Baylor Rape Scandal for Blogscritics--Part Two

(This is the second article in a five part series analyzing athletes, universities, and crime. The primary focus of the series is the ongoing revelations from the rape scandal at Baylor University and was originally published at Blogcritics Magazine on December 20, 2016.) Welcome to Fact or Fanatic, where today we continue our in-depth look into college athletics and how universities and the NCAA handle the growing problem of corruption, bad behavior, and sexual abuse. This problem is so widespread and so malleable that everything’s gone to pot since we published the first installment.

For example, in our previous column we extolled the Army-Navy game and how it represents everything good about college football.

Sorry about that.

As the Wake Forest spy ring story increases in scale, it appears that Army – along with Virginia Tech and Louisville – received Wake’s offensive game plans in the week prior to those games. So, our bad. We got sucked into the annual pageantry of the Army cadets versus the Navy midshipmen, and completely failed to discern that while the players were everything good about the game, the coaches were not.

For shame.

In fact today the NCAA decided to fine both Louisville and Virginia Tech $25,000. Wow. Those amounts are so huge for programs that make hundreds of millions of dollars annually, we’re sure no one else will ever stop and say no when a disgruntled play-by-play announcer offers a coach his opponents’ game plan. Cheating, at least, hasn’t evolved as quickly as some other faults. It’s not that different from a situation involving Tennessee and Florida, a Kinkos, Ron Zook, and Steve Spurrier two decades ago.

Still lame.

In addition, the past few days have been uber-busy in Minnesota. Ten players were suspended for the bowl game due to a sexual assault investigation. The case, which allegedly implicates six players as participants in the assault, wasn’t prosecuted due to a lack of evidence. All six players were suspended, but so were four more. That on its own is bad enough, but what happened next is worse: The remainder of the Gophers’ football team announced they would “boycott” the bowl game and “stand in solidarity” with their teammates.

Wait – what?

The Minnesota football team announced they would boycott all practices for the bowl game and even the Holiday Bowl itself. For a couple of days it looked like the bowl was in jeopardy, until Saturday when the Gophers finally capitulated. The night before, the players were made aware of the details in the 80-page Equal Opportunity And Affirmative Action report that laid out why the 10 players had been suspended. That report, allegedly, was the catalyst for the players and the university reaching a compromise that would send the remainder of the Gophers to the bowl game.

The players also released a statement in which they acknowledged that sexual assault was unacceptable and that all women should be treated with respect, but – you know. Might have been nice if they’d thought that first BEFORE they decided to take a stand beside their teammates who blatantly didn’t share that point of view.

Both these new disasters play right into what we’re going to break down in this second installment of our series on NCAA athletes, criminal behavior, and who’s to blame. Our guests Laura Leigh Majer and Kevin Lindstrom will be adding their expertise to our inquiry, and we are hoping to dig even further in our attempts to disinter the real roots of this ongoing disaster.

We last discussed the tragically flawed situation at Baylor, the entitlement displayed by Stanford University rapist Brock Turner, and the impact both situations have had upon college athletics, fans, schools, and media. This time, and with the addition of these two latest scandals, we’re going to expand our focus a bit and concentrate on one aspect that is a constant in all these cases:

The coaches.

The Buck Stops Here

President Harry Truman’s mantra is as applicable today as it was when he okayed the nukes that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War Two. In college athletics, there’s a definite hierarchy of power and the coaches are the first power position in the chain. The coaches know their athletes intimately. They see and interact with them on a daily basis, season and off-season. They establish the code of conduct they expect their athletes to hold to, and if that code is violated they determine the first disciplinary actions.

But in the world of big-money college sports, coaches are kept busy doing all sorts of things in addition to the coaching they must do week to week: practice, scrimmage, meetings, and so forth. Many big-name school coaches have weekly television and radio shows on the local stations, and appear on sports-related media from ESPN to the college newspaper.

They are pseudo-celebrities in the towns that host their schools, and must make an appearance at every important school event. Have to keep both the media and the boosters happy, after all. Even during the height of the season, they are recruiting – setting up trips for recruits and their families to come to the campus, take in a game, hang with the current team in the facilities, and so forth.

And let’s not forget the community service these coaches are expected to do. They invite children with disabilities or challenges to their practices, or meet groups of them on the sidelines before a game. Recently, for example, Tennessee head coach Butch Jones and several of his best-known players went to Chattanooga to meet the kids who’d survived a tragic bus crash the day before. Urban Meyer at Ohio State has paired with the Ohio Treasurer to create a system where the disabled can save money against future expenses. Every school has a story of its coach affecting positive change in its community, and that’s something we cannot overlook.

The positive impact these coaches have upon their communities is indisputable.

But beneath all those shiny PR moments lies big-time coaching’s soft, dank underbelly. Coaches affect more than you might think, and if a coach goes off the rails the program is not far behind.

The Petrino Effect

We write fantasy, so we love epic stories of disaster, love gone awry, and betrayal. Thank all the gods we have Bobby Petrino to keep us amused, because he’s a fantasy epic George RR Martin would revel in. Petrino’s history is one of the most checkered in college football history, between job-hopping, recruiting weirdness, and bimbo biking. But no one could have seen adding cheating to that list. The fact that no one could have seen it means that someone should have suspected it, because Petrino is that kind of coach.

Yes, we know Cardinal fans. Louisville hired Petrino the first time, and he got the school to the Orange Bowl and thinking big before he jumped ship to coach Atlanta (where he managed to last only 13 games before bailing out and returning to the college game at Arkansas). After a motorcycle accident shamed Petrino out of the SEC, he managed to last one season at Western Kentucky before getting re-hired by Louisville.

Here he is once more, ready to launch his Cardinals against LSU in the Citrus Bowl, and what happens? His staff (yeah, right) accepted information from a disgruntled former Wake Forest assistant-turned-play-by-play-announcer without his knowledge (like we’re going to believe that) and got poor old Bobby stuck in a brand new mess.

Of course.

Bobby Petrino is the poster boy for why neither the fans nor the media can wholly trust a college coach anymore. In the days of yore, no one would have dreamed of questioning iconic coaches like General Robert Neyland, Bear Bryant, or Bobby Bowden. But the birth of the 24-hour news cycle and the instant reporting capability of online new sites has made it correspondingly more difficult for coaches to have that nod-nod wink-wink relationship with the press that some of those old-school coaches claimed as a benefit to their offices. We no longer trust our coaches and we have no reason to.

Fans monitor flight traffic sites to see who their coaches are going to see – or conversely, which coaches are coming to be seen. Every minute of a coach’s press conference is covered on live stream, which gives the media the chance to color or taint the coach’s message at will – while the coach is still talking. And for a coach like Petrino, everyone becomes a journalist ready to break a new scoop.

This kind of sports media free-for-all is prevalent throughout college football, except for one place.

Waco, Texas

Waco is a small city, with fewer than 130,000 residents and a pleasant blend of small-town virtues and big-city amenities. Trip Advisor’s list of things to do there includes several museums, the Cameron Park Zoo, and the Texas Rangers’ Hall of Fame. At #9 on that list is a place that may sound familiar: McLane Stadium, home to the Baylor Bears, almost literally the “house that Art Briles built” at an astonishing cost of $266 million. The stadium is a fitting home for one of the nation’s elite programs, and an equally fitting monument to one man’s ego and power in this otherwise friendly and deep-rooted city.

