The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (19 page)

“Hi, Ted. This is Charlotte. Sorry to call you on a Sunday morning. I did want to touch base with you. Actually, after our conversation last night I did visit with both the chancellor and the president. Here’s where I think we are. One, a number of … things just keep happening in terms of … let’s just put it [at] outside pressure. And so what I really think needs to happen, if there’s not just some incredible objection Mike needs to sign the letter that he … sign the letter that he was presented with. Return that to … return it to Pat or return it to the president, and then he needs to work on some sort of apology. And also the chancellor would like you to get that either to the president or to Pat on Monday.”

Reading between the lines, Liggett determined that the reference to outside pressure was code for Craig James. It was Sunday night before Liggett reconnected with Leach and told him about Bingham’s voice mail and the Monday deadline to produce a letter of apology.

“If there was a Monday ultimatum,” Leach said, “they should have told us that at the Saturday meeting. They never told us that.”

Liggett agreed. But that no longer mattered.

“If you don’t sign the letter, Kent is going to come after you,” Liggett told him.

“Yeah, well, I’m not signing it,” Leach said.

Once Leach left for San Antonio without providing the letter, Gerald Myers told Guy Bailey he planned to suspend Leach. Bailey pledged his support. “But we need to make sure we’ve got the backing of everybody above us,” Bailey told Myers.

They quickly convened a phone conference with Hance and board members Anders and Turner. One of the issues they discussed was the ramifications of suspending Leach on the eve of a bowl game. That step was sure to achieve the one thing they had been trying to avoid—bad publicity. But the board members were beyond that issue. One of them asked Bailey a simple question: If a dean had refused to cooperate with your request to write a letter to a parent who had complained, what would you do?

“He wouldn’t be dean anymore,” Bailey responded.

That sealed it. They all agreed that Leach shouldn’t coach the game. As soon as the meeting broke up, Anders sent Hance an e-mail: “Kent, I agree with Jerry and you. He will not coach the Alamo Bowl while this is ongoing.”

“Our hope,” Bailey explained, “was that the suspension would send a strong enough message that we really had to have the letter.”

The responsibility to inform Leach fell to Myers.

Sharon Leach had invited practically every relative on both sides of the family to the Alamo Bowl. A virtual Leach family reunion was set for San Antonio. As soon as Mike and Sharon reached the hotel room, she started calling family members to double-check arrival times. Her ten-year-old daughter, Kiersten, and thirteen-year-old son, Cody, were unpacking. Mike went off in a corner and began scribbling notes for the team meeting scheduled for later that afternoon. It was roughly 2:00 p.m. when his cell phone vibrated. It was Myers. He didn’t bother with pleasantries.

Sharon immediately knew something was wrong. Mike was pacing with the phone to his ear.

“Why?” he finally said, breaking the silence.

The kids looked at Sharon.

“None of it’s been proven,” Leach said to Myers. “And it didn’t happen.”

Sharon put her arms around Kiersten.

“Who is
they
?” Leach said.

There was another long pause.

“I’m not signing a letter that said I did something I didn’t do,” Leach told Myers.

Myers was through talking. “Mike, the administration, the board, supports this. It’s a done deal. You’re suspended.”

Leach hung up and turned to Sharon. “I’ve been suspended.”

Sharon covered her mouth. The in-laws had just landed at the airport. They would be at the hotel soon. “What do we do now?” Sharon asked.

“Fight.”

Leach called his defensive coordinator, Ruffin McNeill, and told him he’d have to run the team meeting. Then he called Liggett back in Lubbock.

“They are not gonna let me coach,” he began.

“What?” Liggett asked.

“They suspended me.”

“What? Shit.”

“What are my options?”

“Mike, I’m going to have to hang up and think about this for a second. I have to absorb this before I counsel you.”

Minutes after Myers had hung up with Leach, Kent Hance telephoned Craig James.

“Craig, I want to read a statement that will be coming out from the university here in the next thirty minutes. ‘Tech University recently received a complaint from a player and his parents regarding Red Raider Head Football Coach Mike Leach’s treatment of the athlete after an injury. At Texas Tech all such complaints are considered as serious matters, and as a result, an investigation of the incident is underway. Until the investigation is complete, Texas Tech University is suspending coach Leach from all duties as Head Football Coach effective immediately. The investigation into this matter will continue in a thorough and fair manner. Coach Ruffin McNeill will assume duties as Interim Head Coach and will coach the team during the Alamo Bowl. The decision to take these actions was made in consultation with the Texas Tech University president, and the Texas Tech University System chancellor, and Board of Regents chairman and vice chairman. Because this is a personnel matter no further comment will be forthcoming.’ ”

James thanked Hance for the heads-up.

Meanwhile, the video that Adam James had shot on his cell phone in the electrical closet was turned over to Craig’s PR firm. After viewing Adam’s video, one Spaeth associate e-mailed another: “I think the sound adds to the drama. He’s turned on the lights but is afraid he will get caught.” The firm started making plans to release the footage to national media, as well as post it on YouTube.

Ted Liggett never expected Tech to suspend Leach. Not after he and his family had flown to San Antonio. Not on the eve of a bowl game. Not when they had a strong ally in Guy Bailey, the university’s president. Liggett was
convinced of one thing: Bailey and the athletic director weren’t calling the shots. That left Kent Hance and the board. And Liggett was convinced they were listening to Craig James. The suspension, Liggett felt, looked like a compromise move by Hance. It didn’t go as far as James wanted, but it punished—and embarrassed—Leach.

Pissed, Liggett ran through Leach’s options. One was to simply sign some sort of apology letter. Another was to ask a judge to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO), effectively freezing the suspension until a full hearing could be held to determine whether the suspension had merits. The chances of getting a TRO, Liggett believed, seemed pretty strong. Leach’s contract gave him a ten-day cure period for any disputes pertaining to employment.

But Liggett couldn’t help wondering how Tech officials would react if he took them to court. They might just fire Leach.

He called Leach and gave him his options: sign the apology letter and keep his job, or go to court and risk getting fired.

“You might want to think long and hard about doing what they want you to do,” Liggett said.

Leach held his ground. He wasn’t signing the letter.

“Mike, I’ll file the TRO. But it’s going to be a big fucking deal. It will force their hand.”

“File it.”

By the evening of the twenty-eighth, speculation was rampant among the Lubbock media about the identity of the player who had accused Leach of mistreatment. But by the following day, it was a national story. Craig James’s ESPN colleague Joe Schad named Adam James. So had the Associated Press. The ESPN story cited an unidentified source close to the family who said James had sustained a concussion and “Leach told the trainer, two days later, to ‘put [James] in the darkest, tightest spot. It was an electrical closet, again, with a guard posted outside.’ ”

Shortly after the ESPN story broke, Kent Hance heard that Ted Liggett planned on asking a judge to block the suspension. An emergency hearing had been scheduled for the following day. It was hard to predict how a judge in Lubbock might rule. But there was no question what the court of public opinion in Lubbock thought. Fans and alumni were in an uproar. They wanted Leach back. They wanted Adam and Craig James jettisoned. And they wanted Hance and Myers fired. The comment pages on the Lubbock news Web sites were flooded: