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State approved Christian schools have much in common with Mack Ford, Lester Roloff fundamentalist children’s homes

September 27, 2013 by tomaswell

If you like the way Mack Ford treated and taught the children at New Bethany Home for Boys and Girls in Arcadia, you’ll love the education reforms being put in place for Louisiana by Gov. Bobby Jindal, Superintendent of Education John White and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) President Chas Roemer.

Though many of the students at New Bethany never received their high school diplomas as promised, Ford employed the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum for whatever teaching that occurred at the facility.

And though the home closed more than a decade ago, students’ claims of beatings and rapes at New Bethany recently resurfaced when it was learned that two former board members—Ford’s son-in-law and grandson, Timothy Johnson and Jonathan Johnson, respectively— were working in the campaign of 5th District congressional candidate State Sen. Neil Riser, the candidate who is Jindal’s personal choice.

On Tuesday, Jonathan Johnson, Ford’s grandson who has worked for retiring 5th District Congressman Rodney Alexander since 2003 and who now works for Riser as an unpaid volunteer, was asked about the propriety of Riser’s allowing two men tainted by the reports of beatings and rapes at New Bethany. “This doesn’t involve him (Riser),” he said.

Jonathan Johnson never denied the beatings and rapes occurred. Instead, he said, “I was twelve when that happened.” He also denied that he ever served on the New Bethany board. But minutes of a board meeting on June 30, 2001, obtained by LouisianaVoice indicate otherwise.

Called for the purpose of “disposing of properties owned and operated by New Bethany Home for Girls, Inc.,” the minutes identify board members “acting on behalf of New Bethany Home for Girls, Inc.” They include Timothy Johnson (Jonathan Johnson’s father and Mack Ford’s son-in-law), Jonathan Johnson, Maxine Ford, Douglas Gilmore and Thelma Ford (Mack Ford’s wife and the board’s vice president and secretary).

As for the manner in which the property of New Bethany Home for Girls, Inc., was disposed of, records on file in the Bienville Parish Courthouse indicate little, if anything was actually liquidated. Instead, records show the home’s property was simply transferred to New Bethany Baptist Church—a paper transaction that kept control of the property in Ford’s name.

New Bethany Baptist Church is in the New Bethany Home for Girls compound, situated inside a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Former residents of New Bethany said only residents and staff members—no outsiders—ever attended New Bethany Baptist Church.

And while the home officially closed its doors in 1998 (though some claim that a few girls remained there until 2004), LouisianaVoice found several Independent Fundamental Baptist churches across the country (including at least one in Louisiana) that continued providing financial support for Ford’s “ministries” long after the home closed and services at New Bethany Baptist Church were no more.

Among those churches which continued sending financial assistance to Ford:

  • Calvary Baptist Church, Sulphur, Louisiana, W.T. Darnell, pastor;
  • New Testament Baptist Church, Centralia, Illinois, Don Smith, pastor;
  • Faith Baptist Church, Spokane, Missouri, James Mohler, pastor;
  • Berean Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Ronnie Baity, pastor;
  • Gloryland Baptist Church, Lincolnton, North Carolina, Macon Ballard, pastor.

Baity, asked why his church continues to send money to a “mission” that no longer exists, said, “How this church spends its money is none of your business since you don’t help pay the bills.”

And though this is by no means an indictment of all church-affiliated schools, three traits prominent among many—far too many—fundamental Christian schools, including New Bethany, are child abuse, sexual abuse and fundamental Christian textbooks like the ACE curriculum, A Beka Book, and Bob Jones University (BJU) Press that teach such interesting things as:

  • Solar fusion is a myth;
  • A Japanese whaling boat found a live dinosaur;
  • Humans and dinosaurs co-existed;
  • The earth is only 10,000 years old;
  • The Ku Klux Klan tried to be a means of reform in some areas of the country;
  • God used the “Trail of Tears” as a means to bring many American Indians to Christ;
  • It cannot be shown scientifically that man-made pollutants will one day reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer;
  • God has provided certain checks and balances in creation to prevent many of the global upsets predicted by environmentalists;
  • The Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to promote a socialist agenda;
  • Only 10 percent of Africans can read or write because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists;
  • Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free-enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.

