College Basketball: What happened to Chuck Person?

The Rifleman was the most notable figure caught in the FBI investigation. That might have been the deepest cut of all.

The recent FBI investigation into several NCAA schools and their basketball programs served as a wakeup call to many fans of college basketball. It was not the revelation of cheating in college basketball that was new. Every fan secretly suspects that their successful rivals are either cheats or dirty within the rules.

As a North Carolina alumnus, I have lived this reality for the last six years since defensive tackle Marvin Austin’s tweet about being in Miami brought in the NCAA into the life of Carolina football. Assistant coach John Blake was accused of some of the same things that the FBI is looking at the four basketball coaches for.

From that moment on, the NCAA enforcement division has never truly left campus (theoretically they did, but England and France also had pauses in the Hundred Years War). In the tail end of the football scandal that ended the Butch Davis era, the Wainstein Report was commissioned and it revealed that there was an easy class program being underseen (since 1993) by Deborah Crowder in the African and African American Studies Department.

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The NCAA and the Tar Heels have been skirmishing over that revelation ever since. The NCAA is looking at it as an unfair advantage for the school’s athletic programs since athletes did take some of these classes. The Tar Heels are arguing that it is an academic issue separate from NCAA jurisdiction since the classes were taken by a number of non-athletes. The school has been sanctioned by SACS, the accreditation body of southern colleges and some high schools.

The issue is not likely to be resolved soon with legal action from the school likely to follow any overly harsh NCAA punishment (say voiding the 2005 championship). It hangs like a sword of Damocles and cost the Heels at least one key basketball recruit and possibly the 2016 championship as a result.

It is because of that issue that I always cringe when another school gets targeted by the NCAA. Their punishment might indicate how the NCAA is thinking and, at the same time, I am glad for the distraction away from the Tar Heels’ problems. The Louisville escort scandal was like this. On one hand, I thought it was ridiculous and the way Rick Pitino handled it was ridiculous. On the other hand, any harsh punishment for the Cardinals might simply be a prelude for the Tar Heels. Would they touch the 2013 Championship (and therefore later UNC’s 2005 title?)?

The other thing about the Louisville escort scandal was that it happened to someone else. Every fan of another program gets indignant at the transgressions of other schools. They also sigh in relief that it is not them (some believe that it could never be them, but that is another story).

When four college assistant coaches were charged by the FBI and the Justice Department with real crimes (not NCAA violations, which may come later), I mostly was glad that it was not teams I cared about and nobody I knew. Or so I thought.

There was one outlier. That was Auburn assistant coach Chuck Person. I grew up in the 1990s and the basketball video game I played the most was NBALive95. In that game Person was one of the best three-point shooters. His NBA nickname was the Rifleman. In an age before Stephen Curry, kids who just liked to chuck the ball from the three-point arc had fewer touchstones in the league. Person was therefore a player that I connected with despite playing for a team (San Antonio Spurs) that I hardly ever saw on television.

I didn’t know much about Person other than that. He had a younger brother Wesley who also played in the NBA, and I felt connected with that too since I was an older brother. I did not know he had played college ball with Charles Barkley at Auburn nor did I know that he had become an assistant under the Bruce Pearl regime.

Yet there he is, accused of six crimes: bribery conspiracy, solicitation of bribes and gratuities, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and travel act conspiracy.

Person did not play in today’s NBA with its expanding salary cap. I don’t know his lifestyle habits, but I assume he had made millions over the course of his career. If that is the case then it is hard for me to understand why he gave it all away for allegedly $91,500 to steer players toward certain agents. More concernedly, it bothers me that his justification might have been that everyone else was doing it. Remember I don’t need hypotheticals, John Blake happened (and there are three other guys).

Person’s case is therefore personally distressing, however, there is another element here. Of the four coaches, three of them came from programs that are not considered college basketball powerhouses. USC, Oklahoma State, and Auburn have had their moments, but they are programs looking to become powers. If they have coaches that are doing this, then there are dozens of programs in the country in just the same sort of spot that they are.

Next: Rick Pitino and the FBI Investigation

Chuck Person was once an example to me that the three-point shot was a legitimate weapon in basketball. I can only hope that the revelation of his conduct as an assistant coach will lead to others not following his example in the future.

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