Ncaa Motto: Guilty Until Told Otherwise

A friend who subscribes brought a copy of the magazine to school.

“Hey, Melvin,” he said. “You’re in Sports Illustrated.”

What beats that? Maybe Dick Vitale shrieking your name from the TV sets of a few million couch yams, but what’s the likelihood? No, if you play ball at Eastern Washington University or someplace like it, a mention in SI is tangible fame. And why not? He was the Big Sky Conference newcomer of the year last season.

So Melvin Lewis was tickled to read it.

Then he was ticked.

His name was there, all right - a cameo appearance in the middle of an SI special report headlined, “Credit Risk,” detailing college basketball’s rampant abuse of dubious correspondence credits from Southeastern College of the Bible in Florida to keep athletes eligible.

“Melvin Lewis, a star center at Eastern Washington, known by his teammates as Dinner Bell Mel for his prodigious appetite,” it read, “also scored a perfect 62 on his algebra final in the summer of 1993. According to the Houston Chronicle, Lewis had earlier been declared academically ineligible at Moberly (Mo.) Area Community College. Mike Hayes, his coach there, said, ‘His math skills weren’t real strong … his biggest problem was math.”’

The implication couldn’t have been less subtle.

“They were accusing me,” Lewis said, “of cheating on the test - like, ‘How could he get a perfect score?’ That didn’t feel too good.”

That was July. It didn’t feel better until this week, when Eastern and the NCAA cleared Lewis to resume playing - just in time for tonight’s game at Gonzaga.

But 30 percent of Lewis’ senior season is gone and this normally genial giant is, understandably, “a little bitter.”

Not at his school.

“The people here at Eastern did everything,” he said. “They put a lot on the line to help me.”

But few things turn as slowly as the wheels of NCAA justice, and the sad fact is, no one is presumed innocent - not in a scandal which has touched dozens of schools and scores of athletes. Among the more prominent: Michael Lloyd of Syracuse, who has been declared ineligible, and Hawaii’s Tes Whitlock, who will miss his team’s first 16 games.

One problem here: “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lewis insisted.

Alas, there were credits on his transcript from that Sodom-of-Academe in Florida and that suspiciously perfect test score, making him guilty by association - and EWU, too, though the class was taken 2-1/2 years ago, long before anyone in Cheney had heard of Melvin Lewis.

Lewis had, as SI reported, bombed academically at Moberly. He left school and worked for a year, when a cousin who played at the College of the Sequoias in California recommended him there. Coach John Boragno recoiled at the sight of Lewis’ transcript, but nonetheless invited him to summer school in 1993.

“Toward the end of the summer, they found out that, even with those credits, I still wouldn’t be eligible,” Lewis recalled. “That’s when they realized I needed a correspondence course. That was maybe a month before fall classes.”

By that time, Southeastern had a national reputation as a quick and easy solution to a credit fix. No minimum time for course work was required, and the SI report claimed that various answer sheets to tests were “floating around basketball offices across the country.”

Lewis counters, however, that his study aids came from Southeastern itself.

“It wasn’t difficult,” he said of the algebra test. “Unlike most classes, where they say this might be on the test or that could be on the test, they gave me problems that were exactly like the ones on the test.

“I know I worked hard on that class. Summer school was over. The only thing I was doing was studying for this test. I worked with a tutor 2 or 3 hours a day, quizzing me on problems over and over. I had it down pat. When I took it, I knew I’d done well.

“I didn’t know I was going to get a perfect, but I knew I’d done well.”

Melvin Lewis does not claim to be a model scholar - nor a model player. If his weight goes up - and he’s close to 300 pounds - or his grades slip, it’s because he’s lax on the buckle-down aspects of college life.

But the slack standards of a bible college down South are not within his jurisdiction.

“Sequoias had to determine whether his A.A. would stand,” said EWU athletic director John Johnson, “whether there was any academic fraud on the part of Melvin and there wasn’t. The class stood up. They maintained the class as well as the A.A.”

That satisfied the NCAA. EWU approved enough of Lewis’ transfer credits when he enrolled last year to make him eligible.

The NCAA did find that Lewis initially provided misleading information to investigators that he subsequently cleared up. Missing eight games of his final season would seem to be more than penance enough.

“I’m glad it’s over - it’s hard when they could tell you any moment that you’re not playing anymore,” he said.

“I guess the thing that was frustrating was that it happened at JC - it didn’t happen here. I didn’t take the class to get into Eastern, I took it to get into junior college. They treated it as though I was one of the big-time names at Syracuse or something.”

That’s what they must mean by justice for all. Except that even players who do the work can get hurt - and not even the guilty ones found out about Southeastern College of the Bible on their own.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review