The list of schools participating in the 2013-2014 Louisiana Scholarship Programs is peppered with church-affiliated schools, some two dozen of which employ one or more of the three curriculums cited earlier. Each was state approved by BESE, White and by virtue of his support of White and Roemer, Jindal.

  • Delhi Charter School: Until public opinion (and a threat of a lawsuit by the ACLU), Delhi Charter instituted a policy of forcing a female student to take pregnancy tests if the school suspected she might be pregnant. The policy was adopted after a 17-year-old student became pregnant by a school football player and was asked to leave the school. The boy was subjected to no disciplinary action.
  • Claiborne Christian School, West Monroe: Scientists are “sinful men” who exclude God in explaining the world. “Any stories that go against a biblical view of live in this series of books are skipped and are not read in the class.”
  • Faith Academy, Gonzales: Employs ACE textbooks. Students “defend creationism through evidence presented by the Bible verses (sic) traditional scientific theory.”
  • Northeast Baptist School, West Monroe: Uses A Beka and BJU science textbooks.
  • Union Christian Academy, Farmerville: Relies “heavily” on the BJU curriculum, as well as “selected materials that have been approved by the administration.”
  • Victory Christian Academy, Metairie: Uses A Beka and BJU curricula.
  • Northlake Christian Elementary School, Covington: Teaches from A Beka materials.
  • Northlake Christian High School, Covington: Student handbook includes policy against admitting prospective students and staff who do not meet “Biblical standards.”
  • Gethsemane Christian Academy, Lafayette: Uses ACE, A Beka and BJU curriculum.
  • Jehovah-Jireh Christian Academy, Baton Rouge: Uses A Beka curriculum.
  • Greater Mt. Olive Christian Academy, Baton Rouge: Uses A Beka curriculum.
  • Faith Christian Academy, Marrero: Uses A Beka curriculum.
  • Lafayette Christian Academy, Lafayette: Uses BJU and A Beka curricula.
  • Cenla Christian Academy, Pineville: Uses BJU and A Beka curricula.
  • Family Worship Christian Academy, Opelousas: employs A Beka curriculum.
  • Trinity Christian Academy, Zachary: uses A Beka for high school science.
  • Old Bethel Christian Academy, Clark: Uses A Beka curriculum.
  • Eternity Christian Academy, Westlake: uses ACE curriculum.

So while Jindal bemoans “government control” of Louisiana’s education system, he apparently has no problem with fundamental church schools gaining control of students’ minds through curricula that conflict with scientific knowledge—and doing it with state funding.

Anyone who has the ability to see through Jindal’s “reform” package has to be asking whatever happened to the doctrine of separation of church and state.

And that doctrine appears to be the only real difference between the Mack Fords and Lester Roloffs of the world, who steadfastly refused state funding to avoid the necessity of state licensing (and state supervision) and those Christian schools who crowd their way to the public trough for a share of state funding to support their curricula that border on mind control.

Can anyone say “Stepford students?”

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Governor's Office, Vouchers | 27 Comments »

Questions abound as more horror stories emerge from New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys in Arcadia and Longstreet

September 18, 2013 by tomaswell

Do it in the name of heaven,

You can justify it in the end.

 —One Tin Soldier by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter

As more and more revelations come to light about the treatment of residents of the New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys in Arcadia and similar homes run by Rev. Mack Ford and wife Thelma in other localities, many serious questions remain unanswered.

