The Big 12 conference made an emphatic statement Wednesday, informing Baylor that it will withhold 25 percent of future revenue distributions until an outside review deems that the university has implemented needed reforms.

In short, it's a message that Big 12 schools want proof, not mere assurances, that Baylor will follow through on sweeping changes in the wake of a sexual assault scandal that has rocked its football program and campus.

Unfortunately, fellow Big 12 schools now have double-reason to wonder about Baylor's ability to prove it can learn from high-profile, university- and league-scarring mistakes.

Not that anyone should need reminding, but also on Wednesday, Showtime announced that it has produced a feature-length documentary about the June 2003 murder of Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy by a teammate, and the subsequent fallout, including the discovery that Bears basketball players were receiving illicit payments.

Largely forgotten, however, is that the 2003 Baylor scandal occurred less than a decade after the men's basketball program had inflicted a black eye on the school.

The 1994 case involved mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy, resulting in the ouster of then-basketball coach Darrel Johnson and federal convictions of three Bears assistants. The 1994 case played out mere months after the Big 12 was formed and Baylor somewhat controversially was included.

As the idiom goes, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

In this September 14, 2003 story, The News revisited the 1994 Baylor basketball saga and interviewed key participants, several of whom expressed dismay that the university seemingly had not learned from past transgressions:

By BRAD TOWNSEND

WACO - The Baylor basketball scandal has brought them despair, dragged them through stages of anger and resentment, caused them to soul-search and splintered at least one of their families.

They are not, however, the central figures of the 2003 Baylor basketball scandal. They are survivors of the 1994 Baylor basketball scandal, and they are saddened and dismayed that their cautionary tales did not prove to be a deterrent.

But they are not surprised.

"All I can tell you is history repeats itself when you don't want to listen to the truth," says Pam Bowers, Baylor women's basketball coach from 1979 to 1994 and the whistleblower in the '94 men's basketball scandal.

"Sooner or later, it's going to come out."

There are significant differences between the 1994 case and the scandal that led to coach Dave Bliss' resignation Aug. 8 -- but also parallels.

The 1994 case involved mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy -- coaches providing test answers to junior college recruits to help them qualify for Division I eligibility. In the current case, university president Robert Sloan has acknowledged illicit payments to keep nonscholarship players in school and nondisclosure of failed drug tests.

During court testimony in 1995, a junior college coach said that former Baylor head coach Darrel Johnson encouraged him to "stay calm, stay cool and stick with this same story" when investigators began asking questions.

Last month, Bliss acknowledged that he tried to orchestrate a coverup after assistant coach Abar Rouse taped meetings during which Bliss asked assistants and players to help portray slain player Patrick Dennehy as a drug dealer.

Now Bowers, 54, can't help but feel for Rouse, a 28-year-old whom she has never met.

"I don't know the young man who's caught in the middle of this, but I know exactly how he feels," Bowers says. "When you talk to him, do tell him he did the right thing."

If the fallout from the 1994 scandal is any gauge, the lives and reputations of Bliss and his former assistants will indelibly change.

Johnson, now 48, was acquitted but was fired by Baylor. He sells real estate in Texas and Oklahoma and has been out of coaching for nine years. In 1998 he applied for, but did not get, the head job at Sam Houston State. Reached at his Conroe home, he declined to be interviewed for this story.

His Baylor assistants, Kevin Gray, Troy Drummond and Gary Thomas, were convicted of mail and wire fraud on April 5, 1995. Each was sentenced to 50 hours of community service, placed on three years' probation and fined $1,000 to $1,500.

"I've been able to overcome it as best I could," says Gray, 48. "I'm going on with my life, that's all I can tell you."

In a brief phone interview, Gray said he lives in his hometown of Louisville, Ky., but declined to discuss his current occupation. He has been the head basketball coach at Spalding University since 1998 and, according to school officials, is under contract at the NAIA school for next season.

"From a rules standpoint, we may have done some things that we shouldn't have done," Gray says. "But we weren't criminals, and that [the criminal prosecution] was wrong. And I'll never forgive

'Baylor Four'

Texas for that."

