“People have a misunderstanding about this work,” the venerable NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett says to me over black coffee at a diner in a southern college town. “Most of what I do is just making phone calls or looking at computer records. I’m not rooting around in trashcans. I’m not following people. I’m not doing stakeouts in a goddamn car.”
Three hours later, we are staking out a fraternity house in a goddamn car, where Buck Duckett thinks a star tailback is about to take delivery of jewelry, video game systems, and expensive, stylish pants. We sit quietly. Every few minutes, Duckett releases a puff of vape smoke into the night air. Every time someone leaves the house or approaches it, we tense up and Duckett aims a long-lensed camera out of the driver’s side window. But after a few hours of waiting, nothing happens. “Maybe he was tipped off,” Duckett muses. “Or maybe he’s not hiding it at all. They'll show him picking up his stuff on the evening news.”
The National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibits its amateur athletes from receiving compensation. Or, at least, it had. By now three states have passed laws allowing college athletes from receiving money from their name, license, and image. These so-called NIL laws will allow athletes to endorse products and appear in commercials; they should break open the dam and allow essentially the payment of athletes. For many people disgusted by universities raking in billions of dollars through media rights deals while athletes work for free, this is a welcome change. For Buck Duckett, who has made his living busting athletes, boosters, and bag men in the illicit world of under-the-table payments, it is an existential crisis.
“Obviously, the question of how NIL payments will fall under NCAA sanctions is very fluid at the moment,” Brett Dreebin, author of “Dollars and Sacks: A Study of Under The Table Recruiting Payments” tells me. “It is unclear whether there will be a role for investigations and enforcement in the NCAA at all.” An NCAA investigator who asked to remain anonymous had a shorter assessment. “Well we’re fucked,” the investigator said.
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There are depictions on 10,000 year old cave paintings of sports: wrestling, footraces, archery. As early as 3,000 years ago, we have records of sports organized into formal competitions as they became increasingly abstracted from skills required in hunting and warfare. By 2,000 years ago, civilizations from Mesoamerica to Ancient Egypt to Ireland had begun captivating spectators with the games involving balls.
It would take several thousand more years for humans to come up with the idea of professional sports. Professional sports leagues began forming in the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players formed in 1871 with a league that could formally pay players after accusations that teams were secretly funneling money to so-called amateur players. By the 1880s, professionalism had been codified into soccer in England and Scotland.
Professional sports were the inevitable result of money and prestige in amateur competitions; once these stakes were established, it became virtually impossible for teams to resist luring the best competitors through underhanded payments. In England, for example, teams loaded up with Scottish players known as “Professors of Football” who moved to England and played for various payments designed to be called anything but wages. In cricket, “shamateur” players were not paid directly by clubs but were enticed to play there by other means. For example, W.G. Grace, the great nineteenth-century cricketer who won matches by intimidating opponents with the thickness and lustrousness of his beard, drew lavish reimbursements for travel and accommodation that dwarfed payments received by actual professionals. In virtually every case, sports leagues founded on an ideal of gentlemanly amateur play yielded to the temptations to recruit the best players, and the only way to do so was with cash.
There is one major exception. The American college sports apparatus has clung violently to its ideal of amateurism. Even as college sports went from a collection of rowdy amateurs playing games that barely had rules as a cover for organized thrashing to a multi-billion dollar television product, the NCAA has rigorously done all it can to prevent that money from trickling down to “student-athletes,” whom the association likes to think of as ordinary students doing an extracurricular activity that in certain cases happens to be broadcast to millions of people and allows the schools to spend tens of millions of dollars on coaches and hundreds of millions of dollars on lavish athletic training facilities that bear the name of a billionaire donor who in turn gets to call the coach at four AM and scream that they ought to run the dang option. And it is these boosters whose underlings or sleazy brothers-in-law who have been driving around the country since time immemorial with sacks full of cash, deeds to cars in players’ grandmothers’ names, and the gaudiest pantaloons ever knitted by human hands.
