Deconstructing Dohrmann, Or When A Narrative Crumbles

~The lie consists only in the exaggerations, linguistic affectations and half-truths that try to pass themselves off as whole truths.~

José Saramago

Narratives are funny things. The backbone of fiction, narratives provide a path for the reader, connecting events and characters, themes and motifs, forming meaning out of imagination. When we read The Great Gatsby, Blood Meridian, or even Twilight, we realize we are consuming a contrived piece, a cohesive story molded into the authors' vision, infused with the authors' voice. We adjust our perceptions, knowing that fiction is fiction and fact is fact, sensing a danger in confusing the two.

When we read non-fiction, like an investigative piece into a person's career, we let our guard down. Non-fiction is true, after all, and we can trust the facts. Narratives are persistent, though. They won't allow the facts to speak for themselves, if facts ever could, and they have this habit of popping up and aiding the facts along, prodding them into form like a a prosaic conga line.

George Dohrmann understands narratives. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, accomplished author, and graduate from the University of San Francisco's Creative Writing program, Dohrmann knows that non-fiction needs a narrative to be powerful. Facts languish on a page until a narrative brings them to life, telling us why the facts matter and why we should care.

Dohrmann's cover piece in the June 6th issue of Sports Illustrated, which Ohio State AD Gene Smith tacitly acknowledged as a factor in requesting Jim Tressel's resignation, tapped into the growing national narrative that Tressel's career was one marred by repeated cheating and feigned ignorance, making Tressel the Jay Gatsby of college football, a phony of the highest and most deliberate order.

Every non-fiction piece has a narrative guiding it. The best are seamless, leaving little room to question their essential truth. Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel provided Ohio State fans a painful glimpse into an airtight narrative in early March, revealing that Tressel failed to report his knowledge of improper benefits at Ohio State. Tressel lied, Ohio State benefited, and the NCAA is coming. Strong non-fiction narratives are precise like that, detached from emotion but accurate.

Not all narratives are strong, of course. Some are cobbled-together bits of evidence formed around a central idea that doesn't quite make sense when you've finished reading it. The weakest non-fiction narratives resemble fiction more than anything, and they seem out of place in the world of fact. Without the imaginative quality of a fiction piece, the part that lets us find truth in lies, we are left with a story that claims to be true but isn't, and we feel cheated.

The Mahoning Valley

Dohrmann begins his investigative tale at Youngstown State with the story of Ray Isaac and Mickey Monus. Isaac, the star quarterback at YSU from 1988 to 1992, received improper benefits in the form of cash and cars from Monus, a YSU trustee and booster. Monus was convicted on 109 counts of fraud, obstruction of justice, and interstate transportation of stolen goods in 1995; in 1998 he went to trial for alleged jury tampering in the 1995 case.  After transaction receipts between Monus and Isaac were presented at the 1998 hearing, a reporter covering the trial informed Youngstown State of the improper benefits, setting off separate Youngstown State and NCAA investigations.

After explaining the established facts, Dohrmann alleges that the relationship between Monus and Isaac was "the worst-kept secret" on the Youngstown State campus, implying that Tressel had knowledge of the improper benefits while they were taking place, if he did not facilitate them. As evidence, Dohrmann references Pauline Saternow, head of YSU compliance at the time: "Saternow, then the school's compliance officer, had such misgivings about the car that she recused herself from the (internal) investigation committee because, according to (former YSU president Leslie) Cochran, she did not feel she could be objective."

When contacted to corroborate Cochran's quote, Saternow said that she was not interviewed by Dohrmann or his research assistant David Epstein, but that she did inform the pair through email that she has "been retired for more than five years" and had nothing to say on the matter.

The absence of confirmation by Saternow becomes curious in light of her official comments during the 1999 Internal Investigation conducted by Youngstown State-- which Dohrmann did not use. In documents obtained by the Youngstown Vindicator on June 5th, Saternow claimed she "had absolutely no knowledge of Isaac’s receiving money or a car from Monus," directly refuting Leslie Cochran's supposed assertion.

Jim Tressel, Youngstown State

Cochran himself believes that he's not the right person to "define the inner workings of the (YSU) football program." In an interview shortly after the article's release, Cochran expressed befuddlement at his role in the piece and accused the writers of "fabricating" one of his quotes.

