College basketball fans can't help but notice that many teams with African American stars have white players who rarely get into the game unless their team is ahead or behind by a large margin. Basketball coaches—a predominantly white group—sometimes use the last few seats on the bench as patronage plums for the children of donors, ex-players, and others with connections.

  College basketball teams often hold open tryouts on campus that draw as many as one hundred hopefuls. But the nonscholarship slots they vie for may be taken by insiders instead. Every year, on the first day of practice, St. Joseph's University men's basketball coach Phil Martelli holds such a tryout. But in 1999 Coach Martelli exempted one candidate, who had averaged only two points a game as a high school senior, from the competition. His name: Phil Martelli Jr.

  Coach Martelli told me that Phil junior was “average at best.” But he said that his son aspired to be a coach and having him on the team was the best way to teach him. The younger Martelli, who graduated in 2003 and is now an assistant basketball coach at Manhattan College, recalled that crowds in opponents” arenas used to hurl “Daddy's boy” and other taunts at him.

  Similarly, Jared Sichting didn't participate in Marquette University's open basketball tryout in 2002. The five-foot-eleven guard secured his spot on the powerhouse team through a Marquette assistant coach who had worked for the National Basketball Association's Minnesota Timberwolves, where Jared's father, former NBA star Jerry Sichting, has been an assistant coach. Jared, who averaged about 10 points a game in high school, told me he was recruited by several colleges with lower-level basketball programs and hadn't considered Marquette. But in April of his senior year in high school, the Marquette assistant coach called Jerry Sichting, said the team could use an extra player, and asked if Jared was interested. Jared agreed, in part because he aspired to a coaching career. Although the deadline for applying to Marquette had passed, the coaching staff arranged his admission.

  “If he's interested in coaching, it's a way to get a foot in the door, something to put on your resume,” Jerry Sichting told me.

  The younger Sichting received plenty of perks at Marquette. He got top-of-the-line gear that Nike gave the Marquette team for reaching the Final Four in the 2003 NCAA tournament; when he and his teammates played at Madison Square Garden, they were feted at a banquet on an aircraft carrier museum docked on the Hudson River. But he had misgivings about his limited role on the team. He played a total of nine minutes in five games in the 2003-4 season and did not score. The next year he quit the team. “Whenever I use one of my dad's connections to help me out, I feel a little guilty,” Jared told me. “It didn't take much time for me to realize how much better the other players were at certain things. It's hard to sit on the bench and know you're not going to play when you've played all your life.”

  Duke University nonscholarship basketball player Joe Pagliuca also has a well-placed father, Stephen Pagliuca, managing director of Boston buyout firm Bain Capital Inc., and part owner of the Boston Celtics. The elder Pagliuca played on Duke's freshman basketball team and has given more than a million dollars to the university. He chaired the undergraduate school's board of visitors in 2004-5.

  A strong student and a good outside shooter, Joe averaged 17 points a game as a senior cocaptain at Belmont Hill School, a Boston-area private school, but was not recruited by big-time college basketball programs. Bob Gibbons, who publishes a newsletter that evaluates high school players, told me he did not rank Joe Pagliuca on his list of the country's top eight hundred college prospects in 2003.

  Early in Joe's senior year in high school, his father called Steve Wojciechowski, an assistant coach at Duke, one of the nation's premier basketball teams. Wojciechowski told me he was familiar with Pagliuca as a successful businessman and Duke alumnus and spent “the better part of a day” escorting the Pagliucas around Duke's athletic facilities in Durham, North Carolina, and advising Joe on how to improve his game. He said he and Pagliuca kept in touch afterward. “We're lucky here—the culture of the university is that all Duke people look out for each other,” Wojciechowski said. “If one needs a helping hand, another is there to provide it.”

  After Joe enrolled in 2003, Duke coaches invited him to scrimmage with the team, which doesn't hold an open tryout. According to Wojciechowski, “our guys said he was a good player, a really good guy,” and Joe walked on to the team. He rarely played and didn't score a point in his freshman, sophomore, and junior seasons. The Boston Globe reported in April 2004 that the younger Pagliuca “readily admits he made full use of his father's position” to make the team. But in a later telephone interview with me, Joe downplayed his father's role, saying he believes it was “mostly” his own doing. “It's a great experience to be on a team with such high-caliber coaches and players,” he said.

