NCAA Inquiry Centers on Staggers : College basketball: Former City player of the year at Crenshaw says he received prohibited benefits while at University of Texas El Paso.

Not long after John Staggers, a former Crenshaw High School basketball star, showed up in the Salt Lake Community College lineup a few weeks into the 1988-89 season, the questions started coming into the National Junior College Athletic Assn.’s headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Is that the same John Staggers who failed to graduate from Crenshaw? How is he eligible in Salt Lake City?

Soon, NJCAA and school officials found the answer--a high school equivalency (GED) certificate obtained with a fraudulent test score.

Staggers had to leave school, and Salt Lake Community College was put on probation by the NJCAA.

Now, a year and a half later, Staggers’ quest for eligibility that fall is being investigated again, but this time the stakes are considerably higher. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. is involved, and the results of its inquiry could affect two Division I programs, those of the University of Texas El Paso and Ball State University.

The NCAA is looking into how Staggers lived in El Paso in the late summer and early fall of 1988, while he was participating in a federally funded GED program--intended for migrant farm workers and their families on the UTEP campus.

Staggers signed a letter of intent to play at UTEP in November 1987 but could not enroll the next fall because he had left Crenshaw without graduating.

UTEP coaches have said they knew little of Staggers’ living arrangements when he was in El Paso.

But Staggers told The Times that he has given the NCAA a signed statement describing free housing, meals and transportation that he says he got through UTEP coaches. NCAA rules forbid such benefits provided by coaches or school representatives.

Staggers’ testimony is a key part of a preliminary inquiry by the NCAA into the UTEP basketball program. The inquiry is expected to be completed by the end of the summer.

The findings of the inquiry could also have an impact on Ball State, where a UTEP recruiter named by Staggers in his allegations, Rus Bradburd, recently took a job as an assistant coach. Under tougher enforcement regulations adopted by the NCAA four years ago, a coach cited for rules violations at one school is subject to penalties, such as recruiting and coaching restrictions, even if he moves to another school.

Staggers left El Paso after about six weeks and turned up at Salt Lake Community College, where he played in five games before it was learned that a teammate had taken a portion of the GED test used to certify Staggers’ eligibility. Staggers left the school when the fraudulent test result was discovered in December 1988, and his career has been on hold ever since.

“He’s a young man who was used by some people,” said Denny Aye, the coach at Columbia Community College in Calaveras County, where Staggers hopes to play in the fall. “It cost him a year of eligibility, got him screwed up.”

A 6-foot-5 swingman, Staggers began his senior season at Crenshaw as one of the top 50 college prospects in the nation.

The only drawback was a transcript dotted with so many unexcused absences that, according to one college assistant coach, it “looked like a checkerboard.”

Some schools saw Staggers’ transcript and backed off. UTEP didn’t.

“We just took a chance on a guy who was going to be a non-predictor (a player not expected to be eligible as a college freshman) all the way,” UTEP Coach Don Haskins has said of the decision to sign Staggers. “They kind of do that all over the United States.”

Haskins did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.

As a high school senior, Staggers was the leading scorer on the Crenshaw team that went 28-0 before losing in overtime to Manual Arts in the Southern California regional final. He was chosen City 4-A player of the year.

After the season, however, he began paying even less attention than usual to his classes at Crenshaw, an attitude he now attributes to the influence of friends who were already out of school. By the end of the spring semester, he had missed too much work to get his diploma.

“He isn’t a dumb kid,” said Crenshaw assistant coach Joe Weakley, who remains close to Staggers. “He just lacked maturity. You know what they mean when they say, ‘Young in the mind’? That was John--just young. He just wanted to fool around.”

Some close to Staggers thought he would wind up at a school in the California Community College system, which allows students over the age of 18 to enroll and compete in athletics without a high school diploma or GED certificate.

But he went to El Paso instead. The plan--endorsed, he said, by UTEP coaches--was for him to get his GED certificate, enroll at UTEP and possibly be eligible to play for the Miners as early as the second half of the 1988-89 season.

“At first, (UTEP coaches) wanted me to go to a junior college,” he said. “And I was (saying), ‘I don’t know.’ So then they said, ‘OK, we’ll bring you in.’ Aug. 13, they brought me in.”

Staggers said he was met at the El Paso airport by Bradburd, then a UTEP assistant coach, who drove him to an off-campus apartment. According to Staggers, Bradburd told him, “You’ll be staying here.”

Staggers said he lived rent-free in the three-bedroom apartment with two UTEP players during his time in El Paso.

Meals, he said, were often bought for him by Bradburd and G Ray Johnson, a graduate assistant coach at UTEP at the time.

“I came out (to El Paso) with money, but I never spent my money because . . . I didn’t have to pay for anything,” Staggers said.

He had hoped to obtain his GED certificate before the beginning of the fall semester, but he was unable to pass the entire test, which consists of five parts, when he took it shortly after his arrival in El Paso.

As preparation to retake the test, he participated in UTEP’s High School Equivalency Program, a federally funded program for migrant farm workers or their families.