Dohrmann used the attributed quote-- "What bothered me was that the family knows," Cochran says, "Inside the family everyone knows what's going on"--  as evidence that everyone within the Youngstown State family believed that Tressel was complicit in Isaac's improper benefits. Cochran claims that he wasn't misquoted-- he just never made the statement, period.

Also contained in that 1999 Internal Investigation-- which, again, Dohrmann did not use-- six of the seven people interviewed by the investigative panel said "they had no knowledge of Isaac receiving cars from Monus." The lone individual who said he did know about the cars, George Turner, was the the dealer who sold them.

Ray Isaac, too, denies that anyone at Youngstown State knew of the improper benefits. Isaac says that "unless the money, or the receipts of the money, came out that Mickey Monus gave me money; if Ron Cole [then-Vindicator reporter and now YSU spokesman] had not alerted Youngstown State University, then I would have escaped the lie."

Challenging Isaac's claim, Dohrmann cites the NCAA's "Public Infractions Report" issued to Youngstown State, writing, "all of Isaac's teammates who were interviewed 'except one' knew about the car or had suspicions about it."

The quoted words belong to Dohrmann; the offset phrase 'except one' is the only direct language used from the NCAA report, which suggests something much different when read in entirety. According to the actual text, Isaac's teammates stated they knew he had "a car during football season," not that they had any knowledge of the car provided by Monus, or even any knowledge of a relationship between Isaac and Monus, an important distinction from Dohrmann's interpretation.

By simply inserting the definite article (the) for an indefinite one (a), Dohrmann alters the meaning of the official report. Many of Isaac's teammates were indeed aware of a vehicle, and some speculated as to how he could afford it, but there's no indication that any of them knew anything beyond that, making Isaac's relationship with Monus far from "the worst-kept secret" on the Youngstown State campus.

Furthermore, the NCAA infractions report paid compliment to the school's administration and Jim Tressel, who became the athletic director in 1994, for their "thorough and aggressive pursuit of information...despite the fact that these violations were beyond the four-­year statute of limitations and might have resulted in the forfeiture of the institution's 1991 NCAA Division I-­AA Football Championship." Under no NCAA obligation to investigate the potential violations, Tressel endangered his championship season by undertaking the internal investigation and subjecting Youngstown State to NCAA scrutiny.

Tattoos and Memorabilia, Back Again

Dudley'z Tattoos & Body Piercing, home of criminal owner Darell Ross and criminal employee Dustin Halko. Depending on which felon you believe, it's also where former Ohio State football players traded memorabilia for improper benefits, or not. As many as ten former Buckeyes, Halko alleges, exchanged their goods for cash, tattoos, and sometimes weed. Ross denies the charge, calling Halko a spiteful drug addict who just wants his name in the paper.

Whatever the case, Dudley'z eventually closed, and a new shop, Fine Line Ink, opened, becoming a Buckeye hotspot for tattoos in Columbus. A former employee at Fine Line Ink, who only agreed to speak under the pseudonym "Ellis," alleges that nine current Buckeye players traded memorabilia or autographs for tattoos and money, in addition to the six players already known.

Family members of five players have spoken out against the allegations, with at least one considering legal action against Sports Illustrated. Representing the players and their families, attorney Larry James collected 48 of 50 memorabilia pieces issued to the nine players throughout their Ohio State careers; the memorabilia was then cataloged by Ohio State's compliance staff and NCAA employees.

Tressel, Troy Smith (10), and Ted Ginn Jr. (7)

Following an investigation, the NCAA informed Ohio State on July 21st that they had found no truth to the allegations. The NCAA, Dohrmann claims, refused to grant anonymity to his source, "Ellis," preventing him from cooperating for fear of retribution from Eddie Rife.

There's a certain rhetorical beauty to the way Dohrmann constructs this section. For one, despite the fact that Ohio State can account for every memorabilia piece but two handed to the accused players, Dohrmann can always lean on the claim that autographs were part of the transactions, crafting a situation where it's impossible to ever disprove the allegations, no matter how much counter-evidence surfaces. More Ohio State players could have traded autographs for tattoos and cash-- after all, many Buckeyes have tattoos and healthy hands capable of gripping pens, and a preexisting issue with Rife's tattoo shop lends instant credibility to the idea.