  “I call tell you definitely nobody has ever been chosen because of who his father was,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski told me. He says he picked Joe as much for his “strength of character” as for his basketball skills. While Duke is a top Division I program, Joe “should probably have been a Division II or III player,” he said. “He's not going to have a role where we're counting on him in our rotation.”

  Another Duke basketball benchwarmer, Andy Means, who graduated in 2004, told me that his father, aunt, and several other relatives attended the university, and his grandmother was an old friend of Coach Krzyzewski. (The coach acknowledged this relationship but said he has a lot of friends.) “My grandma knew Coach K a long time ago,” Andy told me. “They knew my name. I don't know if that had anything to do” with being picked for the team. He said the basketball coaches didn't push for his admission to Duke but that he benefited instead from legacy preference. “My SATs weren't as good as other people's,” he said.

  Country club teams such as golf and crew, which reap little revenue from ticket sales or television contracts, often carry more players than they need, padding their rosters with kids from families wealthy enough to pitch in. Although a college can send only five golfers to a tournament, the Georgetown University men's team in 2003-4 had fifteen members, all of whom enjoyed the pleasure of practicing at a Professional Golf Association tour course, the Tournament Players Club at Avenel in Potomac, Maryland. When I asked Georgetown coach Thomas Hunter whether colleges seek golfers whose parents can afford to donate, he said, “There's a bit of that.” He added, “I'm not going to do just anything for the sake of adding a person to the program. The player has to have some talent.”

  Although the Grishams live only twenty miles from the University of Virginia campus, Ty hadn't seriously considered going to the elite state university because, as a B student with average SAT scores, he was unlikely to get in on his academic credentials. But when Dennis Womack, then the UVA baseball coach, surprised the family by offering a $4,000 partial scholarship, the prospects changed, not because the Grishams needed the money but because scholarship recruits are generally given a substantial admissions boost as well as a fair chance at playing time. “Suddenly with the offer of a scholarship, which meant guaranteed admission, he had a chance to go to a wonderful academic school and compete in the ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference], which is a very good baseball conference,” John Grisham says. “There's an old saying in college baseball: if you give a kid money, you've got to give him a chance to play.”

  In Division I college baseball, teams typically have thirty-five players, and the NCAA limits them to the equivalent of 11.7 full scholarships. They generally spread that money among twenty or so players by doling out partial scholarships. Some coaches who recruited Ty Grisham, who had been a standout player at a small Virginia prep school, did not consider him good enough for a scholarship in a top league. They thought he was fast but needed to improve his batting to play in Division I. “He was a decent ballplayer,” said Ron Atkins, University of Richmond coach. “For us, he was not a scholarship player.” But Atkins says that if he'd known that Ty's father would finance a stadium, “he would have been a scholarship player.”

  Virginia's baseball team had been in the middle of the pack for years in the ACC, partly because its obsolete stadium made it hard to lure top talent. At the time, John Grisham said, he was persuaded that Virginia recruiters “had nothing but the purest of motives. They wanted my son as a baseball player.” Now, he added, “you've just got to wonder.” He recalled being skeptical of several recruiters from other colleges, whom he declined to identify: “I was just very suspicious of a coach who would show us his stadium and say he wanted to build this or that, expand here or there, put in lights.” He said Ty did not want to be interviewed but is “as confused as I am.”

  Womack, now an assistant athletic director at UVA, acknowledged that the potential financial benefit to his struggling baseball program of having Ty on the team did cross his mind. “It would make sense,” he said. “It's public knowledge that Mr. Grisham is a very generous person with baseball.” But he said the hope of a refurbished stadium was not why he gave Ty a scholarship. “First and foremost, the kid's got to be able to play,” he said. “He had a chance; that's why we signed him. Some pan out, some don't.” Craig Littlepage, now Virginia's athletic director and then senior associate athletic director, said a gift from Grisham was never discussed and that the baseball program at the time was concentrating on in-staters such as Ty.

