Sports of The Times; Brown Skips Town, Again

By DAVE ANDERSON

Published: November 11, 1988

LEAD: MINUTES earlier, the University of Kansas basketball team had lost to Duke, 71-67, in the semifinals of the 1986 N.C.A.A. championship. But now, in a gloomy gray hallway of the Reunion Arena in Dallas, the Jayhawks' coach, Larry Brown, was already looking ahead to the next season.

MINUTES earlier, the University of Kansas basketball team had lost to Duke, 71-67, in the semifinals of the 1986 N.C.A.A. championship. But now, in a gloomy gray hallway of the Reunion Arena in Dallas, the Jayhawks' coach, Larry Brown, was already looking ahead to the next season.

''We're going to be a quality team next year,'' he said. ''We've got some great kids coming in.''

Among those ''great kids'' would be Vincent Askew, a Memphis State player who that summer attended classes at Kansas with the idea of transferring there. Askew later changed his mind. But while Askew was pondering his future, Brown and those who rode shotgun for him on the Kansas stagecoach spent at least $1,244 on Askew in violation of National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting rules.

As part of its three-year probation, Kansas is now barred from defending the national championship it won last season, the first college ever to be so humiliated.

But the culprit won't stand trial. Like so many other times when the police knocked on his door, Larry Brown had skipped town. In a way, he even skipped the country. As the new coach of the San Antonio Spurs, he can't be extradited from the National Basketball Association to be punished for the Kansas crimes that he tried to minimize last week.

''The saddest thing about it is that they spent two years on this thing,'' Brown said, alluding to the N.C.A.A. detectives. ''And when I left Kansas to come to San Antonio I was led to believe this was no big deal. I now realize that every time you are investigated by the N.C.A.A. it's a big deal.''

Brown acknowledged that he had handed $364 to Askew for a round-trip ticket to visit his ailing grandmother, who died not long after that.

''I'd give it to anybody if they told me his grandmother was passing away,'' Brown said. ''It was something I wasn't trying to hide.''

But as it develops now, Askew also received $350 to pay an aunt's phone bill and $183 for another plane ticket. So the saddest thing about it is that if Larry Brown didn't know what was going on, he should have. His delivery man for those payments to Askew occasionally slept in his Lawrence, Kan., home.

ACCORDING to the Nov. 14 issue of Sports Illustrated, the delivery man was 26-year-old Mike Marshall, a former Kansas player who sometimes lived at Brown's home.

Brown is now trying to disassociate himself from him, saying: ''Mike Marshall has been living off me. He adopted me years ago.'' But among Kansas basketball people Marshall was known as the coach's ''black son.'' Two other Kansas boosters have also been identified as being involved: Jerry Collins, a K.U. television producer now on the Spurs' staff, and Ralph Light, a construction executive.

For years boosters have been as much to blame as coaches for recruiting violations. And with boosters like that, Kansas didn't need detractors.

Marshall aspires to be a coach. But for a reputable college to hire him now, it would be like hiring Willie Sutton to guard a bank.

After two seasons at a Wyoming junior college, Marshall transferred to Kansas, where he was a guard on two of Brown's teams. He then transferred to McNeese State before that Lake Charles, La., college was put on probation for improper payments to players. One of those McNeese players was Marshall, who reportedly acknowledged depositing $15,515.44, most of it from McNeese boosters, in the Lakeside National Bank in Lake Charles in only six months.

While in Lawrence in recent years, Marshall also lent Danny Manning small sums that the all-America forward repaid. The N.C.A.A. will also look into this and could reopen the investigation.

None of the players, including Manning, on last season's championship team were cited in the N.C.A.A. report. But the Marshall-Askew connection was enough not only to put Kansas on probation but also to consider the ''death penalty,'' the shutdown of its basketball program for a year.