Carl Wells Books

Recently I completed The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino: A Story of Corruption, Scandal, and the Big Business of College Basketball, by Michael Sokolove. It was a well-written book which would be useful not only to sports fans, but to anyone interested in how the U.S. is put together these days. It was published just this year, 2018.

Rick Pitino was a highly successful college coach, with stops at four schools, and also with a couple somewhat less successful jobs at the NBA level. He was voted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, and by the time he had coached his last college game (to date, anyway), his record was a remarkable 770-271, a winning percentage of .740, with two national championships included, one at Kentucky and one at Louisville, with a national runner-up finish (at Kentucky, an overtime loss in the final) thrown in for good measure. He was universally considered a great coach who got the most out of his talent, even when his talent was not as gifted as he would have liked to have playing for him. Just today I learned that he has been hired to coach a Greek professional team. He missed coaching too much to stay away for long.

The 770 wins, however, are now officially only 647, as the NCAA vacated 123 wins–including the 2012-2013 national championship won while coaching at Louisville.

Recounting the entire arc of Rick Pitino’s career would make this a multi-part series, and I will avoid that option. I’ll try to keep it short.

The vacated wins came because while Mr. Pitino was coaching at Louisville, one of his assistant coaches arranged highly unsavory parties for recruits, with sexual favors for some of the athletes included. Mr. Pitino has consistently stated that he knew nothing about all that.

That was actually strike two for Rick Pitino. Strike one was when he was involved in a sordid personal sex scandal of his own. He was involved in consensual sex with a woman not his wife. To sum up briefly, this all became public. I remember wondering if he would keep his job. He kept his job, and the woman went to prison, I think for attempted extortion.

But it was strike two which caused the NCAA to vacate all those wins, since supposedly the sex parties were an unfair recruiting advantage which helped Louisville to win those 123 vacated games. So, “to encourage the others,” as we might say, the NCAA took away all the victories, including the national championship. It remains vacated. It didn’t happen. (I think this is ridiculous. Louisville won the championship in 2012-2013. Grow up, NCAA. They tried to pull a similar trick on Penn State, taking away numerous Joe Paterno football wins temporarily, but the wins were restored eventually. Penn State’s sex scandal was far more despicable than Louisville’s. In neither case is taking away victories a sensible punishment.)

Strike three was when it turned out that a promising recruit who signed with Louisville prior to the 2017-2018 season, by the name of Brian Bowen, Jr., had a father who had received $19,500.00 (as a down payment on what was intended to be a total of $100,000.00) when his son signed to play for Louisville. Rick Pitino knew nothing about that, he says, but when this scandal came to light, it was strike three for Mr. Pitino, and he was fired just prior to the 2017-2018 season. Very likely Brian Bowen, Jr. knew nothing about that payoff to his father.

It all gets very byzantine, in trying to figure out what happened when, and who knew what. I would not be surprised if Rick Pitino really did know nothing about that $19,500.00 payment. But there is a great deal that I would not be surprised about concerning college basketball, after having read The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino.

All this, and a great deal more, is really just background for Michael Sokolove’s book. What he is really trying to do is to give us an informed view of what is going on with all of college basketball. He shows us that college basketball is a big time business, with shoe companies, school administrations, coaches and assistant coaches, summer AAU tournaments, all involved in behavior that may or may not be illegal, but often seems immoral.

While Michael Sokolove may lean left in his politics–his wife is a senior editor at “The Washington Post”–this book is not an exercise in virtue signalling. In fact, Mr. Sokolove understands that part of the problem is that the ordinary person, the taxpaying slob, is largely the victim of public education and of public theft of money to pay for huge basketball (or football) arenas. (For example, the KFC Yum! Center where the University of Louisville plays it basketball games, was built with $238 million in public funds. Suck on that, taxpaying slob with no interest in basketball.) He also understands that a great deal of the problem is that gifted athletes are actually being exploited for the sake of colleges, including college coaches who make huge salaries. The players provide the talent which makes the games interesting, and receive close to zero compensation, while the coaches and universities make millions.

