Ray Ratto
It was the apropos end to a bizarre year for University of California football - the Golden Bears didn't get a lot of the kids they were recruiting, and nearly got one they weren't. The bigger picture, we'll leave to Comrades Simmons, Smith and Curtis. We will focus instead on Kevin Hart, the unrecruited offensive tackle from Fernley, Nev., who tried so desperately to be a Golden Bear that he ran an elaborate but profoundly flawed game on his parents, coach and fellow students. In short, he stung himself. The funny thing, though, was that because recruiting is such a predator's game, played by predators' rules, that it seemed perfectly plausible that a helpless and naïve high school student could be played by a remorseless grifter.
Now there's a national signing day tale for you. Hart, an all-Nevada guard from a small town, admitted late Wednesday afternoon that he tried to portray himself first as part of the Cal football class of 2011, then as the victim of a cruel hoax that involved not only the people of Fernley and the Lyon County Sheriff's Department but four universities, most notably Cal and Oregon.
The holes in the story seem obvious now. He said he'd been lured by a recruiting agent named Kevin Riley, which happens to be the name of Cal's second quarterback. He said he'd spoken with coach Jeff Tedford a number of times but apparently had never visited Cal, let alone been invited to visit. He told the Reno Gazette Journal he'd visited at Oklahoma State when that school had no record of him. There were no letters to his coach, Mark Hodges, or contacts from other schools. He said he'd been loaned money by the agent and repaid it in full, plus another $500, more or less.
And he'd been the guest of honor at a press conference at his high school where he announced he had chosen Cal. No kidding. He surely had chosen Cal, in the most unusual way imaginable. Once the original story hit the Internet, it ran free and wild. Nobody wanted to accuse Hart of being a scam artist, though many suggested he was stunningly naïve. Many people thought the ugly game that is recruiting had just eaten another innocent, and the story got legs because recruiting is every bit of that, and more. But after a hard day's spotlighting, Hart caved in and spilled the truth. He wanted what he apparently could not have, and resorted to an elaborate and embarrassing subterfuge to get it. And like so many teenagers' plans, it lacked sufficient consideration of the endgame. What was he going to do when he got to Cal, try to convince Tedford that he had been recruited? Concoct a new story that sent him to a junior college to find himself? It was a wormhole of deceit that hoodwinked enough people to get media legs, but nobody within the football industry. The scheme had a great start and believable middle but no close. And while it is still great fun to swing machetes at the recruiting industry as a soulless and grisly body hunt, the Kevin Hart story is no longer that vehicle. A troubled young man wanted into the game so badly that he made himself seem like a victim of it.
Beating Hart up for this monumental judgmental error seems gratuitous, of course. It was a crime of desperation that embarrassed the perpetrator more than any of its victims - his parents, his coach and the local constabulary - but it spoke loudest to the need to be seen as an athletic hero in the only way a graduating high schooler can, by being a star during National Letter of Intent season.
Cal certainly wasn't impacted, except for the few embarrassed answers Tedford was forced to give during his letter of intent press conference. Oregon and Oklahoma State properly claimed ignorance and went on with their days.
No, this one landed squarely on Kevin Hart's unprepared head because he wasn't ready to face athletic mortality, or because junior college wasn't part of his dream, or because he just wanted to be someone famous. He is paying the appropriate price, and will have to find an alternate route to Division 1-A football - which he can still manage if he has the game. Football coaches take anyone who can help their days pass easier, and some of them will do anything to get those anyones. It's the way of the business.
But Hart was on the outside of a glass house with no way for him to enter on his own. He chose a creative but spectacularly poorly executed method to gain entrance, and payment will be swift and enduring. Recruiting is every bit the unseemly game its critics say it is, and yet it was the absence of recruiting that brought down a young man who needed the game most of all.
