Whipped Cream Difficulties

The NYT has an interesting investigative story on the Fiesta Bowl. Or, rather, on the Fiesta Bowl’s money.

The Fiesta Bowl management and staff have apparently been spending the money taken in by the Fiesta Bowl’s 501(c)3 on some questionable items. And when I say questionable, I mean “jail time is a possibility” items: campaign contributions, strip clubs (of course. It always has to be strip clubs.), a $30,000 birthday party (how do you spend $30,000 on a birthday party for an adult human? Unless that birthday party is at a strip club. Or, apparently, Pebble Beach.), airfare and hotel for an employee’s honeymoon (plus airfare for Fiesta Bowl employees to attend the wedding). Those are the high points.

The item that really leaps out at me is $75 for flowers. The flowers were for someone at the University of Texas, and were apparently sent in an attempt to influence that person into accepting the CEO’s daughter into “a honors program” (Plan II?). $75 is such a penny-ante amount; surely the CEO could have come up with $75 out of his own pocket. And why send flowers at all? A phone call would have done just as well. “Nice football team you have there. It’d be a shame if you didn’t get a bowl bid this year because my daughter didn’t get accepted into Plan II.”

The best thing about this? It could cost the Fiesta Bowl both tax-exempt status and BCS bowl status. As a matter of fact, it appears some of the impetus for this investigation came from an anti-BCS group. I wonder what other skeletons are going to turn up in the Orange and Sugar Bowl closets. I also wonder if this is the first hammer blow at the Berlin Wall of the BCS.

Edited to add: For those who don’t want to deal with the NYT, here’s a HouChron story on the firing of bowl CEO John Junker, which covers some of what was in the NYT report. Here’s a direct link to the public release version of the special committee report (which has some information redacted due to “contractual confidentiality provisions”).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Clippings, Law, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.