Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
Turner is the right man for Huskies right now

THE SEATTLE TIMES Todd Turner has never appeared before the NCAA.

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He is a hickory kind of man who studied sports management and the cloth, as if there could be two more divergent pursuits. And when the subject is the good Book, the NCAA Manual, there is a fire that blazes behind the bookish spectacles of new Washington athletic director Todd Turner.

He has a message for the men and women who might compromise the rules for the sake of winning. Ask him and his jaw sets and his hands ball into fists.

"If you do," he said yesterday, "then you can't work for me."

The Book is sacred. The Book is good. To work for Todd Turner, you must not only know the Book, you must live its words.

Hallelujah.

At the University of Connecticut, the story goes, Turner arrived as the new AD in the late 1980s with a demand of his associate athletic directors. Not only did they have to read each new version of the Book, they had to memorize the Book. To be sure they had, there would be tests on the Book.

He denies this story.

"Maybe they felt they had to study it," he said. "They knew it was very important to me."

Things are going to be different around the UW. The moment Mark Emmert walked through the door and said he would be president, the old Husky world shook. It hasn't seen a man like this at the top of the campus, someone who will overlook the sports empire and make decisions with a clap of the hand.

Emmert has inherited an oil slick, one that has taken months to contain. And now with the whole mess tugged ashore and thrown before the NCAA for inspection, the first thing he has done is hire the man who would make sure it could never happen again.
 
Todd Turner will not inspire donations. He will not make purple hands reach for wallets. ADs who study the pulpit rarely do. He is not a back-slapping man. Then again, he is not a cheating man.

The other day, Ron Crockett — one of the Huskies' most powerful boosters — asked Turner a question about the NCAA's Infractions Committee, a group with which the UW has been intimately involved these last few months.

"I don't know," he replied. "I've never been before the NCAA."

Even Emmert, who has known Turner from SEC meetings over the last decade, was startled to hear this.

Later, when asked how many ADs he knew of who had never faced the long arm of the NCAA, Emmert shook his head. In today's world, where "Spend to win" and "Win at all costs" are the breathing mantras, this doesn't happen. "It's a very unusual fact," Emmert said.

Then he said: "We can never let competitiveness get in the way."

In another time, Emmert might not have had to make such a proclamation. Of course, in another time, his first move before even settling into his new office wouldn't have been to hastily call a press conference in the Don James Center on Father's Day weekend to announce a new athletic director.

But a lot of things fell apart in the months before he arrived, and now the UW has to not only be about picking up the scraps of scandal, it has to be about making sure scandal won't happen again. Which is how a man who never faced an NCAA inquiry came to be sitting at Emmert's side.

The new president said this would have been his choice in any time. But the new president also does not seem to be a man of inaction who likes his football stadiums three-quarters filled and his locker rooms dark during bowl season. The new president just won a national championship in football. He does not appear to be the type to settle for a man simply because he preaches the NCAA Manual.

This is the reality at UW, however. There might not be another school in the country more in need of a Kaplan course on the NCAA rules. Instead, they got a man who preaches the rules like a revival minister.

"It's hard because the competition is hard in the Pac-10," Turner said. "You don't get many guys focused on graduation rates. A lot of guys are concerned about winning."

He paused.

"I'm concerned about winning, too," he added.

Maybe the winning will come. At times in Turner's past at UConn, North Carolina State and Vanderbilt, it did — a few Big East and ACC titles. But right now there is only one record that matters most.

No NCAA Infractions Committee visits.

And that is why he is here. Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com