The Old Scribe wrote a Star Tribune column after 36 holes of the 2009 PGA Championship stating that the major championship already belonged to Tiger Woods. It did not turn out that way _ and there still are e-mails and other messages forwarded from readers that remind me of this blunder.

That is certainly a fair reaction from the sporting public, but how about a few kudos when the old boy turns out to be dead-on on even more complex topics, such as the Gophers' dealings with Royce White as far back as 20 months ago?

He has turned out to very wacky young man -- with arrests, banishment from university housing and suspicion in a dormitory theft well after that banishment had taken place. More recently, he took the bold move of going on a website to announce his retirement from Gophers' basketball without ever having played a game.

The Old Scribe tried to warn readers back on April 29, 2008 that a verbal commitment from White was not something the Gophers should have been seeking only a few weeks after he had been expelled from De La Salle for academic fraud.

The e-mailers and respondents beat the Hades out of me for that column, and now that it has proven to be an astute piece of journalistic comment, not a peep has been heard. Here's a hunk of the column that basically forecast the pain in the Tubby Smith's posterior that White had a strong chance to become:

"ROYCE WHITE had the good fortune to be part of DeLaSalle's student body. He messed it up.

The first incident earned him a suspension of several games early  in his junior basketball season. The second, an "academic mistake" as he has admitted, was blatant enough to get him thrown out of school.

A DeLaSalle official would say only, "Royce didn't follow the rules."

Academic mistake. Breaking rules. Gosh, what in the name of (the late) Jan Gangelhoff could that mean? This is a high school kid, so the tendency was to let it pass.

And then last week White decided to make news by announcing six months before he needed to that he planned to accept a basketball scholarship from the Gophers.

We are nine years removed from Minnesota becoming the basketball program by which all others compare themselves when it comes to academic fraud. There's no evidence that White's verbal commitment was greeted with hesitation by coach Tubby Smith, or his boss, athletic
director Joel Maturi, or Maturi's bosses.

They can't comment on the qualities of recruits before they sign, but certainly it was in Smith's power to tell White, "Let's cool it here until next fall -- make sure you have your act together
academically and elsewhere before you make an announcement."

And if Smith wasn't willing to take that stand on White, then Maturi should have ordered his coach to deliver this message: Tell the young man the offer is off the table until he proves himself somewhere other than the basketball court.

Presumably, there are several clear-thinking folks in Gophers Acreage who remember with embarrassment the end to Clem Haskins' tenure.

We few, we sad few, we band of brothers, would feel better about the White situation if the first thing the kid did after being booted by DeLaSalle was something other than enroll at Hopkins.

Certainly, it is an up-to-date, well-funded school with excellent academic opportunities, but extra-talented basketball players from the west side of the Mississippi River congregate there for one reason: to play basketball.

White could have gone on the rebound to ... how about Minneapolis South? Magnet school. Strong academics and mediocre basketball. If White enrolled there, we could say: "Hey, it's true. Royce wants the classroom and the court to be of equal importance in his senior
year."

 But Hopkins? He's there to play basketball -- win a state championship with a returning roster that already might have been the finest collection of West Metro All-Stars in Ken Novak Jr.'s
tenure as upset-prone coach and first-class recruiter.

If White's one season there preps him as well for the Gophers as did the Hopkins experience for Kris Humphries and Dan Coleman, Tubby has a chance -- come the fall of 2009 -- to find himself with a combination of a ball hog featuring inconsistent effort ...

There is a recent precedent for the White situation when it comes to Gophers basketball. Minneapolis Henry's Brandon Smith already had signed with the Gophers when he was thrown off the team by coach Larry McKenzie in December 2004.

Dan Monson stuck with Smith and he enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 2005. He was academically ineligible for the second semester. He was suspended by Jim Molinari, Monson's interim replacement, as a sophomore.

And then Tubby threw Brandon off the team, once and for all, last fall. Lesson learned? Not when you're dealing with a top-40 national talent such as the 6-7 White. Then, you take the shot, even at the school that put fraud behind academic when it comes to big-time basketball.''