If the worst thing that ever happens to Temi Fagbenle is that she gets to play college basketball for only three seasons instead of four, she'll have lived a blessed life. No question, the wrong being perpetrated on this 6-foot-4 Harvard freshman pales compared with some of the injustices in college sports that I've been recounting lately.
Still, Fagbenle's ordeal is worth telling for three reasons. It illustrates the sheer pettiness of the NCAA. It shows that the NCAA won't rectify even an obvious mistake to help an athlete. Saddest of all, it shows that even mighty Harvard won't stand up to the NCAA. Originally intended to help universities police their athletic teams, the NCAA has become higher education's Frankenstein, terrifying its overseers.
Let me tell you a little bit about Temi. Yes, she's 6-foot-4 and a terrific basketball player, but she's a lot more than that. Born to Nigerian parents - her father is a prominent journalist - she moved with her large family to London as a girl. When she was 15, her parents enrolled her as a junior in Blair Academy, a New Jersey prep school, hoping the education she got there would lead her to the Ivy League. The Fagbenles had their hearts set on Harvard.
Temi struggled her first year, so much so that she and her parents decided that she should repeat her junior year to better her chances of getting into Harvard. By the time she graduated, she had won letters in track and tennis as well as basketball, had starred in the school play, had improved her grades enough to be accepted at Harvard, and had become one of the most popular students at Blair. Along the way, she turned down scholarship offers from big-time basketball schools like Duke.
If you are wondering how this outstanding high school career could have led to Temi's being ruled ineligible to play as a freshman, you're not alone. Her mistake, if you can call it that, was to take an exam, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, required of all British students when they are around 15. Inexplicably - and incorrectly - the NCAA says that the exam marks a British student's graduation from high school. Under its rules, a British high school graduate must enroll in college within two years of taking the GCSE. Because Temi repeated her junior year, it took her three years.
The sheer idiocy of this rule boggles the mind. As Harvard pointed out in a letter to the NCAA, if she had stayed in London until she finished high school, she could have played. If she had started as a freshman in an American high school and repeated a grade, she could have played. But because she repeated a grade after coming to the United States, she is ineligible. It not only seems unfair, it seems discriminatory.
Behind the scenes, Harvard worked to get the NCAA to reverse its decision, making four separate appeals. All were denied. With Harvard's help, Temi retained a lawyer, who gave serious thought to trying to get a restraining order against the NCAA, on the grounds that the rule violates state anti-discrimination laws. But, in the end, Temi decided not to sue, to Harvard's palpable relief. After all, if Temi began playing and then ultimately lost the case, the women's basketball team would have to forfeit the games in which she had played. Sotto voce, officials also expressed fears that the NCAA might retaliate in other ways.
Despite its behind-the-scenes efforts, Harvard has never once said publicly that the rule is wrong and that Temi is being unfairly punished. On the contrary, in an e-mailed statement, Bob Scalise, the Harvard athletic director, said, "We at Harvard are fully committed to following all NCAA rules and guidelines." Even, apparently, when those rules are wrong and unjust.
And, I might add, deeply hurtful. "When someone has a tremendous talent, you are taking away a fundamental part of their identity," says Temi's lawyer, Beth Reilly. "And there is a stigma in being declared ineligible, an implication that you have done something wrong. You have a label attached that the whole world sees."
I understand why a school like the University of Connecticut won't stand up to the NCAA. There is nothing bigger in the state of Connecticut than UConn basketball. If it were to start playing Ryan Boatright, the suspended point guard whose mother is the subject of an NCAA witch hunt, it would risk not only forfeiting games, but missing the NCAA championship tournament. The price is too high.
But I would have thought that Harvard was made of sterner stuff. Harvard claims to have values that transcend wins and losses. Harvard has often been a leader in changing how universities act. So long as schools continue to cower in the face of NCAA abuses, those abuses will continue.
The Temi Fagbenle case was a perfect opportunity for Harvard to stand up for what's right. Maybe next time.
JOE NOCERA is a columnist for The New York Times.
