Like It Is

UA booster takes a hit, but was it a backlash?

WALLY HALL
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

No doubt, Arkansas Razorbacks fans are upset with Ted Harrod.
Harrod has been banned for five years from all UA events for poor bookkeeping, and the UA has sacrificed three scholarships over the next two years because of it.
Harrod, though, is like many fans. He thought he was helping.
Oh sure, he's probably aggravated some people over the years because he used his influence to get sideline passes at football games.
But that wasn't him waving the towel to get fans excited.
That's his son, Ted Jr., who was a Sigma Phi Epsilon at the UA.
Actually, anyone who has ever met Harrod would tell you, he's hard not to like.
He's engaging, humorous and intelligent.
Admittedly, he has an air of mystery and an edge to him when it comes to business.
He's shrewd and it would be easier to get information out of SEC Commissioner Roy Kramer than it is Harrod.
He lives a simple life in a nice but modest home.
He doesn't drive expensive imported cars or fly first-class.
Apparently, though, he's got the ink to write a $300,000 check to help renovate the Broyles Complex if he wants.
When Harrod was in the concrete and asphalt business, he poured the entire Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.
We were introduced at the Great Alaskan Shootout in 1983 by Tom Gulley, a noted Little Rock eye doctor.
A year later, Harrod and his late wife Jackie accompanied the Razorbacks basketball team to Japan.
There he and Frank Broyles began to play tennis against Eddie Sutton and Bill Brown and a friendship formed.
Not long after that Harrod began to hire Razorbacks athletes to work at his concrete and asphalt company.
That was when I told him if I caught him cheating I'd nail his behind to the biggest headline we could write.
He used to laugh and say if he was a cheater he would be supporting his alma mater, Texas A&M.
Harrod is a native of North Little Rock and went to A&M to play basketball.
Basically, that's all I really know about him.
We talked two or three times a year on the phone and sometimes he would come to the press box before games to eat, and we would visit a few minutes.
I never thought of him as anything but a loyal Razorbacker.
Would I be surprised to find out he slipped a C-note to a kid who was broke?
Not really.
But buy a car or give a box full of money to someone?
That would not be Harrod's style.
To begin with he's a little too careful with his money.
That's why it was only approximately $11,000 paid to athletes for working (or not working if you choose) over a six-year period.
There are some programs where $11,000 a year wouldn't qualify you as being a booster.
So if it was just some bad bookkeeping and $100 checks, why would Harrod be banned for five years?
Because Kramer insisted he be.
That's why it seems so conceivable that his punishment is a backlash from the investigation into basketball four years ago.
Still, the thing Arkansas wanted to do first and foremost was self-impose strong enough penalties that the NCAA would not feel it needs to come to town.
Not because the UA has anything to hide, but because any type of NCAA inquiry hurts recruiting for a year or two.
Plus, it demonstrates the intent to do right, and that keeps you from being nailed for lack of institutional control, which is a major violation.
NCAA rules state that if an institution is guilty of infractions twice in a five-year period it could face the death penalty.
It has been four years since the basketball program received NCAA sanctions.
However, everything the UA found was secondary violations and, according to Wally Renfro of the NCAA, those do not invoke the chance of the death penalty.
It appears to this observer the self-imposed penalties were not overkill so much as severe enough to satisfy the NCAA.
And finally, this should all be laid to rest soon.

This article was published on Wednesday, August 30, 2000

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