  After his son signed with Virginia in fall 2000, Grisham promised his wife he wouldn't build a stadium for the university. “We knew it wasn't the right thing to do with our son involved in the program,” he told me. Then in April 2001, a university task force recommended eliminating baseball scholarships and limiting the team to regional travel to avoid a budget deficit and comply with Title IX by narrowing the spending gap between men's and women's sports. Alarmed that the program his son was about to join would be gutted, Grisham successfully lobbied the school's governing board to reject the program—and then volunteered to put UVA baseball on a sounder footing by upgrading the stadium himself. Although his gift was anonymous, he told me he was the largest donor to the $5 million renovation and also helped with fund-raising. In hindsight, he said, his gift was a “huge mistake to do when I did it,” because it put “tremendous internal pressure” on Ty to “prove he belonged. I beat myself up every day.”

  After missing his freshman season with a foot injury, Ty barely played in 2003. Womack said Ty saw little action—in the stadium his father built—because he was “a young guy behind a veteran outfield.” John Grisham retorted, “He was not sitting on the bench behind a bunch of all-Americans, I can promise you that.” Teammate Matt Street, also an outfielder, told me Ty was “a little raw” when he arrived at Virginia. “He kind of got pushed down to the bottom and they forgot about him,” Matt said.

  In 2004, under new coach Brian O'Connor, Ty quit the team after ten games. Matt Street said Ty's patience ran out when a freshman started ahead of him against a “cupcake” opponent that Virginia defeated 15-2.

  Because baseball was so time-consuming, “Ty thought he was missing so much of the college experience,” his father said. “It's very frustrating to sit on the bench day after day when you know you can compete with the people on the field. That's what ate him alive.” He said Ty told him after quitting, “When I drove away from the stadium, it was the happiest day of my life.”

  When I interviewed Grisham in the summer of 2004, he told me that he and Womack had not spoken in more than a year. “There's some real strain there,” he said, adding that he also stopped supporting the program financially. “Once Ty walked away, so did I,” he said. “I have no involvement with the program now and don't want any. I don't go to games, don't go to that beautiful stadium over there.”

  WHILE VIRGINIA'S first varsity crew had faltered, the second varsity eight had dominated its competition leading up to the Oregon State meet, earning Catelyn Coyle and Andria Haneman promotions to the first boat. Without those two stalwarts, Katie Yrazabal, Kerry Maher, and the other second varsity rowers would race their Oregon State counterpart, hoping to maintain the JV's undefeated record, before the universities” top eights battled.

  Katie grew up in San Francisco in an upper-middle-class family; her father is a real estate agent, her mother a gate agent for American Airlines. They sent her to St. Ignatius College Prep, a Jesuit school that happened to be the only San Francisco high school with its own crew team, and Katie began rowing as a freshman. Her team flourished on the water, and even more in college admissions; aided by athletic preference, two teammates enrolled at Yale and one each at Brown, Wisconsin, and the University of California. Katie, with an SAT score of “1260 or 1270” and an impressive ERG score, was slotted at Virginia. “Our college advisers at St. Ignatius were like, ‘Have backup schools ready,”” she told me. “They didn't believe it.”

  Kerry Maher was one of five Canadian rowers on the Virginia roster, including four from the province of Ontario. Because rowing is a favorite pastime for working-class families in English-speaking Canada, unlike this country, the Canadians on the Virginia team tend to come from humbler backgrounds than the Americans. Kerry's father was a maintenance worker, and her mother was laid off from a nursing job; she attended a public high school and learned to row at a boathouse shared by all the schools in the area. She also rowed for a local club, and Virginia offered her a scholarship after her boat won the Canadian Henley championship. The UVA rowing team “is full of a lot of wealthy kids,” Kerry told me. “Most of the Canadians are coming from families who either have farms or large families that can barely afford to get by. You can tell the difference sometimes. Sometimes I feel like, ‘Oh, man, I wish my parents could just buy me that.’”