During the much-publicized investigation and federal court hearings in 1994 and 1995, they were often dubbed The Baylor Four.

Drummond, 34, says those dark days seem like a lifetime ago.

"I'm not very proud of what I did or who I was," he says. "But I'm extremely proud of who I am now."

Drummond says that as a 24-year-old assistant coach, he was a follower, but now says he's a leader.

He coaches boys and girls basketball, high school and junior high, in Sidney, Texas, about 115 miles northwest of Waco. The Class A school has only 110 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Considering his bleak career prospects when he arrived four months after his conviction, Sidney seems like nirvana to him.

One of the Sidney teachers who noted his conviction and voiced concern about his hiring was Deanna Hall, whom he would later marry. Now they have a 6-year-old son, Garett.

"It's the greatest place in the world," Drummond said of Sidney. "They all know my past and they've accepted me and brought me into their family."

He says he has not spoken to any of the other Baylor Four since the assistants were sentenced on July 7, 1995 in Waco. By then, Drummond says, their former boss Johnson had stopped talking to

them.

"What happened was he felt like we betrayed him," Drummond says. "Well, I'm a convicted felon. He's not."

Drummond says the assistants protected Johnson to the end. None testified against him in federal court. It was later, in depositions to Southwest Conference and NCAA investigators, that they disputed Johnson's assertion that he had no part in or knowledge of the assistants' faxing test answers to five junior college recruits.

That, Drummond says, is what separates him, Gray and Thomas from Rouse. They followed "the code," the understood oath of loyalty among coaches. Rouse, who according to his attorney taped the Bliss meetings because he believed his job was being threatened, broke the code, in Drummond's estimation.

"Well, he committed career suicide," Drummond says. "Did he do the right thing? Well, that's up to him. Will he ever get another job? Probably not, unless someone knows him."

When offered an opportunity to respond to Drummond's and Bowers' comments, Rouse's attorney, Michael Pegues, declined.

Drummond admits that following the code doesn't excuse his own actions.

"If there's a burning building, you'd like to think you'd go in and save somebody," Drummond says. "You'd like to say you'd do the right thing. But you know what? I was in that situation. I didn't do the right thing.

"Would I do the right thing now? I won't lie. If somebody asked me, 'Did you cheat?' Yes."

A world apart

No one would have imagined that Pam Bowers would end up working here, including Pam Bowers.

The "campus" is a three-minute drive from Baylor's Floyd Casey Stadium but a world apart from her former life.

The sign on the door of the smaller and dingier of the two gyms reads:

"Mrs. Bowers, aux. gym - 6th grade PE."

This, Bowers says, is what becomes of whistleblowers, but after eight years at University Middle School, two therapists and a gradually gained perspective, she says she has personal and career

fulfillment.

"My name wasn't one that everybody wanted to hire in Waco, Texas," she says.

Some might wonder why she chose to stay in a town where she was booed during her final season, 1993-94. It was the summer before that season when she decided to inform athletic director Grant

Teaff about improprieties in the men's basketball program.

She took the middle school job in the fall of 1995, shortly after her wrongful termination and sex discrimination suit against Baylor was settled out of court. The school board originally voted not to hire her, then reconsidered a few weeks later.

Suddenly, a longtime Division I college coach found herself working with kids who had no idea who Pam Bowers was.

"It was a good experience for me," she recalls, her voice cracking. "At the time, I was really struggling because I felt like my career had been taken from me because I did the right thing.

"I was feeling pretty sorry for myself."

Here, 90 percent of the students are on the free-lunch program. Bowers has taught pregnant 11-year-olds, kids on drugs, kids whose parents are in jail.

"To be honest, working at Baylor and living where I lived, I thought this life only existed on television," she says. "They've probably helped me a lot more than I could even begin to help

them."

She says that despite what people may think, the last thing she wanted to do was hurt Baylor. She had long suspected shenanigans in the men's department ("You'd have to be a total buffoon not to

know") but stumbled on the smoking gun by accident.

