The Mysterious Case of Ron Weaver

How a 30-Year Old Football Player Who Had Already Played Out His NCAA Eligibility Managed to Trick the University of Texas Into Giving Him a Full Scholarship to Play Football — All Over Again

All facts are taken from the reporting and subsequent investigations into the incident that is the subject of this article.

I was a Division 1 athlete in football and baseball from 1986–1990. After my eligibility was finished and I earned my undergraduate degree, I immediately entered law school. During law school, I roomed with another former D1 athlete at the same school who had been a basketball player and was also going to graduate school. The guy was my best friend at the time, and has been one of my lifelong close friends. We had both played on conference championship teams during our playing days, but we had this nagging feeling (misplaced in hindsight) that we hadn’t quite accomplished enough in those four short years. It ate at us.

We were recent college graduates in our early 20’s, and it was the early 90’s; angst was in fashion, and we fed off of it, but not to an unhealthy degree. We listened to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden — this new sound that had come out of the Pacific Northwest and assaulted our senses and psyches — and they seemed to speak to us in more ways than one. We seemed more able to identity with their sentiments than we did with a lot of the people around us.

In our free time around the apartment, we would lament and pontificate over these issues. If you prided yourself on excellence, any shortcoming whatsoever was almost a failure. And we were both just beginning to come to grips with the realization that the thing that had defined our lives up until just recently was over; from the age of about 5 we had both defined ourselves as athletes. It had given both of us the lion’s share of our self-worth. This was a very difficult thing to admit, but we worked through it together.

Should we have gone to a different school? What if we had played for different coaches? Why did we make the decisions we made when we were 18, 19, 20? Why didn’t people give us better advice when were trying to make those decisions? We would soon come to conclude that being in the right place at the right time was 95% of the battle. Which seemed very random to us.

But whatever the answers — and we didn’t get many — the brutal truth was, in an instant, it was over. We were looking for that new identity, but we hadn’t found it yet, and while we were idling getting those secondary degrees — we went out every Thursday through Saturday, went to the gym nearly every day, and played a lot of golf — we entertained ourselves with other flights of fancy. Grad school for him and law school for me were not the all-consuming endeavors they seemed to be to most of our classmates. We were able to get by on much less than 100% effort. The question was, do you want to be the honor graduate, or do you want to have some fun?

But then, an idea began to form. For example, we had grown up in the 70’s and 80’s during a time when Hollywood movies were filled with people playing characters much younger. For instance, 24 year-old John Travolta played 17 year-old Danny Zuko in Grease. Ralph Macchio was 22 when he played a 16 year-old Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid. Judd Nelson was 25, and Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy were both 22 when they played high school teenagers in The Breakfast Club. If these people could convincingly play people much younger than them, why couldn’t an average person do it in real life? Was it possible?

As a result, the plan we pondered — just to entertain ourselves — was this: What if a person could drop off the radar and out of sight, create newer and younger identities for himself, move to some city or town out west, and reenter some obscure junior college?

“Jucos,” or junior colleges, we surmised, didn’t have the same stringent and exacting standards and monitoring that major four-year universities did. The person seeking to extend his college athletic career could probably get his hands on someone else’s high school transcript and, along with some kind of fake ID proclaiming him to be the person on the transcript, gain entry into any number of junior colleges. That would probably be enough to pull off the entire caper.

Now, for all the judgmental, prosecutorial types out there, these were never serious discussions. It was for fun. Of course, we were still too young to realize that much of these things might’ve been downright illegal, let alone dishonest. This never entered our minds. The point is we were never serious about doing any of this; it was just something we pondered on to entertain ourselves in our otherwise pedestrian lives after sports were done, and we wondered if anyone would ever be able to pull it off in the real world.

Once properly enrolled in junior college, a person could just play their way into getting recruited (again) by the big time schools, and would undoubtedly earn a scholarship (for another 2–3 years) at a new school. And that person would perform much better the second time around. Why? Because he would have all that knowledge he had learned in his previous life — that initial four years of eligibility — and he would use that information to his advantage.

What “knowledge” am I talking about? Take baseball at the D1 level, for instance. The only real difference between great pitchers at the high school and college level is command and location. College pitchers don’t necessarily throw any harder than high school pitchers; they just have much better control and can locate their pitches much better. They never throw a pitch out over the middle of the plate. (On purpose anyway.) I didn’t know this when I got to the D1 level, and those guys picked me apart. I figured I would just get by on pure athletic ability like I had done my entire life all the way through high school. But I was wrong. I swung at bad pitches; I struck out a lot. It wasn’t until my last two years that I figured this out and changed my approach.