Mr. Sokolove says too many insightful things to sum up briefly. Here are just a few words from near the end of the book. College basketball “serves to enrich adults within it.” Can it be cleaned up? “But the sport, as it currently exists, cannot be cleansed just by sweeping up around the corners. It has to be transformed into something that preserves the glory of the competition but does not exploit the players.” (p. 242)

He offers little hope that such reform can happen. For my part, I see little hope of reform in the near future. Public education is inherently wrong, but almost no one is ready to see that yet. Moreover, the central problem is not that a few hundred or a few thousand people are corrupt. The central problem is that we as a people are corrupt. It starts with the American Christian church, of course. Until the church reforms, our culture taken as a whole cannot reform. In the church we give 2.5% of our increase to God. He asks for and requires 10%. Moreover, we want other people to pay for our children’s education, we want Medicare, and we want Social Security. We could go on and on about our corruption. For us in the Christian community, we will need to begin to learn or relearn the difference between mine and thine. Right now, for us Christians, “Mine is mine; thine is negotiable.” No nation-wide effort to get rid of corruption will work until we root the corruption out of our own hearts and behavior.

College sports, and sports in general, have become an idol for many of us. This is probably what we should have expected. Reality abhors a vacuum. When we lose sight of God, something has to fill that void. Sports fills the void for a lot of people. In an otherwise corrupt nation, it is also not surprising that college basketball partakes of that corruption to a high degree.

Mr. Sokolove has done a superb job of turning over the rocks to see what is crawling underneath, in the world of college basketball. He has done so fairly and judiciously, without faux righteousness, and even without jumping on people who are down (Rick Pitino, Brian Bowen, Jr., U. of L. fired athletic director Tom Jurich, and the sleazy fringe figures who pass the money around while trying to take a nice cut for themselves). He says, correctly, that “On film, the great college basketball scandal of 2017 and 2018 would play as tragicomedy.” (p. 163)

The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino is an informative and thought-provoking book, well worth the time invested in reading it. You don’t have to be any sort of sports fan, to be able to appreciate this book. It is still fairly expensive. A week ago the best used price I could find was $16.30 (total) at AbeBooks. The price may come down eventually. For now, this may be a book to borrow from the library. If your local library does not have it, they will probably be able to get it for you through inter-library loan.

Since this is Christmas Day, it is a fitting time to give a few of my recent musings on Christmas.

This is partly prompted by the fact that our little county has hit the big time–made national headlines–because our county courthouse has a nativity scene. If that seems to you to be an unlikely path to making national news, think again.

Here’s what happened. Someone from our county–a ‘”concerned local citizen”‘–wrote the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group based in Madison, Wisconsin, to complain about the nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. The FFRF is an “organization that promotes the separation of church and state.” So they wrote to our county commissioners requesting that the display be removed immediately. The display remains up for now, and we will have to see how this plays out over the long haul.

Somehow the story got to the website usnews.com, which is what is left of what used to be the magazine, “U.S. News and World Report.” So we really are a national news story, although I doubt if this has been on any of the national television networks.

Anyway, here is the link to the usnews.com story:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/wisconsin/articles/2018-12-20/organization-wants-indiana-county-to-remove-nativity-scene

A really good photograph of our courthouse is included in the article above.

I always wonder, when I see people concerned about the separation of church and state, whether they really believe that religion and state can be separated, even theoretically. My guess is that most people–whether enemies of Christianity or friends of Christianity–really do believe that such a separation is possible. The friends of Christianity haven’t thought about it. The enemies of Christianity haven’t thought about it either, but they know that the concept of the separation of church and state is a handy weapon to battle against Christianity. They hate Christianity because they hate God. They hate God because He tells them what to do, and they want to do what they want to do rather than what God wants them to do. So, if something called the separation of church and state is supposedly a weapon against Christianity, that weapon is taken up without any intellectual pondering over whether religion and state can be separated.