The NCAA’s attempts to police amateurism have been a history o bumbling officials trying to bail out the Titanic with a water bucket. They could never stop everyone from getting paid or even most people. But they stopped quite a few, and when they did it was often because of Buck Duckett. 1978, his first big case, “Big” Walt Nexus, $2,300 in a Sesame Street lunch box given to his kid brother. 1984, Maxwell Rictus, thirteen gold chains, a Dodge Challenger, pants on the table. 1992, “Lucifer” Nick Lufus caught bragging about $68,000 and a pair of hammer pants overlaid in gold lamé in the lyrics to an obscure song on his cousin’s label that Duckett tracked down in a swap meet and spent four days with a Dictionary of American Rap Lingo in order to decipher that the NCAA ruled as “compelling evidence” to suspend Lufus the night before the Muskie Bowl. 1996, “Wet” Steve Jason got a 38 dollar lunch comped at a local burrito restaurant.
Duckett tells me that his busts came about from patience and a boring willingness to follow facts, trace receipts, and talk to sources. His colleagues paint a far more colorful picture. Bill Maceman– now retired from the NCAA and working private security at a minigolf and go-kart emporium where he keeps a dossier of teenagers banned for petty theft, pirate vandalism, and mooning– tells me that Duckett once slept in a dumpster for three nights in order to catch Moose Manjagt accepting a Member’s Only Jacket from local jute magnate Moose Dugan. Other Duckett stories seem to have become legends. I heard several versions of a story about Duckett seizing a set of golf clubs and rare Vicuña wool golf pants from the power forward Ralph Van Prigg by alternatingly posing as a caddy or burying himself in a sand trap. In one version, he disguised himself as an alligator lounging in a water hazard in order to scare away the other golfers and isolate Van Prigg’s party and then having to dodge multiple rounds when Van Prigg’s policeman uncle produced a service revolver and began firing at him (Duckett cryptically asks me if I thought he’d disguise himself as an alligator when I asked him about it but did not specifically deny it).
One thing that is nearly impossible to nail Duckett down on is the extent to which he believes in amateurism in sports and the effects of new NIL policies. Every time I press him on this, he simply says “I don’t make the rules.” Duckett says he is simply doing a job, just as he would be following company rules if he was investigating insurance claims or selling time shares. But his enthusiasm for the bust tells me otherwise. It is hard to believe Duckett would be working so hard to nab players getting payment if this was simply a job. Quadd Hatcher, a newspaper columnist who crossed paths with Duckett while defending the suspended tight end Owen Groud after Duckett caught him with a cash sack told me “Duckett wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t care about players getting paid because this job is so self-evidently stupid.”
It is hard to see why Duckett would be so attached to amateurism in college sports. He was not a college athlete. In fact, he put himself through school partially as a professional boxer, a wiry lightweight under the name “Gentleman Buck” whose 6-13 record allowed him to graduate in three years with degrees in criminology and pants. Duckett came onto the NCAA’s radar when he was working as an assistant private investigator under the legendary Ike Dreighto. He was shadowing Bike Branton, the heir to Indianapolis concrete magnate Michael Branton III, during his scandalous affair with the famous saloon ventriloquist Margaret Walross when he accidentally discovered that Indiana quarterback Moose Hatton was receiving shipments of custom suit pants from the Brantons hidden in cement mixers. The NCAA appreciated the tip and eventually approached him for a job. Within a year he was wearing a false mustache and running sting operations as a disc jockey named Larry Groove giving away free records to athletes.
It remains impossible to see why Buck Duckett is continuing to work cases. Other NCAA investigators are quietly shelving their records and waiting for a new assignment or perhaps a buyout. Duckett’s office is fully operational. Loose papers encroach on his desk like foliage reclaiming an abandoned boomtown. Each wall contains a large corkboard with red string mapping out baroque links between athletes, bagmen, and boosters with spokes veering off into incomprehensible directions (one says “Auntie Annie’s King of Prussia– ask for Pissed Dave”).
And yet Buck Duckett keeps on investigating. He says he will keep doing so until they tell him to stop. All he knows how to do is to keep disguising himself as a mime and secretly taking pictures of a banned cash transaction while pretending to fight against the wind. He does not need to pretend anymore. The wind is here.
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