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St. Bonaventure scandal leaves death in its wake By Jill Lieber, USA TODAY
CLARENCE, N.Y. — I am so sorry for the pain I have caused St. Bonaventure University, my family, friends, my colleagues at First Niagara and my beloved wife, Ann.
Bill Swan Those were Bill Swan's final words, penciled in script on the back of an order form for a Christmas flag.
Swan, 55, president and CEO of First Niagara Financial Group and chairman of St. Bonaventure University's board of trustees, committed suicide Aug. 20. He hanged himself in the basement of the beautiful, two-story home he shared with his wife of 28 years, Ann, on a cul-de-sac in this affluent Buffalo suburb. Only the family pet, a schnauzer named Bogey, was home at the time. How could a successful, 6-4, 240-pound man with a legendary lust for life, charitable giving and all things St. Bonaventure, suddenly decide he could not go on? "The amount of external stimuli that was coming at him from all directions would do most normal people in," Ann Swan says. • He was maneuvering St. Bonaventure through a men's basketball scandal centered on the late-season determination that the team had an ineligible player — a junior college transfer who had been admitted and allowed to play with a welding certificate rather than an associate's degree. Swan engineered the departure of the school's president, athletics director and coaching staff, but some believed he could have prevented all this had he gotten involved earlier. • He was orchestrating First Niagara's $356 million acquisition of Troy Financial Corp. • He worked 60 to 80 hours a week at the bank and felt compelled to make a similar effort to turn around St. Bonaventure. He averaged five hours of sleep. • He was attacked in the local media, via e-mails from alumni and on Bonnies Bandwagon, a Web site not affiliated with the school. Ann Swan says a posting on the Web site, condemning him for his article about the scandal for Trusteeship magazine, might have been the final straw. "The week before Bill died, he said to me, 'Have you seen the Internet?' And I said, 'Yeah, the idiots are at it again,' " Ann Swan recalls. "Well, I went to bed one night during his wake with this Bandwagon posting in my head: 'Every time Bill Swan opens his mouth, he hangs himself.' " She dissolves into tears. "I feel so guilty," she says. "Instead of making a crack about the Internet posts, I should've given him what he really needed — a hug." Friday night, St. Bonaventure's basketball team will open its season with a home game against Robert Morris. NCAA Infractions Committee action on its case is pending. And the public-relations scars remain from the players' decision to boycott last season's final two games after the Atlantic 10 Conference barred the team from the conference tournament. But with new coach Anthony Solomon, 38, a former Notre Dame assistant, the school will take another step away from a wrenching series of events and into a hopeful future. Ann Swan, still living in the house, for the time being, plans to be there. She wants to do it for her husband, who had envisioned the game to be further affirmation that St. Bonaventure, and its Franciscan values, were strong, sound and intact. She wants to do it to protect his legacy. And she wants to do it to prove to herself that she can go on without him. Franciscan values to the core Bill Swan grew up in a working-class section of Buffalo. His father, Clay, was a city bus driver and his mother, Anita, was a waitress. He graduated from Bishop Fallon High, and, thanks to his parents' sacrifice, achieved his dream of attending St. Bonaventure. It's a small, Catholic institution in Olean, N.Y., a town in the Allegheny Mountains, 70 miles south of Buffalo. There, Swan blossomed almost instantly from an insecure, overweight kid into a confident, outgoing campus leader. He became a popular disc jockey on the student radio station, and was voted by his peers to the position he coveted most of all — the Brown Indian mascot, the cheerleader at basketball games. That put Swan in the middle of the Bonnies' hoops heyday — the Bob Lanier era. The future Basketball Hall of Famer led St. Bonaventure to a 65-12 record in three seasons, including a Final Four appearance in 1970. Swan was so enamored of St. Bonaventure, he considered becoming a Franciscan friar. He held the Franciscan values — contemplation, love, respect for the dignity of all, joy and peace — close to his heart. Every day of his working life, he never left home without tucking a Franciscan values pamphlet in his suit coat pocket. And he waved it every chance he got. At bank meetings. In the trustees room. During fundraisers for St. Bonaventure, local charities and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo. "Bill recognized that his Bona years formed him, enlarged his capacity and gave him friends and mentors that were unparalleled," says Sister Margaret Carney, the school's interim senior vice president for Franciscan charism. "Alma mater means loving mother. St. Bonaventure truly was Bill's second mother. It took him in a life direction." Which helps to explain, in part, why he was so deeply hurt by the basketball scandal. "The welding jokes, the barbs, the slanderous comments about the university devastated him," Ann Swan says. "Here's a guy who spent his whole life supporting St. Bonaventure, and in 24 hours, it's the laughingstock across the country." Engulfed by the scandal So, Swan threw himself into, and on top of, the