Whipped Cream Difficulties

So it may be too early to speculate on the future of the Fiesta Bowl.

At least that’s what Bill Hancock, executive director of the BCS, says.

Oh, by the way…

Hancock said Wednesday that for at least five years, while attending Fiesta Frolic, he let the Fiesta Bowl cover his golf tab and accepted free gifts from Nike.

What is “Fiesta Frolic”?

The Frolic is an annual, multiday spring gathering the bowl stages for college-football officials at a Phoenix resort.

Hancock called the Frolic, which costs the Fiesta Bowl several hundred thousand dollars a year, a “remarkable business opportunity” for college-football executives to network. However, the Fiesta Bowl Special Committee’s investigative report noted that it recently changed its name to Fiesta Bowl Spring College Football Seminars at the request of attendees “to make the event sound like less of a ‘boondoggle.’ “

And the BCS has created a seven member task force to review the allegations against the Fiesta Bowl.

Its seven-member task force includes a member who for years let the Fiesta Bowl pay for his golf at a resort, and another who took a free Caribbean trip last year from the Orange Bowl, The Republic has learned.

Speaking of the report, I’m slowly going through it. There’s some stuff I haven’t seen reported yet. For example, someone seems to have been a gold bug: there’s an estimated $22,300 worth of gold coins (including $20 gold pieces “ranging in date from 1877 to 1924”) that are supposedly in the possession of the Fiesta Bowl. (I do not see anything in the report, though, that states possession of those coins was actually verified.) In addition, the bowl apparently paid for subscriptions to:

• The Fractal Market Report and The Fractal Gold Report.
• The Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.
• Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
• Innovomark, which appears to be some sort of marketing consultancy.  “The central theme that links all of the products and activities of the company can be concisely described by the formulation of ‘Strategies’ and execution of the appropriate ‘Tactics’.” Yes, that’s a direct quote from their website. No, I don’t know why they put “strategy” and “tactics” in quotes.
• Le Metropole, “where the real gold story has been told for the past 12 years by Bill Murphy, the Chairman of The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA)”.

Note that all of these were personal subscriptions for former CEO John Junker, for which he was reimbursed by the Bowl (according to the report).

I’m also amused by the discussion of payments to someone identified in the report only as “Person X”. Mr. “X” was apparently being paid somewhere around $40,000 a year (the amount varied from year to year, but $40,000 seems to be a good average) plus six tickets to the game. And nobody knows what he did for that money. Literally. That’s a direct quote from the report:  “I don’t know what he does. Kelly doesn’t know what he does.” The Arizona Republic has managed to identify Mr. X.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Clippings, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.