Of course, lacking any real proof beyond the testimony of a veiled source, Dohrmann's parched claims suffer from a serious evidence drought. It is difficult to outright dismiss the notion of Buckeyes selling autographs, but it's equally as difficult to accept it without question when there's little supporting evidence. Indeed, it seems quite clear that Dohrmann recognized the weaknesses in the piece and suitably adjusted his narrative to obscure them.

Before revealing the new tattoo allegations, the only meat on this bone, he spent 950 words forming the poorly constructed Youngstown State retrospective and then followed it with 1,073 words of insinuation centered around Maurice Clarett and Troy Smith, who Dohrmann links as proof of Tressel's monitoring laxity, finally climaxing in a bizarre story from another anonymous source who claims that Tressel rigged a recruiting camp raffle as an assistant coach in 1985, presumably ensuring that players with Ohio State scholarship offers won.

When contacted for comment, current Ohio Dominican head football coach Bill Conley, who coached alongside Tressel on that 1985 staff, denied the claims by the anonymous source and said that he could not even recall a camp raffle existing in 1985.

Composed of hearsay and recycled quotes devoid of context, the prelude to Dohrmann's evidential unveiling acts as a thinly veiled character assassination upon Tressel, placing the reader in a particular mindset when reaching the actual tattoo claims, which do not even directly connect to Tressel. Yet after reading two enormous pages of prose questioning Tressel's entire career, it's almost inevitable that most would leave Dohrmann's article convinced Tressel was a fraud culpable in a massive improper benefits cover-up, a testament to Dohrmann's narrative skills, perhaps, but not his journalism.

A Final Word On Narratives

No matter how many words its author sacrifices, every grand narrative must ultimately place a frame around its content, denying the reader any information or evidence that does not fit. And so rests the great sin of George Dohrmann's narrative, not in the lies it tells but the truth it ignores. For while Dohrmann can ironically quote "integrity" and "faith" and "gratitude," he cannot erase the overwhelming collective body that revealed those traits throughout Jim Tressel's career and life. Instead, he left the inconvenient evidence out of his own constructed piece, replacing it with scorn and sweeping claims of moral failing.

On August 12th, four days from now, Jim Tressel will appear before the NCAA Committee on Infractions for violating two NCAA bylaws. He will undergo invasive questioning that often results in coaches weeping, and he will hear his former employer, the institution he loves, vocally distance itself from him. He will affirm that he broke both bylaws, and he will provide a defense for his actions while saving blame from Ohio State.

Weeks later, the Committee will release its verdict and Tressel will receive whatever punishment they hand down. And he will deserve it. He will deserve it for breaking rules, and for violating amateurism, and most of all for choosing his career path in college sports, an odd world that demands of its participants both perfect record and perfect moral sensibility.

But Jim Tressel does not deserve George Dohrmann, or Pat Forde, or Kirk Herbstreit, or the innumerable other professional analysts who crafted a grand narrative-- or worse, passively allowed one to be crafted-- around Tressel's career as a cheater and fraud. The man whose resignation frightened the Make-A-Wish Foundation because they lost their biggest Ohio supporter, and the man who donated $3 million to various charitable causes, including funding construction of Ohio State's new library, does not deserve scorn and hatred and the national vitriol he's received.

The man who abolished his predecessor's abysmal academic record and established his team as achievers in the oftentimes embarrassing field of athletic scholarship does not deserve lampooning or mockery. And the same man, the one who demanded his players spend time at hospitals consoling terminally ill patients before each game, does not deserve what has transpired these past few months, because the prolonged vulturous media campaign that has taken place does not fit the singular mistake inaccurately branded a crime by writers without the talent to find a less obvious, more fitting metaphor.

Most of all, Jim Tressel does not deserve a cobbled-together story of manipulated quotes, selective evidence, questionable sources, and possible outright fabrications to define a long, charitable career in a profession that does not encourage long, charitable careers. Dohrmann's inability to relate a fuller story, his reliance on cheap sports cliché and feigned moral outrage, should offend not only Ohio State fans, but anyone with an interest in real goodness-- not football goodness-- and anyone who does not want their own life to one day be characterized by a hit piece.

It's profoundly sad that a man whose life is filled with charitable moments can be marginalized by someone who only writes about such moments, and even sadder that an unthinking public will allow that narrative to go unchallenged, simply because it's easier and more profitable to do so.