fire. With unanimous backing from the board of trustees, he ousted President Robert Wickenheiser, athletics director Gothard Lane, head coach Jan van Breda Kolff and assistant coach Kort Wickenheiser, the president's son. He took a week off from his job, and ran the university. He held a Unity Convocation to rally the school and the community. "We will not sacrifice our values for anything — not even athletic glory," Swan promised, waving his Franciscan values pamphlet. Says David Ferguson, vice president for university relations: "He had to practice that speech three times before he could get through it without breaking down. It was the moment in his life that he just wanted to do the right thing." But a month later, when the university released the findings of its internal investigation into the basketball program and 6-8 center Jamil Terrell's transfer from Coastal Georgia Community College in Brunswick, Ga., the unity Swan had tried to stitch together started coming apart at the seams. The report revealed that Swan and Jim Gould, head of the trustees committee on athletics, had some knowledge of Terrell's eligibility issues in June 2002 but chose to not get involved. Lane had forwarded Swan and Gould two e-mails: One written by Lane to Robert Wickenheiser explaining that Coastal Georgia had stated Terrell didn't have an associate's degree and therefore didn't meet NCAA standards for transfers. The other from Wickenheiser to Lane interpreting applicable NCAA bylaws regarding transfers, concluding Terrell met eligibility requirements and stating any further discussions on the subject were unnecessary. The school's report also revealed that Swan had told Lane at the time that it was "an internal issue and that R. Wickenheiser would be accountable if the conclusions set forth in the email to Lane were erroneous." Media, alumni and supporters criticized Swan for his reluctance to get involved. On April 20, Jerry Sullivan, a sports columnist for The Buffalo News, called for his resignation. "Bill was annihilated," Ann Swan recalls. "He went into a shell. ... He felt as if his morals, his values and his soul had been attacked." Critical postings on Bonnies Bandwagon devastated him, too. Says Father Dominic Monti, the school's interim president: "Bill plunged into everything 1,000%. Once he was convinced something was right, he had difficulty understanding how someone might see differently. This was the only blemish on his record. "To me, Bill never stopped being the Brown Indian. His role was to get everybody revved up, behind the team, to boost the school. But, in this instance, even if 80% of the people agreed with his decision, there was a hard-core, 20% who weren't willing to let it go. And Bill thought, 'I guess I've failed.' " By late spring, the criticism had calmed, and in June, he was re-elected board chair. But then, he wrote an article for the July-August issue of Trusteeship magazine, titled, "The Real March Madness," detailing the Trustees' role in saving the university — and further defending his decision not to get involved sooner in the eligibility issues. " ... I have asked myself countless times: Did I make the right decisions?" Swan wrote in the final two paragraphs of the five-page article. "Considering the information I had, and balancing it with my general sense of the responsibilities of trustees, I can report that I am at peace with my decisions. "The more important question for me now is, knowing what I now know about how good people and great organizations can sometimes go awry (and knowing that "best practices" for trustees do not constitute magic formulas for behavior), would I take the same actions in a similar situation? That is a question I will ponder to my dying days." That article reignited the Bonnies Bandwagon, where the postings included, "The fish stinks from the head," and "I wouldn't want to work for this guy, he's an Enron guy." At the time, nobody knew the toll the basketball scandal was taking on him. However, Lana Benatovich, a St. Bonaventure trustee and a close friend of the Swans, who had no children, recalls a comment he made at dinner five nights before his death. "I complimented Bill on a great article in the Rochester Business Journal about the bank merger," Benatovich says. "And Bill responded with, 'Yeah, but what's going to happen when the NCAA comes out with their report?' "My mother used to say, 'This too shall pass,' but I don't think Bill thought the basketball scandal would ever be over." Anger has yet to abate In Ann Swan's lowest moments, when her heart fills with so much anger and grief that she feels as if it's going to explode, she takes off running through her rambling house, screaming at the top of her lungs. "I'll pick up the dog, look him in the eyes and yell, 'You were the only one here that day! Tell me what happened in this house!' " She says she's not angry at St. Bonaventure. "St. Bonaventure didn't destroy him," she says. "It gave him life." She's angry at Robert Wickenheiser; she asked that he not attend the funeral. She's angry at Lane. "I firmly believe one phone call to the NCAA could have prevented this whole mess," she says. She's angry at her husband. "My life will never be the same," she says. When it came time to bury him, she didn't hesitate. She laid her husband to rest in the St. Bonaventure cemetery, on a hill overlooking the school. Into his coffin, she put his tattered Franciscan values pamphlet and his Brown Indian headdress. |
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