Cuonzo Martin smiles as he speaks to reporters during a news conference Monday, March 28, 2011 in Knoxville, Tenn. after being named the new men’s head basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, replacing Bruce Pearl. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)One link between Bruce Pearl and Cuonzo Martin is obvious. Had Pearl not been fired as Tennessee men’s basketball coach on March 21, Martin could not have been hired to replace him on March 28.
That fact is irrefutable. But that’s not the first time Pearl rather directly altered Martin’s life.
For that moment we must return to the summer of 1990. Martin was about to commit to play for Illinois, as might have been expected of a schoolboy star from East St. Louis.
We say “about” because it was during that summer that the Deon Thomas recruiting scandal began, a scandal created by Pearl when the then-Iowa assistant coach reportedly taped a phone conversation between Illinois assistant Jimmy Collins and prep All-American Thomas that seemed to indicate the Illini were willing to deliver both cash and a car for the player’s services,
Thomas always denied such an offer ever happened, and the NCAA later cleared the Illini of wrongdoing on that particular charge. But it found enough secondary violations eventually to ban the school from postseason competition for a single year.