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Time machine needed to ask one more question
Published: 10/14/2010 3:34 PM
Last Modified: 10/14/2010 3:34 PM

Foxsports.com broke news that the Baylor basketball program is being probed by the NCAA. Among allegations is that a Bears assistant coach threatened to have a foreign player at an Indiana High School shipped back to his home country (Colombia) if the recruit committed to any school except Baylor.

At the risk of piling on, and without assuming guilt, I’m not surprised.

Recruiters probably play good cop/bad cop all the time -- whatever gets a kid on campus. But this allegation of hardball reminded me of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with Ira Williams, mother of former Oklahoma State player James Anderson, while visiting his hometown of Junction City, Ark.

I asked about all the coaches who visited the tiny town on the Arkansas-Louisiana border and she said, “They all said about the same thing when they came anyway, so you just have to know who you are comfortable with.”

Because Anderson was the quiet sort, I asked her if he let coaches do all the talking so he could sit back and get a “read” on the people who were recruiting him. She said that was the case, and said she tried to stay silent too. Then she brought up Baylor.

“I didn’t really say too much throughout this process (except) to them, because with them it had kind of gotten ugly,” Williams said.

I didn’t ask for elaboration on how it got ugly or what constituted ugly because, at the time, it was too far off the subject of the story I was writing. In hindsight, I wish I had asked the obvious next question.



Reader Comments 2 Total
DomoArrigato (2 years ago)
Just when Baylor had finally distanced themselves from their former Basketball coach, Dave Bliss, and that scandal...here comes a new scandal for Baylor.
G-Block (2 years ago)
"...How Ugly Was It?"
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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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