The Baylor Basketball Incident: An Eyewitness to One of the Biggest Scandals (and Turnarounds) in NCAA History

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. They show where America is the star, and the American people. To subscribe to our podcasts, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next to story about one of the biggest scandals in college basketball history, along with one of its biggest turnarounds.

Let’s take a listen.

My name’s Matt Salmon, and I’m the head boys basketball coach at Grapevine Faith Christian School right outside of DFW, Dallas-Fort Worth. And then, that’s what I do full-time. But what I get to tell my players about is a story that a lot of them haven’t heard before, but their parents are probably familiar with. Or, I remember at some point hearing about what happened with Baylor basketball in the early 2000s. And one of my dreams growing up was to be a Division one basketball player, but I never dreamt of being part of one of the largest scandals or tragedies in college basketball history. And going into my senior year down in Waco, that’s exactly where I found myself. But before that, you kind of have to start back at how did basketball become so important to me? So, I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania in a small little town called Berwick, PA. And my family and I were very active in church, and I would say that we did church really well every—

Sunday, Sunday night, Wednesdays. We were up there. And at a young—

age, I prayed a prayer when I was about five and accepted Christ into my heart.

But just grew up with that type of head knowledge.

But it was really when I was nine years old is when I fell in love.

I fell in love with basketball.

One thing that was really big that separated me from my teammates was my ability to practice for long periods of time and not get bored. And I realized quickly when I was about nine or ten that I had three goals. One was to make my freshman eighteen, one was to make varsity as a sophomore, and one was to get a Division one scholarship for basketball. And so, I dedicated my time to that. One example that just of me thinking or viewing the game differently was in seventh grade, going to the Berwick Middle School dance. You know, when I’m dressed up in my half-green, half-purple silk shirt with black jeans, no belt, of course. Shirt tucked in and I’m ready to just dance it up. While I go in and I’m walking past the gym, and the light is on. I jiggle the door. The door is open. I go in, and there’s a basketball waiting. Ripped my silk shirt off, and I worked on my game for about two and a half hours in the gym by myself. Came out after the dance, and my mom said, “Hey, how was the dance?” I said, “I don’t know. I was working on my game the whole time, and I didn’t feel bad about it. I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. One really important moment—

for me came. I was a camp junkie.

I would go to camps all summer long from fifth grade on. And going into my freshman year, I flew down to Texas, and I met the head coach of The Colony, Texas, Tommy Thomas, a legendary coach around these parts. I was about five-seven, five-eight, flat-top sized, thirteen shoe, nothing special to look at. But I had these big dreams and these big goals. And I talked to Coach Thomas about these goals, and he said, “Matt, that can happen for you down here in Texas, well.” As a fourteen-year-old, I flew back to Pennsylvania, where all of our family is from, and I told my mom on the way home from the airport, “I need to move to Texas so I can be a college basketball player.” They asked my little sister, Becky, if she’s three years younger than me, if that was okay, and she said, “Yeah, let’s go.” Within two weeks, our entire family had changed their lives dramatically for the dreams of a fourteen-year-old boy. I mean, you talk about parents being invested. You move across the country to a place where we know nobody, we have no family—they’re all in. So, I had those three goals, and I made my freshman eighteen at The Colony, Texas, where it’s a Big Five, a public school with a lot of diversity. I had to learn real quick how to play against athletic players, how to get tough, and how to not just use my physical skill but my mental ability to play with these guys. I had a great growth spurt going into my sophomore year, where I went from a five-eight to six-one or six-two, really skinny, but now I was tall and skilled, and I made varsity as a sophomore. Well, going into my senior year, The Colony were really good, on ranked seventh in the country. And I get to go down to Waco, Texas, to Baylor University to go on my college visit with a guy named Dave Bliss. Coach Bliss, who had already been a legendary coach, met me and my mom at the gas station in Waco, and he had a Bible in the back seat of his car.