  • Why, for example, have the Fords and employees of the home never been charged with felony child abuse?
  • How can a man (and dozens more like him scattered across the U.S.) mete out such barbaric treatment of children in the name of a Savior who’s every utterance of love, peace and forgiveness is in direct contradiction to the policies of these institutions?
  • How can the doctrine of separation of church and state trump state laws enacted to protect children who are unable to protect themselves from inhuman, sadistic and yes, anti-social treatment?
  • And most puzzling of all, how is it that Rodney Alexander and Neil Riser would each hire the grandson of New Bethany’s founder and who, along with his father, Ford’s son-in-law, sat on New Bethany’s board of directors?

http://clarkword.com/nb_docs/docs/NB%20Board%20of%20Directors.jpg

Besides the Arcadia home, the Fords also ran homes for boys in Longstreet in De Soto Parish and in Walterboro, S.C. One by one, the homes were eventually shut down by authorities, the Arcadia home in 1998 (some reports indicate that New Bethany boarded girls there as recently as 2004), but only after inestimable mental, spiritual and physical damage had been inflicted on hundreds of children, many of them in their early teens.

New Bethany is situated in a secluded spot deep in the piney woods south of Arcadia where the children’s screams could not be heard. Its remote location kept the facility out of the public eye and allowed Ford to give outsiders a look on his own terms—at church services, in a controlled environment, where the neatly scrubbed girls would sing and give emotional testimonials about past drug abuse and promiscuity (many of those “testimonials” contrived by Ford) and how New Bethany had turned their lives around—all orchestrated for the maximum emotional impact so as to extract “love offerings” from those in attendance.

http://clarkword.com/nb_docs/arcadia.jpg

Ford resisted state inspections, claiming that he accepted no state funding and that he was not licensed by the state and was therefore not subject to state regulations under the doctrine of separation of church and state.

On one occasion a state inspector did manage to breach the normally chained front gates of New Bethany but that inspector died suddenly a short time later.

Ford used his death as evidence of God’s intention to protect New Bethany from state regulations, saying that the inspector had been struck down by God and a similar fate would likely await other state inspectors.

Still, the clock was ticking and eventually it was the State Fire Marshal’s Office that would prove Ford’s undoing. Not that he didn’t try to thwart state efforts. Ford, following the lead of those like him at other homes, would learn when inspectors were due and would force the girls to move items away from exits and windows and to clean up the facility. He also would go to the extreme of physically transferring girls and boys to a like facility in another state.

And now, 15 years after New Bethany in Arcadia was finally shut down—hopefully for good—we learn that Timothy Johnson, Ford’s son-in-law and a former vice president at Louisiana College in Pineville, is a volunteer in State Sen. Neil Riser’s campaign to succeed retiring 5th District Congressman Rodney Alexander.

Even more baffling is the fact that Ford’s grandson and Timothy Johnson’s son, Jonathan Johnson, is on the payroll of Riser’s campaign after having worked for Alexander for about a decade.

Alexander’s office said Wednesday that Jonathan Johnson, who made $75,000 a year as Alexander’s State Director, was on “unpaid leave,” and would not return until November. Apparently Jonathan Johnson is confident that he will continue working after next month’s primary and the November general election for Congressman-elect Riser.

But the fact remains that if these two men sat on the New Bethany board, they would have had to have known what was going on at New Bethany—the beatings, the mind control, the harsh punishments, and the rapes by Ford that so many of the former residents have come forward to claim.

If, in fact, Timothy Johnson did remove a former student-turned-staff member after she tape recorded a Ford sexual attack on her as claimed, then he not only had knowledge of the incident, but is complicit in concealing a violent crime.

And yet, despite all that we now know about New Bethany’s facilities in Arcadia, Longstreet and Walterboro, S.C., the only prosecutions occurred in South Carolina and even then the perpetrators were allowed to plea bargain their punishment down to probation.

So, why didn’t Louisiana authorities act?

That’s an excellent question for which there are no ready answers. Perhaps authorities were intimidated at the prospect of grappling with God. Authorities in Bienville Parish have claimed they were unaware of the rape allegations but several victims say that is simply not true, that they knew and did nothing.