It doesn’t occur to these people–just as it doesn’t occur to most Christians–that every state operates under the jurisdiction of some god. The god may be the God of the Bible, the Allah of the Muslims, the god of the humanist atheists (themselves), or any of hundreds of other gods. But some god makes the rules. The atheist separation of church and state people seem deliriously unaware that they too have a god–themselves–just as do the Christians have a God. The humanists seem not to be very intellectually self-conscious people. When they try to force a baker to make a cake for a homosexual couple getting “married,” they are doing so because they are god and they want to make the rules. Where is separation of religion and state in such a case? These are not theoretically astute thinkers.

Granted, however, there well may be a handful of enemies of God who are well aware that their arguments for the separation of church and state are just propaganda. They want to tell us what to do, and they want to get rid of any faint sniff of the Christian faith, and if the Christian rubes are foolish enough to fall for the separation of church and state nonsense, then so much the better. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for us rubes, we rubes really are that foolish.

A long-term solution is simple if not easy. The U.S., far too huge, needs to split up into many fragments. Let the humanists have their Christianity-free countries, by the dozen, score, or hundred. And let the Christians self-consciously begin to covenant with their God through the Savior Jesus Christ, in a few benighted backwater countries where deplorable and irredeemable people can live out their pathetic Neanderthal lives. Let the god of the country make the rules–but quit pretending that religion and state can be separated.

One of the most astonishing ironies in all this is that it is under Christianity that the powers of the church are most limited. According to the Bible, the civil authorities are under God, but they are not under the church. That is the way God organized things. For proof, read the Old Testament. So there really would be a sort of separation between church and state, in a Christian republic, monarchy, democracy, or whatever. The church would be restrained. The civil authority would be restrained. They both would answer to God. And the Bible gives plenty of information of how this could work out well in practice. If, of course, we have godly people wanting to do what God wants done. Oops. Well, this may take a while.

Now, about the celebration of Christmas. I think it is a good thing. It doesn’t bother me if it turns out that we have somehow lifted the pagan celebration of the winter solstice and brought it into Christianity. And so what if Jesus Christ was born on December 25, or July 25? It will prove difficult to pinpoint the exact date He was born. The main point is, He was born. That seems to me to be something worth celebrating, and worth celebrating every year to remind us that it happened. After all, this was one of the two most remarkable events in human history. God was born as both God and man, the child of the human Mary and of the Holy Spirit. He was God incarnate in the body of a small baby. This is all worth celebrating, and even non-Christians unconsciously or subconsciously understand that, as they do special things in the Christmas season. Sure, some of the special things they do might include getting drunk at the office Christmas party. But they might do other things which are worth doing. They might even show up for their twice a year visit to church (Christmas and Easter). It is good that non-Christians often in some way celebrate Christmas. It is a start, and sometimes not a bad start, at that.

The consumerism which we see at Christmas is of course ridiculous. But the principle of giving presents at Christmas time is not ridiculous at all. It is very fitting that we give presents. After all, mankind had the best present of all on Christmas Day–the birth of the God-man who would die on the cross so that countless billions of people could have eternal life. That we imitate God by giving presents to our loved ones (and perhaps to others as well) seems to me to be very sensible. We celebrate our own birth with presents. Who wants to stop the tradition of getting presents on his birthday? Nobody. Of course we should celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ by giving presents to other people. If we want to give a present to God for the present of His Son Jesus Christ, we can always do that by improving the way we live out our daily lives with a focus on trying to please Him.

Santa Claus? My Aged Parent will put a lump of coal in my stocking for saying this, but I think it is wrong for Christians to lie to their children about Santa Claus. The children need to understand who Jesus Christ was and is, and why we celebrate His birth. They don’t need to be lied to, and it is a betrayal of at least one of the principles we have been trying to instill in them. That is the principle to be truthful. Surely the true Christmas story is entrancing enough, without having to lie to our children about what is going on in order to jazz things up. The lie detracts from what I consider to be the truth of Christianity.

