My favorite Auburn Story
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_23_16/ai_59019429/
CINCINNATI, OHIO -- The official statement given via Jack Brennan, public relations director for the Cincinnati Bengals, is: "James Brooks was able to function and perform in his football role while with the Bengals. No one was aware there was a problem."
The "problem" he refers to was the revelation that occurred during a hearing in Judge Steve Martin's Hamilton County, Ohio, courtroom last month regarding delinquent child support payments in excess of $110,000. James Brooks could not read the court documents; this after graduating from Warner Robins High School in Georgia in 1977 and
after spending at least four years at Auburn University in Alabama.When asked by the judge how he graduated from Auburn, Brooks said, "I didn't have to go to class."
Back at Warner Robins High School, Lynn Shephard, secretary of more than 20 years is quick to point out that, "Reading was always [Brooks'] problem. No one here knew how he got into Auburn ... much less how he made it through. We knew he couldn't read. There was just no way.
Doug Barfield, who was head football coach of the Auburn Tigers from 1976 through 1980, says that at the time, many people knew Brooks was illiterate. "Even when I met with his mother and recruited him," he says, "reading was a concern on both James' and our part.
When Saulsbury then began asking Brooks how he made it through Auburn, he told her he would give another student his college identification card and they would take the test in his place. Research papers and essays, she says, were always given to him in advance, yet he would hand them in as his own. "This is something he bragged about," she says.
The Registrar's office at Auburn says that Brooks left the University in 1980 without a degree in his chosen major of vocational distributive education.
