Publish date: 2024-05-19
MINNEAPOLIS — Walking down the street after downing a good meal at Commander’s Palace, one of the signature spots in New Orleans, Deon Thomas stopped when he heard someone calling his name. This was in 2012 during the Final Four, back when Thomas was an assistant coach at Illinois-Chicago and regularly bumped into coaching friends while out and about. He turned to the source and saw Bruce Pearl, near frantically chasing him down.
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It had been more than 20 years since the two became forever linked by a college basketball scandal that rocked the sport, tainted Thomas’ reputation, banished Pearl to hoops purgatory and cost another man his job. The two had not spoken in all the time in between, strangely hadn’t even really seen one another. Now here was Pearl, barreling down the street asking Thomas to come back inside and talk for a minute.
The human spirit has an almost visceral need to package everything into a nice, neat beginning and end. Closure, we call it, as if tying together the loose ends can somehow make sense of the illogical. As Thomas followed Pearl back into the restaurant, he figured maybe this is what Pearl needed, to finish the chapter between them. He would go. He would be polite, but he didn’t need it. “No, no, no. I was done with it,’’ he says. “Me and Bruce, we’re going to be joined at the hip until the day we leave this Earth and probably a few years after that, but I was done.’’ Except as Thomas sat in that restaurant and Pearl talked, he realized he hadn’t finished with anything, so much as he had buried it. “I could feel it, like I was finally rid of this weight on my shoulders that I didn’t even know I had’’ he says now. “Like I walked out of there and I thought, ‘OK, now I’m done.’’
Riding on the backseat of a golf cart between his locker room and interview responsibilities, Pearl first shares a pained smile when I mention that I had spoken to Thomas. Pearl is here, at the peak of his professional career, having led football-mad Auburn to the Final Four, but he understands he can’t ever shake his past. Not that he’s really tried. Say what you want about the man, but he does not hide from conversation nor dismiss questions he doesn’t like; you just might not like the way he spins his answers. “I get it,’’ he says. “We’ll always be linked.’’
His history would always read complicated, but it’s especially hard to wade through now, as college basketball stands covered to the tips of its high tops in scandal. Pearl’s Auburn team is deeper than many: His former associate head coach, Chuck Person, pled guilty for his role in a pay-to-play scheme; two other staffers, Frankie Sullivan and Jordan VerHulst were placed on indefinite leave, and two of his players suspended last year, the alleged beneficiaries of Person’s payments. Another assistant, Ira Bowman, is also out for an entirely unrelated bribery investigation, and Pearl himself arrived at Auburn only after being released from a three-year show cause stemming from an investigation while he was the coach at Tennessee.
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Yet it is the beginning of Pearl’s career, back when he was a 29-year-old assistant, that makes all of that all the more peculiar. He was an idealist, he says now, a kid who got a shot only because Dr. Tom Davis carted him along on his coattails, first as a manager at Boston College and later as his assistant at Iowa. Pearl was recruiting Thomas, a 6-9 power forward out of Simeon High School in Chicago, locked in a recruiting tussle with Illinois. He says he got wind of some dirty dealings going on out in Champaign, choosing to record a conversation he had with Thomas, where it seemed as if Thomas admitted that Illinois assistant Jimmy Collins had offered him cash and a car. The whole thing spiraled from there, a he-said/he-said debacle with accusations coming from each side as to whether Pearl was informant or merely attempting to cover his own dirty tracks. Only when NCAA investigators came to the Iowa campus to talk to Pearl about allegations into his own contact did he turn the tape over.
Though the NCAA never was able to substantiate the allegations, no one won. Dick Vitale said at the time Pearl had “committed professional suicide,’’ a proclamation that proved true as the coach suffered a de facto banishment, unable to get a Division I job for a decade despite raging success at the D-2 level. Though exonerated, Collins had to settle on a job at Illinois-Chicago rather than a possible ascension to the head position with the Illini. For years he held to his bitterness, refusing to partake in the postgame handshake line when he and Pearl sat on opposite benches in the Horizon League.
Caught in the middle of the grownups sat Thomas, a 17-year-old kid more or less raised by his grandmother. “That, I mean, he was the victim,’’ Pearl says. “We’re supposed to protect the student-athlete, and we didn’t do that.’’ Instead, Thomas was exposed to a world he swears he didn’t know existed, to the cutthroat business of college sports. “I had no idea how the whole recruiting thing worked,’’ he says now. “Or how relentless coaches could be.’’
The accusation leeched onto Thomas, but he didn’t necessarily want to be rid of it either. He wrapped himself up in his hurt and anger. Nothing — not a wildly successful run at Illinois, where he became the school’s lone 2,000-point scorer; not a professional career in Israel; not even time — could heal it. He was angry for himself, angry for his grandmother, angry for Collins. Just plain angry, and he didn’t want to be anything but. “What hurt the most was it was about my character,’’ he says. “If you knew my grandmother, there was no way in the world, with the way I was raised. I was taught you don’t take nothing you don’t deserve or did not earn. That’s what bothered me the most.’’
In 2005, a full 16 years after it all went down, Illinois met Milwaukee, then coached by Pearl, in the NCAA Tournament regional semifinal. The Chicago Tribune called Thomas in Israel, where he was still playing, to see what he thought of the game. He said he planned to stay up late to watch it, hoping the Illini would “kill” Milwaukee. Asked about Pearl, he didn’t mince words. “It’s kind of hard to forgive a snake,’’ he said, adding, “I don’t want to really use the word, but he’s evil. What else can you say he is?”
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Thomas says now he hung up the phone on that interview and paused, his grandmother’s words echoing in his head. All these years later, he could still taste the bitterness, but what good was it doing him? Nothing had changed. His story hadn’t been rewritten, nor had he been liberated from the accusations. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is not who you are,’’ he says. “And honestly, that day I just said, ‘I’m done. I’m over all of it.’’’
And he thought he was, until Pearl chased him down in New Orleans. The coach had been chased all those years by his own history too. He’d endured the shunning and the shaming, and nothing had really changed for him either. The story back-burnered, but it never really disappeared. It never would. “A lot of people got hurt during that process,’’ he says now. “A lot of people, and I felt really bad about that for a long time.’’ Pearl did not offer an apology, Thomas says, but he did offer an explanation, and it was good enough. “I was at peace with it,’’ Thomas says. “I was released from it.’’
Two years later, the two bumped into one another on the recruiting trail, Thomas then working at UIC. Pearl turned Thomas on to some recruits, even offering an introduction to a grassroots coach he thought might be helpful.
Thomas got out of coaching after two years, and is now working as a radio analyst for Illinois basketball, as well as the Big Ten Network. He also just took a gig with the Illinois university system as a community relations coordinator — “a mini lobbyist,’’ he says with a laugh — working with politicians and community groups in the hopes of expanding educational opportunities for people of color.
He will watch Saturday’s semifinal games with a rooting interest. He’s all in on Michigan State. “Go green, go white, but that’s because I’m a Big Ten guy,’’ he says. “It has nothing to do with Bruce. I wish him nothing but the best.’’
(Photo of Bruce Pearl: Shanna Lockwood/USA Today Sports)
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