One administrative employee at New Bethany said he, along with then-State Rep. Woody Jenkins of Baton Rouge, wrote legislation that exempted church-affiliated facilities such as New Bethany from state regulations.

If that indeed is the case, then the entire Louisiana Legislature that passed the bill is also complicit in any crimes that took place—as is the governor who signed it into law.

The responsibility for the agony and suffering of hundreds of girls and boys who were forced to endure the sadistic—and that’s the only word for it—treatment at the hands of Ford and his staff can be laid at the feet of Ford, his family and staff members, Bienville Parish law enforcement, the legislature and the governor’s office.

Next: If you support the education reform programs of Gov. Bobby Jindal and Superintendent of Education John White in their push for more church-affiliated charters and their fundamentalist curriculum, you may want to first examine how some of these schools operated in Arcadia and continue to operate in other parts of the country.

Posted in Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Politicians | 128 Comments »

Neil Riser campaign worker linked to defunct church girls’ home, accusations of sexual abuse by father-in-law minister

September 16, 2013 by tomaswell

© 2013

Two men with ties to a defunct church-operated home for girls and boys in Bienville Parish—and to the Baptist minister and accused sexual predator who ran the facility—currently are actively involved in the congressional campaign of State Sen. Neil Riser (R-Columbia), LouisianaVoice has learned.

Timothy Johnson of Choudrant in Lincoln Parish, who was fired earlier this year as a vice president at Louisiana College after leading an unsuccessful coup against President Joe Aguillard, is married to the daughter of Rev. Mack Ford who ran New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys south of Arcadia in Bienville Parish for several decades.

Timothy Johnson performs work on behalf of the Riser campaign, Riser’s campaign headquarters confirmed on Monday. His son, Jonathan Johnson, Ford’s grandson, worked for about a decade as State Director for retiring 5th District Congressman Rodney Alexander at $75,000 per year and is currently a paid employee of the Riser campaign.

LouisianaVoice has obtained more than a dozen affidavits from women who lived at New Bethany as teenagers and each one accuses Ford of sexual abuse, including rape and in at least one case, of having forced a 17-year-old girl at the school to perform oral sex on him.

The girl, now a woman with children of her own, said Ford had her follow him into a building on the New Bethany grounds only to encounter a woman who was cleaning the office. He told the woman to leave so he could “counsel” the girl. Once the woman was gone, he directed the girl to get on her knees. “I thought it was to pray,” she said, but then she said Ford unzipped his pants.

Another girl who claimed to have been subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of Ford, attempted to have Ford prosecuted after she left the home, married and had children of her own but law enforcement officials and the district attorney’s office in Bienville Parish ignored her claims until, despondent over her failed efforts, she committed suicide. Before she killed herself, however, she fired off a scathing letter to Ford.

In her letter, she reminded Ford that she was recruited for a singing quartet which would visit area churches to give testimony in order to attract monetary donations to the home and he would then later force her to have sex with him.

Once, while on a testimonial trip to Rhode Island, she said in her letter, she walked in on Ford having sex with another girl and instead of being contrite and ashamed, Ford blamed women in general, telling her that a man could “smell a woman” and that smell was what caused men to yield to temptation.

“You used your power to gratify your selfish, sick needs with no regard to the harm and pain and years of shame you were inflicting on innocent children,” she wrote. “And sickest of all (were) your attempts to find sexual fulfillment from children you had an obligation to protect. You lied to everyone—our families (and) multitudes of churches across the nation. You lied and said we were safe with you when in fact, you were a predator of the worst kind.”

When the children at the facility were not being sexually abused, each of the affidavits claim, they were being physically and mentally abused. The abuse including beatings, scrubbing children’s bodies with steel wool pads, handcuffing them to their beds with no opportunity to go to the bathroom, being forced to clean commodes and dog pens while wearing no rubber gloves, and forcing other residents to gang up on rebellious residents.

