Yeah, he knew what that meant. He just didn’t understand what any of it had to do with him.
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All week, McLean had been aware of the transcript scandal cycloning through the basketball program at Westchester Community College in suburban New York, where he’d completed his junior college career. Two players had lost their scholarships at Florida A&M because of alleged transcript fraud, but they’d been gone before he arrived at WCC.
Then St. John’s examined the transcript of recruit Keith Thomas, who had played with McLean, and when Thomas was declared ineligible it all started to feel a bit too close to home.
Whatever had transpired with any of those players, McLean had no idea, and he saw no real connection to his own situation. He had gone to class religiously at Westchester. He took real courses. He got valid grades. It was all there on his report card. He had to be fine.
Until that meeting late on a Friday afternoon in October 2014. Alyssa Budkofsky, Quinnipiac’s academic adviser for basketball, sat with two transcripts in her hands. Moore asked: Gio, do you remember what classes you look last year?
“And he says, ‘Yeah,’ and he rattles off all the classes on the real transcript," Moore told Sporting News. “So she hands him the fake transcript and says, ‘Do you recognize these classes?’ He’s looking at it and he goes, ‘No,’ and now he sees his name and his address on top. It was almost like the five stages of grieving.
“His first thing was like rage. Denial. And then it was all starting to come to him. ‘How did they do that? I can’t believe they did that! I trusted them.’ And then he started crying. He just broke down. He was like, ‘What’s my grandma going to say?’ His first instinct was: ‘They’re going to throw me out.’ He was devastated. We were in there for about two hours, and he cried for like an hour and a half of that.”
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McLean’s road to becoming a legitimate college student had been arduous and circuitous and unconventional. He didn’t finish high school and got his diploma by earning a GED. He started at one junior college, finished at another. But somewhere in all of that he had found a sense of purpose and a hunger for learning that sometimes can be uncommon among college athletes. He didn’t merely tolerate school as part of the cost to play competitive basketball. He had grown to embrace it all.
And now they were telling him he was an illegitimate college student, never mind all the studying and the papers and the exams and the sweating out grades. He had been admitted to Quinnipiac University under false pretenses.
“One of the biggest crimes you can commit in their world, in an admissions office world, is a fraudulent transcript,” Moore said. “Their knee-jerk reaction, obviously, is to remove this student right away.”
Quinnipiac did not immediately dismiss McLean. It did not eventually dismiss him. That this never happened is one of the grandest upsets in the history of NCAA basketball.
McLean will go through his Senior Day celebration Sunday afternoon at the TD Bank Sports Center, when Quinnipiac plays its final Metro Atlantic home game against Manhattan. He has only played one season with the Bobcats, though he has petitioned the NCAA for permission to play another year. It’s uncertain whether he’ll be successful, but that’s not the entire reason he’ll go through the ceremony now.
On the third weekend in May, McLean will graduate from Quinnipiac with a degree in sociology.
Students with academic backgrounds such as his are considered “non-traditional” in the academic world. That phrase does not seem to do justice to his journey. Not in the least.
“I didn’t have one red flag.”
It was a motorcycle accident that ended his father’s life. Wayne McLean was a police officer in Jamaica, proud of his job, making good money. He wanted Giovanni to have an American education, so he sent his son at age nine to live with his parents in the Bronx, but Wayne visited so often it almost felt like he always was there.
Gio was 14 and living in New York when he got the terrible news.
“At first, the first day or two, I was maybe in shock,” McLean told Sporting News. “The next day, it really hit me. Like man, I won’t see my dad anymore. That was one of my best friends. I could talk to him about anything. I was just hurt. That’s the only thing I could say: It just hurt. A lot.
“I’m not really a big emotional person. I don’t show my emotions a lot. It didn’t seem like it affected me as much to people, but it did inside. When I was alone, I’d talk to myself, and I had time to think about it and it hurt me a lot.”
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His life would never totally be the same afterward. How could it, really?
Among many gradual changes that occurred was his abandonment of soccer, the sport his father had played and that had been Gio’s first love. He used to go to his father’s practices, watch him, imitate him. It didn’t feel the same without that connection present. He instead began learning to play basketball, and it came quickly to him. He was quick and agile and relentless. He played two years of unstructured ball before joining a competitive team at school. Everything that had worked for him on the soccer field translated once he began using his hands to control the ball.
Among the other gradual changes was his eventual abandonment of his education. He began his high school career in Queens but then transferred to Bronx Regional, and he played varsity basketball as a junior and then briefly as a senior, averaging 21.8 points and 5.6 assists through eight games before tearing up his knee.
He doesn’t offer a terrific explanation for why that ended not only his high school basketball career, but his high school career, period. “My legs were swollen, and I didn’t go back,” he said. “I missed a while. When I finally went back, it was too late to catch up.”
On the playgrounds, though, once he was healthy enough to compete again, he heard friends such as Dwight Hardy talking about heading to St. John’s to play, and Omari Lawrence on his way to Kansas State. Keydren Clark, one of the greatest scorers in NCAA basketball history, would talk about his experiences at St. Peter’s, and it was impossible to miss what Kemba Walker was accomplishing at UConn.
