The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (12 page)

And that was just football. The wining and dining had a Four Seasons feel, which just happened to be the host hotel. Friday night featured a visit to Coach Brown’s house, where Mack worked his magic on the parents—“He could sell a Pinto to Donald Trump,” said The Man—then dinner in a private room at the city’s top restaurant. That’s where he first met a few of the Angels, their female weekend hostesses, all smiles and creamy charm, the sexual tease heightened as they ditched the restaurant and the parents and headed to a Sixth Street bar. Forget the fact he was well underage at the time. He walked right in, no questions asked. Three-quarters of the team was already partying inside.

“That left a lasting impression,” said The Man.

The energy of the place, he remembered, was off the hook: an intoxicating mix of alcohol, house music and hard-bodied girls, the sound system cutting out every half hour so the crowd could belt out—what else?—the Texas fight song.

His Angel that night was an African-American stunner. They didn’t sleep together, but the message was sent, loud and clear: commit and there will be plenty of opportunities. Sure enough, he later learned firsthand, several of the Angels were sleeping with stars on the team.

Ah, sex, UT-style. After a huge showing in the spring game before his sophomore season, the girls came on to him in waves. “It would almost be you could pick the one you wanted to take home,” he recalled. Some nights he simply doubled his pleasure—taking two back to his apartment.

By his junior year The Man was making national headlines, rolling up big numbers on the field and killing it in the campus haunts on Sixth. So he started to seek other action. He took to hitting the more “adult” clubs in
Austin. The women, many in their thirties, came on to him like the young ones—only more aggressive and less interested in small talk, more sophisticated and experienced. Plus, they had money.

Then things got really interesting. A teammate came home from one of the local strip clubs and handed him a phone number. The Man called the number. A stripper answered. They talked. She invited him to her upscale town house. He went on a weeknight. She answered the door wearing nothing but a robe. Moments later it was on the floor. She was in her twenties with dirty-blond hair, a doll-like face and a
Playboy
body.

“So do you want to fuck me now?” she whispered.

For the rest of his junior year The Man returned to her home regularly for sex with a woman far more sophisticated than any he met on the UT campus. She had more bling, too. She drove a fancy sports car, had plenty of cash and had a line to high-grade marijuana. She shared all of her toys with The Man.

“All through college it never ended,” he said. “She was as cool as a girl could be. Pimped me out. Whatever I wanted—cash, a hundred here and there—she gave it to me. She let me drive her car whenever I wanted. If I wanted to smoke pot, she had that, too. Thinking back now, she was a pretty awesome asset.”

These were the perks of being The Big Man on Campus—days focused on football, nights given to partying and sex.

Don King—no, not the boxing promoter—has been the king of the Austin strip club scene for thirty-five years. The Yellow Rose, Austin’s first upscale “cabaret,” was under his watchful eye for more than thirty years. On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2012, King was kicking back on the patio of a local sports bar, working on a perfectly executed afternoon buzz. Two of his best strip-club-owning buddies happened to be in town and were along for the ride. Over time what started out as a few icy drafts for King progressed to a carefully calibrated series of chilled vodka shots, fueling a natural, often hysterical, storytelling talent.

As he talked, King waved a cigar around with his right hand. His long gray-white hair was in a ponytail, a diamond stud in his left ear, a gold chain hanging from his neck. He wore jeans, flip-flops and an autographed Earl Campbell jersey. His car was just across the way—a burnt-orange Nissan 350Z complete with detachable steer horns built into the hood and an “Eyes of Texas” car horn that could be heard three blocks away.

“These kids would walk in gaga-eyed,” King said of the Rose. “They’re
in one of the most famous titty bars in the world, and they’re realizing if they go to Texas to play for UT, and we go into this place, we eat and drink for free and sit around VIP for free for the next four fucking years.”

The Rose is still around today, 6500 block of Lamar, far from the prying eyes and maddening crowds of the downtown social scene. Low-slung, it sits between a liquor store and a collision repair shop, across the street from a tattoo joint. The decor leans toward rough cedar walls and maroon couches and booths. Most important, it has two corner VIP areas that became the home away from home for many a UT player.

“The players used to call it the office. They were going to the office,” said King.

He started out in bars, working his way up to Austin’s big live music scene and a club called Crazy Bob’s, which night after night lived up to its name. “Three dollars at the door, five hours of happy hour, three for one, three full-sized drinks for the price of one. Two-dollar pitchers of beer. Three-dollar margaritas,” recalled King. “It was crazy.”

When Crazy Bob’s went bust, King found work slinging drinks before managing a nasty little bandito biker hangout where strippers shared the billing with drugs, nightly fights and the Wednesday night special—the winning stub in the midnight ticket lottery earning a free massage, and negotiated happy ending, at the massage parlor next door. From there it was on to the Dollhouse. When it closed down, King moved to the Yellow Rose. That was 1981.

The thing about King was that right from the start the Rose had rules for football players. No underage drinking. None. Half-priced drinks when players turned twenty-one. Abuse the rules, act like an asshole—rip your shirt off and hop onstage to bump and grind with the girls, like one former Longhorn star—and you were headed to the office and a chat with Uncle Don.