Female residents were forced to turn their backs and look down when male residents walked by. They were told if the boys lusted after them, it was their (the girls’) fault.

Children constantly ran away but were returned by sheriffs’ deputies and Ford steadfastly refused access to the grounds by state inspectors, claiming that he took no state money, was not licensed by the state and was not obligated to comply with state child care laws because as a church-affiliated facility, he was protected by the separation of church and state doctrine.

One of the things the state wanted to inspect was a four-story girls’ dorm that had no windows and no sprinkler system in the building.

It took decades before the state was finally able to shut the facility down and when it was finally closed in 1996, at the organization’s final board meeting, the board member who made the motion to sell off all the facility’s assets was Timothy Johnson, Ford’s son-in-law, married to one of the Fords’ eight daughters.

A support group comprised of former residents of New Bethany who say they each were physically, mentally and sexually assaulted claim that one girl who was assaulted by Ford managed to record the attack and was subsequently whisked away from the school by Timothy Johnson in an effort to protect his father-in-law.

Despite this incident and despite his serving on the board and making the motion to sell the home’s assets, Timothy Johnson is said to have insisted in a conversation with an employee at Louisiana College that he had never heard of New Bethany.

Another interesting twist emerging from documents received by LouisianaVoice involved a 1981 visit to another of Ford’s homes, the New Bethany School for Boys in Longstreet in De Soto Parish. The chairman and spokesman for the school, Rev. Bill Burrows, met with state officials and told them New Bethany was not required to be licensed by the state because of a new state law he had written with the help of then-State Rep. Woody Jenkins of Baton Rouge.

Jenkins would later make three unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Senate against incumbents J. Bennett Johnston, Russell B. Long and Mary Landrieu.

Ford even branched out in his operations, following the pattern set by his mentor, Lester Roloff, who ran several such schools in Texas before dying in a 1982 plane crash. Ford opened a school in Walterboro, S.C., where one of his daughters resided. South Carolina officials later raided that facility, however, and arrested two men who ran the home for cruelty to juveniles after authorities found boys locked in concrete cells wearing only their underwear and with just a coffee can for a toilet.

Ford taught the girls that it was a sin to wear pants and makeup or to listen to popular music or watch television and that if they were friends with anyone of a different faith, they would go to hell.

One girl said she was forced by one of the women at New Bethany to pull up her dress and to pull down her panties at which time she was beaten on her buttocks with a paddle.

On another occasion, a girl said she arrived at New Bethany and was sitting in a room when Ford walked in and asked her name. When she did not respond, he grabbed her by the hair and slapped her repeatedly with both the palm and back of his hand until she screamed out her name. He then told her she would continue to be “spanked” until she could answer in a civil tone.

One girl said she saw a girl who refused to eat grabbed by “several resident females” and held down while a staff member pried open her mouth and shoved peas down into her mouth. When she tried to spit them out, the food was shoved back into her mouth until she gagged whereupon she was told by the staff member that if she threw up, she would be paddled.

One man who removed his daughter from New Bethany was especially critical of the methods employed by Ford. “He would take those kids around to area churches to give testimonials about what a wonderful place it was,” he said. “And those kids weren’t about to rebel because they knew what would be waiting for them later if they did. When they would give their tear-jerking testimonials, the church members would hit the floor with their knees while reaching for their wallets to held Mack Ford with a love offering,” he said.

Ford now lives in retirement at the back of the New Bethany property and his son-in-law moved first into academia and now both he and his son have are involved in the Riser campaign that has itself been the subject of considerable criticism.

First, Alexander announced he would retire in a matter of weeks and then Gov. Bobby Jindal immediately announced Alexander’s hiring as head of the State Office of Veterans Affairs at $150,000 per year, a job that will give a substantial boost (from about $7,500 per year to $82,000 per year) to Alexander’s state retirement over and above his federal retirement and social security benefits.

