City Seattle Times Busts the Huskies (and the City)
posted by on January 28 at 12:49 PM
I labelled this post City, though it could just have easily fallen under Sports, Sex, Drugs, Media, Politics, and ??!!.
Long story short: Yesterday the Seattle Times kicked off a series of reports on the University of Washington’s football team of 2000, the year the Huskies won the Rose Bowl, with a team reportedly packed with coddled criminals.
As the Times reports:
When that Rose Bowl season began on Sept. 2, 2000, the UW’s starters included:• A safety who, according to police reports, had cut his wife’s face, broken her arm and broken her nose. He had already served time for choking her into unconsciousness. While playing in front of 70,000 fans on Montlake that day, he was wanted on an outstanding warrant.
• A linebacker under investigation for robbing and shooting a drug dealer. He had left behind a fingerprint stained with his blood. By the season opener, police knew the print was his — but they didn’t charge him until the season was over.
• A tight end under investigation on suspicion of rape.
At least a dozen members of the Rose Bowl team were arrested that year or charged with a crime that carried possible jail time.
As for the coddling:
When one player was sentenced to 30 days in jail, the judge wrote in her order: “To be served after football season.”Another Husky, facing a felony charge of assaulting a police officer, was released without bail and granted a delay so that he could keep playing.
Yet another player in trouble was allowed to perform 150 hours of community service at football camps.
Here’s Chapter 1 of the Times’ series—“Convicted of assault and accused of rape, star player received raft of second chances.”
Thank you, Times, and thank you, Slog tipper Fnarf, who sent the link with a summation:
The UW covering up rape of one of their students? The King County Prosecutor’s Office covering up rape? Saintly Norm Maleng, COVERING UP RAPE BECAUSE IT’S A FOOTBALL PLAYER? The UW deliberately trying to harrass and humiliate a rape victim? TWENTY-FOUR CRIMINALS on the Rose Bowl team? Football corrupts.
Is anyone really surprised by any of this? The UW and the city has been coddling these guys for years. Disgusting.
Why is football still important enough to warrant cover-ups like this? We aren't in the cocking Mid-West.
Come on people, how else will the players be ready for the treatment they will get with the NFL?
It's an amazing story - and more to come. My reading of it is that the City itself, via SPD and the City Attorney's office, did a pretty good job. It's when SPD went referred to the County for felony prosecution everything started to suck. Apparently the City Attorney's office got disgusted when the County refused to file felony charges, so stepped in and convicted on misdemeanors where it could.
Don James had quite by the early 90's, right (he was a great coach, but it seems they haven't recovered from the scandal on his watch)? So what is the lesson here - If you don't pay players to be on your team, you've got to let in the riff-raff?
A hell of a piece by the Times. The Huskies have not been able to fix this team since then.
Man, and we thought the Miami Huricanes were Gangsta U. Turns out our Huskies held their own in the thug depr.
Whats worse is that Neuheisel destroys our program and as a reward gets the head job at UCLA.
On the bright side, it helped tarnish the reputation of Saint Norm Maleng and his little sidekick Danny Satterberg. And, it reminded me how much I hate that butterfingered bastard Jerramy Stevens.
What was interesting to me was the anger expressed by the police, that a pretty much slam-dunk rape case was voided by the prosecutor's office, over the heads of the people working the case. The girl (a virgin) was clearly roofied, and Stevens not only raped her, in the fucking yard, but lacerated her asshole, and bragged about it afterwards to all his buddy felons.
And years later the motherfucking university was demanding that her last name be publicized, even though by that time Stevens was gone from the U but she had returned. It was a deliberate act of intimidation.
That's what's stunning -- not that there are felons on the football team, but that there is an organized team on retainer to defend the players after they get busted. There's an attorney -- Mike Hunsinger -- who has represented 14 members of that 2000 team, as well as several coaches and the director of football operations. There's unnamed people in the police force and in the prosecutor's office who alert the team the instant trouble arises, and coordinate the effort to get them off. Norm Maleng is dead, but Husky supporters live on in those departments.
Of course, the idea that any of these players are actually students at the university they attend is laughable. Stevens was, and presumably is still today, a semi-literate baboon. The legal protections given to him started in high school, where he stomped on the face of a kid his buddy had just chopped down with a baseball bat. The kid broke his jaw and ate through a straw for six months; Stevens got home detention, which he violated repeatedly.
Fnarf, you're a little obsessed about this.
Didn't get in to UofW? Dumped by a college athlete long ago? WTF gives?
did you even read the article?? the City through the police department actually went after the rapist - it was the county prosecutor who went soft. better to say UW and the County Prosecutor who did nothing!
I don't think football corrupts, so much as it attracts the most violent and ego-driven people in the country to participate. Surprise! They're criminals. And since football is the most popular sport in the country, anybody who does well in it is a fucking HERO. The end result is that society (and the justice system) bends over backwards for these people. Want things to change? Stop going to the games.
