School's Out

In his five years of practicing clinical neuropsychology, Philip Whatley of Oklahoma City can't remember ever before having fielded such an urgent request for his services. Then again Whatley, who specializes in diagnosing learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder (ADD), had never before been asked to evaluate a college athlete, let alone an athlete whose sport was in season and whose eligibility was in jeopardy with a semester rushing to a close.

The call came on Dec. 11 from a counselor at Oklahoma City University who asked whether Whatley could immediately test Marcus LoVett (pronounced luh-VET), a 6'2" guard who had helped lead the Chiefs to the NAIA championship last spring: This season LoVett's scoring (24.9 points per game) and rebounding (9.9) had staked Oklahoma City to a 9-1 start and a No. 3 ranking as it chased its fifth national title in seven years. The next afternoon Chiefs coach Win Case, 33, brought LoVett to Whatley's office for a five-hour evaluation, and when that was over, Whatley spent five hours more—his first all-nighter since graduate school—writing his preliminary report so he could accommodate the school's request that it be delivered the next morning, the last business day before grades were to be posted for the fall term.

Whatley's evaluation is unambiguous: The 22-year-old LoVett has an IQ of 91, which falls in the average range. His vocabulary and verbal comprehension skills are above average, and he reads and calculates with little difficulty. But he suffers from ADD and what is known as a disorder of written expression, a learning disability that inhibits him from expressing himself in writing. Nonetheless, before coming to Oklahoma City, LoVett had somehow picked up an associate of arts degree from the College of Southern Idaho, a junior college in Twin Falls, and 83 credit hours from Southern Idaho and three other schools, even though he writes at a fifth-grade level. In light of his evaluation Whatley recommended that the university accommodate LoVett's problems in a number of special ways, including extended-time testing, exams with multiple-choice rather than essay questions and as much one-on-one instruction as possible.

Whatley is no big sports fan. "Until it was pointed out to me, I didn't know Marcus was a star basketball player," he says. Nor did he know he was about to find himself enmeshed in a welter of charges of broken promises on one side, countercharges of academic irresponsibility on the other and, ultimately, perhaps inevitably, litigation. The events of the weeks that followed would open a window on a phenomenon that is widely acknowledged to exist in college sports but rarely seen so starkly: schools hooking an athlete to an eligibility-support machine until his four years of playing are up.

As it turned out, Oklahoma City pulled the plug on LoVett of its own accord. The counselor and coach who had been so quick to retain Whatley's services had hurried in vain; LoVett had snorkeled academically ever since enrolling at Oklahoma City in the fall of 1995: He had missed classes and tutoring sessions, and now, as the fall-semester grades posted on Dec. 18 revealed, he had failed three courses and taken incompletes in two others, thereby sinking irretrievably below the 2.0 grade point average required to remain eligible to play under NAIA rules. On Dec. 23 the university turned down LoVett's request that Whatley's recommendations be applied retroactively so that he might do makeup work over the holiday break and salvage passing grades for the semester. LoVett says Case shared his disappointment but told him to accept the decision with grace. "Why would you want to go to the media with this?" LoVett says his coach told him, an account Case disputes. "You don't want people to know you have a handicap. The best thing you can do is show a lot of dignity. Just walk away, go to class and hold your head up high."

LoVett did not walk away. On Jan. 3, with his college basketball career imperiled, he filed a civil suit in Oklahoma County district court. In it he alleges that when he signed with the Chiefs in August 1995, Case promised to have him tested promptly for a learning disability, a charge the coach also denies. LoVett seeks damages as yet undetermined from the university for failing to provide the promised assistance, depriving him of the opportunity to showcase his basketball talents and for inflicting emotional distress.

By claiming that irreparable damage would be done to his NBA prospects if he were not allowed to play, LoVett was quickly granted a temporary restraining order that permitted him to remain a member of the Chiefs. Oklahoma City, believing it could face NAIA sanctions for using an ineligible player, struck back by postponing its Jan. 4 game with Park College of Parkville, Mo., and by not playing LoVett in a Jan. 11 meeting with Phillips University of Enid, Okla., in which the Chiefs suffered their first home loss in 43 games. Oklahoma City also held LoVett out of a game against crosstown rival Oklahoma Christian five days later, which the Chiefs struggled to win. On Jan. 17, following a two-day hearing, Judge Bryan Dixon lifted his restraining order, choosing not to overrule the NAIA regulations to which Oklahoma City is subject. LoVett is still enrolled in classes while pressing on with his civil suit. Meanwhile, the Chiefs, who were 15-7 as of last weekend, are playing out the season without their star guard, a circumstance former Oklahoma City coach Abe Lemons likens to "going into an ass-kickin' contest with one leg."

Researchers often attribute attention deficit disorder to environmental factors such as parental neglect or mental abuse. But from the huge disparities in LoVett's scores on a variety of tests—he fared reasonably well in all categories except those requiring writing—Whatley suspects a neurological basis for LoVett's learning handicaps, as if he had suffered some sort of traumatic head injury as a child.

In fact, LoVett grew up amid both itinerancy and abuse. He shuttled between his parents' hometown of Fort Wayne, Ind., and Wichita Falls, Texas, where his father, Michael, settled right before he separated from Marcus's mother, Debra, when Marcus was about 15. Michael has been in and out of trouble much of his life, with a rap sheet that includes convictions for assault, burglary, criminal trespass, forgery and unlawfully carrying a weapon. Marcus says that his father frequently beat Debra and their three boys, an accusation that Michael doesn't refute, saying, "I look at it as disciplining. They was pretty bad kids." At 15, Debra had already had her first child, Michael Jr.; when she became pregnant with Marcus 11 months later, she tried to abort him by drinking a potentially lethal homemade concoction, so bleak did she see the prospect of bringing another child into her abusive world.

When Michael became violent, Debra sometimes had to summon the police to their home. Marcus says he suffered a particularly nasty beating when he was eight. "It was one of those blows to the head where you black out for a second—everything goes dark—but your eyes are still open," says Marcus, who had not told Whatley of this alleged beating before Whatley made his diagnosis. (Michael says he doesn't recall that particular incident.)