I sent the following letter to the Star Tribune in response to veteran sports reporter Sid Hartman's August 12 column. SInce I doubt the Star Tribune will run it, I run it here for your edification.

You must sometimes stand back and marvel at Sid Hartman. Consider his Saturday column about the Gangelhoff/Haskins affair.

He says "it was very interesting" when it was revealed that Elayne Donahue of the U's counseling program, announced she went public with the Gangelhoff story "because she believed the university wasn't taking enough action."

Then his piece becomes pure, vitriolic blame: "well, Elayne, you were the one who hired Jan Gangelhoff," who performed much of the cheating. "Everyone .... knew it was Haskin's opinion that you would never win at Minnesota if you continued to reject minority students who were good basketball players."

But his next sentence is the marvel: "The most important thing is to forget about the past and move forward."

Let us stop and ask what this amounts to:

* How does Haskins' wariness of Donahue exonerate him? It doesn't. She could be way overly vigilant, and he would still be a liar, a cheater, and a crook. In fact, might not his proclivities even explain her vigilance?

* What does the U's winning record have to do with Donahue? That wasn't her job. Her job was to maintain academic standards among athletes. Haskins went around her to set up an autonomous, Haskins-controlled counseling system, with his man Alonso Newby in charge. Incredibly, Hartman makes this sound like Donahue's fault.

* Why does Hartman throw in the "minority" reference, unless it is to tar her with weird racial overtones?

* What sense does it EVER make to "forget about the past and move forward"? Isn't that, on the contrary, the universal formula for stupidity?

* Finally, where was Hartman throughout this controversy? We know where he was. 99% of the time, he was defending his friend Clem Haskins and heaping rubbish on people trying to tell the truth about a program gone wrong, questioning their motives, as if their motives lessened Haskins' lying, cheating, and criminality.

Hartman in this story has not been a reporter, but an advocate, indeed, an interested party in the intrigue, and he passionately defended, as he customarily does in his column, his powerful buddies. Sometimes it's cute name-dropping, as with Steinbrenner and and Bobby Knight. Here, he is whitewashing a criminal. It's less cute.

Before we forget the past entirely, Sid, like the dolts you hope all sports fans are, maybe you could explain whose side you are on here, and why people should believe you today, and ignore everything you said earlier?

I imagine you will say that your first interest is THE KIDS. Then why did you heap abuse on kids like Russ Archambaud who stepped forward to give their side in the investigation? He's a kid. Aren't the kids who Haskins helped slip through the academic process entitled to something akin to an education?

Or is there just too much money, too much glamor, and too much power involved in University sports for the Star Tribune's ace "reporter" to shoot straight with its readers?

I can't wait to hear your logic on this.