College Bosses Preach Purity Inside Sin City

Gambling is societal cancer, the NCAA’s executive director says. More than 25 percent of college football and men’s basketball players bet on sports, a 1996 survey suggests. Gambling scandals are the quickest way to destroy college sports, officials say.

So where do we find most of the nation’s college athletics directors this week? Where are the men and women who preach about the evils of gambling holding their annual convention?

Las Vegas.

Bally’s, to be precise.

The casino at Bally’s is larger than a football field. You can roll dice, play cards and dump quarters into one-armed bandits. You can also bet on sports.

Yes, Bally’s has a special area where it accepts wagers on sporting events. Got five grand burning a hole in your pocket?

Convinced the Tampa Bay Bucs are Super Bowl-bound? Think Mark Philippoussis is a lock at Wimbledon? Then Bally’s is the place for you. And this is the establishment where the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics is conducting its convention.

Isn’t this priceless? If the hypocrisy wasn’t so blatant and outrageous, it would be hilarious.

This is like Weight Watchers having lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. This is like Dennis Rodman singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Keep in mind, the athletics directors and their assistants who are schmoozing away in Vegas this week are the same folks who are petrified of a gambling scandal. And petrified they should be.

Athletes in high-profile sports - professional, college and even high school - are magnets for gamblers, bookmakers and agents. These pillars of society will do darn near anything for inside info from an athlete. Drugs, money, prostitutes. Just let your imagination go.

It may strike you as harmless when the point guard from Podunk U.’s basketball team plops a few bucks down on a pro football game. But what if the point guard is a sucker and loses $100, $500, or even $1,000? What if his bookmaker threatens to go public, jeopardizing the point guard’s eligibility? Does the point guard leak sensitive team information to the bookie? Does the point guard agree to shave points?

This scenario so panics the NCAA that last year it hired a full-time watchdog to monitor agent-athlete relationships and gambling. Cedric Dempsey, the NCAA’s executive director, said the hiring was made because gambling is a “cancer growing in our society.”

The NCAA also funded a gambling-related survey of 2,000 Division I football and men’s basketball players. More than 600 athletes responded, and 25.5 percent of them admitted to betting on sports.

There is more tangible evidence, too. Within the last two years, football players at Boston College and Maryland have been busted for sports betting, while the basketball programs at Fresno State and Arizona State have been investigated for point-shaving.

At January’s NCAA Convention, delegates revised association rules to forbid athletes or administrators from participating “in any gambling activity that involves intercollegiate sports or professional athletics, through a bookmaker, a parlay card or any other method employed by organized gambling.”

The NCAA is so gambling-conscious that it has become downright paranoid, deeming the time-honored tradition of a defeated crew team presenting its soaked jerseys to its conquerors as an improper wager.

Yet there are the administrators of college sports, those who vote on NCAA rules, convening in America’s gambling Mecca. There they are spending money on hotel rooms, meals, drinks, shows. There they are yukking it up and, undoubtedly, venturing into the casino and sports book.

Viva, Las Vegas.