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Famous (potentially) last words, courtesy of me, on April 11 when OJ Mayo officially turned pro:

In the end, like most things, the reality of OJ was somewhere in between the extremes of those who figured his tenure would lead to the SMUing of USC’s hoops program and those who, to paraphrase Mel Gibson in Braveheart, assumed Mayo would be seven feet tall, win games by the hundreds, and consume the Pac-10 with fireballs from his eyes and lightning bolts from his arse. All in all, it worked out for everyone, I’d say. And the benefits for SC could be felt for a long time (assuming nothing emerges, Reggie Bush style, down the road).

Fair to say the news coming out of today’s ESPN Outside the Lines report on benefits OJ Mayo may have received before and during his ever-so-brief tenure at USC would qualify as “Reggie Bush style.” The revelations center around an event promoter/sports agency “runner” named Rodney Guillory, already known to Trojans hoops fans for a) helping get Mayo to SC, and b) getting former star Jeff Trepagnier in trouble with the NCAA. This time around, according to former Camp Mayo insider Louis Johnson, Guillory has:

• Provided Mayo with cash, clothes, hotel rooms, phone service, meals, a flat-screen TV, and airline tickets, among other things,
• Been on the take, so to speak, to steer Mayo to Bill Duffy Associates, the agency group that is representing him as a pro,
• Participated in what would easily be the creepiest and most inappropriate use of a credit card we’ve learned about in the last few days if not for a certain University of Florida safety, running up thousands of dollars in charges one the credit line of what seems to be a fake sickle cell anemia charity.

For the record, the NCAA frowns upon this sort of thing.

Johnson doesn’t deny that Guillory is committed to Mayo, and vice versa, but assuming all of this is true, and judging by the amount of corroboration produced by ESPN for their report, it certainly seems solid, the guy has also been looking out for himself, too.

Clearly, too, some people, like, say…. me, were a little to quick to give Mayo, or at least the people around him, the benefit of the doubt, working under the assumption that he was as clean as anyone seems to be in big time college sports these days. Call me naive, to say the least. I still believe he’s a good, polite kid, and the reports seem to indicate Mayo was not pleased with all of Guillory’s actions. I’d be surprised to hear that Mayo skipped his classes and didn’t meet his obligations on campus, and certainly while he was on campus, trouble many people expected didn’t materialize, in terms of bad behavior or posses run amok.

Still, the Year of OJ, as many feared before he arrived, could leave SC in hot water.

Beyond the material produced for OTL, ESPN.com’s Kelly Naqi breaks down in detail the relationship between Mayo and Guillory, and the shady things Guillory was doing. Mayo says he’d been checked out by the NCAA before and during his year at Troy, and that his relationship with Guillory, which goes back to when Mayo was 15 years old, was totally Kosher, and Duffy’s agency denies they fluffed Guillory to ensure they’d get Mayo as a client.

I don’t buy it.

And SC, especially in the wake of the Reggie Bush thing, should have been far more aware of what was going on. Writes ESPN.com’s Pat Forde:

You can plead ignorance once — and even that was almost impossible to believe, in the case of Bush. Plead it twice? Um, no. USC should be crushed by the NCAA, the Pacific-10 and its own administration.

Especially with a player everyone in Hoopsworld strongly suspected was no amateur before he set foot in Los Angeles. You had to search hard to find a soul who didn’t think O.J. Mayo had been prostituted for years as his prep legend grew, starting in seventh grade. (Put it this way: When early Mayo confidant Sonny Vaccaro gets muscled out of the scene, somebody’s bringing some serious juice to the table.)

So you take the Bush allegations, add a side of Mayo and ask the question: Has there ever been a more textbook definition of “lack of institutional control”?

I’ve heard a lot of people express the belief that Pete Carroll and the athletic department didn’t know about the benefits Reggie Bush was receiving. I certainly don’t know anything to refute that. Nor do I know if Tim Floyd knew about these details of Guillory’s relationship with Mayo, and the benefits the freshman might have been given. But assuming the allegations are true, it would indicate some willful ignorance on the part of the institution. Again, Forde:

You have to assume USC simply didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know the extent to which runners already had set their hooks into their highest-profile basketball recruit ever. The Trojans knew they were in this deal for one year before Mayo turned pro, and they probably just averted their gaze, hoping nothing blew up and the victories would pile up.

I’m sure more details will emerge over the next few weeks, and from Mayo’s perspective, he’ll be fine. He’ll go to the NBA and likely prosper. And while Mayo hasn’t seemed like the type of guy to callously inflict damage on the basketball program at USC and his (now) former teammates, if he accepted the gifts there’s clearly some willful ignorance on his part, too. You can’t be handed the things he apparently was given without wondering if everything was copacetic, especially given the kerfuffle over the Lakers tickets he was given by Carmelo Anthony in January. Put two and two together.

Take a look at the OTL reports below, and you can decide for yourself. But it’s fair to say that the gift of OJ Mayo, which seemed like it would last for a year, and maybe beyond thanks to the boost he gave to recruiting, might continue to give for years to come.

Brian Kamenetzky hosts the Lakers Blog and Blue Notes: A Dodgers Blog for the LA Times.com. He’s a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, and can be heard regularly on the Steve Mason Show, on 710 ESPN radio in LA. Write him at bk@sportshubla.com.

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