Nice job Seattle Times. The Seattle Times staff always cries on here when Slog writers rip on them. But it seems to me Slog gives them props just as often.
Newly elected County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg name is all over this story, as directly involved, named on documents, for refusing to investigate or dismissing and post-postponing valid charges.
Remember all the "honest prosecutor, why would you want to replace him? even though he's a Republican?" horseshit from last fall. Endorsed by the Times and prominent Democrats even though their was a good challenger. Why didn't we hear about all this 4-5 months ago?
Oh, come on, next thing you'll tell us is that the Football Team head honcho gets more than the President of the UW ... um, never mind.
I said it about Satterberg on Slog before the election but let me repeat it:THE ONLY GOOD REPUBLICAN IS A REPUBLICAN WHO HOLDS NO PUBLIC OFFICE. There are NO exceptions to this rule.
The most terrifying paragraph to me is this one:
"Pharms, a 250-pound linebacker from Sacramento, Calif., was a star at the UW. He bench-pressed more than 400 pounds, sported a pit-bull tattoo, and sometimes, during games, locked eyes with an opposing player and proceeded to urinate, the stream darkening his pants. He did this to intimidate. After all, who'd want to go against someone as crazy as that?"
Maybe this particular anecdote is old news for all you football people, but that seriously freaks me out.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004148820_rbpharms280.html
In high school, there was one set of rules for jocks and cheerleaders, and another for everyone else. It shouldn't be such a surprise that things were the same at the UW.
It's times like these that I'm glad our football team has sucked balls for decades.
It's true, I'm a little obsessed with big-time college athletics.
Have you ever seen Hoop Dreams? Big time "amateur" sports corrupts people's minds. What especially galls me is the suggestion that sports is a way for "minorities to get ahead". Minorities who can bench-press 400 pounds, that is; geeky Urkels with glasses get no scholarship love.
And when prosecutors corrupt their office for it, we all suffer. Ethics isn't something you can have just a little of; you're either clean or you're not. Letting a Husky get off a rape charge JUST ONCE corrupts your entire record. Yes, it's normal for people in the football program to try to game the system, but the KING COUNTY PROSECUTOR?
I think what really sends me over the edge is the worship of college football by all kinds of people who should know better. The university is corrupted, the law is corrupted, but every time you cheer the Huskies our entire society is corrupted.
go cougs!
Think of the money they could save if colleges totally gutted their athletic departments? WOW, the money that could go to students who want to learn.... Just Imagine
Hoop Dreams may be the greatest movie ever made.
But if we fail to feed the rapacious bread-and-circus beast that is academic and professional sports, what little joy will remain for us plebeians?
The Slog? Denny's? The will to live? A fresh piece of porn? The unfair denial of helping Paul Allen and Howard Schulz out? Or not having to sell my first-born so that I could actually take my first-born to one of those circuses in exchange for a sackful of bread?
Time to take a walk around Green Lake. Still free and free of the Old-Boys' Club odor of smelly, pampered jocks.
Actually, Belmont Place, the sports teams from Roosevelt High run around Green Lake all the time ... wave hi to my son when he does, k?
People are surprised by this? This type of behavior is so common and old that a few years ago, Doonesbury did an entire week based on BD doing recruiting for his football team in prisons, and really, does anyone think that the bazillion scandals that have broken out in the NFL couldn't have been predicted when those guys were in college, or possibly even high school? Do people think that these guys decided they were above the law only after they had a contract and a Superbowl ring? They were date raping drunk girls and beating up nerds in high school, were committing armed assaults and gang rapes in college, and go on to keep thinking the law doesn't apply to them when they go pro.
Jeez, I remember football players getting coddled in high school all the time. Crimes, rapes, academics.....why does anyone find it surprising it occurs on Montlake?
I agree with gitai. How many of you were victims of "nerd basketball?" For the unfamiliar it is when jocks (most notably football players and wrestlers) walk down the hall and push random people into lockers by their heads. It happened to me, and I was a 90 pound girl. I also went to the UW and saw football players push to the front of the line to get food and everyone just looked the other way. Everyone I knew avoided them. So, no...I don't like football thank you very much.
I have absolutely no problem with professional sports. You want athletes, pay them. Pro athletes are subject to the laws of the state. But don't try to pretend that it has anything to do with schools. That's the root of the problem: the pretense that it's connected to school. All the rest follows irreversibly from that fundamental lie.
Neuheisel's Bruins are gonna BEAT THE SHIT out of the Huskies November 15th at Montlake!
The spectre of Saint Don will forever be the crutch of UW boosters everywhere. Sort of like Ara Parseghian.
Tangentially, I look forward to further exposure of Norm Maleng's corruptted administration.
@16: If you're intimidated by guys who pee their pants, stay off the #4 bus.