Then Riser announced his candidacy…but before Alexander had gotten around to announcing that he was stepping down, according to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), leading to well-founded speculation that the Alexander retirement and subsequent state job offer was orchestrated by Jindal to open the door for Riser. Riser, for his part, said the FEC incorrectly dated his candidacy documents.

The state congressional delegation, with the exception of the state’s two U.S. Senators, Democrat Mary Landrieu and Republican David Vitter, immediately endorsed Riser for the 5th District seat.

So now we have a candidate for an office that was created for him by the governor to replace a sitting congressman who will move into a cushy appointive position to feather his state retirement while two campaign workers—a son-in-law and a grandson—tied to a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who is said to have preyed on teenage girls for several decades now work in the candidate’s campaign.

And Jindal tried to tell us on inauguration day back in 2008 that it was a new day in Louisiana.

You can’t sell this as fiction; the plot would be considered far too improbable.

Posted in Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Transparency | 55 Comments »

Hey! We haven’t gone away; we’re just busy cobbling together a pretty good story that’s sure to raise a stink

September 16, 2013 by tomaswell

Dear readers:

I hope you haven’t given up on me because I’ve not posted anything for a few days. There is plenty to write about but I am presently working on a story that will be very explosive and which will generate a lot of controversy in both political and religious circles. Because this will likely be, by far, the most emotionally-charged story I’ve yet written on LouisianaVoice, I am required to move slowly and cautiously to verify all facts and to separate facts from unproven allegations.

I know this sounds like some local TV station hyping its 10 p.m. Thursday news stories a week in advance (a practice I abhor), but I wanted to explain why we’ve been relatively silent these past few days.

Your humble newsboy (with apologies to John Hays for stealing his online nom de plume).

Posted in Politics | 15 Comments »

Could Sports Illustrated story on Oklahoma State be part of underhanded anti-SEC scheme by all those BCS also rans?

September 12, 2013 by tomaswell

It’s not often that we agree with the writers who ply their trade with The Hayride, a web blog that is decidedly pro-Bobby Jindal—especially when the blog refers to Baton Rouge District Judge Janice Clark as a “bully” for threatening to jail members of the LSU Board of Stuporvisors for their failure to comply with her order to release public records to the media.

That said, we rarely call out other bloggers for their opinions because we believe in everyone’s right to his or her own opinions. It’s a position we hope they hold in the same high regard and to date, The Hayride has called me out only once and that was for a sloppy error on my part.

So, we both go about doing our thing, each reading the other on a regular basis and most times disagreeing with the other’s position. That’s the First Amendment working at its best and I hope it can remain that way.

Today’s post by Oscar about the Sports Illustrated series about Oklahoma State and Les Miles found us agreeing in part and adopting a slightly different conspiracy theory, thanks to the suggestion from a friend who put the bug in our ear.

  • That the SI exposé is a piece of tabloid journalism best suited for the now defunct Weekly World Guardian: agreed.
  • That the series was written by an Oklahoma Sooner fan who has his own agenda. Agreed.

But that is as far as our commonality of conspiracy theories goes. His is a bit limited and localized; mine is much more far-reaching and spiced with more intrigue, kind of like the grassy knoll, the inside job on the Twin Towers, Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate and CIA drone assassinations all rolled into one.

No, wait. That CIA drone assassination thing just might be real.

Oh, well, never mind. Here’s our theory.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) has been kicking butt in the Bowl Championship Series, almost to the point of boredom.

Since 1998, its inaugural year, SEC teams have won nine titles. The ACC, Big Eight, Big East, Big Ten and PAC 12 divided the remaining six championships.

Even more humiliating to the other conferences, the SEC has won the last seven consecutive titles and eight of the last 10. And let’s not forget that in 2011, the championship game featured two SEC teams, Alabama and LSU. With the exception of LSU’s 2003 title and Auburn’s squeaker over Oregon in 2010, all 10 SEC wins have been by double digits.

