At NCAA Headquarters

1.

There was not a lot of shade by the shuttle stop outside NCAA Headquarters and by the time the bus came, the official NCAA track suit I had that was issued to all employees was soaked. It was supposed to wick away sweat, but it was outwicked, and my hair, which was recently trimmed to NCAA specifications, was not stopping it from trickling into my eyes and around my lips. When the shuttle finally came, it felt like I had been thrown into a meat freezer. This was around '18, back before the Reorganization.(1)

The orientation process had been a blur. They flashed pictures of athletes wearing different pairs of pants at us and we had three seconds to determine if they were legal, illegal, or suspect. They did not tell us how we did, but after four hours of this, about two-thirds of us were summoned into a room and told to gather our things and get on the bus to Plainfield.

The NCAA's Pants, Shoes, and Apparel Processing Facility was temporarily located in Plainfield after the Tattoo, Jewelry, and Automobile section expanded. It was a converted warehouse, and they had just screwed cubicles into the ground. Everything echoed. There was a single phone connected to the Section Head, Lynn Mealer who never stopped scowling about the relocation, and when it rang it sound like a piercing wail.

Our job was simple, Mealer said to us, her voice booming like an offstage deity in a play. We do not investigate. We do not even try to investigate. The Investigation Section back in Indy did all of the stakeouts, the following, the disguises, the shootouts on the docks. We just watched. All of us had a monitor and all day we looked at pictures and video of players' pants(2) and tried to determine if something seemed off. If it was, we'd flag it and it would go to investigations for a second look. At 9 AM you got your first feed. No music, no radio, no conversation except for designated break areas. You will learn how to differentiate brands and cuts of pants and you will know how much they cost and you will memorize the Pants Cost Matrix in the third tab of your binder, and if you start flagging too many normal pants, the investigators will come down here. You don't want to see Duckett or talk to him, believe me. You're the tip of the spear, she said. When she was done, I asked to call my probation officer.

My parents really wanted me to be good at football. My father was all state in Ohio, my mom's brother's played DII ball, and I was good at running kids over in peewee football. But I hated the game. I hated the practice, I hated hitting people, I hated my dad, and I hated how Coach Tremppo told me I was lousy player and lousy kid and I was only on the team because he needed someone on the team to get shoved around. What football did get me was access to players, and get me close to Price Glauker, who got me into pants. Glauker's uncle was a booster with a pants warehouse. Pretty soon, we had the whole team outfitted illegally and were moving onto the junior college the next town over. The summer of my senior year, I spent the entire time driving from college town to college town giving away bags of pants and shorts to recruits and anyone on the teams who would take them, even the punters. It was a punter that got me. I didn't know he had washed out the team and got picked up the The A.(3) The NCAA judge told me if I wanted to go to college I would be sentenced to working for the NCAA(4).

We all coped with the processing differently. I started to see pants every time I closed my eyes. Every time I left the Facility, I was immediately scanning everyone's pants and making notes. At least four times, someone threatened to hit me, and that's when I generally stopped leaving the apartment complex. Gerry Wicks stopped wearing them altogether. Even in the dead of winter, he was in shorts. He was standing in a shin-high snow drift waiting for the shuttle from our Plainfield apartment complex, the Lamplighter, shivering, his legs turning red and raw but he would not put on a single pant, not even after a series of memos then meetings, then threatened legal action and counter-action. Harry Denn was the only one who wanted to be there and he only talked about pants. He checked into his station with a crisp pencil, he talked about pants on breaks, he talked about pants at lunch; I once saw him looking at pants Perry Crossing with a weird little smile on his face, his eyeballs sort of rolled up into his head. It was like that for weeks before no one would talk to him anymore. We just could not bear it. He seemed to understand that, that his life would consist finding the exact amount of pants conversation anyone could bear before being relegated to his odd little world. He would hit the buttons on his Feed with his eyes blissfully closed, and we could never figure out how he did it. He hit the button and took small, strangled breaths.

2.