For some reason, that 24-7 monitoring wasn’t going on in Waco. While Baylor football players were committing crimes and perpetrating sexual assaults, not one member of the local media reported on what was obviously a systemic problem at the university. And although alleged assault occurred as far back as 2011, it wasn’t until August of 2015 that Texas Monthly broke the story with “Silence at Baylor.”

A must-read article, by the way.

Not until that article was it confirmed to everyone who was whispering uncomfortably about the Baylor scandal (and in specific the Sam Ukwuachu case) and to the world at large that yes, the coaching staff at Baylor knew exactly what was going on, and didn’t give two shakes of a dog’s tail that they were bringing a sexual predator onto their campus. After all, why should they? The curtain of secrecy was drawn so tightly around the Baylor campus that everyone from the local media to the boosters to the alumni to law enforcement seemed to be in on it.

Let us be frank. Regardless of the full-page ads, the banners of support hanging from luxury suites at McLane, and the fervent protestations of anyone even peripherally involved with Baylor football, the chances of any coach, athletic department employee, or administration employee being unaware of the ongoing problem are slim to non-existent. The legwork required to hide such criminal acts is prodigious, which makes the Baylor Campus Police and the Waco Police Department also suspiciously negligent. In fact, PBS reports that a 60 Minutes report claimed an alleged “history of Baylor campus police and Waco authorities burying reports of sexual violence.”

Former Title IX Coordinator Patty Crawford sent a request to the Waco Police Department, asking for the records of any reported sexual assaults on Baylor students. She received an email from the Baylor Vice-President of Campus Safety that the WPD “do not want the actual police reports turned over to Title IX” – another example of university obstructionism that led to her very public resignation in October.

That VP is Reagan Ramsower and here’s what he said to CBS Sports about Crawford’s claims:

Ramsower said the Baylor campus police department he oversees had a history of burying sexual assault complaints that came to them.

Keteyian asked Ramsower about the investigation into the incident report. “Nothing ever happened for well over a year. What happened there? Was there an investigation? And if not, why not? You have a police report – ”

“There was a police report; I suppose it stayed with the police department,” Ramsower said. “It never came out of the police department. That was a significant failure to respond by our police department, there’s no doubt about it.”

Doesn’t it make you wonder?

Doesn’t it make you think about how the university was able to keep all this under wraps? And if Art Briles had avoided just one mistake – offering Sam Ukwuachu a position at Baylor after he was off Boise State’s team for being abusive to his girlfriend – he might still be sitting in his office today, the gloried head coach of an elite program, and no one besides the victims, the perpetrators, and the officials involved in the cover-up would have any idea that the Baylor athletic department was manufacturing not ways to win on the field, but ways to encourage players in their entitled behavior, and teaching them that with enough money and power anything can be made to no longer exist.

Baylor wasn’t producing future pro football players. Baylor was producing serial rapists and batterers. And the coaching staff and administration were in it up to their eyebrows, especially Briles.

As Laura Leigh Majer points out: 

“The alleged crimes happened under his watch. For him to build the success of the Baylor football program to the level he did, he had to have a close watch over all the activities of the program. Consequently, he has culpability for the alleged crimes. He allowed this behavior to continue. He accepted transfers who were known to have abusive pasts.”

Her opinion gels with what Brenda Tracy, sexual assault victim of the 1998 Washington State gang rape case and advocate for tougher sexual assault penalties, observed during her visit to Baylor to talk to the football team about the victims of sexual violence. It wasn’t until after her talk with the athletes that a Baylor assistant coach pulled her aside and once again exposed that curdling, rotten underbelly of Baylor’s real agenda.

“He said this wasn’t a football issue. This was an issue on the rest of the campus. And he just went on and on that [former head coach] Art Briles did absolutely nothing and this was all unfounded and nothing happened and they were being treated unfairly and there was some conspiracy going on against Baylor football.”

This “conspiracy” was evidently huge. Ousted Baylor President Ken Starr claimed in August that Art Briles was the real victim of the Baylor rape scandal.

“A grave injustice was done to Art Briles,” Starr said of the coach’s firing, going on to say that he takes issue with media descriptions of Briles’ behavior. “Coach Briles has been calumnied…it’s completely unfair.”

Briles himself seems to agree, if you take his “apology interview” with ESPN as anything other than a blatant ploy to render him a legitimate candidate for a big-time coaching hire. An interview, we might add, where he never uttered the words “rape” or “sexual assault.”  His lawsuit against Baylor last week asserts that the university and Baylor officials entered into a conspiracy to libel him and make him into the scapegoat of the ongoing scandal. The suit also contends:

that purported lies about him reflect a media strategy hatched by “spin doctors” at the public relations firm G.F. Bunting & Co. This company, which Briles not so gently directs the Texas court to observe is from out-of-state California, has “embarked upon a campaign of malice” against Briles, a native Texan. This “campaign,” Briles insists, “includes re-creation and invention of facts to manipulate public opinion and to cover the past and ongoing wrongdoing, mistakes and failures of the Baylor University Board of Regents.”

Briles also asserts that his inability to secure a new coaching job reflects a conspiracy by the defendants to dissuade other schools from hiring him.

Texas attorney Kevin Lindstrom offered his perspective on Briles when we asked about the coach’s potential culpability. 

“Unless the published information from the Pepper Hamilton Report is significantly inaccurate, he certainly contributed to the environment that led to the problem being systemic. If nothing else, it appears that his protection of the football program impeded investigations, and he certainly was not proactive about disciplining his players or coaches.”

We also asked if the response of the university, alumni, boosters, and fans was detrimental to both Briles’s case individually and the school’s. “To the second part, absolutely. We have seen it in multiple situations where cover-up and denial are making the efforts for justice more difficult, whether it be Penn State or Watergate. The aggressive nature of their denial of any wrongdoing by Briles, when compared to the suffering of the victims, is astounding to see.”

Coaching Pedestals with Feet of Clay

The local media in any big college town has dual allegiances. First off, if they want to survive in the post-print digital age, they must be able to attract the most views from their fan base. If you don’t think that absolutely impacts media coverage of college sports, then we’d courteously recommend a gut check – one thoughtfully provided by the International Business Times in its article “Sports Journalism in the Digital Age”:

With this explosion of information, however, come profound questions for the sports media industry and those who rely on it for news and entertainment. Technology has massively disrupted online sports journalism, bringing fans an unprecedented range and volume of content choices while simultaneously altering legacy business models in sports media. At the very least, sports journalists will continue to face powerful new competitors with unbeatable access. And one way or another, their old prerogatives will be challenged.