We’ve already seen how anemic the NCAA is in both its ability to investigate reports of wrongdoing and to mete out appropriate punishment. To illustrate that weakness, one need only look at the Pete Carroll, Reggie Bush, USC “investigation,” the Cam Newton “investigation,” and the Johnny Manziel “punishment.” A half-game suspension? Really? If Manziel was innocent of selling his autographs (and we’re not suggesting guilt or innocence here), he should have received no punishment. If he was guilty, he should be ruled permanently ineligible under existing NCAA rules. A half-game suspension is a joke. Let’s just split the baby.

So, it is left to hack journalists, with the help of the weak sister conferences, to do the dirty work.

It’s this simple: Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma and USC can’t compete on the field with the SEC, so they compete in the only way they can—character assassination, innuendo, and stories based on interviews with players who may or may not have an axe to grind. No matter, if the stories can weaken the SEC’s stranglehold on the national championship it’ll open the door to those schools whose boosters are starting to grumble about the lack of top-tier competiveness.

This is not to say that “student-athletes” (I hate that term) don’t screw up. Of course they do; they’re kids away from home perhaps for the first time and they will test the waters. LSU has had its share under Miles and he did exactly what he should have done in each case: He fired the players. And they were front-line players: Ryan Perrilloux and Honey Badger Tyrann Mathieu (the latter after everyone in Baton Rouge had purchased black market Honey Badger T-shirts). I personally disagree with Miles’ decision to allow Jeremy Hill back on the team, but on balance, I like what I see in Miles as a decent human being and a very good coach, his detractors’ opinions notwithstanding.

I recently had lunch with Miles, along with my two sons-in-laws. One son-in-law was the successful bidder on the lunch which benefitted an organization for the hearing impaired. I went in expecting Miles to show up, go through the motions but to be largely aloof and distracted from the moment at hand, to simply go through the motions of fulfilling his public relations obligations.

What I saw was a man who was most attentive to his guests, quite talkative (a talkative Les Miles, imagine that!), friendly and receptive to any questions we might wish to lob his way. He spent most of the lunch talking about the difficulties experienced by his brother, who has been deaf since birth and how teachers initially believed him to be mentally retarded. We found a Les Miles who was able to talk openly about a very personal subject; we saw a man who was warm, open, congenial and personable—traits not normally associated with his predecessor at LSU.

But back to our original point. Is it coincidence that all those stories have come out in recent years about Florida, Auburn, Mississippi State, and now LSU? Three of the four—Florida, Auburn and LSU—have BCS championship trophies (LSU and Florida have two each). Mississippi State was indirectly involved in the sordid Auburn-Cam Newton story and LSU, in addition to being a two-time BCS champion, is joined at the hip with the latest accusations at Oklahoma State by virtue of Miles having coached at both schools.

Of course, it was never necessary to do a hatchet job on Arkansas. Former Coach Bobby Petrino took care of that himself in that bone-headed motorcycle accident with a female employee/girlfriend as his passenger.

Do the Florida, Auburn and Oklahoma State stories represent the opening salvos in the campaign to take down the SEC? Perhaps. Stranger things have happened.

If so, you can look for the next shoe to drop somewhere around Tuscaloosa. (‘Bama, after all, has three BCS trophies.) There are already stories circulating about former ‘Bama players Luther Davis and D.J. Fluker. Fluker, now with the San Diego Chargers, recently tweeted that he took money while a member of the Tide football team. That may explain why ‘Bama Coach Nick Saban lost his temper (what else is new?) and walked out on his weekly news conference on Thursday. (It also explains why I shall never have a Twitter account.)

Whether or not this scenario plays out, one thing is for sure: Sports Illustrated, like the rest of the print media, has fallen upon hard times. Unlike most other periodicals, however, SI seems to be taking desperately sordid measures to forestall the inevitable: the death of a once great but now sadly mediocre—or worse—publication.

Posted in Politics | 7 Comments »

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