Why Would NCAA Want to Roll These Dice at All?

By J.A. ADANDE

July 28, 2001 12 AM PT

Before we arrive at the subject of college basketball games in Las Vegas casinos, we’re going to take a slight detour to Australia.

Did you see the story about people flocking to watch great white sharks feed on the carcass of a dead whale? Some of these Crocodile Hunter wannabes were even climbing onto the whale to pet the sharks.

Now, I realize it has been 26 years since “Jaws” came to movie theaters. Even for the few who saw the third sequel, “Jaws the Revenge,” it has been 14 years. But you shouldn’t need to be a marine biologist or a full-time Discovery Channel watcher to realize sharks have big, sharp teeth and can hurt you with them.

“These creatures are not toys,” South Australian Environmental Minister Iain Evans told a wire service. “In the case of the great white, they can be extremely dangerous and it is clear the state government will need to look at changing the law in order to protect people too stupid to protect themselves.”

Which brings us back to college basketball. The promoters and participants of three tournaments had to be shamed into moving their events from a casino by news stories, NCAA officials and even members of Congress. They couldn’t figure it out for themselves, from the outset, that holding games at the Paris casino ballroom in Las Vegas might look--how can we put this?--bad.

It’s one thing for boxing promoters to stage fights on the grounds of the big Vegas casinos. Any association that sport had with integrity vanished sometime around the repeal of Prohibition.

But no sport has been more sanctimonious on the topic of gambling than college basketball. That’s mainly because no sport has been more adversely affected, from the New York city scandals in the 1950s to point-shaving ordeals at Arizona State and Northwestern in the 1990s.

Now there are impossible-to-miss posters in college teams’ locker rooms that feature the NCAA’s anti-gambling slogan: “Don’t bet on it.”

A few years ago, the NCAA threatened to withhold credentials for its men’s basketball tournament from newspapers that printed point spreads. Last month, NCAA President Cedric Dempsey and some high-powered college football and basketball coaches went to Capitol Hill to support a bill banning legalized gambling on collegiate sports.

So how embarrassed were they when word came out earlier in the week that three tournaments were going to be held just a short walk away from the sports books at Paris?

Even in the hypocritical world of the NCAA (motto: money for all, except the players), this stuck out.

And, of course, everyone tried to display the appropriate amount of outrage.

Dempsey said he was “dismayed.” Purdue Coach Gene Keady, whose school was among the participants, said he had not been told the games were going to be held in a casino.

Although one would think that a school would want to know exactly where a game is being played before it commits, I spoke Friday to a person responsible for making a major college basketball program’s schedule and he said venue changes can and do happen.

The schools and the NCAA can say they disapprove now, but they sure didn’t seem pressed for action when the site was cleared in May. Even though there were apparently no words in the voluminous NCAA guidebook that could stop it, no one in the offices thought to contact the schools and the promoter to suggest that this might not be such a good idea.

Another four-team, one-day event scheduled for the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino is being moved reportedly because Fresno State had reservations about playing in a casino and expressed them about a month ago. So the school that hired Jerry Tarkanian is ahead of the NCAA on this moral and ethical issue. The event, which includes USC, Pepperdine and Gonzaga, is close to reaching a deal to play at the Forum in the first week of December, according to a spokesman for the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which books sports and entertainment events for the arena.

That should be fine, as long as the teams stay north of 90th street and don’t go to Hollywood Park.

Meanwhile, Chris Spencer, of Cincinnati-based Worldwide Sports Inc., citing “pressure,” said the Paris events would be moved as soon as the NCAA approves the change.

Are you kidding? This will be the fastest approval in the history of the overly bureaucratic, glacial NCAA.

Meanwhile, the NCAA is firing up the old engines to make sure there’s no way this can happen next year.

“We need to support legislation that would prevent this kind of tournament from occurring,” Dempsey said on ESPN Radio’s “The Tony Kornheiser Show.”

“You would think that it would not be necessary even to have to have legislation to deny people from doing that, that they ought to be able to use good sense.”

And you would think it would not be necessary to enact laws to keep people from petting great white sharks.

But if you had bet on it, you would have lost.

J.A. Adande can be reached at [email protected].