“I told my waitresses and floor manager, don’t let them drink, because I don’t want the scandal,” said King. “I don’t ever want to challenge or ruin anyone’s reputation.” Down went another shot of chilled vodka. “It was safe for them,” he said. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to them. I would not let people come up to the tables and bother them. We’d treat them like VIPs, even though they didn’t have money. But you know what? As soon as they graduated, that free ride was over. Full price.”

For those who wore a Texas uniform on Saturday, the Rose was a gift that kept on giving—all the free soda and food you could eat, naked girls everywhere you looked. On any given Friday or Saturday night seventy of
King’s finest dancers, culled from his “entertainment base” of three hundred girls, worked the floor. Single mothers, pros and more than a few UT honeys. A good six-hour shift left between $300 and $800 in their pockets, a far cry from forty hours a week behind the counter at Whataburger.

Somebody ordered another round. King took a sip of his draft and lamented the fact times had changed. UT football players didn’t come around much anymore. Fact is, he had moved on as well. Not rich enough to retire, he managed another strip joint out near Round Rock. But he missed the old place and the chance to slip a bottle of vodka or two out the back door to a superstar after a national championship win or help reel in the next high school star with a complimentary evening at the club, watching some tasty little coeds do their thing. Run right, the system was nothing if not the sum of many moving parts. Quietly, professionally, one of its kings had done his part to give Texas an unseen edge.

“Over the years,” he said, downing the last of an ice-cold Coors Light, “I’ve done more for recruiting at UT than Mack Brown.”

T
wo hundred and fifty-seven wins. Nineteen conference championships. Twenty-two bowl appearances. Those were the final numbers when LaVell Edwards retired in 2000 after twenty-nine seasons as head coach at BYU. Only six coaches in the history of college football had won more games. But one particular win in 1984 cemented Edwards’s status as a coaching legend—a 24–17 bowl victory over Michigan to cap an undefeated season and secure BYU’s only national championship.

The unenviable task of succeeding Edwards fell to Gary Crowton, an offensive coordinator with the Chicago Bears. Crowton arrived in Provo in 2001, and BYU appeared headed for another national title run. The Cougars got off to a 12-0 start behind running back Luke Staley, who led the nation in rushing that year with 1,596 yards and won the Doak Walker Award. Heading into the final game of the regular season, BYU was ranked seventh in the nation. But Staley broke his leg the week before the last game. Without him, BYU lost to Hawaii and then fell to Louisville in the Liberty Bowl, finishing 12-2.

Things went downhill from there. Despite a soft schedule, BYU went 5-7 in 2002, marking its first losing season since 1973. The 2003 season was even worse. BYU dropped to 4-8 and went 1-5 at home. Back-to-back losing seasons had never happened under Edwards.

“We had two losing seasons in a row,” Crowton said. “I was under a lot of pressure from the administration to get back to the national championship and to get better players.”

The pressure to win in 2004 was actually put in writing. “It happened after my third year,” Crowton said. “I got a letter from the administration that said I had to be 6-5 the next year.”

With his job on the line, Crowton changed BYU’s recruiting approach. “I had to win,” he said. “So I went out and recruited the best athletes.”

Karland Bennett and B. J. Mathis were two recruits who Crowton and his staff felt could help change BYU’s fortunes. They were the stars of Berkner High’s football team in Texas. Bennett, a six-foot-one, 205-pound linebacker, was team captain. Mathis, a five-foot-seven, 170-pound running back, was an all-state kick returner. Both had scholarship offers from top programs—Bennett from Oklahoma, TCU and Arkansas; Mathis from SMU and Tulsa. But only BYU made offers to both players. So on the same day—January 22, 2004—they committed to the Cougars.

The duo was unfamiliar with the school’s strict honor code, which prohibits alcohol, sex before marriage and pornography. But Crowton personally explained BYU’s standards during his in-home visits. Most of what he told them about the honor code, however, didn’t register. Bennett later said, “It was just on a sheet of paper with everything else that we had to sign, some religious thing.”

That religious thing is actually a pretty big deal, seeing that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns BYU. The school’s honor code mirrors the teachings of the church, which goes as far as forbidding its members to drink coffee and tea. Still, Crowton didn’t foresee any problems. “Their high school coach told us that B.J. and Karland were ‘angels,’ ” Crowton said. “Plus, I went to their homes and talked about the high standards and told them not to come if they couldn’t do it.”

One thing was abundantly clear: Bennett and Mathis would be racial minorities in Provo. Less than 1 percent of the city’s 120,000 residents are black. But African-American college football players face a similar racial landscape at Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Notre Dame and countless other powerhouse programs. Bennett and Mathis weren’t worried. They had thrived as teenagers in Richardson, an affluent, predominantly white suburb of Dallas. Besides, they were focused on playing in the NFL, and they were convinced BYU gave them the best chance of achieving their dreams. BYU coaches pointed out that their program had more alumni in the NFL than any school in the West except USC. Bennett and Mathis were promised a lot of playing time and visibility: the first game in the upcoming season was on national television against Notre Dame. The campus was a draw, too. Everything was new, shiny and clean, especially the football facilities. Plus, people were ridiculously friendly. Mathis was so impressed that he told his high school teammate Trey Bryant, a 305-pound junior defensive lineman being aggressively pursued by
Baylor and BYU, that he should choose BYU. “This is the place,” Mathis told him.