The Baylor case is one such episode, when old school journalism directly confronted new age media. During the five years of the alleged cover-up, local media never once undertook the investigative journalism that would have easily revealed what was going on. In fact, as late as this summer, Waco local television station KWTX-10 was still releasing articles with a decidedly pro-Briles and pro-Baylor slant. Apparently, “anonymous sources” report that:

Pepper Hamilton, the independent law firm the university hired to investigate the sexual assault scandal that engulfed the school’s football program, fumbled, according to university insiders and secret recordings of meetings with athletic staffers obtained by KWTX, which suggest that the firm’s investigators came to Waco with an agenda to purge members of the football program and had a racial undertone in their line of questioning.

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently there are racial overtones present when a woman says “No.”

But here is where the flaws of the journalistic model are grossly apparent. In an age of mega-monster journalism like ESPN or Fox Sports, so many stories are reliant upon first being reported by local media. If the local media is on board with the university and the football coach, then those stories that can cause a winning program to implode are not filed. It’s not until an external media source, like Texas Monthly, breaks the story that the national outlets get involved. And when that outlet is ESPN and Outside the Lines, the story isn’t just broken, it’s nuked.

Waco media isn’t alone in this type of turn-the-other-cheek behavior toward a big-name coach for a national football powerhouse. That’s the way it’s always been in college football, unless a coach’s transgressions are so huge that they can’t be hidden. Think of Ohio State coach Woody Hayes’s little faux-pas in the 1978 Gator Bowl, when he punched a Clemson player.

Those mistakes you can’t hide from anyone.

But in 1978, it took a coach hitting a player on national television for the public outcry to be loud enough for a legendary coach to get fired. Not until 1987 did the sports world learn what it would take for an entire program to get nuked by the NCAA, when Southern Methodist University received the “death penalty” for paying its players. The story was broken by the local ABC affiliate in Dallas, WFAA, and investigative journalist John Sparks. The ongoing activity at SMU was an open secret in Dallas, especially as it involved big-name players like Eric Dickerson and a cadre of wild and woolly boosters working in conjunction with the coaching staff of the Mustangs. As Sparks himself said in 2011:

The story culminated more than two years of work. SMU’s president, athletic director, head football coach and recruiting coordinator abruptly resigned, and by the time the dust had settled, the NCAA handed down the death penalty that led to the cancellation of SMU’s 1987 and 1988 seasons, the university changed its form of governance, boosters were banned for life, the Methodist Bishops investigated and the trail led to Texas Governor Bill Clements – who admitted he had known about the payments and had ordered that they continue even while SMU had been on probation.

So the behavior of Baylor alumni, boosters, and fans along with that of university administration, officials, and coaches perhaps isn’t that shocking. Perhaps that’s just the way it is in Texas, or the South, or college football in general. Perhaps the golden rule of CFB coaching is “don’t get caught” – advice Petrino obviously is incapable of following. Or “don’t fib about emails,” like BCS-championship winning coach Jim Tressel did at Ohio State. Or maybe even “best not take that recruit to your house for breakfast,” like Ole Miss’s embattled head coach Hugh Freeze did. But a lot has changed in our society since SMU got the first, last, and only death penalty administered by the NCAA to date. As Sparks remarked:

After it became clear that the death penalty decimated SMU’s football program, the conventional wisdom was that the NCAA would never again hand down such harsh punishment. So an atmosphere where no one was going to let the death penalty happen again provided the perfect haven for “anything goes.” No one was going to do anything about it. What better environment for those who would cross over the line to operate in?

Indeed. And now once again, the college football world is looking at a private, church-affiliated university in Texas and wondering if obstruction of justice for elite athletes who commit crimes merits the same punishment that another private, church-affiliated Texas school received 30 years ago for their blatant payment arrangement with its players.

But there’s an element to the Baylor case that sets it apart from the SMU case. While coaches were involved in the Pony Excess scheme, the impetus and financing came from boosters, and the case was broken by local media looking into the story for over two years.

At Baylor, the impetus for the alleged cover-ups originated within the university itself, aided and abetted by local law enforcement and ignored by the local media for five years.

“Let me first state my personal bias as a woman from Dallas who was in junior high when SMU was given the death penalty,” Majernik begins. “That said, let me also state that the accrediting agency claims Baylor failed to provide ‘appropriate fiscal and administrative control’ over their athletic programs.  Conclusion: YES, in my opinion, Baylor should receive the death penalty from the NCAA. SMU’s transgressions were nothing by comparison. The unfortunate part of such action is, of course, the players who did not commit any crimes but have to pay the penalty.”

Counters Lindstrom: 

“They have fired the enablers in the big leadership positions, which was not insignificant. We saw the president, athletic director and head football coach of a major college program resign or be terminated. How often has that happened? So to the extent that they recognized there was a significant issue and that current leadership not only wasn’t going to solve the problem, they were clearly contributing to it, they made very legitimate efforts.”

As an aside, we know two other places where the termination of the president, athletic director, and head football coach took place. One was SMU in the 1980s, and the other was Penn State just a few years ago when university president Graham Spanier, AD Tim Curley, and HC Joe Paterno all resigned or were fired. So it’s happened at least twice before. That being said, look at the gravity of both cases – and the Penn State case is one we’ll examine in depth in our next installment of this series – and that should reveal the scale of the Baylor situation comparatively.

Lindstrom continued: 

“On the other hand, clearly they have not been as aggressive about their Title IX program as they should have been, and they made a very selfish decision to keep the remaining coaching staff on board in order to not lose their players. While they are paying the price for that in some ways now, I sincerely hope that there were no other assaults or issues that any of those coaches could have impacted negatively, both for the victims’ sake and for Baylor’s.”

It didn’t quite work out that way, unfortunately. And Baylor’s lack of punishment for the assistant coaching staff under Briles’s regime has resulted in more embarrassment for the university in the wake of Baylor’s claim that Briles and other athletic department officials knew of a 2011 gang rape but didn’t report it.

Earlier in November, Briles’s son Kendal, the Bears’ offensive coordinator, and other members of the team’s staff issued a statement in which they claimed that the student-athlete’s coach had reported her rape to Judicial Affairs. They quoted that coach as saying that Art Briles had “handled the matter honorably.”

The Baylor “Culture”

Wow. The arrogance and insensitivity involved in Briles’s former staff releasing such a statement when confronted their current employer’s report is mind-boggling. If there were, for some reason, any lingering doubts that Art Briles’s influence permeated the entire investigative process during these events, or that it still hovers over like Waco like a miasma of doom, go ahead and set them aside.

There’s been a lot of talk about “culture” when it comes to the burgeoning disaster of sexual assault cases on American college campuses. In particular, culture is a hot-button word being utilized in cases allegedly involving student-athletes. But culture is a nebulous word, here used as a kinder way of saying cesspool or pigsty – a euphemism for what people are hesitant to come out and say.

At Baylor, however, the euphemism “culture” is very specific. Baylor University was so invested in winning football games, in having top-tier facilities, in playing the big-money game of recruiting top tier athletes, in gaining the prime time television slots, in having Heisman trophy winners, in beating arch-nemeses like TCU or Oklahoma, in straddling the top of the CFB world, that the university created a culture where it was all right for their players to assault “just a few” women sexually, where it was all right to threaten a victim with disciplinary action if she didn’t play ball, where it was all right to make a quiet phone call to the Waco PD about those inconvenient little matters, where it was all right to obstruct justice in order to get those wins, get those top draft picks, and hoist those trophies.

