Nearly everywhere he went in the fall of 1999, the scuttlebutt was that Memphis was the Southern sewer of recruiting corruption. The son of a star UT football player and a former UT baseball player himself, Ernsberger is far from naive. But he had never seen anything quite like it. The allegations about inner-city high school coaches in Memphis brokering star players for cash were eye-opening enough, but the forum for hashing them out was a story in itself: the obsessive, overwrought, occasionally over-the-top world of Internet message boards like Gridscape.com and Tiderinsider.com.
As he followed the football season, the names of two aging, fanatical Memphis boosters kept coming up. One was Alabama super-fan Young, a wealthy businessman with an erratic reputation and ties to the late legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant. The other was Roy Adams, an equally avid Tennessee booster and a garrulous sort who had become infatuated with fan forums on the Internet. Once they had been friends and drinking buddies, but years ago they fell out and were now sworn enemies.
"They are quintessential Southern characters with probably too much money and certainly too much time on their hands," Ernsberger said in an interview. "That's really what I was interested in as much as the Albert Means recruiting saga. They proved to be every bit as colorful as I expected them to be."
Ernsberger devoted an entire chapter to Young and Adams in his book Bragging Rights: A Season Inside the SEC. His research in Memphis and his contacts with coaches in places like Knoxville and Oxford pointed him toward a second Memphis story -- the unorthodox recruiting of Means, a highly regarded lineman from Trezevant High School.
"I had heard a lot of stories," said Ernsberger. "Ole Miss treated the Albert Means situation as like, 'duh, you think this is new stuff?'"
The relationship between Means and Lynn Lang, who seemed to live large for someone on a teacher's salary, became another chapter. It ended with this cryptic message:
"Or is there, as many SEC folk suspect, something rotten in Memphis? Will we ever know the truth? As they say on The X-files, the truth is out there."
Bragging Rights was published in December, 2000. If the truth was still "out there," at least the story of Logan Young, Roy Adams, Lynn Lang, and Albert Means was in print. A serious writer had given narrative structure, perspective, details, and credibility to what had previously been rumor, gossip, and anonymous Internet chat. The ripple effect is still being felt.
Blowing the Whistle on "Slave Trading"
Milton Kirk makes only a cameo appearance in Bragging Rights and Ernsberger did not interview him. Kirk was Lang's sidekick and assistant and is the brother of Shelby County Commissioner Cleo Kirk.
Throughout Albert Means' senior year of 1999-2000, Kirk was often at Lang's side, within earshot as he made his pitch to various coaches at Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan State, Tennessee, Memphis, Ole Miss, and Alabama. He was familiar with the details, which allegedly ranged from $200,000 in cash to $50,000-$80,000 in cash along with a house and two cars. Kirk thought he was supposed to get some of the cash himself. When he didn't, he began to complain, first at parties and football gatherings, then to the NCAA in the fall of 2000.
In January 2001, a month after Ernsberger's book was published, Kirk told his story to The Commercial Appeal. In a story by reporter Gary Parrish, Kirk went public with his sensational claim that Lang had shopped Means for $200,000 and been paid to push him to Alabama.
"Parrish read my book and was interested in the subject but did it all on his own and deserves all the credit for talking to Kirk," Ernsberger said. "I did not talk to Kirk. He was in the office when I was at Trezevant but I didn't quote him. He didn't seem like a meaningful figure at the time."
Parrish's scoop drew a huge response from readers and was picked up by regional and national media. At a time when colleges were being busted by the NCAA for giving athletes plane tickets, pocket money, or sneakers, auctioning an unproven high school defensive lineman for $200,000 -- none of which apparently went to the player although some may have gone to his family -- was unprecedented.
Kirk's story, embellished with charges of "slave trading" and belated sentiment for Means' mother who Kirk said was also supposed to be paid, had been hinted at on the Internet for months before the story broke. UT booster Roy Adams, a regular Internet poster under the name "Tennstud," says at least a dozen people heard Kirk make the charge two and a half months before he went public with it. But Adams denies pushing Kirk toward the CA and told the Flyer, in fact, that he advised him to keep it quiet.
For counsel, Kirk turned to Karl Schledwitz, a lawyer turned developer with good political savvy. Schledwitz graduated from Trezevant High School and UT, where he was student government president and a friend of Phillip Fulmer. In a deposition this year, Schledwitz said he and Kirk spoke numerous times to the NCAA in 2000.
If Kirk had not gone to the newspaper, the case might have stayed with the NCAA. Federal and state prosecutors have said they started their investigation after reading Kirk's story in The Commercial Appeal.
In contrast to the cocky, powerfully built Lang, who was a three-year letterman as a defensive lineman at Alcorn State from 1990-1992, Kirk presents an aging, somewhat forlorn appearance and has been given to self-pitying statements about his financial plight and the injustice of it all. His notoriety came with a high price. Since he incriminated himself as well as Lang, Memphis City Schools officials had little choice but to fire him.
His troubles were far from over. On August 29, 2001, he and Lang were indicted on bribery and extortion charges "under color of official right" or, in other words, as public employees. Shortly thereafter Kirk pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation and community service.
Lang held out for nearly another year, although it isn't clear exactly when he began to cooperate with prosecutors. He was first represented by A C Wharton, who was then a private attorney and Shelby County public defender and is now Shelby County mayor. Lang dropped Wharton, or vice versa, three weeks after the indictment was returned. Wharton hasn't commented on the case, but it seems likely that Lang lied to him.
On November 7, 2002, Lang appeared in court to plead guilty to racketeering and pledge his cooperation with the government. Curiously, he was represented by a public defender. The coach, who had allegedly received $150,000 in cash in 24 installments from Logan Young two years earlier, was now officially indigent.
That's the kind of talk I expect from an Iowa Hawkeye. Not an Ohio State Buckeye