A Payroll to Meet


Book Description

"Examines the largest case of corruption in the history of collegiate athletics, the thirty-year practice of illegal payoffs to football players at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and the subsequent "death penalty" handed down by the NCAA"--




The Pony Trap


Book Description

Forget everything you think you know about SMU Football and the infamous Death Penalty. Previous accounts told the story from the perspective of the NCAA or of the news media and hyped the scandal for personal gain. The story as they told it, was one of corruption and of the under resourced NCAA struggling mightily to clean up rampant cheating within the college ranks. In The Pony Trap, former SMU football player and member of the Death Penalty team David Blewett, backs into the motivation to find out what really happened. His daughter innocently asks, "Daddy, did you do anything wrong when you played football for SMU?" Blewett embarks on a journey of remembrance and discovery. Along the way he decides to get back in football playing shape and pushes the NCAA to reinstate his eligibility to play his last year of football at age 45. He reestablishes old friendships and engages with the current athletic department at SMU for the first time. It's a story of football, it's a story of struggle, and it's a story of the numerous traps set for the team and for SMU. What you thought you knew about the biggest scandal in NCAA history is not what happened. The truth is, it was much bigger than SMU, and it involved the corruption of the NCAA itself. The Pony Trap shines a light on the beginnings of college football and the evolution of the NCAA. It examines the preferential treatment of the University of Texas vs. the biased treatment of SMU. It presents a balanced and accurate picture of what the SMU football team was really like. In the end, Blewett answers his daughter and sets the record straight. SMU wasn't handed the Death Penalty, SMU was trapped and forced into the Death Penalty. There was no way out. For hard cover copies, radio interviews, and more information...please see www.ThePonyTrap.com




A Payroll to Meet


Book Description

Examines the largest case of corruption in the history of collegiate athletics, the thirty-year practice of illegal payoffs to football players at Southern Methodist University in Texas.




Infractions


Book Description

Jerry Parkinson spent nearly ten years, from 2000 to 2010, as a member of the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions, participating in over one hundred major infractions cases. He came away from that experience--and the experience of reading extensive commentary on infractions cases--with the conviction that most observers do not understand the NCAA's rules-enforcement process, despite the amount of public attention many major cases receive. Parkinson uses his insider's perspective, along with illustrative stories, to help readers understand how the NCAA's rules-enforcement process really works. These stories include: a university board of trustees chair committing suicide over an infractions case; a pay-for-play scandal leading directly to the state's governor; a head coach falsely portraying a deceased player as a drug dealer to cover up the coach's own misconduct; a gambler laundering his money by making the largest booster payments in NCAA history; and a coach's sexual abuse of children leading to some of the harshest sanctions ever imposed by the NCAA. Based on years of experience and infused with insight, Parkinson provides a broad view of the world of NCAA rule breakers and the NCAA rules-enforcement process.




Big Red Confidential


Book Description




The Courting of Marcus Dupree


Book Description

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.




Win at Any Cost


Book Description




Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game


Book Description

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?




Taxing Women


Book Description

Taxing Women comprises both an insightful, critical analysis of the gender biases in current tax laws and a wake-up call for all those concerned with gender justice to pay more attention to the pervasive impact of such laws. Providing real-life examples, Edward McCaffery shows how tax laws are actually written to punish married couples who file jointly. No dual-income household can afford not to read this book before filing their taxes. "Taxing Women is a must-have primer for any woman who wants to understand how our current tax system affects her family's economic condition. In plain English, McCaffery explains how the tax code stacks the deck against women and why it's in women's economic interest to lead the next great tax rebellion."—Patricia Schroeder "McCaffery is an expert on the interplay between taxes and social policy. . . . Devastating in his analysis. . . . Intriguing."—Harris Collingwood, Working Women "A wake-up call regarding the inequalities of an archaic system that actually penalizes women for working."—Publishers Weekly




Only His


Book Description

When she lands her dream job only to discover that her new boss is the man who broke her heart, Nevada Hendrix, despite the attraction that still lingers between them, refuses to mix business with pleasure.