In case you had ever wondered what the “culture” part actually means, there you have it. And no, we don’t have to backtrack and tuck an “alleged” in there before the word assault, because Baylor players have been convicted of those crimes already. The culture isn’t created by the music played at games, or the uniforms, or the nightclubs that let athletes in for free, or the palatial facilities big-time programs have for their players. The culture is created by the head coach and the assistants, the athletic department the coaches answer to, and the administration that oversees the athletic department.

At Baylor, the culture was solidified when in June of 2014, Art Briles defiantly accepted Sam Ukuawachu as a player on his football team in the full knowledge that the athlete had been dismissed from Boise State because of domestic violence – and then that player sexually assaults a Baylor student just four months later. That one move by Art Briles sealed his “culture” and his legacy, and the resulting disaster has unfolded as a result.

Because what did that one action express?

Come to Baylor, where we don’t care about your past and will help you evade future punishment by enabling and protecting you in the present.

“The safety of all students on a campus should be a primary concern for a university. No one should be above the law or given ‘special treatment’ for being a star athlete if they break a law. I do not think universities are providing safe environments, and support for victims, overall.”

Majernik’s point is a good one, and one that plays right into how we want to close this article. Because it has become patently obvious that at Baylor, the safety of all its students was never the priority. The safety of those who played on Saturdays in McLane Stadium – that was the priority and the focus of the “culture” at Baylor University, and everyone bought into it.

Except, perhaps, for the 17 women who are claiming to have been sexually assaulted by 19 football players. But certainly, Art Briles and his staff and the university they represented handled the matters honorably. Or as Shakespeare brilliantly put it in Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar:

The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–

For Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Unfortunately, there’s one more piece to this puzzle we have to investigate, one more element to factor into this issue, and that’s the role of the NCAA. Can we all at least agree on one thing? Regardless of the ominous silence resonating from the NCAA offices, the governing body of collegiate athletics must play a role in what happens next.

And to do that, there has to be a meeting of the minds between two diametrically opposed ideologies: big money sports, and Title IX.

Baylor Football Scandal for Blogcritics--Part One

(This is the first article in a five part series analyzing athletes, universities, and crime. The primary focus of the series is the ongoing revelations from the rape scandal at Baylor University and was originally published at Blogcritics Magazine on December 14, 2016.)

Welcome to NCAA Fact or Fanatic, where we’re stoked that Army just broke the 14-year-old streak against Navy. It was a great game, and if your last name is Poe, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with naming your son Edgar. (Go Army! He had a great game too.)

Watching the military academies play is an annual don’t-miss pleasure for me. The teams respect each other. The attending cadets from West Point and the Midshipmen from Annapolis are polite, they are competitive but respectful, and their joy when they win is unvarnished and unrestrained. You don’t see a player punching a fan in the face (and then getting rewarded by being a Heisman finalist) or a coach stomping off the field without shaking his opponent’s hand.

Army and Navy represent everything good about college football, and that’s why their annual post-season game is such a pleasure to watch. But 2016 hasn’t been a big year for the good side of NCAA athletics.

For many reasons.

At several major universities with high-profile athletic programs, the news in the past few years has been embarrassing. The University of North Carolina’s academic fraud was exposed two years ago. Ole Miss’s academic fraud was supplemented by special benefits and illegal recruiting. Notre Dame recently self-reported its own academic fraud, and in August had six players arrested on the same day. The University of Alabama just this season had two star players (Cam Robinson and Tim Williams) arrested for drug and/or gun charges at different times.

Four different universities. Four different types of violations or crimes. And four times that college football fans have questioned the NCAA’s response to each specific situation. UNC has yet to receive any sanctions or punishment for the decades-long scam that allowed athletes (and other students as well) to skate past required GPA totals. Ole Miss voluntarily sacrificed scholarships – 10 to be exact – but the NCAA has so far been mum, and word is the Rebels are about to be slammed for allegations of a far more serious nature. Notre Dame was forced to vacate all wins from 2012 and 2013. As for Alabama, its stars sat out one game each against inferior opponents.

And then, there’s Baylor.

Let us be clear. Sexual assault on college campuses is a skyrocketing national problem. According to the Office of Civil Rights, which is part of the US Department of Education and is responsible for Title IX enforcement, 347 US colleges have been reported for Title IX violations. Of those cases, 57 have been resolved, leaving 290 open. (If you’d like to see the schools on the list, head to their website. Some of the schools are surprising.)

That’s a staggering number. But it doesn’t reveal the entirety of what we’re looking at here. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center tells us that one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college. More than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report the assault, while 63.3% of men at one university who self-reported acts qualifying as rape or attempted rape admitted to committing repeat rapes.

It’s an indisputable fact that Baylor’s not the only school with Title IX issues. What makes Baylor stand out is the prominence of its football program paired with probably the stupidest, most self-destructive behavior the school, its staff and administration, and fans could have demonstrated after the story broke. Considering that Baylor is a Baptist-affiliated private university, the outrage was proportionately higher. And as more details pile up and more women – including victims of at least four alleged gang rapes involving football players since 2011 – are added to the Title IX lawsuit against the university, we felt we needed better perspective on the Baylor case and the environment that incubated such behavior.

So we have brought in a pair of experts for their take on the issue: one male attorney and one female sports journalist.

Kevin Lindstrom received his journalism degree from Texas A&M and his law degree from SMU. He worked as a journalist for the Temple Daily News while getting his degrees and is now an attorney in Dallas.

Laura Leigh Majer graduated from the University of Texas-Austin with a Bachelor’s degree in History, and received her Masters of Public Administration from the University of North Texas. She is an NCAA Special Contributor to NFLFemale.com and host of “Down and Dirty Sports” on AltConRadio. She lives in Dallas.

Some of our questions were sent to both Lindstrom and Majer. A few were individual and pertained specifically to the insight they are best qualified to offer. We thought it important to have both a male and female point of view, one that answered to the law and the other to the media – and we feel the credibility each offers to the tangled Baylor web of disaster is necessary in helping to disentangle the web of craziness surrounding not just Waco, but the entirety of college sports.

Obviously, it’s going to take more than a single column to dig our way through everything, so this is the first component of our approach to the complex dilemma. This series of articles will be focusing on Baylor University primarily, but make no mistake: This is a national problem, and one that has reached unacceptable levels of prevalence.

“I find the Baylor football scandal a disgusting outrage and how it has been handled to be a travesty.”

Majer didn’t mince words with her first assessment of the ongoing scandal. Lindstrom agrees.

“As background, I think big time football came to a small private college and no one was ready for it. There were not enough safeguards, whether that be in making sure the police departments knew the correct protocols, or Baylor’s Title IX office, or the athletic department. Add to that a win-at-all-costs mentality and some conscious decisions to bring in players even though there were legitimate questions about their background, and you have a recipe for systematic problems. As crimes were committed, the focus was on protecting the football program, not protecting the victims.”

