Former Texas tennis coach Michael Center finds purpose after scandal, prison and a lost career

Michael Center lost his career and spent months in prison. Now the former Texas tennis coach is sharing a story of survival, service and redemption. (Ricardo B. Brazziell/AP)

AUSTIN - Michael Center appreciates the little things of life.

Especially because over the past seven years, he's come to realize those are actually the biggest things.

Half a year in prison will do that to a person.

These days he thoroughly enjoys going on long walks with his beloved Shih Tzu dog Casey around his Northwest Hills neighborhood in Austin, where he's lived for a quarter-century. He loves trying - in vain, he adds - to keep up with his fitness-crazed wife Allison of almost 26 years, eating her grilled salmon in quiet dinners at home and watching "Ted Lasso." He adores just spending time with his two grown, college graduate sons David and Ben.

Those may be mundane activities in most people's routines, but to 62-year-old Michael Center, whose perfect life turned upside down after being a pawn in a nationwide academic scandal and convicted of fraud , they mean the world. They are his world.

He's also juggling jobs these days in fields he never expected. He's giving motivational talks. He's worked for a real estate investment group. He helped with a pickleball start-up. He's still working as a tennis instructor in Fort Worth and commuting. He works with the homeless.

And he was just hired as director of junior development and events coordinator for the Bayard Friedman TCU Tennis Center.

Oh, and he's self-published a book about his ordeal called "Breaking Serve." But he adds, "I don't think John Grisham's going to be worried about me passing him up this month."

It's been a long, arduous journey, and he may never coach again.

Long ago, chronologically speaking, are the days he was a highly decorated, tremendously successful championship tennis coach at Texas and before that TCU and Kansas State. Emotionally, maybe still a little too fresh. He still gets anxiety over this chapter in his life.

He especially loves giving leadership and motivational speeches to groups both large and small. He delivers 45-minute presentations, complete with a slideshow, and without the benefit of notes.

Center has addressed groups as diverse as a defense manufacturing company to emergency room doctors to sales people to high school coaches. He's given about two dozen talks, some to as few people as one-on-one sessions to a room filled with a riveted crowd of 700. He will talk to Ohio State athletes next month.

Without question, speaking to others has been part of the cathartic and healing experience for himself.

"The reason I'm speaking shouldn't be to make myself feel better," he said during a recent two-hour interview. "I should be speaking so that when people go through difficult moments in their lives, which everybody does, my message might be able to help someone. Mine is a story about getting back up and trying to help people who get knocked down get back up."

And make no mistake. Michael Center has been through difficult moments. Too many to name.

Like being awakened by seven FBI agents pounding on his door at 8 a.m. in March 2019 and shackled at the ankles as his wife and sons prepared for a spring-break ski trip. Like getting arrested at the height of his career as the Longhorn men's tennis coach and getting zero support from a school that was totally complicit in the whole sordid episode. Like being railroaded through a legal system bent on only winning convictions instead of discovering the whole truth and pleading guilty of fraud and spending more than four months in federal prison and two more in a halfway house.

Yeah, difficult moments indeed.

After coaching college tennis for 30 years and 19 of them with the Longhorns where his final team won the national championship in a match he could only watch on television, he was naively caught up in a nationwide admissions scandal called "Operation Varsity Blues" that rocked the nation.

Not only was Center not present when Texas beat Wake Forest for that title in spring of 2019, he wasn't even allowed to visit with his players afterward. He never got a championship ring.

His very small and gullible role in helping an unqualified student of a wealthy family gain admission to Texas in exchange for the family's sizable donation to the tennis program ultimately landed him in a medium-security federal prison and then a halfway house for more than six months.

One simple mistake cost him his job, his very livelihood, his spotless reputation and for a long time his self-esteem. He's more than paid the price.

He arrived at the Three Rivers federal correctional prison in Southwest Texas on April 6, 2020, after sitting for three hours in the back seat of an Infiniti with his wife and sister-in-law Dede in front. He was lost in his thoughts and fears. He was terrified. He was allowed to bring two personal items - his eye glasses and his wedding band.

"I kept thinking I don't think I'm tough enough," he said, looking back. "I don't think I can do it."

He was immediately quarantined for the first 14 days. Because the COVID pandemic had just begun only a month before, Center was kept in a 10-by- 10 isolation cell with no air conditioning, temperatures in the 90s, little food and no chance of a restful sleep on the concrete bed. He laid down on a tiny foam mattress on the floor.

"I was scared to death," he recalled. "I've always been claustrophobic. It was the worst first 48 hours of my life."

He made do, best he could. He estimated he read 50 books during that prison stay, including all of Grisham's novels and Nelson Mandela's 658-page autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom" after his own 27 years in a South African prison.

Center recei...

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