Here are two ironies. 1/In our locale on the planet (not in Australia, where they are confused about when it is winter and when it is summer), in the time of the deepest darkness, we celebrate the birth of the light. “The people who walk in darkness/Will see a great light;/Those who live in a dark land,/The light will shine on them.” (Isaiah 9:2) In our winter darkness, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ is the celebration of the beginning of the light which leads to “gladness,” “justice,” “righteousness,” “peace,” and a lot of other very good things (Isa. 9:3-7).

2/The second irony comes a few months later, in the new year, when around springtime we celebrate Easter. The murder of the sinless Jesus Christ, at which we all, Jews and Gentiles, connived, has led to eternal life for untold millions, and probably for untold billions as the centuries unfold. Ironically, His murder has led to life for countless people, and will lead to life for countless more. Darkness/light; murder/life. God is hard to defeat.

[Technical difficulties–hopefully now fixed for good–kept me from posting a blog installment on Thursday, Dec. 20, 2018. Rather than shrug it off and resume on the 27th with a missing Thursday, I decided to catch up with this posting today. Regular programming will resume on Thursday, Dec. 27, Lord willing. Enjoy Christmas Day, and the Christmas season.]

This series began on Thanksgiving Day, which was a suitable time to list things for which I am thankful. Here are a few more.

19/Pens. I happen to like pens. It fascinates me that companies can manufacture pens, and sell them at a low enough price so that I can buy ten good pens for a dollar plus sales tax. I may not be as gifted a writer as William Shakespeare, but I am willing to bet that I have the advantage over him in that with which I write. (He did okay considering what he had, I guess.) For under ten dollars, I can buy enough good pens, and enough good paper, to write five or six world-wide best sellers. I haven’t got around to doing that yet, but I could. Some pens I like, some I love, and some I don’t admire, with all kinds of variations up and down the scale. The world offers much variety, but a great deal of the variety is good. While my fallback ink color is black, I also enjoy pens that come in non-standard colors. Pilot puts out a Precise V5 pen which features excellent non-standard colors. Bic makes a really nice inexpensive pen, the Round Stic, with black ink, ten for a dollar. My current favorite pen is the Jot gel pens, three for a dollar at Dollar Tree. Mostly those are black, but they also offer a three-pack which includes one pen with black ink, one with blue, and one with red. I usually don’t like blue ink, but these Jot pens offer a lovely flavor of blue, and the red is good too. These Jot gel pens with fine ink can be hard to come by, because the local Dollar Tree does not always carry them. So I bought a case of 48 3-packs, through the Dollar Tree online website. The odds are very strong that I will not be able to use all those pens before I croak. Let my heirs fight over the remains.

20/Holidays. I really don’t mind a steady routine. “Scrambled eggs? This must be Tuesday.” A daily rut works fine with me. But I also enjoy holidays when I can get out of the routine a bit. I don’t have to go in to work at the job which pays me money. I don’t have to write my books. I can run a little more than usual, read a little more. Nap whenever I want to, without worrying that I have to be somewhere at a certain time. Eat a little more. “Scrambled eggs? This might be a holiday.” The holidays which give me a break are New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Those are the ones I enjoy. Most of the others are just excuses to give federal employees time off with pay while the rest of us work for a living. But the Solid Six holidays are something for which I am grateful.

21/Rabbits. I run and walk most mornings. I live in town, sort of on the outskirts, and much of my moving around is done on streets in town. The rabbits live right in town with us. It is always a treat to see a rabbit. It is not an everyday occurrence, so there is no danger that I will be bored by seeing too many rabbits. But on a good day I see one, and on very good days I see more than one. One day I saw four in the same place. Another day I saw six total, scattered around at different locations. On warm summer mornings I push my Aged Parent in a wheelchair for a mile (sometimes more, sometimes less). We are always thrilled when we see a rabbit. We saw four one morning. Finally I started marking down on a calendar the days when I see a rabbit, and how many. Next year I plan to start with the first rabbit of spring, and keep an accurate record all year long. Rabbits of course migrate south to Florida for the winter, so I won’t see any rabbits for a while, but I saw one on Thanksgiving Day (appropriately), and eight days later on November 30 I saw another. I doubt if I’ll see another rabbit until March, but when I do it will be time to celebrate their return from the south. A wonderful book featuring rabbits is Watership Down by Richard Adams.

