A Bone To Pick With Boone

Besides, Pickens has given away a fortune to nonfootball causes: Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in his hometown of Dallas ($8 million), Katrina victims ($7 million), UT Southwestern Medical Center ($2 million) and the T. Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State ($1 million), to name a few. But this last check makes those look like Monopoly money.

"I saw an urgent situation that needed big dollars," Pickens says. "And I stepped up to it."

O.K., so maybe your definition of urgent runs more along the lines of famine, tsunamis and disease, but good luck changing Pickens's mind. It's like talking to a hurricane. This is the infamous corporate raider who tried to buy Gulf Oil without Gulf Oil wanting him to and wound up with a silo of money.

Pickens, 78, is larger than life. This summer a freshman defensive end was coming off the field when he was introduced to the great man. The kid's eyes went wide as spaghetti plates. "Oh my God!" the kid said. "I thought you were dead!"

Maybe a few wished he were when this recent donation hit, because it's going to mean that about 250 families will have to be relocated to make room for the new, colossal athletic complex. But, hey, it's not like Oklahoma State doesn't have a heart. The university is paying people a $300 bonus for every year they lived in their house before the bulldozers come. Sure, Aunt Ida, you've been forced out of the home you raised your kids in, but won't that $6,000 be nice?

Some people think they ought to name the whole school after Pickens. Boone Pickens University. Well why not? He's handpicked the athletic director, the football coach, everything up to the curtains in the suites. Plus, all the money he donates to the school goes straight back into his wildly successful BP Capital energy hedge fund. Which means he gives the money with one hand, manages it with the other and decides how to spend it with, I don't know, his teeth?

Robert Darcy, a poli-sci professor at Oklahoma State, says the tail is not just wagging the dog, it's swinging the dog around like a lasso. "We have [school] departments in basements, dorms, attics and condemned buildings," Darcy says. "This university is underfunded in every imaginable way. And yet the only concern here continues to be football."

O.K. So what's your point?

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