We’re talking about a university where 17 women have reported domestic violence or sexual assault involving 19 football players in the past four years. So this isn’t some fluke we’re talking about. Baylor regents recently admitted there are 125 cases of sexual assault or harassment the university is currently investigating. 

One hundred and twenty-five. How is that possible?

It’s important to understand that Baylor University has been in active conflict with the requirements of Title IX for decades, as the Dallas Morning News reported in May.

Baylor has had a history of resisting Title IX, the 1972 law which barred sex discrimination on campuses that receive federal money. In 1974, when Baylor women couldn’t wear pants on campus, the school’s president called the law “the grossest grab for power in federal history.”

You couldn’t dance on campus at Baylor until 1996, couldn’t be part of a consensual sexual relationship or be homosexual until 2015. The university’s resistance to equitable treatment of male and female students is further complicated by a student code of conduct that is guided by restrictions on drunkenness, lewd or indecent behavior, students living together outside marriage, and

Expression that is inappropriate in the setting of Baylor University and in opposition to the Christian ideals it strives to uphold.

Yes, we’re choking on that last one as well. Baylor’s policies emphasize a “boys will be boys” mentality, while expecting girls to “act like ladies” – a pair of outdated, unrealistic ideologies for the 21st century. Its sexual conduct policy is equally out of touch:

Baylor will be guided by the biblical understanding that human sexuality is a gift from God and that physical sexual intimacy is to be expressed in the context of marital fidelity. Thus, it is expected that Baylor students, faculty and staff will engage in behaviors consistent with this understanding of human sexuality.

Why are these rules so important? Because while students and athletes alike are expected to follow them, they are the same rules that were used to browbeat sexual assault victims after they reported the rapes to the administration. In order to have an athlete dismissed or otherwise punished, the victim would be dismissed from the university as well.

“There is still a blame-the-victim mentality, and unfortunately, because there are a few very dramatic cases of false reporting, I think it’s harder to fight against it,” Majernik said.

Blame The Victim

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center:

A multi-site study of eight U.S. communities including 2,059 cases of sexual assault found a 7.1 percent rate of false reports (Lonsway, Archambault, & Lisak, 2009). A study of 136 sexual assault cases in Boston from 1998-2007 found a 5.9 percent rate of false reports (Lisak et al., 2010). Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, researchers studied 812 reports of sexual assault from 2000-2003 and found a 2.1 percent rate of false reports (Heenan & Murray 2006).

Obviously the true numbers of false reports are well below 10 percent. But that slim chance seems to be applied to almost every case of a star athlete accused of an alleged sexual assault. Not just at Baylor, either. Since the 2006 Duke lacrosse team rape case, every alleged assault by a star athlete is considered by the fans of that particular school to be a false claim by “cleat chasers” or “gold diggers” who entrapped the athletes into consensual sex and then reported the encounters as rapes.

One of the more egregious examples occurred with Stanford University’s star swimmer,

Brock Turner, who found an unconscious girl and raped her. Turner’s family inundated both mainstream and social media with statements like this (bolding mine):

His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17th 2015. Brock can do so many positive things as a contributor to society and is totally committed to educating other college age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity. By having people like Brock educate others on college campuses is how society can begin to break the cycle of binge drinking and its unfortunate results.

That shifts the focus from Turner, the rapist, to the victim’s drunkenness and promiscuity in a classic “blame the victim” tactic that unfortunately has been successful in US courts for centuries. Turner’s sentence was correspondingly light. Six months in prison (he served three and was released), three years of probation, and lifelong registration as a sexual offender add up to a mild price to pay for a man who found an unconscious woman lying on the pavement and whose first thought was not to call 911 like any normal person would, but to remove articles of her clothing and have sex with her without her knowledge or consent. And as the victim said in her statement to the court (which we advise you to read in order to understand the horror of the process for victims of sexual assault):

It is deeply offensive that he would try and dilute rape with a suggestion of “promiscuity.” By definition rape is the absence of promiscuity, rape is the absence of consent, and it perturbs me deeply that he can’t even see that distinction.

We have to agree. It’s hard to call an unconscious woman promiscuous by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing more difficult to imagine is Brock Turner having a positive impact on anyone. Even the thought of him talking about alcohol and promiscuity is nauseating, and burgeoning with a self-righteous sense of entitlement that is apparently wholly genetic.

Apple…tree.

So inherently, there are societal issues in dealing with sexual assault, the criminal process, and particularly the status of being a star athlete at a large university and how that impacts investigations. As Lindstrom pointed out: “To be fair, because athletes are on a pedestal, there is the possibility of them becoming a target, and so to the extent that there should be safeguards against that, that makes sense. But surely there is a way to protect both the athletes and the general student population without allowing one side to get away with abusing the other.”

If there is a way to do that, no one has found it yet.

At Baylor, whose strict Christian code already forces the student body to try and disguise the normal pastimes and pleasures of young adulthood, victims were browbeaten into silence after reporting alleged crimes to the administration. As USA Today reported:

Investigators with the Pepper Hamilton law firm who dug into Baylor’s response to sexual assault claims determined the school’s rigid approach to drugs, alcohol and sex and “perceived judgmental responses” to victims who reported being raped “created barriers” to reporting assaults. Some women faced the prospect of their family being notified.

“A number of victims were told that if they made a report of rape, their parents would be informed of the details of where they were and what they were doing,” said Chad Dunn, a Houston attorney who represents six women who have sued Baylor under the anonymous identification of Jane Doe.

It’s no wonder that an estimated 90% of women who are the victims of sexual assault never report their rapes. It’s an easy defense strategy to claim a victim “asked for it” by the way she behaved, the way she was dressed, the way she talked, the way she presented herself – and somehow, legally, that translates into a examination of her past sexual history, a gauntlet the alleged rapist doesn’t have to face.

Reactions and Consequences

What really sets Baylor apart from the more than 200 other universities and colleges currently dealing with Title IX sexual assault claims is the incomprehensible support that the school, staff, football players, boosters, and alumni have given to the university – support that clearly demonstrates the ideology that wins are more important than students’ safety. Although the university president, athletic director, and head football coach were all fired or encouraged to resign, there’s been very little effort on the part of the university to rectify the culture of its campus – a culture where it’s a known fact that star athletes are going to be protected from the consequences of their own actions.

That culture is what led Baylor’s Title IX Coordinator, Patty Crawford, to resign in October. As Diverse, a website dedicated to documenting diversity in higher education, reported on October 5, 2016:

Patty Crawford told CBS This Morning that the university set her up “to fail from the beginning.” Crawford, who resigned Monday from her role enforcing the federal standards meant to prevent discrimination based on gender, said she received “resistance” from senior leadership but did not identify those leaders.

Baylor officials marginalized her by leaving her out of meetings, undermining her authority and making decisions that should be left to a school’s Title IX coordinator, she said. The treatment led her to file complaints with both the university and U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights. Charges that she was the victim of retaliation are included in those complaints.

“I never had the authority, the resources or the independence to do the job appropriately,” she said.

The events that have occurred since the firing of Coach Art Briles and the resignation of former Baylor president Ken Starr seem to bear this out. Although Briles was forced out, his entire staff (including his son and son-in-law) remained through the 2016 season.