22/Hooded sweatshirts. For some reason I find these irresistible. I have an embarrassing number of these. (Sort of like Imelda Marcos used to be with shoes.) Hooded sweatshirts are so practical. If it is cold and windy you can put the hood up, but if you start to warm up you can put the hood down. I like both the zipper kind and the kind without the zipper. Some sweatshirts have pockets, either on the side or in front, which are good for storing things. By the way, I don’t call a hooded sweatshirt a hoodie. Such a word seems vaguely disrespectful to me. Of course, follow your conscience on that issue. A few weeks ago at the place where I work, I admired the bright orange University of Illinois sweatshirt a customer was wearing, and told him so. Believe it or not, the customer promptly removed the sweatshirt and gave it to me! Really, I had not been hoping for that, or hinting at that. I tried to talk him out of such a generous gift, but he sincerely wanted me to have it. Sometimes the only thing we can do is accept a gift graciously. I have been trying to honor his gift by wearing the sweatshirt often. It is a size too big, but that is much better than a size too small.

23/Interesting people in the Bible. There are a lot of them. They grow on one the more one reads about them. Here I’ll just name a few. My absolutely favorite person in the Bible is the little slave girl of 2 Kings 5:1-3, who pointed Naaman (a fascinating person in his own right!) in the direction of being healed of his leprosy. What a girl! So full of faith and also so full of generosity of spirit. I have written about her at length in my book Nameless Heroes of the Bible. Joab is a fascinating person, a mixture of good and evil. He doesn’t get a lot of notice from Christians, but that may be an error. I hope to write more about him someday. I love Jonah the grumpy prophet, so flawed and so brave. The town clerk of Ephesus intrigues me. I admire him greatly and hope he is enjoying a wonderful afterlife (Acts 19:23-41). The blind man of Acts 9 is a great hero of mine, and I hope someday to meet him as well (not necessarily too soon). There are lots of other people in the Bible who are fascinating. I say this as one for whom the Bible is not easy to read. It is work for me to read it. But eventually the work is fully repaid. Getting to know some of the people listed above, and a large handful of others, is a great blessing.

24/The Internet. The leftist gatekeepers can no longer have it all their own way. One can find the truth. Lots of knowledge, and lots of entertainment, are there for the searching. Email allows one to be in touch with people quickly and frequently and efficiently. Finding and ordering books can be done; only a few years ago it could not really be done well. (Of course lots of things other than books can be efficiently purchased on the Internet.) The Internet is a great blessing to most of us. Of course, like any tool it can be used for bad ends. (Spam, pornography, etc.) But on the whole the Internet is a vast blessing to mankind, and something for which I personally am very grateful.

25/DVDs. A world of entertainment is available for minimal cost. Besides feature films, there are complete sets of lots of television series. My Aged Parent and I have enjoyed watching “Columbo,” “Monk,” and “Poirot.” She didn’t like “Sherlock” as well, but I enjoyed it hugely, warts and all as Oliver Cromwell might say. The list of options is endless. Life is not all about being entertained, of course–but entertainment can be a part of life that helps us keep going. I am thankful for DVDs.

This ends my list of things for which I am thankful. Of course there are others. We live in an era in which much of Christian civilization is intent on committing suicide. In the midst of tragic but completely unnecessary evils, it can become very discouraging to look at the seriously nutty things going on. But even in such sad times, there are always numerous things for which to be greatly thankful. I’m sure your list would vary greatly from mine–but everyone reading this will be able to come up with a similar list of wonderful things about which you are grateful. Thank you, God.

On Thanksgiving Day I began a series on things for which I am thankful. Here are a few more.