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“That’s what I wanted to do,” McLean said. “I knew what I had to do, and I just went ahead and did it.
“I was always a smart kid. I just didn’t focus. I didn’t focus at a young age. But I was always very intelligent and very smart. I knew what I was doing.”
McLean got his act together and secured his GED, all the while establishing himself as a New York City playground legend. He played so ferociously, so energetically that at Dyckman Park they gave him the nickname “Batteries Not Included.” He and three friends were noticed in that arena by a coach, and they wound up at Moberly Area Community College playing for Jay Spoonhour.
The first year went great, until the end. Gio averaged 9.1 points but was injured on the eve of the regional championship and couldn’t play. Moberly lost and fell short of the NJCAA national tournament. His injury was severe enough to keep him out of competition for a year, and when it was time to resume his career Spoonhour was gone from Moberly, having taken a Division I job at Eastern Illinois.
McLean wound up playing his final junior-college season at Westchester in 2013-14. The team went 28-5 and made the nationals. He led the team in scoring at 16.8 points per game and shot 43.7 percent from 3-point range. Coaches from high-major schools — serious high-major schools including Oklahoma’s Lon Kruger — were interested in signing him.
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McLean even gave a commitment to Oklahoma, but there was a Big 12 Conference rule regarding the number of semesters a prospect must spend at a particular junior college that would have required he sit out a season before competing for the Sooners. He’d done enough sitting. Led by assistant coach Eric Eaton, Quinnipiac had been recruiting him all along. He chose the Bobcats.
“We probably went four or five straight weeks down there, could see him once a week,” Moore said. “Every conversation we had with him, there always was a theme of academics. We’re trying to schedule the official visit, and he’s saying, ‘I can’t go on a Friday, because that’s the day I have classes all day.’ Or we’re on the phone and I’m asking how it’s going and he’s says, ‘I’m turning in a paper.’
“I didn’t have one red flag."
“This is not about basketball. This is his life.”
On the morning of Oct. 29, 2015, Tyrone Mushatt was indicted on nine felony counts related to allegations he had used forged academic transcripts to help secure athletic scholarships for basketball players who competed for him at Westchester Community College.
Mushatt, 42, had worked at WCC for 17 years and been the head basketball coach for six before the school cancelled the 2014-15 season after the transcript allegations were revealed.
Attorney John Pappalardo, representing Mushatt, said during court proceedings that an internal investigation of the matter indicated Mushatt was not involved in this scheme and “was unaware of it and had nothing to do with it,” according to The Journal News.
Following the hearing he told the paper, “I think he spent his career helping kids. That’s been the purpose of his life. He really had no reason or motivating factor to do what they’re alleging.”
An anonymous e-mail sent to the National Junior College Athletic Association in October 2013 claimed a coach at WCC had changed grades for players and concocted bogus grades for classes those athletes had not taken.
The message also was sent to the State University of New York chancellor and to the New York State Office of the Inspector General, according to the work of investigative reporter Lee Higgins, who teamed with sports reporter Mike Zacchio to break the story about the scandal in The Journal News.
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Eventually — and it took about a year for all this to become an issue — this led to the examination of former WCC athletes’ transcripts provided to a number of four-year schools. One of them was Quinnipiac.
“When I showed him the transcript that we had, I just remember that he broke down in tears,” Budkofsky said. “It was heartbreaking, because at the time we had no idea how this was going to play out. In his mind — and in my mind, too — the way this could go down was he was going to have to pack up his things and that was going to be the end of his time at Quinnipiac. Which was heartbreaking because it’s such a great opportunity for him. He knows that, and was taking full advantage at the time.”
When McLean was at Moberly, the basketball program had an academic adviser that arranged for him to schedule the proper classes to gain NCAA eligibility.
“When I got to Westchester, I asked the same question: Do we have an academic advisor?” he told SN. “Coach Ty said he handled the academics, the advising thing. So I was going to him and asking, ‘Am I good? Are these classes good?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to set you up in the right classes to graduate.’ I had no reason not to trust him. He’d been there for so many years. That’s what I did: I took the classes he gave me, I passed them, and that was it.”
McLean arrived at Quinnipiac in the summer of 2014 and was enrolled in two classes; one that met conventionally and an online course. Budkofsky said it sometimes can be difficult to have the discipline to complete the work on online classes because it requires carving out the time to sit in front of the computer and not succumb to distractions.
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“I offered, like I do with everybody, ‘I’ll meet you in the library on these days at these times and we can work on that.’ A lot of kids don’t take me up on that,” she said. “But Gio did. He’s got the drive. He’s motivated to do this.”
McLean earned As in both summer courses, was enrolled in a regular load in the fall term and had gone through two months, earning solid grades, when the transcript hit the fan. His professors had seen him in class regularly, noted how he handled his work. Budkofsky recognized she wasn’t dealing with a sham student trying to skate through on his athletic ability.
