Shipley was either a coaching whiz and social pioneer, coaching the Univeristy of Southwestern Louisiana into the basketball elite, breaking the "color line" at the same time, or he was a scoundrel who caused USL to suffer the harshest penalties ever meted out by the NCAA.
Shipley's final six Ragin' Cajun teams all were ranked in final Top 20s. He was conference Coach of the Year six times in two leagues, and USL won almost 70 percent of its games (296-129, which translated into seven conference championships and six runner-up) in 16 years under Shipley.
You'd almost think those are Hall of Fame credentials.
But the only way Shipley can get into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame is if he buys a ticket.
Shipley has been on the Hall ballot for the better part of a decade and has yet to garner enough votes from the state's sports wrriters to get in.
The reason is clearly the NCAA probations that hit USL in 1968 and 1973. The 53 violations in 1973, including 32 involving the basketball coaching staff, put the entire USL athletic program on probation.
A decade before the term "death penalty" became part of NCAA jargon, a shutdown of the Cajun basketball program was ordered.
Only Kentucky, in the early 1950s, has ever endured a similar basketball sentence.
The NCAA as a matter of policy does not discus specifics about any of its investigations, but an enforcement officer familiar with USL at the time said, "This was the biggest penalty ever handed out, and there was a reason for it."
Shipley's staff was charged with grade-fixing, giving money and loans without charging interest, providing cars and clothes to USL players, providing transportation home, and gas and maintenance for their cars.
The cash payments were of varying amounts, ranging from $5 to $185 a week.
"Hell, some of those kids needed clothes," said Shipley, now 65 and a Lafayette oil executive. "They needed to live like other students. They needed linen, and they needed toothbrushes. Yes, they got something. And I'd say we got by cheaper than anybody else in the top 10."
Less easily rationalized is the grand-tampering, which Shipley said was done by well-meaning academic "friends," though the NCAA said in its charges that the USL basketball staff was involved in arrangements for "fraudulent testing and certification."
Neutral observers on the scene at the time hold to a theory that Shipley's problems began in 1965 when he defied the state's segregation laws, which forbade "white" teams from playing in tournaments where they may have to play againt black athletes, by taking his Gulf States champion Cajuns to the NAIA tournament in Kansas City, Mo.
A year later, he recruited the first black players (Marvin Winkler, Leslie Scott and Elvin Ivory) at a Louisiana state college.
"The other GSC schools wanted to take a little more time and agreed to get black players together," said Austin Wilson, the Louisiana Associated Press sports writer. "As I recall, Shipley said, 'I don't agree to this.'"
Ed Tunstall, the Louisiana AP bureau chief at the time, said, "Shipley simply saw players he knew could help him and ticked everybody off by getting them." Not only were the other coaches angry, but the State board of Trustees, which runs Louisiana's secondary coleges, refused to aprove the grants-in-aid for the black players.
With Shipley's blessing, a black business group in Lafayette raffled a car, and the proceeds paid for the grants.
"When the NCAA first came around," Shipley recalled, "I filled them in on that, why we had players who were not on scholarship. And that turned out to be one of the first charges they hit us with."
Neither USL nor the NCAA has copies of the 1968 case on file to verify Shipley's claim.
"But the State Board of Trustees did freeze Shipley's salary at $15,900 for the five years after the first black were recruited.
"I did think they were trying to send a message," Shipley said.
Dr. Ray Authement, now the president of USL, noted that to that point, Shipley had an impeccable personal record but after that became "sort of obsessed with getting the players he wanted."
Shipley said after he talked to the NCAA in 1967 about the lack of athletic grants for his black players, "It became a brushfire. It just kept going. It never stopped."
Today, Shipley contended the biggest mistake he made was not getting a big-time lawyer. A young lawyer named Bob Wright and former state senator Edgar Mouton worked for Shipley's interest as volunteers. John Allen Bernard was retained for USL. "I guess I was a volunteer," Bernard said. "I've never been paid."
They kept the NCAA at bay in the couts for more than a year, fighting the NCAA sanctions.
Shipley's attorneys won in state court but lost 4-3 in the Court of Appeals. The turn of one appeals vote could have mirrored the recent case of UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian, whose attorneys conferred with Shipley's when they fought the NCAA.
"The problem we had was there was nobody left to fight for USL," Shipley said. In the wake of the scandal, the president resigned, the athletic director resigned, the football coach resigned and Shipley resigned.
"They just wanted to get it over with," Shipley said of the new Cajun regime.
Richard Chappius
, a Lafayette lawyer who represented the NCAA, said USL was only fighting procedurally to keep the case going. "The NCAA had USL dead to rights."
Authement said Shipley's credentials for the state Hall of Fame have to be looked at from an historical perspective. "He was one of the first Southern coaches to recruit blacks. He had many problems diretly because of that. There were tansgressions, but there also were mitigating factors."
Benny Hollis, the athletic director at Northeast Louisiana Univeristy, was a member of the committee that voted Shipley into the state Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame several years ago.
Hollis, who played and coached against Shipley's teams, agrued passionately that the Hall of Fame would be incomplete without Shipley.
"Beryl Shipley did a lot more on the plus side than on the minus side," Hollis said. "As a man who made a living coaching basketball, take it from me, he was a great coach. He got a lot of average players and made them beter players."
Interestingly, one of those players Shipley developed, Dwight "Bo" Lamar, is enshrined in the Louisiana Hall of Fame.
There is one other matter to weigh. Integrity was never a discussion when the only other coach whose basketball program was found corrupt enough for the NCAA to shut down was inducted into the national Basketball Hall of Fame.
That, of course, was Adolph Rupp.
Times-Picayune
February 4, 1991
Marty Mule
UL Coach (1957-73) Beryl Shipley
Quote
Beryl C. Shipley
Originally Posted by LuLu