And I think I’m—

not saying that it was planned, but he was a master salesman. He knew what I stood for and knew what my mom was all about. And my mom made the comment to me when she saw the Bible, she felt like this was the right thing. So, it was pretty wise to have that in the back. But Coach Bliss did a great job of taking us around the whole campus, and everybody that he introduced me to, he introduced me like I was already one of his players, and that, like me, coming to Baylor was going to be the best thing for our university. And I’ll never forget he said this. He said, “Matt, I want you to be one of the pillars of our program.” And man, any eighteen-year-old hears that from a Big Twelve school, Division one, and you’re the kind of kid I am that has these goals. I would have signed there if I could. On the way home, I looked at my mom and I said, “That’s where I want to go,” and with tears in her eyes, she was like, “Oh, I’m so glad.” So, freshman, sophomore, junior year, I played every game at Baylor—meaningful minutes at times, lesser minutes of times—but I realized how to bring value.

By the end of my junior—

year, I had solidified a starting role, and man, we were about to be really, really good.

We had future NBA—

players that were sophomores. We had some role players like myself that were juniors that were going to be seniors.

And going into—

my senior year, we were picked to be in the top four of the Big Twelve, which that means that you’re probably Top Twenty-Five, and that means you’re going to March Madness, to the Big Dance.

When we come back, more of Matt Salmon’s story. “Arise, a Fall, Arise Again” here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country—stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give, and we continue with Our American Stories and Matt Salmon’s story. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

There’s the past till Latner. What’s it up?

I grew up watching Duke make its amazing runs in the early nineties with Laettner, you know, hitting that turnaround shot against Kentucky. Like, I practiced that shot in the dream—not just playing college basketball, but was getting to that stage—and man, like, it really felt like it was about to happen.

I can remember it.

Was a Friday afternoon in June of 2003.

I just come in from playing sand volleyball.

I stayed on the Baylor campus every summer to be with our strength coach, to get extra classes in.

But I just loved the university, and I loved being—

on campus and being a basketball player at Baylor. And one of my professors that I was friends with called and said, “Matt, what’s up with your team?”

“What’s going on?” I said, “What do you—you?”

“What do you mean? What are they doing now?” He said, “No, like, you need to turn on the news right now. They’re saying that there’s been a homicide and that basketball players might be involved.” So, that summer of 2003 was the longest summer of my life. We had just finished weights, and we were told that we were having a team meeting in the locker room—which that’s not odd to have team meetings—but in the locker room, our coaches were there. But the strange part was there’s policemen in there. That was the different part. And so they go around and they’re asking, “Hey, we haven’t seen Patrick.” Nobody’s seen Patrick in about a week. His parents haven’t heard from. You guys know anything? The interesting thing was, so, Patrick was a redshirt, and Patrick was a different guy. He’d be there for a week; he’d be gone for two weeks; and we would never have explanations.

He was in and out all summer long.

So, for me not to see him for an extended period of time wasn’t strange at all. So I dismissed that whole thing. Patrick will show up with like a new tattoo or a new earring. He was in Vegas, who knows? And then that Friday was when that came out in the news, and this story started to unfold, and then these allegations started; they started to dig into Coach Bliss a little bit. This was a hard moment where I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks, and we still didn’t know where Patrick was. And I was walking in the bottom of the Ferrell Center, and I was crossing paths with him, and he looked older to me, you know; it looked really beat down. And I was such a good follower, you know, as a player and a coach—not a coach’s pet, but man—I just believed in them, and they, I knew they loved me, and I him. I said, “Coach, I just want to let you know that I’m sorry for what you’re going through and what people are saying about you.” And I told him, I was like, “I don’t think you deserve any of that.” And being around him so much, I’d once watched him do a four-hour coaching video in one take with no ums or ahs. He was an incredibly accomplished speaker and a good salesman. But standing in front of this guy, I felt like something’s off. He is not looking me in the eye. He’s very kind of frantic with what he’s saying and doing. But he said, “Matt, you know what we found was, when we went into Patrick’s apartment, we found drugs and money, and Matt, that’s how he was paying for school.” And I said, “Wow, like, yes, sir, like that makes sense,” because it had come out that Patrick wasn’t on a scholarship.

