Wanda Rappaport and the moist haze

Just two days before classes started, Trevor Windgate pulled into campus amid fanfare never before known to Lewis & Clark. A small convoy of three black SUVs with smoked windows and omni-directional high-frequency antennas rolled onto campus and were parked at egotistical angles. Windgate climbed out of the rear seat of the middle vehicle. He was accompanied by the school’s athletic director and the basketball team’s head coach. From the other vehicles came four men, all wearing dark suits and shades on an overcast day. There were coiled wires coming out of their ears and they occasionally mumbled into their cuff links. That, and their immutably stern faces, gave observers the unmistakable impression that Trevor Windgate was already under protection of professional bodyguards. Former U.S. Secret Service agents, if I had to guess. It was all part of the pomp and stagecraft orchestrated by the Athletic Department to make sure its improbable new recruit wouldn’t have any regrets about going downscale.

A throng of reporters immediately surrounded the star. Rain drizzled from the sky. A man was holding an umbrella over Windgate’s head to make sure his fabulously expensive suit was protected from the elements.

The coaches asked me to attend because I would be the other half of the team’s backcourt tandem. Yet they had me stand forty feet away, as though my mundane presence might take some of the luster off their heralded Adonis. He hadn’t played a single minute of collegiate basketball and was already nationally renowned; I was recruited from Brooklyn, New York to be the team’s playmaker and nobody outside city limits knew my name.

Standing aside me in the moist haze was Wanda Rappaport, dean of the School of Law. The musty scent of patchouli oil emanated from her.

“This is huge,” she said, “the biggest thing that could have happened to my law school. I’m going to mentor this young man. The people at the Alumni Association are already wetting themselves.”

I looked at Rappaport, whose small round lens had fogged in the damp, chilly air. It wasn’t the kind of language one expected from a doctor of jurisprudence, but her point was taken. Trevor Windgate and the surging basketball program would have every graduate rediscovering their alma mater. That’s why athletic departments are the militaries of college campuses. They’re first in line for fiscal appropriations while other departments had to settle for the leftovers. Good athletic programs maintain school pride and keep money pouring into alumni association coffers. The average Joe was out there thinking, I might have flunked sophomore calculus twenty years ago but my basketball team won this weekend.

Life doesn’t get much better than that for most American men.

But that’s how it works at major universities with nationally publicized sports programs. This was Lewis & Clark, a school that built its reputation on academic prowess. Athletics had been little more than after-school exercise programs. Maybe that was going to change. A new era might be dawning.

Trevor Windgate was on the move again, walking away from the reporters and surrounded by his new entourage. The man closest to him, occupying the position of power and influence, was head coach Roman Hoyt. All eyes were on the new recruit, all six-and-a-half feet of him. Packs of muscle were evident even through the fine wool of his suit and they found their greatest concentrations at the shoulders, triceps and quads. How was anybody supposed to guard a kid so jacked up on country blood and organic chemistry?

When they disappeared into the Student Union building Wanda Rappaport’s mouth started moving again.

“What the media is saying about that lame-brain coach is a joke.” Acid had come to her voice. “Suddenly he’s a mastermind recruiter. What a smoking pile of horse excrement.”

Again, the uncouth vernacular from such a learned woman. Perhaps she had been living among the pines for too long.

“I’ll tell you who recruited Trevor Windgate to this school – I did.” She paused to glance through her foggy spectacles, gauging my reaction. “He didn’t come here to play basketball; he could have done that anywhere. He came here to study law and the environment. Hoyt will never admit that I was the person who made the decisive trip to Kentucky. Windgate was getting away and Hoyt didn’t know how to reel him back in. He didn’t understand the kid’s real motives. Trevor asked for me. I closed the deal. He didn’t want to talk X’s and O’s with the coach, he wanted to talk torts and litigation with a legal expert.”

Rappaport stared straight ahead while she spoke, as though allergic to anything more than fleeting eye contact.

“Of course, you won’t read any of this in the newspapers because the Athletic Department has muzzled me. They’re committed to their own version of events. I’ll play along ... for now.”

I extended a hand to Rappaport. “My name is Jimmy Tribeca.”

“I know who you are,” Rappaport said, ignoring my offering. “You’re the point guard. Starting this season you’re life is going to be all about feeding the ball to Trevor Windgate.”

I was startled that she knew me, and that she seemed to understand some of the finer aspects of basketball, a sport she had just derided.

“You watch the team play?”

“Never.”

Rappaport walked away, leaving a faint wisp of patchouli behind. She was a tiny woman, except for the big cumulus of frizzy hair, a wildlife preserve in its own right, as untamed and overgrown as most of the region’s heavily-watered vegetation.

@copyright/Mike Consol