Boston Celtics assistant head coach Jerome Allen was hit with a 15-year show cause penalty by the NCAA for his role in a University of Pennsylvania bribery scheme during his tenure as head coach at that school.
The NCAA has hit Boston Celtics assistant coach Jerome Allen with one of the toughest penalties in its history for his involvement in a bribery scheme during his time at the University of Pennsylvania.
Allen served as head coach of the Ivy League school’s men’s basketball program from 2009 to 2015 — his alma mater — and would later plead guilty to accepting a bribe for putting a student on the program’s recruiting list in order to improve that student’s chances of getting accepted into Penn.
The now-Celtics assistant coach would be later be determined by the NCAA to have committed other violations regarding recruiting and team tryouts, reports CBS Sports’ Kyle Boone.
This lead the collegiate oversight body to levy a 15-year show-cause penalty, one of the longest ever doled out.
The penalty requires any NCAA school to appear before an NCAA committee and possibly be fined and sanctioned for hiring a person hit with such a punishment — effectively ending Allen’s career in the collegiate ranks.
And that’s why NCAA hit Jerome Allen so hard, and hit Kevin Stallings with a three-year show cause. Neither are coming back to college.
We’ll see what this means for all the schools that were wrapped up in the college hoops federal investigation when the NCAA levies penalties. https://t.co/PAGYFTaTMG
To his credit, Allen owned up to his actions, even testifying against the parent who bribed him with as much as $200,000 dollars in wire transfers, $75,000 in cash, hotel stays, luxury transportation, and other perks.
“I accepted the money to help Morris Esformes get into the school,” testified Allen, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jay Weaver. “I got his son into Penn; I got his son into Wharton. None of that would have happened without me.”
Allen would likely love to forget about that era of his career, and with this ruling having been handed down and his new role of assistant coach with the Celtics going swimmingly, he may finally be able to do so.
Fourth-year Boston Celtics shooting guard Jaylen Brown and assistant coach Jerome Allen share a love for deejaying despite being a generation apart in age.
The art of deejaying has many acolytes hidden in plain sight, and the Boston Celtics are no exception.
After news broke earlier this season that fourth-year shooting guard had picked up an interest in the wheels of steel (as vinyl turntables are often called by disc jockeys), it soon became clear that Shaquille O’Neal wasn’t the only Celtic alumnus with some skills in the craft.
Brown, a fan of music and culture, gravitated towards the art after witnessing DJ Diesel (Shaq’s nom de plume for his deejaying persona) perform in Boston this winter.
The resulting conversations would soon reveal assistant head coach Jerome Allen dabbled a bit back in the day on the ones and two (another insufferable nickname for turntables) himself.
“Music is just naturally a part of me,” Brown said in an interview with team reporter Taylor Snow. “Before I can remember what right or wrong was, music has just been there. My mom listened to music when she was pregnant with me, and it’s just always been around.”
So, for a player who bought a piano as one of his first big purchases after becoming a pro, interest in the musically transformative art of deejaying was a natural progression.
“It just keeps you engaged in something outside of basketball,” he added. “When you go home, it keeps you out of trouble.”
“Before I can remember what right or wrong was, music has just been there."@FCHWPO has a budding interest in deejaying, the art in which assistant coach Jerome Allen is well-versed and willing to teach.
Music did the same for Jerome Allen a generation and change earlier, just as hip-hop was blooming into its golden age.
A fan of Philadelphia-area artists in particular, Allen would hunt for new tunes obsessively.
“Sometimes we would spend hours and hours inside the store looking for certain artists or rappers from other parts of the country,” noted the now-assistant head coach.
While Allen wasn’t the prospect Brown was coming out of college, he had a solid NBA career, bouncing from the Minnesota Timberwolves who drafted him in 1995 to the Indiana Pacers, Denver Nuggets and Milwaukee Bucks.
After his time in the NBA ended, he played overseas for several years, ending up in Turkey, where he picked up deejaying as a hobby to fill the time between games in a strange land where few spoke his language.
He convinced his wife and cousin to purchase the requisite equipment to ship out to him, and when his wife arrived, she was less than ecstatic their living room would have significant floorspace dedicated to Allen’s new interest.
“Music is just naturally a part of me."
Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO ) has a budding interest in deejaying, the art in which Celtics assistant coach Jerome Allen is well-versed & willing to teach.
“I met with his cousin, who is also a deejay, and we went and purchased all this high-end equipment that I know nothing about,” Aida, his wife, recalled.
Aida also recounted how it channeled Allen’s energy positively as friends and family would visit.
“Every time we had a visitor from the US, there had to be a rap battle, like a family rap challenge … It was crazy. But it kept us connected, and it kept us entertained, and gave us the ability to have fun.”
The hobby became a passion, and the hooper became a disc jockey as well, plying his new trade in everything from clubs to weddings.
To his co-workers on the Celtics, hearing that Allen disc-jockeyed came as a surprise, one some had difficulty believing at first. But Allen threw down at a recent annual Christmas event for homeless children the team organizes, and eyebrows quickly went up in amazement.
“When we had that Christmas party and he was actually deejaying,” Tatum said with an incredulous air, “I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty crazy.'”
“He’s got some skills,” offered guard Marcus Smart. “Like he’s got some real skills. He’s definitely better than we expected.”
The shared love of the art has brought Brown and Allen together, the latter a fan of more contemporary south coast sounds like Outkast, Zaytoven and Lil Baby than the elder statesman’s tastes for the Sound of Philadelphia.
“For me, I look at music sort of like basketball,” said Brown.
“I see a rhythm, I see a beat – the beat of the ball sounds like it could be the beat of a drum. The pace, the motion, the fluidity is all the same. So music has always been a part of me, and basketball, I look at it the same way.”
“Music is an art. Basketball is a form of art,” he added.
“It’s probably one of the most important forms of art that’s been given to us,” noted Allen.
There’s long been an intertwined relationship between hooping and deejaying, and it’s refreshing to see it being rejuvenated for a new generation.
While there isn’t much truly new under the sun, the next generation’s takes on what came before keeps life fresh, and breathes new life into old art forms.
The return to the intersection of basketball and deejay culture may only just be getting underway in Boston, but the author of this piece — a deejay himself — and many others are excited to see where the remix will take us.
