Vindication for Gregorak comes much too late

Ty Gregorak pulled off Argonne onto the freeway Friday afternoon, a long drive ahead of him to a new job and a fresh start.

But it might be more than a few figurative miles before he can lose that bedeviling ghost in his rear-view mirror.

Getting back to coaching football may well do it. A little time and another gig, a second chance. Other men in the profession who have either slipped or been tripped have repaired careers and images, at least to the point where their lowest moments aren’t recounted until the second screen of a Google search or until the story jumps off the front page of the sports section.

“Mike Price called me and we spoke for over a half-hour about that,” Gregorak said before leaving Spokane on Friday. “Different situations, but somewhat similar, I guess. Something crazy happened, anyway.”

Price’s infamous firing at the University of Alabama for a drunken, but benign, strip-club escapade and his subsequent resurrection at UTEP is hardly a model career arc, but his call and counsel were welcomed by Gregorak, who some day may well pay it forward.

It has been two weeks now since charges of vehicular trespassing and theft in Boulder, Colo., against Gregorak were dropped. But the mystery over exactly what occurred in the early hours of May 1 remains, though not the upshot – his possibly premature and at the very least hypocritical dismissal as assistant football coach at UNLV. That he has landed a new job – he declined to say where, preferring the announcement come from the school – would normally call for a moving-on mindset, with no desire to look back.

“But I’d be lying,” he admitted, “if I said I didn’t care about what people in my hometown thought of this.”

Gregorak graduated from West Valley High School in 1997, then played at Colorado for three years before injury wiped out his senior season. He immediately jumped on the coaching track, and for the last seven years was Bobby Hauck’s linebackers coach at the University of Montana before Hauck took the UNLV job last winter and took Gregorak with him.

He was bound for the Denver area to recruit beginning May 3, but went a few days early to join some former Colorado teammates in Boulder for what he called a “mock reunion.” It started on a Friday night at The Lazy Dog, and moved on to a joint called the Pearl Street Pub and Cellar. Gregorak insisted that throughout this stretch, he was not drinking heavily and “was not intoxicated.

“But being there,” Gregorak said, “is the last thing I remember. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hotel room.”

This is where “The Hangover” jokes begin, and Gregorak told them himself when he met up with his friends for golf the next day. But they came with an uncertain edge, because when he woke up in that hotel room there was a .45-caliber gun, a wallet, a bottle of cologne, a phone charger, sunglasses and a knife on the desk that didn’t belong to him – and that he said he has no idea how they came to be there.

They belonged, as a search of the wallet revealed, to Joseph Benedetto, a bouncer at the Nitro Club, a Pearl Street strip joint. Before his tee time, Gregorak drove to Benedetto’s residence to return them – unaware that Benedetto had called Boulder police at 3:20 a.m. to report that his car had been broken into and those items stolen. The following Tuesday – in the middle of recruiting – Gregorak learned that there was a warrant out for his arrest.

At which point, the advice of a friend he called immediately after discovering the items in his room on Saturday echoed in his head: “Ty, I don’t know if getting rid of it isn’t the way to go.”

Things unraveled quickly. Gregorak surrendered to police. Then it was discovered that he’d been driving on a suspended license, part of the resolution of a DUI citation he received in Minnesota last summer. UNLV athletic director Jim Livengood, after initially demurring that “we’re trying to let the legal system play out,” did an about-face and gave Gregorak the choice of resigning immediately or not having his contract renewed when it came up in June.

The crux of the case, as it unfolded, was Benedetto’s claim that he had refused Gregorak entry into the Nitro Club twice that evening because he was intoxicated – providing a motive for the theft, though how Gregorak would know where the bouncer’s car was (in a parking structure) was somehow ignored, as was how a car that was locked (as Benedetto claimed) showed no signs of forced entry. But police could not match Gregorak’s fingerprints to any on or inside the car. And when prosecutors finally got around to looking at tape from the surveillance camera outside the strip club, it was obvious that the man Benedetto turned away was not Gregorak – who does not show up on the tape at all. What’s more, security videos from the St. Julien Hotel place Gregorak in the bar and checking in – alone – during the time the confrontation at the Nitro was supposedly taking place and never show him leaving, at least through the lobby.

So, 2 1/2 months later, the charges were dropped.

In that time, Gregorak’s story didn’t change: He claimed not to remember a thing.

Now, a cynic – and most of us are when it comes to alibis like this – would sneer at the convenience of no memory. But, in fact, there was no credible evidence of his involvement except this:

“All those things were in my room,” Gregorak acknowledged. “That’s all. But they were in my room.”

Though he suggested to Benedetto upon returning the items that he might have been drugged, Gregorak now offers no theories as to what might have happened (“I’m not into conspiracies”) – perhaps knowing such explanations are as thin as the Boulder PD’s case. But he again contended that he did not drink to excess that night – and doesn’t believe he has an alcohol problem, even if reasonable people may conclude otherwise.

The DUI?

“A terrible mistake, with no one to blame but myself,” said Gregorak, explaining that a painful episode in what has been a difficult divorce from his wife and separation from his infant son, Gage, led to the incident. “I felt like such a hypocrite, because I’ve spent 10 years telling kids to be smart about that – have fun, but be smart. It’s not that hard. I feel awful because I put myself and others in danger. I screwed up.

“But I don’t feel like I have a problem. I’ve been to multiple counseling sessions now. I’ve gone to some AA meetings, just to ask myself the question and listen to people’s perspectives. Have I drank too much at times? Yes, I have. Do I need a drink? No.”

That he should expect to have kept his job at UNLV as events unfolded is naïve, given what befell Price and other coaches who have stumbled before him. It’s an unforgiving climate – if an inconsistent one.

For example, UNLV’s top returning running back, Channing Trotter, was the point man in a theft ring while working at a Las Vegas clothing store that allowed friends and fellow athletes to take more than $2,200 in merchandise – and he was given a second chance. At the moment, basketball standout Tre’Von Willis faces felony charges of domestic battery and grand larceny – and has not been removed from the program. Last week, it was reported that dismissed Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli, with theft and drug citations in the past year, might land at UNLV, though he’s now headed to Mississippi.

In any case, there was no hard stand by Livengood to say, “Not here.”

He did say, after firing Gregorak, that he actually expected the charges to be dropped eventually and that “I’m not going to forget about Ty … I’m not going to abandon him.” But Gregorak hasn’t heard from him since.

The UNLV athletic director did not return a phone call seeking comment last week.

Of course, Gregorak was an employee and higher standards apply – but the implication that there will always be a second chance if you can help a school win a game would seem to perpetuate the likelihood of criminal behavior among athletes. Maybe the do-overs need to be meted out less liberally all around – or else everybody should get the same day in court.

“I got how it read and how it looked,” Gregorak said. “Jim says I used ‘horrible judgment’ and put myself in a ‘horrible situation.’ I guess I did somehow. But if I had to do it over, I’d still go to Boulder to see those guys and still order the same Fat Tire.”

Choices and second chances. Ty Gregorak has a lot to think about on that long drive to a fresh start.