The pugnacious attorney gets arrested and accused of trying to extort the powerful shoe company while the people in charge avoid scrutiny.
While attorney Michael Avenatti burns and tries to take Nike down with him, NCAA President Mark Emmert and the rest of the college system continue to hide from the basic truth: It should be no crime for a shoe company to pay a teenager.
This is the underlying issue. In a country that supposedly endorses free enterprise and the ability to live life as you choose, organizations such as the NCAA are allowed to bend those simple principles in ways that handcuff the innocent.
Or, in this case, handcuff a man who should never have had the power to even threaten to expose Nike. Avenatti, who was arrested Monday, took to Twitter on Tuesday to begin his campaign to take down Nike.
Ask DeAndre Ayton and Nike about the cash payments to his mother and others. Nike’s attempt at diversion and cover-up will fail miserably once prosecutors realize they have been played by Nike and their lawyers at Boies. This reaches the highest levels of Nike.
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) March 26, 2019
From what Avenatti has described, Nike has continued down the path that Adidas traveled on the way to an FBI investigation. Paying people under the table and exerting influence sound really nefarious. In truth, Nike was likely just trying to sign some players to a sponsorship deal. There should be nothing wrong with that. It may not sound like wise business for Nike to do that with a 17- or 18-year-old athlete. But that’s Nike’s business to decide.
It shouldn’t be determined by some unethical set of eligibility rules that are enforced by the NCAA and agreed to by the many colleges that run high-profile sports programs. That is the issue at the root of all of this. Colleges which hide behind the shield of the NCAA continue to exert idiotic standards about what players are allowed and not allowed to accept in the pursuit of a mirage of purity called amateurism.
This is akin Don Juan expecting his bride to be chaste.
Of course, most people are going to miss the bigger picture because of Avenatti, a jerkball scumlord who has become so radioactive that even his own clients have fired him. Avenatti is a pinata of hatred. At the same time, he’s the shiny bobble that distracts the masses from paying attention to the hypocrisy espoused by men like Emmert.
For some reason, we have been convinced by colleges that it’s bad for young men to take money from businesses like Nike or from boosters who want them to go to a certain school. Colleges hide behind the idea of trying to keep the playing field level or maintaining some type of integrity.
These are the same schools that then turn around and sell their tournaments to the highest bidder or, worse, allow their own application processes to be corrupted. For those who don’t remember, Reggie Bush was forced to give up his Heisman Trophy after taking a bunch of supposedly illicit benefits while at the University of Southern California.
I know every turn of that story because I reported it with Charles Robinson at Yahoo! Sports. For all the excitement involved in chasing that story, I have always maintained that I don’t blame Bush for taking the money. He and his family grew up with extremely limited resources. They weren’t exactly poor, but they struggled. When given a chance to the enjoy the spoils of his talent and hard work, there was nothing wrong with what he did.
At least not in the eyes of people with common sense and integrity. In fact, anyone who understands the bigger picture should also understand that young athletes like Bush then and DeAndre Ayton now would be far better served by making such payments legal. When you have above-board transactions, it teaches people the proper way to do business instead of teaching them that everything is some back-alley deal.
When Bush was a rookie in the NFL and going through the throes of the investigation, he famously got up in the middle of an league seminar and asked a simple question.
How do you know who you should trust?
That’s a pretty basic question that Bush should have learned to answer from his college experience, if not before. Instead, young men continue to be cast adrift into a financial morass because colleges are more concerned about controlling the purse strings than helping them.
The truth is that the criminal activity in all of this has nothing to do with Avenatti or Nike or any other shoe company, even if it’s easy to believe that. The reality is that the most unethical behavior is coming from the colleges, the administrators who run those programs and the NCAA.
The very people who should know better.