Prominent Baylor alumni ran a full-page ad in two Texas newspapers in June, thanking Starr for his “integrity, leadership, character” and “exceptional care for students and their well-being.” And believe it or not, they didn’t stop there. You can go to the website and personally send Starr a letter of gratitude and support.

Ten days later, alumni and boosters began a movement to bring Briles back as head coach. Briles was fired on May 25; the meeting of the regents where this movement was considered occurred about two weeks later.

And let us not forget the Baylor-TCU game on November 5, to which fans were urged to wear black – and more specifically “Bring Back CAB” (“Coach Art Briles”) shirts. SBNation’s article showed long lines of people waiting to get their shirts, as well as Tweets from players.

Lindstrom weighed in on the matter with some strong words. “We have seen it in multiple situations where cover-up and denial are making the efforts for justice more difficult, whether it be Penn State or Watergate. The aggressive nature of their denial of any wrongdoing by Briles, when compared to the suffering of the victims, is astounding to see.”

Majer agrees. 

“I look at the support for Briles from alumni and boosters with incredulity. I’ve said many times that if this happened at my alma mater, I would be outraged and would expect full reporting and the harshest punishments for those involved. I do not understand how a fan base can place the success of a football team over the survivors of crimes committed by the players.”

Let’s be frank. The odds of Art Briles not knowing what his players were doing, and particularly at a college with a set of the most ridiculous and unrealistic expectations for young adults’ behavior, are slim to nonexistent. This is borne out with the recent revelation that both Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw were made aware of a gang-rape perpetrated by football players against a female athlete in 2012 – and neither did anything regarding the report.

Haven’t hit your outrage quota for the day yet? Liberty University just hired McCaw as their athletic director. Both Liberty and Baylor are Baptist-affiliated schools.

And Briles just last week sued Baylor for making him the “scapegoat” in the gang-rape case, a case where five football players assaulted a female athlete. The former head coach doesn’t appear to have any sort of regret or sense of personal responsibility when it comes to what happened on his watch. Apparently, he’s more concerned about his future in coaching, seeing as his lawsuit claims that Baylor officials are conspiring to keep him from getting another job.

Says Lindstrom: 

“Right now, it seems it is incredibly too easy for a school to do what Baylor did for FIVE YEARS. Five. YEARS. If you want to talk about potential liability, once you establish that there is a pattern, anything after when a reasonable person should have been aware that the system is allowing crimes to happen with impunity, I know I wouldn’t want to be in front of a jury trying to explain why I had enabled a football player to be involved in a gang rape of a student. That is the sickening thing, frankly, that it wasn’t just a one-off. This was a consistent pattern that involved more than ten students and more than 10 student athletes.”

The truth of his statement is frighteningly, despicably clear. Those five years were the most successful years in Baylor football history.

Those five years bankrolled the $266 million dollar McLane Stadium, where on November 5, 45,000 Bears fans blacked out the game just to receive a 62-22 ass-kicking from the Horned Frogs in a powerfully karmic manner.

Those five years saw Baylor’s first Heisman Trophy recipient, quarterback Robert Griffin III.

Those five years saw Baylor institute its Title IX office – in 2014, three years after having such an office was made mandatory by the Department of Education. (See Pepper-Hamilton’s report summary for more insight.)

College athletics aren’t blood sports, but they can create a few – and clearly did so at Baylor. The blood isn’t on display for everyone to witness. It’s a private exsanguination that occurs after the very public assassination of a victim’s character. It’s a bloodletting where the image of the university’s branding or the image of a star athlete takes precedence over doing what is not only right, but required by the law and by basic human decency. And while there are multiple universities who must accept responsibility for the blood spatter on their own campuses, Baylor University stands out as a coven of vampires, feeding from its victims, while hiding behind the mantle of the Baptist church to shield its transgressions.

A parasite.

“What is really frustrating about the Baylor matter to me, personally, is that everyone dropped the ball,” Lindstrom adds. “The media, the police, the school and the football program all failed the victims, and when it became a clear pattern, how can those involved not feel a sense of responsibility for the later victims would probably would not have been victims had they been doing their jobs?” Lindstrom’s comment leads to questions that cannot or will not be answered, which makes his vexation easy to understand. That’s why we’ll explore them more fully in the next installment.

But Laura Leigh Majer expresses her dilemma in words that resonate with us, and probably will with you as well.

“I no longer look at the game of college football the same way. I had very little joy in the 2016 season. Instead, I pulled the curtain back and saw what it is: a big money-making game. If any changes in the culture are going to be made, it will be on so many levels, from the field, to the school, to the press box. There are still a lot of men who don’t like women covering sports, especially football.”

“I had very little joy.” 

For some, those five words might apply to a disappointing season, or a loss to their school’s most hated rivals. But Laura Leigh Majer is not only a true fan of the game, but a member of the sports media as well – and she states unequivocally that she can no longer enjoy the sport she loves so much. We know exactly what she means.

We opened this column talking about the Army-Navy game and why it was mandatory viewing for us because of the unvarnished joy the academies have when they win, and because they represent everything that is good about college football. In a year where there is an ongoing saga of athletes accused of committing crimes, it’s hard to come up with a way to reassure Laura that there are still joys to be found in college football.

Mostly because we can’t even convince ourselves. Or our daughters.

We will continue this ever-changing and ever-horrifying story in our next column, where we will evaluate the culpability not only of the universities, but of the NCAA in general. Ms. Majernik and Mr. Lindstrom both have more to say, and so do we. We realize this article is long, but the subject is too important to skim over. And when it comes to student safety on American college campuses, there’s no such thing as digging too deeply into these parasite-infested waters.

And that’s a fact.

The Little Drummer Boy and the Carol of the Coyotes

This cold, wet night is better suited for October than December; Halloween instead of Christmas.

But there can be no doubt. This is Christmas Eve, incontrovertibly the night when Christians the world over celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the foundation stone of their entire belief system.

Perhaps that is why people like me find ourselves so baffled on December 24^th. Christmas is a holiday rooted deeply in belief, both individual and cultural.

As a child, I believed. 

Christmas was a time of magic and wonder, and Christmas Eve was the night when all the small magics of childhood come together in a breathless kind of anticipation. Will Santa come? Will I get that doll/game/book/toy I asked for? Or does he know about the time I locked my three-year-old brother in the bathroom with the tub running. I’m sure Mom told him about that. She never forgets anything. As a result, Santa Claus doesn’t either.

Was there anything ever so delicious as slipping in between cool sheets with the heaviness of blankets and comforter, determined to stay awake so you could hear the hooves of the reindeer as Santa landed on the roof? How one moment, you were straining to hear Santa’s arrival and the next you were opening your eyes and finding that somehow, incredibly, it was Christmas morning?

But those are the happenings of childhood, when everything was possible.

As adults, that magic is lost.

For a decade, I didn’t have Christmases with my family. Any of my family. I created Christmas for my friends whose families had disowned them. The gay community was at its craziest, most frenzied pace during the 1990s. Especially around the holidays. We drank and danced and dared each other to think longingly of the Christmases of our childhood, and tried to create our own magic without the fallacy of Santa Claus and the unforgiving families we'd left behind. I wasn’t gay, but they didn’t care. I invited them all to my table—young and old, well and sick, forgotten and forbidden, and we created our own family.

