It was like a scene out of “Hoosiers.”
On Dec. 22, 1998, Ken Michin, a center on the Boston University men’s basketball team, went up for a layup and was fouled from behind by Manhattan College’s Nate Coughlin. Pushing and shoving ensued, and the altercation culminated when Terrier star guard LeVar Folk punched the Jaspers’ Kenneth Kavanagh and broke his nose.
Now, more than four years later, the Supreme Judicial Court the state’s highest court is hearing a lawsuit from Kavanagh and his attorney Michael O’Reilly against Boston University, claiming men’s basketball coach Dennis Wolff encouraged Folk’s behavior.
According to Sunday’s Boston Globe, Kavanagh’s attorney wants a jury to decide if the BU coaching staff should have anticipated Folk’s actions.
O’Reilly did not return repeated requests from The Daily Free Press for a telephone interview.
According to the Globe, O’Reilly said he finds it ‘inconsistent that you would recruit a student, have them play in a basketball program … Then when something like this happens, they say, ‘We had nothing to do with it.”
In a telephone interview with the Free Press yesterday, BU lawyer Larry S. Elswit countered that the laws of negligence and agency usually only apply to other students at the university and ‘the precedent is favorable to BU and we feel the court will appreciate that.’
O’Reilly’s argument that Wolff should have seen this coming and prevented it by taking Folk out was problematic for him when he brought it before the SJC.
‘Doesn’t that run contrary to the whole notion of a sports competition?’ Justice Roderick Ireland asked, according to the Globe. ‘As long as the referees don’t find that they are committing inappropriate behaviors, don’t you want your players to be aggressive?’
Kavanagh said under oath, however, that the game was ‘an unusually physical game; the most physical game he had ever been a part of,’ a notion Wolff disputes.
‘It was a physical game, but no more or less than others,’ Wolff said in a phone interview Monday. ‘The kid returned to the game [after being punched] and didn’t miss any time [afterward] so he wasn’t that hurt.’
O’Reilly claims, however, that his client’s nose never healed completely, and has since left Kavanagh with breathing problems.
John Leonard, who coached Manhattan at the time and is currently the assistant coach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said he had ‘no recollection’ of the game and refused any further comment, when reached yesterday in his office.
Folk was ejected from the game for his actions and given a mandatory one-game suspension by the NCAA. After reviewing the game tape, Wolff concluded that the one-game ban was a ‘sufficient punishment.’
Wolff also said he felt Kavanagh and O’Reilly had an ulterior motive for coming after BU.
‘They have tried to settle out of court multiple times to get the school to give them different sums of money,’ he said.
‘We do not settle in cases where we don’t feel we have any responsibility just because it’s easier,’ Elswit said.
Parts of the lawsuit were thrown out of Suffolk Superior Court in 1999, while the remainder was thrown out in 2001.
It is now in the hands of the SJC and a decision is expected in a few months.
And while Elswit admitted that it is ‘impossible’ to predict how the court will rule, he felt that legal precedent was on his side. Similarly, Wolff, while not claiming to be a legal expert, felt that, as in the past, the case would be dismissed.
If Kavanagh wins his lawsuit, however, it will have a potentially debilitating financial effect on college sports.
‘A decision in favor of Kavanagh would drastically change college athletics,’ Elswit told the Free Press.
He elaborated to the Globe, saying, ‘insurance premiums would skyrocket. I think schools would be forced to respond by contracting the kinds of activities that they now offer.’