Patrick was a six-eight freak of an athlete that—

could shoot, and he was going to be an NBA player. Like, he was one of the reasons why we were going to be really good the next year. For us to ever think that he wasn’t on scholarship, it never came up; like, I would look more like a walk-on than he did. And so, but that came out that: “How is Patrick Dennehy paying for school?” And then Coach Bliss told me this story as a truth, and as the good soldier that I was, I just went along right with it.

Fast forward: They find Patrick’s body.

After about a month and a half, found out that Carlton Dotson, some one of our teammates, had shot and killed him. Dotson had fled and was pleading insanity up in Maryland, and Coach Bliss resigned before all the truth came out. And my mom tells the story that she looked out at the window of me and I was crying, and she was crying, and it was like hard to see her son kind of lose that innocence that I had had and to be hurt like that. I went to the press conference, and they asked some of us older players to talk. So, I stood up in front of my teammates and their families and defended Coach Bliss, thanked him for all the time that he had had with us, and told them that I would be staying and that I hope they did too. And I had this feeling kind of in my heart at that point: “I’m lying right now.” I was the spokesman for a program that I did not believe in, did not appreciate, didn’t really even want to—

be a part of anymore.

I had to get out of not just Waco, but I felt like Dallas-Fort Worth. So, I flew back to Pennsylvania to stay with that coach that I had come down to Texas to go to camp with—that guy that I had known. I went back to… he moved back to Pennsylvania, and so I’m staying with him just—

to get away.

Our media guy called me late, late one night, and he said, “Matt, have your phone on you tomorrow morning.” I said, “Why? Like, what do you need me for?” He said, “It’s about to get really bad.” I said, “How can it be worse than it is? Players did, coaches, coaching staff’s gone.” He’s like, “Just have your phone ready.” My coach came up and woke me up and said, “Matt, you need to look at the newspaper.” And in that newspaper was a recording written out, of one of the assistant coaches that was new, that I didn’t know that well, was in the office with Coach Bliss and other players—not me, but other players—and it was him constructing this lie of how they needed to blame Patrick, paint him as a drug dealer, and somebody that was; that’s how he was paying for school. And Bliss even went on to say, “Patrick can’t say anything about it.”

He’s dead.

And the thing that really hit me—I would think, more than anybody else in the country besides Patrick’s family—that read that he had told me that story almost word for word, but not as a lie.

He told me as a truth.

He didn’t ask me to lie to people like he was telling these players and these coaches to do. And that was like a last-straw moment of any type of belief in people or goodness.

That I had. Oh, I was so angry and mad, and—

we found out that, yeah, he knew that Patrick had threats, and he had been paying for players and other players too.

But that summer it was full of a lot of hope, and despair that—

You know, the question I never asked was, “God, how can I be a light in this situation? How can I bring good and lead people the right way?” Instead, what I did is, I think I actually, I let people… not think I did.

I know I did.

I led people the wrong way because when you say that you stand for something and you believe something, and then when it gets hard and you completely throw it away, people will see that, and they’ll get confused. I think I led people farther away from having faith in God because I was known for something and then completely was doing the opposite when things get hard. So, regret—I mean, pain of discipline is far less than the pain of regret.

And that’s one thing I regret.

And you’ve been listening to Matt Salmon tell a heck of a story about how his world unraveled in the summer of 2003. And I’ll never forget it myself, as these news stories and news accounts rolled out from ESPN and all across sports pages and the news pages of America: a murder in college basketball, drugs, and then ultimately the corruption at the core of the coach and the program. But interestingly, Matt Salmon put himself in the middle of it, even though he didn’t do anything wrong. He failed himself as a leader and the people around him as a leader, and failed himself and his walk with his own God. And by the way, to get the book “The Leftovers: Baylor Betrayal and Beyond” by Matt Salmon, go to Amazon or the usual suspects. More of this remarkable story about basketball, about life, and so much more. Matt Salmon’s story continues here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the howering tale told by Matt Salmon about the college basketball program he was a part of. And by a senior year, he would be a starter on a team that would more than likely end up in the Big Dance and be a Top Ten or Top Twenty college program.