The phone rang buzzed in the car. Duckett still had a flip phone and the NCAA made him turn it on but he could not answer it. He was motionless under a blanket and wide receiver Darryl Mant was about to get some pants from a booster from the trunk, but it did not have any pants, but had Buck Duckett ready to spring into action. The phone buzzed again, but there was also a crack of daylight.

It was another meeting he had missed. Duckett knew that he could not avoid the Reorganization forever by hiding out in the field, but he was going to try as hard as he could. Duckett's section chief Ed Nackro had been telling him that things were coming crashing down. "Duckett, it's over for pants," Nackro said to him. But Nackro had been saying that since '05, when they moved Pants over to that warehouse in Plainfield, and here they were still reeling in busts and suspensions and vacating basketball games.(5)

Duckett had tried to get out of pants once. He wanted cars. Everyone in the entire section wanted cars. He put his head down and did his best with pants. The Deputy Vice President of Investigations cited him for his "dogged pursuit of pants violators." And when they announced the promotions to Automobiles the next year, he was still in pants. Instead, the promotion went to Phil Prompt, who made fewer busts but was at more meetings. Prompt was great in meetings. He always wanted to add technology; Prompt actually created the idea of Processing. Processing produced few leads, that is far fewer than Duckett's network of pants informants in athletic departments and malls, but the NCAA wanted to move towards computers while Duckett was still filing reports in carbon. After that, he got put on another reorganization committee, but he could not stand the endless power points and the meetings, the whole time there were pipelines of pants shooting through underground networks while they talked about more efficient ways to fill out forms.(6)

Now, though, Duckett had heard that they were going to legalize it all. Duckett could not think about it. He came in every day and looked at his corkboards, and talked to his informants. His sources did not have much to say anymore other than questions about why he was still doing this. Every day, ominous memos about The Reorganization piled up on his desk.

1. The Reorganization was a massive reallocation of NCAA resources away from its Invetigations and Processing sections to its Sponsorships and Marketing sections. In one stroke of a pen, 14 section heads were merged into other departments, 13 were bought out, and one, the Tattoos Investigation Section head Luther Varnich, disappeared completely with a briefcase of sensitive documents which were later recovered at the crash site outside a regional airport in Honduras.

2. The Feed was introduced in 2005 as a more efficient way to monitor athletes and prevent costly and dangerous undercover missions. It came as a result of a bureaucratic war that saw Investigations Deputy Section Head Walt Malt arrested after trying to sabotage the Feed servers with homemade explosives. The explosion took head of Feed Security Irving Luarent's right hand, which he replaced with a menacing but useless claw.

3. Employess of the NCAA referred to it at the time as "The A."

4. The case was the first known attempt by a judge to sentence a defendant to work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This judge, A. Barbara Three, had run on a reelection platform of cracking down on pants. The next time she tried it, it resulted in the landmark case NCAA vs. Oprock, which got all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled 9-0 that this kind of sentencing was impossible and absurd. The judge resigned. Jimmy Oprock had lawyers and not parents who just told him to sign whatever they put in front of him. Oprock later sued and won $468,000 for his trouble. By this time, I had been finished with the Processing Facility for six years.

5. Buck Duckett's massive bust of the A&M Ring caused the school to vacate 22 wins in the season and take down an NIT Participant banner. They gave Duckett a replica banner to hang in his office, but he never put it up. It was the largest pants bust in NCAA history, with 75 pairs of illegal pants displayed for the TV cameras and Duckett grimacing through a press conference where he refused to speak.

6. To be more specific, the NCAA Investigation Section Reporting Meeting Series from April 2007 to February 2008 met to determine whether they should switch from the standard V-238 Violations Form for student-athletes caught with contraband which was then filed in a database to a V-500 Series report that was on a newer system and allowed tracking from other departments, which could be cross referenced into larger investigations and flagged for the Special Section, which would allow for much larger investigations and possible activation of the armed Enforcement Section. The issue was whether the increased efficiency would be counterbalanced by the need to retrain all Investigation Sections and whether the availability of information would allow for investigations to be compromised. This was not a concern when the Meeting Series was initiated in 2005, but in the next year, an internal NCAA mole connected to a powerful sports agency destroyed 38 active shoe investigations before the mole was chased onto the Chase Tower and he plummeted to his death.