  The working-class Canadian rowers have to adjust not only to the affluent atmosphere but to the academic rigor of an elite university. Kerry, who had been a good student in high school and scored “just under 1200” on the SAT, was placed on academic probation after her freshman year; she had to take summer courses, attend study hall, and go through an appeals process to stay on the team. As a sophomore, she improved to a 3.0 average, “just from learning how to do things properly.”

  Another Canadian rower, Amanda Kennedy, also had a rough transition academically. Over bagels at a crowded Charlottesville, Virginia, breakfast spot, Amanda told me that her father and mother—a General Motors plant supervisor and a billing clerk—didn't go to college, and that she had needed donations from Ontario service clubs to rent a single scull. At a regatta in her high school senior year, somebody handed out almanacs that listed U.S. colleges with rowing teams; she picked thirty-two of them and sent them her athletic resume. “My phone didn't stop ringing,” she recalled. Because American colleges required the SATs, she took them, “did horrible,” tried again, and raised her score to “1000 or 1100. The colleges said, ‘We can work with that.””

  She ruled out the Ivy League because they didn't offer athletic scholarships; as an international student, she didn't qualify for federally funded need-based aid. She ended up visiting four colleges: Boston University, Miami, Temple, and Virginia. Although she says she didn't realize that Virginia was viewed as a top school, she enjoyed the small-town ambience and accepted Coach Sauer's offer of a partial scholarship, supplementing it with Ontario student loans.

  As a freshman, she said, “I screwed off, I just rowed and partied.” This regimen caught up to her when she was suspended from the team for the first semester of her sophomore year. She told me that Coach Sauer threatened to withdraw her scholarship, but he eventually relented, and she boosted her grades. “The work wasn't hard, you just had to go to class,” Amanda said. She graduated in 2003 and now works for a local business.

  Despite a brisk wind that whipped up waves on the Ravenna Reservoir course, Katie, Kerry, and the second varsity trounced the Oregon State JV by fourteen seconds. Next came the revamped first eight's turn, with Catelyn Coyle quarterbacking the boat at stroke and Andria Haneman in the next seat. Parents peering from a nearby churchyard or from a motorized barge shouted, “Pick it up, UVA!” “Let's go!” and other encouragement as Virginia's orange oars cut crisply through the water, scattering ducks right and left. Team boatman Roger Payne, steering the barge, timed the race and announced the strokes per minute: “UVA is at thirty-four, Oregon State thirty-four and a half.” Steadily widening their lead until open water could be seen between the two boats, the varsity defeated Oregon State by nearly eight seconds. As the first eight crossed the finish line, Catelyn thrust her arms in the air and shouted to Roger, “Nine for nine, Roger”—a reference to her undefeated racing record for the year.

  After carrying their shells to the boathouse, the rowers repaired to a nearby lawn where parents had prepared a gourmet repast. Over grilled chicken sausages and bow-tie pasta with feta cheese, Coach Sauer shrugged off my suggestion of socioeconomic and academic disparities between American and Canadian rowers. He told me that he had grown up on a farm himself and had attended Purdue, a state university in Indiana, where he hoped to play football. “I got my bell rung” and switched to rowing, he said. “People go, ‘It's an elitist sport.” If it is, I didn't know about it. I sure as hell don't come from that.”

  Nevertheless, Coach Sauer acknowledged he was concerned about the team's lack of racial diversity—so much so that he had recently made an exception to his cherished ERG rule of thumb for recruits. In the summer of 2004, Amanda Fulwood had been touring colleges and made an appointment to meet him. Amanda, who is African American, was then entering her senior year at Shaker Heights High School in a well-to-do Cleveland suburb. Her family had moved there from suburban Maryland in 2000 so that she could attend the highly regarded public school; her father, Samuel Fulwood, had become a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He had encouraged his daughter to play basketball, but Amanda took up rowing instead because many girls in her honors classes belonged to the crew club, which has since attained varsity status, one of the few public school girls” crew teams.