On April 5, 1993, Thomas faxed a term paper to Westark Community College in Fort Smith, Ark. The intended recipient was prized recruit Jerome Lambert, but the go-between, the person handing off the fax, was Drummond, at the time a Westark assistant.

One morning soon after, Bowers stopped by the desk of the secretary she shared with Johnson. She says she laid down her mail and other papers, then scooped up the stack. She says it wasn't until she got home that she found the term paper.

Bowers says she wouldn't have reported the incident to Teaff had Baylor not forced her hand, firing her in May, rehiring her three months later, then firing her in 1994.

"They used my win-loss record to get rid of me, when in essence they wanted to get rid of me because I knew too much," Bowers says.

She says she settled her civil suit against the school because she realized that even if a jury had awarded her a large sum, the judge could have lowered it at his discretion.

"There's no hatred for them," she says of Baylor. "I loved what I did and I miss it very much. It's a part of my life that I'll always cherish, but it's still a very painful part of my life."

Anger remains

Jerome Lambert came to Baylor for the 1993-94 season and Drummond accompanied him - not as a coach, but as a manager. He says it wasn't until another assistant suddenly left that he was given a position on Johnson's staff, at a salary of $12,000.

That's part of why Drummond has "a lot of unforgiveness in my mind and heart" toward U.S. attorneys John Phinizy and Dan Mills and Waco FBI agent James Fossum for taking what some legal experts deemed a university and NCAA issue into federal court.

Fossum became interested in the case after reading newspaper reports that many of the term papers and answer sheets were faxed or mailed over state lines, which in Fossum's mind constituted federal mail and wire fraud.

In court, Mills said the coaches defrauded Baylor of scholarships and equated their actions to going into the BU administration building "with a gun and ski mask and making off with $50,000."

Says Drummond: "Here's what a lot of people don't understand. That NCAA stuff, yeah, that's detrimental, but that's nothing. We're convicted felons. I can never vote. And I'll be one [a felon] the rest of my life."

The consequences set in quickly for the three assistants. The day after their indictments, the school board of Salina, Kan., passed a resolution not to renew the contract of Thomas, who had just completed his first season as head coach at Salina's Central High.

At the sentencing three months later, Thomas, with wife Gina weeping behind him, told the judge: "My job, my reputation, are gone. All I can ask now is a chance to start over."

The Thomases, now living in Wichita, Kan., did not respond to phone calls from The Morning News.

Johnson's former attorney, Jim Darnell (who now represents former Bliss assistant Rodney Belcher), told the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press three years ago that the Baylor scandal cost Johnson "his career, his marriage, his family." Darnell now says Johnson enjoys being out of coaching because it has given him time to spend with his son.

Drummond, who occasionally counsels young inmates at a prison in Brownwood and just last Wednesday talked about his role in the scandal to kids at his church, insists he has no ill will toward Johnson. But he isn't sorry that Johnson is out of coaching.

"He should be," Drummond says. "I've taken responsibility for what I've done. I think I've paid the ultimate price.

"Would I do it again? Obviously, no. But I'd go through it all over again to get where I'm at."

His feelings toward Bowers are more complicated. Drummond believes she came out of the scandal better off than anyone else, pointing to her lawsuit settlement. "That's fine," he says. "Did she use me? Yes."

Bowers says she was shocked when federal prosecutors got involved in the case and is sorry the assistants "had their lives ruined for doing what they were told to do."

"It always seems like the person who heads it gets away," she says, "but I guess that's the American way."

Drummond and Bowers agree on this much: They are saddened for current Baylor students, ex-students and faculty who are reliving their nightmare.

"I don't know if Baylor will survive this," Bowers says. Naturally, she can't help but wonder what will become of Rouse.

"The first time you compromise who you are and what you are, it's so hard," she says. "But the second time it's a little easier, and pretty soon you've compromised yourself so many times you don't know who you are.

"And I hope that young man knows who he is."

Staff Writer Jeff Miller contributed to this report.