Staggers said he enrolled in it at the direction of UTEP coaches and got rides to the classes from Johnson.

Arturo Lazarin, the program’s director, confirmed that Staggers got into the program through the arrangements of UTEP athletic department personnel but said Staggers was allowed only to monitor the program because he did not meet the criteria for enrollment.

Johnson, who recently was promoted to a full-time position on the UTEP coaching staff, denied buying meals for Staggers or giving him rides. He said he gave a similar statement to an NCAA investigator who interviewed him about two months ago in El Paso.

Bradburd, who was hired by Ball State on April 30, did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed. His attorney, Roy Brandys of El Paso, declined comment.

Said Johnson: “John’s deal is a funny deal. He didn’t graduate from high school. He was down here in that free (GED) program. He wasn’t going to pass, and he pulled out on us.”

Staggers said he got frustrated in El Paso when UTEP coaches didn’t follow through on a promise to find a job for him.

“Then I heard Rus talking behind my back, saying, ‘John’s not going to be here any longer if he doesn’t pass his GED,’ ” he said. “I mean, it was fine with me if I wasn’t going to be there. They’re the ones who brought me down there.”

Hurt and angry, he called a friend, Anthony January, a former Carson High player. January had left UTEP for Salt Lake Community College, where the basketball program, in only its third year, was becoming a haven for players with checkered pasts. Staggers wanted to know if SLCC had a place for him. January went to Dave Osborn, then the school’s coach.

“And the next thing you know, I had a ticket at the airport,” Staggers said.

He arrived at Salt Lake Community College in time to enroll for the fall quarter, but becoming eligible to play for the Bruins was another matter. Once again, he had to get his GED certificate, and once again, he struggled with the test.

So arrangements were made for a stand-in to take those portions of the test he hadn’t passed in El Paso.

Investigations by both the school and the NJCAA, initiated when officials noted a dramatic improvement in Staggers’ scores, did not officially implicate Osborn, who resigned in the midst of the NJCAA inquiry.

But Staggers now says that the SLCC player who took the test for him, Paul Seeley of La Puente, told him that Osborn was behind the scheme.

Osborn, in a recent interview, denied any involvement but said that Seeley, who was serving as something of an unofficial tutor for his teammates, might have misunderstood instructions from the coaching staff to help Staggers become eligible.

“I can understand how he could mix that up,” Osborn said. “We were under a lot of pressure to get this kid eligible. It was a misunderstanding.”

Seeley, who played briefly last season at Gonzaga, could not be reached for comment.

After its investigation, the NJCAA, which serves as the governing body for all junior colleges in the United States outside California, put Salt Lake Community College on a year’s probation. It also ruled that Staggers, who was immediately suspended by the school when the fraudulent test score was discovered, was ineligible to play for any NJCAA school.

Ron Gerber, the SLCC athletic director at the time, recently said of Staggers: “He’s like a lot of young men who (haven’t) figured out what life’s all about. He didn’t lie to me. When I found out about (the fraudulent test score) and approached him, he admitted what had happened.

“Of course, he didn’t come running to tell me about it, either. He did what you or I would do at 18 if basketball was your whole life. The guy wanted to play ball. He had his eye on the NBA. To him, school is a handicap, a hindrance.”

There is evidence, however, that Staggers may be starting to take school seriously.

Running out of options, as well as time, he enrolled last fall at Columbia Community College. He needed to pass 24 hours of class work with a 2.0 grade-point average to be eligible to play, and according to Aye, he got the work done.

When the Columbia Claim Jumpers begin the 1990-91 season, Staggers will, if all goes according to plan, be in the lineup for his first taste of formal competition since the GED test fraud was uncovered in Salt Lake City. And if he obtains an Associate of Arts degree by next spring or summer, he will be eligible to play two full seasons at an NCAA school.

Because of Columbia’s isolated setting, Staggers has found the school an ideal place to start over.

“No distractions,” he said. “It’s just like a national park--squirrels, deer.”

And the NCAA.

Prompted by news reports quoting former UTEP players as saying they had been lent cars by boosters, the NCAA initiated its preliminary inquiry into the Miner program late last year, and it didn’t take long for an enforcement representative to find Staggers in Columbia.

Staggers said he gave a detailed account of his time in El Paso, including the assistance he claims to have received from Bradburd and Johnson, to the NCAA last fall and reviewed and signed the statement early this year.

The preliminary inquiry could, according to sources familiar with the case, be upgraded to an official inquiry, in which the school must reply to formal charges, as early as next month.

The inquiry has found evidence that could lead to a variety of charges, according to the sources, but those involving Staggers are the most serious, in the NCAA’s view, because, if proved, they would mean that UTEP received a significant recruiting advantage.

Staggers, for one, isn’t too concerned with what it all means.

“I just told (the NCAA) what happened,” he said. “I didn’t lie to them.”

More than anything else, he looks back at what happened to him in El Paso and Salt Lake City and regrets leaving Crenshaw without a diploma.

“It was the most embarrassing experience I’ve ever had,” he said. “I thought I’d never go through an experience like that. I would never want to go through it again.”