A family for a day.

But that family, like the first, has fallen into the past.

Now I stand alone on the back deck, while behind me my family sleeps. My husband, secure in the home of his parents, sleeps soundly in our bed. But I can’t. My father is eight hours to the south; my oldest daughter eight hours to the east; my youngest daughter half an hour and a world of anger away. My children now have children, and they already sleep—seven little souls worn out with their own effort to stay awake for Santa. Seven little souls secure in the belief that on Christmas Eve, magic happens. My daughters are busily being Santa, arranging gifts under the tree and anticipating the morning madness.

The simple drama of Christmas, enacted by players who know their roles in the world of that personal and distinctly unique thrill of the holiday. 

And yet...

I once again find myself alone on Christmas Eve, but I don’t mind this aloneness as once I did.

The night is wild and wet, the wind whistling through branches stripped bare from a sudden and violent slide into autumn, and now face the winter with stoic desperation. The air stings against my skin, softly singing a susurrus of sovereign solitude. But I hear another song, a song I've rarely witnessed. I hurry to the rail of the deck in the corner nearest the forest, and I wait in silence for the song to begin once more. 

And it does.

Not too far from here, in the ravine near the spring, coyotes are singing as well. Their song isn’t lonely, but proud and autonomous. Not the Christmas carols we all sing, but just as sacred and far more rare.

You know, even as an adult I find that some Christmas carols bring tears to my eyes. The Little Drummer Boy always gets me. The imagery on its own is so perfectly expressed.

Little baby
I am a poor boy too
I have no gift to bring
That's fit to give our King
Shall I play for you
On my drum

Mary nodded
The ox and lamb kept time
I played my drum for Him
I played my best for Him
Then He smiled at me
Me and my drum

Think of a child who has nothing but a drum—no parents, no friends, no school. His drum is the only thing that stands between him and starvation, and his ability to play that drum is the only company the child has. So when he finds himself standing beside the manger where the newborn Christ lies on his bedding of straw, he feels compelled to give the infant a gift. He can’t compete with the gold, frankincense, and myrrh the three wise men bring. He gives the baby the only thing he can—he shares his talent. Playing the drum is his gift, and the Christ child smiled.

I’ve never been able to sing the whole song through. Every Christmas I try, and every Christmas I fail. For anyone who is both blessed and burdened with a creative talent, the imagery hits too close to home. Anytime you share your talent, it’s a breathless, terrifying sort of gift. Not everyone can understand what you’re giving them. Not everyone values it. But then you reach that one person, a total stranger, who experiences your gift and is grateful that you gave it.

And for that one, paralyzing moment, you are no longer alone.

Like me, now, standing in the dark, cold corner of the back deck. It no longer matters that my family is scattered over four states. It no longer matters that I, alone, am awake and welcoming the midnight’s ominous silence. For I am not alone. Instead, I listen to the coyotes caroling deep in the ravine, and as their voices rise into the heavens the clouds break apart and reveal an arctic

night’s sky. The stars are icy, their light static and brittle. The moon is still hiding her argent face from the field and woods beneath her.

And I? I am breathless with the wonder of the moment. This moment is a gift. I don’t know who gives such a thing to me. Maybe I’m fool enough to think it something significant instead of just a completely random jumble of occurrences. But for now, it’s mine and mine alone. No one else is experiencing this, so it must be meant for me.

A gift…and a lesson. I am not alone. I have never been alone. I have chosen before to keep myself aloof—apart—and therefore safe in my isolation. I have been the coyote singing a wild song to the aurora borealis…not because I saw the northern lights, but because I believed they was there.

Now the clock chimes midnight, and it is Christmas Day. The coyotes have fallen silent, and the skies have clouded back over. A rain that’s more solid than liquid has driven me back into the warm silence of the house. The kittens are curled up in their basket, and my husband still sleeps.

Leaving me to ponder the gift of knowledge Christmas gave me, and the strange gratitude I have for the perfect serendipity that led me outside, hurting and alone, so that some providence could remind me of the true miracle of Christmas.

I am never alone.

Merry Christmas.

Post-Op Thoughts: Creativity Vanquishes Pain

I have three-quarters of a million dollars invested into my spine, but that's not the most expensive aspect of the injury that started me on this road to disaster.

Chronic pain in general and chronic back pain in particular are so all-encompassing. Every aspect of your life is impacted--mostly by taking things away. When I was in the car wreck that blew up my spine fourteen years ago, I had an extremely active lifestyle. Swimming, scuba, hiking, off-trail hiking, rock climbing, bicycling...all activities I loved. All gone now. I would walk 1-2 miles a day. The furthest I've been able to walk for the past four years is a block.

Half a block for the past year or more.

I do all my shopping online so it can be delivered. I haven't been in a brick and mortar store shopping in two years at least--mostly because even though I can't walk in WalMart, I don't think it's right for me to take the little carts away from people who "really" need them. And then I get pissed when I see people who don't really need them zipping through the aisles like it's a NASCAR race.

I can't pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk. Been that way since 2012. And, of course, I ignore that rule when there are grandbabies or cats involved.

Or my laptop.

As a writer and editor, I spend the majority of my time on the computer. But I cannot sit up for longer than half an hour at a time, so I have learned how to awkwardly write with the laptop perched too high on my abdomen.

Basic life activities are gone--driving a car, for example. If I slipped behind the wheel of my PT Cruiser now, I'd automatically be guilty of an OMVI because of the medications I'm on. Housework is out save for a few easy chores and the ones I've figured out how to do by sliding around the house on my butt. As you can imagine, my baseboards are immaculate. The crown molding, not so much. I can fold laundry, as long as the basket is brought to me. For the rest, I've learned some life hacks but my house makes me fussy because it's not the way I like it to be or feel.

Now I am six days out of another major back surgery, and once again lying on my mother-in-law's couch while I fret and worry and wonder for the umpteenth time: "Will this one actually work? Will I get that life back I enjoyed so much? Or will this be just another patch-up job that raises my hopes and then destroys them, leaving me to fight out of the depression that came after the last four-five-six surgeries?"

There's no way to answer that. With the type of bizarre condition in my spine, the success or failure of this procedure won't be known for months--six months before it's official according to my spinal surgeon. But I'll know sooner.

I know--you're sitting there, reading this and thinking that I'm whining. And you're right; I am whining. Hard not to, if I'm being honest. But my whining doesn't lead to me lying in bed, feebly asking my mother-in-law for cups of coffee or just one more cupcake. (She knows me too well. That's why the cupcakes are here.) When I'm told to walk a half hour every day, I walk an hour. When I'm assigned exercises to do in bed every four hours, I do them every three hours. I push myself, always, to supersede my doctor's expectations.

For example, in order to get released from the orthopedic hospital I was in, patients had to walk 150 feet. I went 125 feet two hours after I got into my room post-surgery. Just like an athlete striving to improve their strength or agility, I know that for every extra foot, every additional effort, the healing will be faster and more thorough. I never do too much, but I never settle for just enough either.