The second time around, a guy like that would have all this knowledge and be ready at the outset. He would be more selective at the plate. He would wait for his pitch. He would get more hits. He would take more walks. He would hit more home runs and get more extra-base hits. He might even get drafted the second time around.

Or thinking more deeply, would it matter whether the person attempted to pull this off in one sport compared to any other? For instance, would it be easier or more difficult depending on what sport it was? Would it matter, for example, if there were 85 players on a roster versus 13? Would the interloper be able to hide in plain sight inside an 85-man program as opposed to one with only 13 players on the entire roster? At the time, NCAA rules permitted schools to have 85 athletes on football scholarship. But in basketball, that number was just 13. Baseball only had 11.

Taking it a step further, on any given Saturday, an average college football team might play 40 players in any game. On the other hand, of the 13 players on a college basketball team, 10 or 11 might get into any given game. Simply put, was a plan like the one we pondered more or less likely to be uncovered if the guy was playing basketball for Duke University as opposed to football for Oklahoma State? And why?

This ultimate “why” question then led to another long series of questions with very complicated answers that most people did not — and still do not — want to talk about. Could it possibly be that people pay more attention to the makeup of a basketball team than they do a football team? And why? Would it have anything to do with the concept of unconscious bias? And would unconscious bias prevent people from discovering they had an ineligible player in their football program because they weren’t even paying attention in the first place?

The bottom line was, we concluded that such a course of action was probably impossible; after all colleges had compliance departments within their athletics departments that were supposed to prevent something like this from happening, right? But if anyone had a hope of actually pulling it off, his best chance — based on all the foregoing reasons — was to attempt it as a football player, not as a basketball player. With 85 players on scholarship and over 100 players including walk-ons, a guy could assimilate in pretty easily. Not so much in basketball or baseball.

What possibilities did this open up? Well, if someone could hide in plain sight on a 100-plus football roster and merge into the background even more because he played a position that people didn’t pay much attention or notice to, could someone actually carry out the fanciful scheme my roommate and I had laughed about? We eventually decided it was too outrageous a prospect for anyone to seriously consider pulling off.

Thus, as we went about our daily routine of getting up and going to classes, spending the bare minimum amount of time required on studying and homework, and living the typical life of an early 20- something, former D1 athlete in a small university town, grad student, little did we know that there was one guy who was actually plotting and carrying out this exact plan for real at the same time we were pondering it.

His name was Ron Weaver. Or Ron McKelvey. Or whatever his real name is. You get the picture. And he would eventually become a figure the vaunted University of Texas Longhorns and their fans would prefer to forget.

The incident would raise deep questions about how and why it could have happened, how it was able to go on for so long before being detected, and why he was able to do it on a football team at one of the most visible programs in the nation.

Weaver, who played under the alias Joel Ron McKelvey, played under his own name when he enrolled at Monterey Peninsula College in the fall of 1984. He played at Sacramento State in 1988 as a wide receiver. As a result, Weaver had already used up his NCAA eligibility by 1989.

After graduation, Weaver tried out with the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League and with the Houston Oilers, but he did not make any professional roster.

He then later enrolled at a Los Angeles junior college under an alias and a different date of birth, using the name and social security number of a friend who had never played sports. Changing positions to defensive back, he played two seasons at the junior college before transferring to Texas, where he was recruited by the coaching staff and claimed his age was 23 instead of 30. Weaver also joined the team after photos had already been taken for the team media guide. He eventually received a full scholarship.

Weaver was supposedly only caught after he told a reporter he planned to write a book about his exploits. He was not exposed to the media until the day before the December 1995 Sugar Bowl, when The Salinas Californian, acting on an anonymous tip, revealed his real name and age. A promise to produce a birth certificate went unresolved, and he disappeared the night before the game. The Longhorns lost to Virginia Tech, and several players later said they were very upset by the discovery that one of their teammates was a complete pretender.

Texas coaches and school officials claimed to know nothing about Weaver’s fraud until he was caught. Despite some initial fears, Texas did not end up having to forfeit any games, and the school wasn’t even sanctioned by the NCAA. The NCAA bought the school’s story that nobody knew and could not have known of Weaver’s scheme, even though he played the entire season.

In the end, the machine emerged unscathed.

Glen Hines is the author of two books, Document and Cloudbreak, available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.