out of coaching after a streak of victories that made him "the Man" in Orange Mound. A University of Kentucky assistant coach admitted sending "Coach T" $1,400 in money orders to keep him happy, and two former Melrose players now suit up for the Wildcats at Kentucky. Even more egregious is the case of Trezevant High School, four miles up Range Line Road from Orange Mound. The school fired two of its coaches, Lynn Lang and Milton L. Kirk, this past spring, after Mr. Kirk told reporters and investigators that they solicited bribes from college football coaches to get one of their players, Albert Means, to sign. The reported price: two Ford Expeditions, a house, and a six-figure payoff. Mr. Means eventually signed with the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kirk are now under federal investigation, and the NCAA is deciding how to punish Alabama and Kentucky. This isn't just about Memphis. A culture grows up around high-school sports everywhere, especially football and basketball. It revolves around kids who start focusing early on sports as their way out of poverty and often broken homes. And it revolves around coaches, guardians, and an array of hangers-on, many of whom have their hands out. But there's something different about Memphis. Of the graduating class of 2000, 10 high-school players received football scholarships from universities in the Southeastern Conference, arguably the best league in the country. By comparison, only three players from Atlanta and only one player each from the football hotbeds of Miami and Houston signed scholarship deals with SEC institutions. 'Total Peace in Orange Mound' Not unlike communities in rural Texas or Georgia or Alabama, Orange Mound lives for Golden Wildcat football. Mr. Thompson's former players and other observers credit the dismissed coach with creating a program that rallied the local residents and gave boys an alternative to hanging out after school with the wrong crowds. "We'd have hour-and-a-half meetings after school where we'd talk about life and how to deal with certain situations," recalls Kendy Hall, a Melrose alumnus. "When we played, it wasn't for ourselves. Our mentality was that we lived in Orange Mound, a community which isn't one of the best communities in Memphis. "And every single Friday, we were going to bring together a community that wouldn't normally come together, the doctors, lawyers, drug dealers, and everybody," he continues. "For three hours, from 7 to 10, there was total peace in Orange Mound." At Trezevant, Lynn Lang had created the same kind of excitement, provoking a fairly heated but friendly rivalry with Melrose. An alumnus of Alcorn State University, Mr. Lang had played with Steve McNair, the All-Pro quarterback for the Tennessee Titans. None of the accused coaches was available for comment. Trezevant also began to attract some of the same kinds of talented players Melrose was known for -- enough to get Mr. Lang in trouble with the Memphis Interscholastic Athletic Association for recruiting players outside his district. The Bears never made it to the state finals, but people were getting excited about Mr. Lang's prospects, especially his players. Albert Means, a hulking defensive end, was one of the best high-school players in the country, not just Tennessee, in the class of 2000. Like many inner-city public high schools, Melrose and Trezevant have problems in areas other than football. Students at both high schools average less than 16 on the ACT, somewhere around the 40th percentile of students taking the test nationally. (Memphis City Schools officials point out that all seniors at the two schools, not just the college-bound ones, take the test.) Dropout and absentee rates are far higher than state averages: Just over 40 percent of Trezevant's ninth-grade class in 1996-97 dropped out before the end of its senior year, while almost 24 percent of the same class at Melrose dropped out. There are always the bright spots. Jacob Ford, now a freshman defensive end at the University of Memphis, says he scored a 23 on his ACT and plans to major in art. He did poorly in class his first year or two of high school and had to struggle to get his grades up as a junior and senior. Mr. Thompson steered him and three of his teammates to Memphis. Not all of Melrose's success stories are about athletics. Mr. Hall is a senior wide receiver at the College of the Holy Cross, a I-AA institution that doesn't even offer football scholarships. A physics major who plans to go to graduate school "somewhere out west," Mr. Hall says his parents and Mr. Thompson pushed him to excel in academics, partly because Mr. Thompson did not think he was a blue-chip athlete. And Mr. Hall participated in a program that gives promising Memphis high-school juniors a summer, and sometimes an entire year, at New England preparatory schools. Mr. Hall attended a summer session at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Connecticut, where he met a Holy Cross football coach who persuaded him to consider going to the small college, nearly 1,300 miles away from Memphis, in Worcester, Mass. The kids who succeed in getting out of