Oh, and "Greg", and "Bellevue Ave" in the early morning news comments:
FUCK YOU for suggesting I am cheering for a rapist. Keep projecting there, fellas. Where the fuck did that come from? How about blame the player (read: criminal) and the administration that covered it up? It was entirely their fault. Fuck you guys for being so classless.
29. Or at least out of their students, especially the drug dealers and the women.
Remind me to stay inside that day.
@29: Congratulations, UCLA's almost as classy as Miami now! Keep reaching for the stars!
Football doesn't corrupt. Money corrupts, and that's what this is about. Husky Football is a cash cow for the UW, even more so when they are winning.
@29 - Fuck yeah! Go Bruins!!! I will be there.
The Huskies have sucked since they erected that statue to the racist Jim Owens in front of their stadium.
this story is gonna make it into next year's "the best american sports writing" collection.
fnarf is right. sports are sports, the whole student athlete crap is nonsense when it comes to football and basketball. make a semi pro league to get your future pros. dont use colleges for an NFL-NBA farm, youre just begging for corruptions.
@29
the bruins are a bunch of pansies, if it was up to me i'd throw them out of the pac 10 to the WAC. corrupt coach or not, the Dogs are gonna kick their pasadena butt!
is it just me or is slog filled with people who use to get beat up in middle and high school?
so you got stuffed in a locker. wahhhh. get over it. youre better for it now.
i played sports in high school and there were douchebags in all HS tribes.
Gita, Maxine et al: Nobody is surprised when athletes get to follow their own rules. But yes, I am shocked and dismayed when they get away with rape, robbery, assault, repeated drunk driving, etc.
And I don't agree we should just shrug our shoulders and pretend it's OK.
I don't know about anybody else, but I sure as hell don't want any of my tax money going to refurbish Huskey Stadium! Barbara Hedges is a douche bag, enuff said.
@37: A bunch of pansies who kick the crap out of the Huskies in football and hoops year after year. 2008 shall be no different.
@32: Here's what you said:
Posted by laterite | January 28, 2008 11:18 AM
Here's what I said:
Posted by Greg | January 28, 2008 1:09 PM
Schadenfreude, of course, is "satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune." But whose misfortune? Well, it was a little unclear from your words. However, since the article focused pretty heavily on how Jerramy Stevens raped a girl and was let off, your crowing about the UW football scandal came across very assholishly.
this is why we need to create amateur leagues that offer an alternative to college for athletes.
anyone else remember Neuheisel having girls bend over asses out for the 300-student crowd in Al Black's lecture hall to pretend to be football players?
man those guys are douches.
I guess this means we won't be spending $150 million in public funds to renovate Husky Stadium, then?
@43: you mean, like the minor leagues? Funny how baseball can somehow afford to run their own development leagues but football and basketball can't. Yes, I know there's college baseball, and it's undergoing creeping professionalism (and the goddamn LITTLE LEAGUE is on TV now), but it's not (yet) subject to the same kinds of corruptions.
In any other line of work a guy like Bobby Knight would be in prison.
Of course we'll be spending $150 million on the new and improved Husky Stadium. Have you not been paying attention? Football is king and Assholes always win. Didn't they send you the memo?
I think it was after the one that said boys will be boys. Watch your assholes (literally and figuratively) ladies.
Love how you douchebags turned this into a post about GO HUSKIES! Go BRUINS! instead of one about how the system, UW Athletic Department, Prosecutors and Police allowed a RAPIST to get away with RAPE and then be rewarded for his efforts.
That makes you a real fan, congrats.
I thought this was fine journalism, and shed some light about how the UW keeps recreating Reggie Rogers for new generations.
However...
How long did the Seattle Times know about this? Even the $150 million for Husky Stadium is supposed to be dead this session. Why not publish this before Satterberg got elected? Why wait to publish this until after the Seahawks were done for the year? Why wait until after AD Turner was canned?
#48, as others have said, this wasn't the police's fault, it was the King County Prosecutor's Office. And the UW athletic department. Our taxpayer dollars at work to protect rapists, not only at the UW, but at Qwest Field. The M's got rid of a pitcher who beat up his wife, but the Seahawks embraced a rapist.
Greg @42: Ok, I'll give you some benefit of the doubt, though my comment was pretty much directed at the UW athletic dept. and its apologists. I'm still not sure how you could come to the conclusion that I would be "cheering" a rapist. I didn't explicitly mention that case in my comment anyway. Seriously, you and Bellevue Ave's comments about me made me almost physically ill. My intent was not at all to defend Jerramy Stevens. Why would I? That's monstrous.
This is how the corruption seeps into the community. Satterberg (as did Maleng before him) knows which side his bread is buttered on. There are some VERY powerful Husky boosters around, and the way college athletics is structured, boosters are almost obligated to commit crimes when they donate money -- which is their business model. These are men who drop $100,000 on the team, both over and under the table, without blinking an eye. Need a hooker, or a hot car, or a good lawyer pronto? The players and coaches know exactly who to call.
@50: I accept that, and I apologize for misunderstanding your intent.
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