My lot in life has been bizarre, and is certainly not helped by the piece of broken hardware in my spine that if it shifts can either kill or paralyze me without warning. No one could have anticipated the butcher job that took place during my first back surgery in 2006--when a surgeon put the wrong sized artificial disc into my lumbar spine, had to pry it out, and in the process of hammering the correct size prosthesis into place with a sledge hammer broke it and started this fourteen year spiral of doom. No one believed me for six years when my pain worsened instead of improved. I was treated as if I was a drug addict, looking for a bigger fix. Not until I got an infection at that same level did anyone finally diagnose the real problem--and in the process reveal that the artificial disc had been shredding my spinal column and could not be removed. The prosthetic was inserted from the front, and was now insinuated between arteries on the front and my spinal cord on the back. The subsequent fusions weren't done to 'fix' my spine, but to keep that artificial disc from killing me.

And after the gazillionth back procedure in four years, it turned out that the fusion intended to secure that broken artificial disc was also broken.

It's hard for anyone to look ahead at their life and accept that regardless of what they do, regardless if they do exactly what the doctor tells them, all the parts of their life they particularly loved are a permanent thing of the past. But there's an aspect of healing I possess that many of my disabled peers do not. An outlet.

Creativity is both a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because your parents were right. "You can't earn a living writing stories. That's just a pipe dream."

And for most people, it is. A debut author's first book is released, and when it doesn't sell they give up. Mentally, they've made the transition from "anyone can write a book" to "I am a failure as a writer" and they don't try again.

But creativity is also a blessing. For one thing, you're running around with your characters in your mind, watching their story unfold and finding a way to share it with your readers. For another, people with the right personality traits (for me it's being damn stubborn) are taught not to give up. Ever. Sure, the odds of me being able to walk much more than a block for the rest of my life are pretty much non-existent, but I have made the choice not to let that define who I am. I live vicariously through my words, and create new worlds that both intrigue and challenge not only my characters but myself.

And all of this led me down a path that once was closed to me, and brought me to Charlie Burris and the Orange & White Report--writing articles and features about college football when I was told during college that there was no place for women journalists in sports--unless they covered ice skating or gymnastics. Plus every Saturday, I get to interact with the other O&W writers and argue or theorize or analyze football games while they're ongoing. That transforms me from a woman old enough to be their mother lying in a huge back brace in Ohio to a sports journalist, and fulfills a long-ago dream of mine in the process.

In the end, then, my overriding thought after my fourth major back surgery in ten years would have been applicable whether I regain the life I missed or continue in the life I've had.

1. My spine cannot restrict my mind.
2. My world is much, much more than the four walls that I am usually trapped within.
3. My life is not over; it's richer and rewarding beyond my expectations thanks to the people I interact with every day online.
4. Never give up on your dreams and ambitions.
5. It's 11:14 am and Florida still sucks.

So don't feel sorry for me; I don't feel sorry for myself. And as you look at your life and the things you wanted but didn't get, don't think those things are past you either. Life or circumstance don't dictate your destiny--you do.

Even with failed hardware in your spine.

LiveSciFi Zozo Investigation Day Two Live Blog

So here's what sucks about falling asleep. You miss stuff. 

I was up early yesterday, had a conference with my literary agent, then wrote my column, and all that fun stuff. On top of that, considering the pain level a chronic pain sufferer deals with, the medications totally knock you out. Unthinkingly, I took my meds at the regular time last night. So by the time we started hitting 3:30 - 4 am, I was pretty much done for the night. 

I kept waking up when things would happen, but then dozed back off. My own fault. Should never have said, "I'll just lie down for a while." 

So now I'm hours behind, and will have to watch catch-up footage here in a bit when it's posted. My own fault. 

That being said, though, right now the house is empty and for the past hour it's been echoing with bangs and snaps and clicks on a fairly constant basis. To me this is compelling because there is literally no one there. 

10:56 HUGE bang in an empty house. Something feel somewhere.

11:12 Another huge bang followed by what sounded like a cough.

11:30 in the past half hour, we witnessed extensive tampering with the camera system in an empty house. IR lights going off and on, cams switching from day to night vision, and all accompanied by significant noises. This house isn't just haunted at night. It's haunted by day.

11:49 One of the things that makes a live streamed investigation interesting is the simultaneous chat. Even when the investigators aren't in the house, there are hundreds of people still monitoring the equipment. This serves a couple of purposes. First off, it keeps people engaged in the event. It also leads to an ongoing dialogue about what's happening. Sure you get your kooks talking about orbs or claiming to have seen stuff that isn't there. Middle school kids need hobbies too and for the most part that seems to be annoying grownups. But if something significant happens, like a loud noise, the chat rooms dissect it the same way investigators do. But second, those transcripts provide time stamps to evidence. The team can go back later and match up the video with the log the chat room creates, and that can lead to evidence they might otherwise have missed.

Although probably not in this house. No way to miss what's going on now.

12:36 If you talk on speaker phone during a live stream, the entire world hears your conversation. And nothing else. That is all.

1:03 If the tornado siren test is going on, it's probably not the best time to do an EVP session. Mostly because you can't hear anything. Just sayin', Darren.

1:47 Okay, I'm going to be a little stern here because I'm seeing things I do not like. First off, the only reason a paranormal investigation has any validity at all is through the strict adherence to protocols and running a controlled experiment. You eliminate as many external influences as possible. You turn off your phone. You create a control. You document any changes you observe, like something falling over. You use your own equipment. You handle other people's equipment with care. If a session is disrupted by outside sources, you end the session and discount any potential evidence.

For almost an hour and a half, I and the rest of the chat have watched in horror as all of the above strictures have been ignored. YOU DON'T HANDLE SOMEONE ELSE'S PERSONAL EQUIPMENT OR POSSESSIONS CARELESSLY, like holding an antique doll by the head or so roughly a limb falls off. You don't try to use someone's personal technology.

How do I know this? Because I did my first investigation in the late 1980s and multiple ones since. Pretty much the last two hours and counting can be tossed out the window because someone who doesn't know what he is doing is destroying the validity of the investigation with every step and decision he makes.

It's a damn shame.

2:27 And the torture continues, unabated. Talk about a room of pissed off viewers. Good lord.

The thing I've always liked about LSF is the interactive nature of their live streamed investigations. Evidence captured in a totally silent house while the investigators are asleep or out. All of that has been destroyed. We went from a morning of continuous activity, to an afternoon of absolute bullshit. What makes that even worse is that the LSF team isn't there and all this destruction is coming at the hands of a guest to the investigation who is trying to force activity when he didn't need to.

Paranormal investigation is about creating a situation in which activity can happen, not bombarding the place in the middle of the afternoon with frantic trigger object shifting and blaring music and constant movement. One of these dolls could get up, walk down the stairs, and dance a jig in the middle of the living room floor and it couldn't be construed as evidence because of what's going on around it.

3:45 and all's well. Torture has stopped--mercifully--for the time being. I'll be glad when the investigators get back and turn this back into a serious attempt to capture paranormal activity.

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