Trezevant or Melrose are the ones who have a mentor who can make them see that they have prospects. Sometimes it's a principal or an outstanding teacher. For Mr. Hall, there were several such people -- his parents, a junior-high basketball coach. And Mr. Thompson. A Well-Developed System Coaches play a huge part in the lives of kids like Mr. Hall, Mr. Ford, and Mr. Means. They're father figures, often role models, and they're at the center of a well-developed system designed to identify and prepare outstanding athletes and connect them with college recruiters. Quite a few of the coaches realize that this puts them in a particularly profitable position. A federal indictment brought against Mr. Lang and Mr. Kirk and National Collegiate Athletic Association "letters of inquiry" paint a picture of coaches trying to fill their own pockets, not to mention garages, as the Universities of Alabama and Kentucky worked to open pipelines to Memphis's promising fields of talent. According to a federal grand jury that was empaneled in Memphis, Mr. Lang required all college coaches who wanted to recruit Mr. Means to go through him. And going through him meant paying a price: Mr. Lang told a University of Georgia coach that he "would have a hard time recruiting [Mr. Means] if he could not do anything" for Mr. Lang. He then told an unidentified Georgia booster that it would take two vehicles, a house, and $60,000 in cash to get Mr. Means to sign with the Bulldogs, according to the indictment. He and his assistant coach, Mr. Kirk, made similar demands of coaches and boosters from Florida State and Michigan State Universities, as well as those from the Universities of Arkansas, Memphis, Mississippi, and Tennessee. That was extortion and racketeering, according to the grand jury. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kirk face one count of racketeering, and Mr. Kirk faces an additional count of bribery and five counts of extortion. No charges were filed in connection with Mr. Lang's dealings with Alabama, where Mr. Means ended up before transferring to the University of Memphis in January. However, Mr. Kirk told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that in January, he and Mr. Lang had demanded $200,000 from Crimson Tide boosters, and that he had been cut out of his share. An NCAA investigation found that an Alabama booster had offered Mr. Lang $115,000 and paid him at least $30,000. The university faces numerous charges of NCAA rules violations, and its officials are scheduled to appear before the Division I Committee on Infractions in November. Mr. Kirk and Mr. Means have both maintained that the player and his family knew nothing about the deal. Mr. Means's mother faced eviction from her apartment shortly after the story broke. Another Inquiry Meanwhile, the University of Kentucky received its own "letter of inquiry," similar to an indictment, from NCAA investigators this summer. That came after a former assistant coach, Claude L. Bassett, told a television interviewer in December that he had sent Mr. Thompson $1,400 and had given him and numerous Melrose athletes Kentucky hats, jackets, and other gear. The Memphis school district dismissed Mr. Thompson in March, after suspending Mr. Lang and Mr. Kirk in January. Both Mr. Kirk and Mr. Thompson appealed their punishments, but failed. Mr. Kirk is now working at a recycling plant in Memphis, and Mr. Thompson has plans to open Coach T's Sports Bar and Grill, here in Orange Mound. But the fallout from the scandals has spread. Both Melrose and Trezevant are ineligible for the state playoffs this year, even though Trezevant has a better record than all but two of its rivals in Region 8-3A. And life's been a little difficult for Malcolm Jones, who was transferred from Treadwell High School to Melrose to take over coaching from Mr. Thompson. His team has four wins and three losses, but despite the usual crop of 10 or more Division I-A-caliber athletes, recruiters have lost their way to Melrose. "I try to do the best I can," Mr. Jones said. "I'm absolutely clean, and I want people to know that about me and my program." Further evidence that sports may be the best ticket out for many of these kids came this month in, of all places, a study in the Economics of Education Review. It found that black men who participated in sports in high school were much less likely to drop out of high school, and much more likely to go to college and to graduate, than their peers who did not play sports. "Considering the result for black males, one could conclude that sports programs aimed at inner-city minority youths may provide lasting benefits to these youths and to society," wrote the authors, Eric R. Eide of the RAND Corporation and Nick Ronan of Ernst & Young. That makes sense to Mr. Means, who has already played his way into the starting lineup at the University of Memphis. He's thinking about majoring in education. "I think maybe I want to be a coach someday," he says, when his playing days are over. And why not? Coaches have been at the center of his life for a long time now. For better or worse.
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