So when all this developed, she argued on his behalf.
“She was putting her reputation on the line with our admissions people,” Moore said. Budkofsky and Moore visited the head of admissions and registrar, and she testified, so to speak, that she believed McLean had no knowledge the transcript submitted on his behalf had been forged.
“For him, it’s not even about basketball,” Budkofsky said. “I remember saying that to Tom as we were going into the meeting: Don’t even bring up basketball. This is not about basketball. This is his life. He’s either staying in school or he’s not. That was the message I was putting forth to them: If he goes home, his life is going to take a completely different trajectory, and no one wants that for him.”
Hurdling Quinnipiac’s ivory tower was only part of the battle for McLean. It might not even have been the bigger half. There also was the NCAA. He had to be declared immediately ineligible, which meant no practice, no locker room, no conditioning with his teammates. Then the NCAA’s 2-4 Transfer Eligibility Committee had to consider his case.
Upon examination, it turned out the real classes McLean had completed at WCC were not sufficient for him to be eligible at Quinnipiac. So he had to sit out the 2014-15 season. The NCAA allowed him remain on scholarship, which was essential for him to remain, but he couldn’t attend practice, even to sit in the stands and observe. He couldn’t sit on the bench. He was allowed to continue working with Budkofsky, which helped in establishing eligibility to compete in 2015-16.
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“The NCAA was great about it,” Moore said. “They were more than fair. They said: We’re not in the business of kicking kids out of school.”
McLean has not spoken with Mushatt. He does not understand why anything happened at all, why everything happened as it did.
“I’m past it now. I don’t like to live in the past,” Gio said. “I don’t have any feelings toward him. We don’t speak, but I’m not going to hunt him down or something. I’m fine. I’m going to be professional about it, just move on from it, try to get better."
“It did give me a deeper appreciation for what a unique kid we’re dealing with every day.”
Quinnipiac didn’t have a game scheduled for the night of Monday, Jan. 19, so McLean sat and watched as No. 1 Oklahoma visited Iowa State for a game that was the featured attraction of ESPN’s Big Monday. It occurred to him that he was close to being a part of that game, that he could have been passing the basketball to All-America candidate Buddy Hield and helping the Sooners drive toward a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed.
“But would I really have been there, if this would have happened at Oklahoma?” McLean said. “I’m glad I came here. This is the best decision I ever made, to come to Quinnipiac. The relentlessness they showed, trying to keep me here, was unbelievable.”
On the night McLean learned he had been trapped in the transcript issue — Budkofsky called it “probably the worst day of my career” — he was so distraught Moore wondered if he might call a friend from New York, pack up all his things and just bolt for home. It’s not even a 90-minute drive, particularly without traffic. Moore ordered his assistant coaches to periodically check on him, assure that he needed to allow the process to reach its conclusion.
McLean has played 23 games for the Bobcats this season. He leads the team in scoring and assists and four times has scored more than 20 points, including a career-best 25 when the Bobcats beat Fairfield on the road.
But this is not the year he or Moore might have imagined. The team is 8-17. A three-game winning streak in late January/early February has been followed by a current four-game losing streak that included a double-overtime home loss to Fairfield.
There are four games left on the schedule, starting Thursday night at home against St. Peter’s, plus however long Quinnipiac can last in the MAAC Tournament. And that could be it for McLean’s college basketball career. Because he sat out the year after Moberly with his knee injury, and then the year because of the transcript issue, the five years NCAA athletes are allotted to complete four seasons of competition expires this spring.
Quinnipiac has asked for a waiver so that he can be given a “sixth year,” and despite the obvious hardships he has faced there is no certainty it will be granted. His case is unusual, quite obviously. There’s hardly a precedent for what he’s been through.
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“Even though the waiver process was somewhat painful for him, to have to re-experience some of the twists and turns, it also was enlightening for me to go through it with him,” Moore said. “It did give me a deeper appreciation for what a unique kid we’re dealing with every day.”
So if this is to be McLean’s only Senior Day, it appears his grandmother will be able to join the ceremony. It will be a proud moment for him and for so many others who worked to make it happen.
In a few months, when he graduates, if there’s no more college basketball for him he would like to play professionally. Eventually, having interned at a youth center last summer, he hopes to use his sociology degree to work with children in need. He certainly has a story to tell them.
“One night I will remember: The first week of December, we lost to Niagara and during the game Chaise Daniels, our best inside player, we thought we lost him with a season-ending knee injury,” Moore said. “It turned out we only lost him for a month, but we didn’t know that yet. We came into Canisius the next night and Gio got hurt in that game, missed a huge part of it. But we played about as well as possible and upset them.
“I was walking down the hallway to the locker room afterward and he was being worked on by the trainer. The joy on his face — he gave me one of the biggest hugs. He was so genuinely excited about our win. It was a game in which he didn’t score 30. He was on the sideline almost the whole game. But he was so proud of everyone else had done.
“His unadulterated joy at winning that game, it was awesome. You can’t fake that.”
