On Friday, for the second time in two months, members of the news media were summoned to St. John's to hear the university's spin on the latest scandal in its basketball program. Players were expelled and suspended in the wake of an embarrassing escapade at a club near Pittsburgh.
The final casualty count was extensive: one player expelled, two more expected to be expelled, two indefinite suspensions and one suspension for Sunday's game against Boston College at Madison Square Garden.
But the inescapable contradiction of the afternoon was apparent as soon as the news media were ushered in to conduct interviews. We were directed to the President's Room at Alumni Hall, but there was no president.
Where was the Reverand Donald J. Harrington?
I asked the same question in December, when we were summoned to hear the spin on the sudden, ill-timed and -- in retrospect -- wrong-headed firing of coach Mike Jarvis. Where was Harrington? He hired Jarvis with so much pride and joy, but was nowhere to be seen or heard when Jarvis walked the plank.
Harrington has been the president of St. John's since 1989, but has been unable to get his arms and ego around the men's basketball program. The enterprise has been the university's golden goose since 1979, when Big East basketball began and the TV money began pouring in.
St. John's was a city college built on city kids. The facilities were out of date, but Lou Carnesecca was charming and the program was winning and it flew just under the New York radar because New Yorkers and the sports media were obsessed with the Giants and the Jets, the Knicks and the Nets, the Yankees and the Mets, the Devils, the Rangers and the Islanders.
But sometimes things just jump up and smack you -- like a group of basketball players from a religious institution having group sex with a woman after an out-of-town loss, in the midst of a disastrous season two months after their head coach was fired.
And no Harrington.
The basketball program is going through the most depressing spell in its history, facing its darkest moment, and the president is out of town, leaving all the questions in the hands of his young athletic director and an assistant coach turned interim head coach.
There comes a time when a university president has to step up, not just to face news media music, but to address the broader problem the university faces. Instead, the president sends a lieutenant and a sergeant to explain how a group of players under their charge wound up in a predicament like this.
In a way the university is lucky. What would have happened had the players been harmed?
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