St. Paul report wins Pulitzer for 'U' stories

ST. PAUL (AP) -- Soaked with champagne and beaming, George Dohrmann gave credit to his colleagues at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press for being part of a team that helped him win the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting.

Dohrmann, 27, the lead reporter on the newspaper's series on academic fraud in the University of Minnesota men's basketball program, wiped tears from his eyes Monday and joined in the clapping as his fellow journalists broke into ''For he's a jolly good fellow.''

''I think, I hope, everybody here realizes ... this is a paper-wide thing. Who didn't work on this? I wish they didn't give it to me, I wish they gave it to all of us,'' he said, his voice cracking.

''From when this first began, everybody was so good. When I pitched the story, I was 25. They trusted me and just said, 'Go for it.'''

Dohrmann and his team reported that a tutor did work for student athletes, athletes earned credits from classes they never attended, faculty were bullied by the basketball program staff and the head coach told players to lie about the scope of the cheating.

The university spent seven months investigating before concluding that 34 of 50 allegations were true. Twenty-eight of those involved at least one violation of NCAA rules during nearly a decade when Clem Haskins coached the team.

As the newspaper was celebrating Dohrmann's honor, which included a $5,000 prize, the university imposed more sanctions on its men's basketball program as a result of the scandal.

The school will eliminate six scholarships over four academic years; reduce official visits from 12 to eight for the next three academic years; reduce the number of in-person recruiting contacts for prospective players; and cut the number of coaches allowed to evaluate players off-campus during the summer.

The school also will return to the NCAA 90 percent of the money it received from the Big Ten Conference from participating in the 1993-94, 1994-95 and 1996-97 NCAA basketball tournaments with ineligible players.

Earlier, the university had banned the team from postseason play for one year and put itself on NCAA probation for an unspecified period of time.

The NCAA is still considering what sanctions to levy against the university, which spent nearly $1.9 million on the basketball probe.

Dohrmann said he got wind of possible problems in the program while talking with someone in the university's athletic department.

''They gave me the names of some people who used to work there. One of them was Jan Gangelhoff,'' he said. ''It was three-plus months of talking to her before I realized I had something.''

Gangelhoff, a former tutor, alleged that she wrote more than 400 papers for as many as 20 basketball players between 1993 and 1998.

Also on the core reporting team were Judith Yates Borger, Rick Linsk, David Shaffer, Blake Morrison, Kris Pope, Charley Walters, Jeff Seidel, Bob Sansevere, Aron Kahn and Amy Becker. Their work led the university to dismiss or decide not to renew the jobs of Haskins, vice president of student athletics and development McKinley Boston and men's athletics director Mark Dienhart.

''I hope everyone here grabs ahold of this and feels a part of it,'' said Dohrmann, a 1995 Notre Dame graduate who spent two years with the Los Angeles Times before moving to the St. Paul newspaper 2 1/2 years ago. ''The Pioneer Press doesn't get enough credit in the Twin Cities. We made 'em look at us.''

Editor Walker Lundy said, ''Everybody has a piece of this. You may not have worked on the story but you picked up the slack for someone else who did.''

''Enjoy this moment. This is as good as it gets,'' Lundy said.

A three-piece band broke into a rendition of ''Twist and Shout'' and champagne was passed around the newsroom.

The other finalists for the beat reporting Pulitzer were David Cay Johnston of The New York Times, for his coverage of problems stemming from the reorganization of the Internal Revenue Service; and Robert O'Harrow Jr. of The Washington Post, for stories on threats to personal privacy in an increasingly digital age.

The Pioneer Press project earlier this month was named the best investigative reporting project in the nation in 1999 by the Associated Press Sports Editors. And Monday night, the newspaper reporters picked up a Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award for the articles.

Pioneer Press reporters have twice before won Pulitzer Prizes. In 1988, Jacqui Banaszynski won the feature writing prize for her series on an AIDS victim in a farming community. In 1986, reporter John Camp won the feature writing prize.