I was going to post the link to the story, but the text version (that the link goes to) is horribly fouled up with entire sections transposed and makes no sense. Below is a reproduction that I think I have gotten everything back in proper order so the article makes sense.
Coach calls drug allegations tragic
By TIM DUMAS Chronicle Sports Writer
Until Monday morning, Montana State football coach Mike Kramer was wondering how to fit Andre Fuller onto the cover of next year’s media guide and schedule poster.
By Monday afternoon, Kramer was trying to figure out how Fuller — who was a candidate for captain next season, who was third in a high school class of 500 students and whose mother is an administrator at the same school — could be caught in a drug ring.
“I haven’t slept a wink,” Kramer said Wednesday. “It’s the greatest tragedy that I could have imagined.”
Fuller, a junior cornerback whom teammate Will Claggett called “one of the leaders on the team,” was arrested Monday along with former MSU players Eddie Sullivan and Derrick Davis. The three were charged with dealing cocaine and marijuana.
Fuller, from Pompano Beach, is the second athlete from Florida with ties to Montana State to be arrested in the past six months. Former football player John Lebrum was charged — along with former basketball player Branden Miller of Milwaukee, Wis. — in the murder of Jason Wright in June.
As a result, Kramer said his program will no longer recruit players from Florida as long as he’s head coach, even though one current Floridian, linebacker Clive Lowe of Fort Lauderdale, is a success story.
“That spits in the face of Clive Lowe, who did everything right,” Kramer said.
The coach said that he never saw Fuller’s arrest coming.
“I had no idea until 10:31 a.m. (Monday) when Peter called me,” he said, referring to MSU athletic director Peter Fields. “I called Andre and told him he needed to report to the police, and he complied and he was there in 12 minutes.
“He immediately complied when I asked him to do it. Why couldn’t he have done that (listened) in June (when Fuller was originally charged)?”
In the wake of another group of arrests of out-of-state athletes, Kramer, a leading candidate for the vacant head coaching position at Idaho, said his program does everything it can to ensure that troubled individuals don’t make it to campus.
But he admitted that countless background checks through high school administrators and coaches sometimes aren’t enough to guarantee the athletes won’t land in trouble here.
“We tell them that what you do in a social setting reflects on all of us,” Kramer said. “Not just Mike Kramer or (school president) Geoff Gamble or Peter Fields, but (wives) Sandi Kramer, Patty Gamble and Debbie Fields. They all feel sullied and dirty for having been associated with Andre.”
With Florida out of the picture, what of California, where Sullivan, Davis and countless other recruits and transfers are from?
Kramer estimated that of the 680 athletes who have played for him at MSU, roughly 400 are from California. This past season, 28 were Californian; 41 hailed from Montana.
Many people in the Bozeman community, including alumni, wonder why Montana State continues to recruit players from California. “I’ve heard that myself,” Claggett said Wednesday from his Marysville, Calif., home, “and it makes me angry a little bit that we get such a bad rap. The thing that you have to understand is, you can get bad kids from anywhere.”
“The fact is,” Kramer added, “that this group (Fuller, Davis and Sullivan) cannot ever take away from what those other 680 guys accomplished.”
Nevertheless, Kramer acknowledged how the public is viewing his program.
“I think it’s shallow that people are saying that every one of Mike Kramer’s players are selling drugs,” he said, “but it’s being said. It’s part of the human experience.”
Still, Kramer shouldered part of the blame for Monday’s arrests.
“I started out as a teacher, and when not every one of your students get As, you feel responsible,” he said. “These guys obviously flunked and I feel responsible anytime a student flunks.”
Kramer, who normally doesn’t talk about skin color, addressed the racial overtones that inevitably come with such arrests.
“I’m fearful that because these guys (Fuller, Davis and Sullivan) are black, there’s going to be a backlash (against the African-Americans currently on the team).”
Claggett said the soft-spoken and deeply religious Fuller got in with the wrong crowd.
“You get going down one road and it’s hard to turn back,” he said, “but the thing with Andre is, and I really believe this, this is a black shadow on one part of his great life. He’s going to go on and do great things.”
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