13/My taste buds. Thanksgiving Day included a favorite, turkey, with the associated gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes. But my taste buds do yeoman work year around. Eating is one of the joys of life. Drinking liquids is not too bad either. Reality could have been arranged so that we ate and drank only to sustain life, without being able to take pleasure in the process. But God generously permits us to enjoy our eating, and our drinking. We take eating and drinking for granted, like we do most of our blessings. So here I want to bring my taste buds on stage and say thanks for being there. Granted, your over-zealousness causes me to be five pounds overweight. (What’s that? Oh, okay. In the interest of strict accuracy, let’s say several multiples of five.) But my overeating is not really your fault. As the Bagthorpes of Helen Cresswell say, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

14/My home. It is small. A leak is developing. The storm windows need repair. The property tax bill this year was more than I hoped it might be. And so on. But my home is a very great blessing to me. I live in a quiet neighborhood, which I consider very important. I hate stupid loud noise. At bedtime I am able to drown the noise of the occasional barking dog with an electric fan. It is a safe neighborhood. I have almost enough bookshelves, and with a little more diligence I can make it enough rather than almost enough. I have been in situations in the past in which there was too much noise, and in which there was no room for my books. Those times remind me how blessed I am to live in my quiet, unprepossessing, bookshelf lined, not huge or outwardly impressive home.

15/People who try to tell the truth. We are living in an era in which much of what we hear is politically correct drivel. But there have always been a few people who try to tell the truth. They are willing to think for themselves and to accept the criticism for thinking and saying impolite truths. Here I will list just a few names: Frederic Bastiat, George Orwell, Ron Paul, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. One could easily name a dozen names (or many more) of truth-telling people publishing on the Internet right now. They are imperfect, and some of them are not Christians, but they are telling the truth according to the light given them (which in some cases is a lot of light). Fill in the names yourself. Join me in being grateful for those few people who try to tell the truth on important issues, in this era when truth is the hated enemy of our “elite” rulers. Probably it has always been that way. Probably truth is always hard to love and hard to speak. Thank heaven for those few who try to speak the truth.

16/My friends. I have only a few, and those friendships are not perfect. But they give me hope that someone sorta kinda maybe thinks I am at least a little bit not completely without redeeming social value in the world. Such hope can be hard to come by. There are what, seven or eight billion people in the world? But mostly the world is a lonely place where having even one friend can be pretty unusual. So I am grateful that there are a few people who feel some sort of friendship toward me.

17/Pets. Pets bring a lot of joy to life. They have distinct personalities. They bring us companionship. They put up with us and sometimes even like us or love us. If the God of the Bible exists, I expect that there will be lots of animals in heaven. Some of them will be our pets. They have gone on ahead, to be there to greet us if we get there too. I wonder if they will be able to speak, as Balaam’s donkey did? (Numbers 22:28-30) He had a personality and was quite articulate. Maybe our pets will be articulate in the afterlife. Whatever surprises we get, they will be good surprises rather than bad ones. I am grateful for the pets we are permitted to have here on earth.

18/Exercise. Our bodies were made to be used. I am grateful that I can run and walk. I am moving more slowly than I did a few years ago, but still moving. I hope to do that until I croak. I remember one day about four and a half decades ago. For some inexplicable reason I decided to take a walk. I was in town, and headed down the hill on the sidewalk. I guess I had what is called an epiphany. I was seeing the neighborhood from a different angle; instead of driving by to get from one place to another, I was actually seeing the houses of the town in which I lived. It was a short walk, probably a total of one-half mile or less. It was an unusual experience, and a good experience, even though returning home meant I had to go uphill rather than down. We are made to live and flourish in a physical milieu. The streets and houses of our life are meant to be seen and noted and appreciated. The automobile, as wonderful as automobiles are, has to a certain extent tempted us not to appreciate the physical world which we are meant to walk through and enjoy. I have run a lot of miles in my life, walked quite a few, have ridden quite a few on a bicycle. I am glad for all of them. The exercise has a physical benefit as well as a psychological benefit. (Big shock–we are physical beings as well as thinking beings.) Exercise means that if a snowfall comes, I can shovel a narrow path to the mailbox without necessitating a call to the EMT people. Exercise is something which has been a great blessing in my life.

Next week, Lord willing, I will try to conclude this series on things for which I am thankful.