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USF star’s story turns out to be tale of bull
By Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard
Published: January 10, 2008 09:06AM
It was one of the feel-good stories of the South Florida football season, how senior linebacker Ben Moffitt balanced the responsibilities of sport, school and family, commuting 110 miles each day between Tampa and rural Bushnell, because that was home for his wife and their two children, ages 5 and 3.
The Bulls promoted him for honors with the slogan “Linebacker. Leader. Husband. Father.”
We offered our own version of the story the day before the Oregon-USF matchup in the Sun Bowl, written by Register-Guard reporter Chris Hansen, based on past stories and Hansen’s interviews with Moffitt, USF coach Jim Leavitt and defensive coordinator Wally Burnham in El Paso.
“It’s a weird balance,” Moffitt told Hansen. “It can be hard, but it comes with the territory I guess, and it’s been working out.”
Well, there’s a postscript.
Last Thursday, Moffitt, 23, filed for divorce from his wife of five years, Shauna Moffitt, 26, who told The Tampa Tribune that he’d moved out Nov. 11. The next day, the Tribune published a story in which Shauna Moffitt alleged that she wrote nearly every paper for her husband during his five years at USF and completed two online courses for him.
She e-mailed the newspaper copies of six assignments she said she wrote for her husband between Jan. 17, 2007, and Oct. 10, 2007. She said she wrote all of the assignments on her computer at the Sumpter County appraiser’s office, where she is a data specialist. (Her boss is looking into that now.)
“We were a team,” Shauna said, as quoted by the Tribune. “I did the papers in order for Ben to play. I’d write his paper and he’d go clean the kitchen.”
Ben Moffitt termed the allegations “hearsay. That’s all I can say. It’s very unfortunate for my kids.”
A USF spokesman also used the word “hearsay,” saying that “it’s a domestic issue and there’s nothing at this point to consider.”
Not even to investigate whether the star linebacker participated in academic fraud?
Of course, the charges could turn out to be false, the product of an apparently acrimonious break-up that’s the sad story here.
But South Florida won’t know that until it conducts some sort of inquest; failure to do so, as the Tribune editorialized Wednesday, “shows an appalling disregard for academic integrity.”
Whether that’s the REST of the story, it’s the rest of the story to date. And probably more than you wanted to know.
And it demonstrates the peril about writing about the private lives of athletes and coaches. Because while people like stories about people — stories that go beyond stats and strategy, as it were — you generally only get part of the picture, the side that the subject wants you to see.
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