Sexi Alexi
by Adam
Sexi Alexi—that’s what the girls at Princeton had
dubbed him. But college freshmen weren’t the only ones
the intriguing runner had appealed to. Alexi Indris Santana
also appealed deeply to Princeton’s admissions department.
He was a real life Huck Finn, a character that Princeton’s
Dean of admissions has described as the perfect candidate for
admissions. Like Huck Finn, Santana was original, self-reliant,
and as New Yorker writer David Samuels put it, held “the
kind of diverse life experiences that might keep the school’s
Tom Sawyers entertained.”
Santana’s 1410 SAT score placed him among Princeton’s
most qualified applicants, and his Hispanic name hinted at a
minority. But what really captivated admissions officers was
his essay that told the story of a self-educated ranch hand
who read Plato among the Nevada canyons, trained as a long distance
runner in the Mojave Desert, and slept beneath the stars. However,
also like Huck Finn, Santana was fictional.
Alexi Santana was the name 28-year-old Jim Hogue had chosen
for himself in an attempt to reinvent his life. Hogue had been
raised in a poor Kansas neighborhood where he excelled in track,
driven by a cutting ambition to always outdo the competition.
Upon graduating high school, he was awarded a scholarship to
run for the University of Wyoming where he faced annihilating
competition from some of his own teammates, a newly imported
group of Kenyan runners in their mid twenties. Yet Hogue did
not concede dominance to the Kenyans. Instead, he copied their
training methods and pushed his body beyond its physical limitations.
His determination soon turned counter-productive and Hogue found
himself injured, unable to train normally. After the injury,
he returned briefly to racing but ended up dropping out and
enrolling at the University of Austin, a move that Hogue attributes
to the death of a grandmother in Laramie, but others speculate
that his transfer was the result of a deep change within Hogue.
His time in Austin was limited. Hogue stopped taking classes
when he ran out of money and went to live and work in Las Vegas,
building houses during the day and frequenting casinos at night.
It was there in Las Vegas that Santana was born. Hogue had heard
about a kid in Wichita who had created a new identity, and was
intrigued by the idea. His friends in Las Vegas helped him come
up with Santana, and a chef from Switzerland loaned him an address
to which Princeton could send mail. While putting the fundamentals
in place, Hogue—soon to be Santana—researched published
statistics that tell who is admitted to selective universities
and, with a careful reading, can reveal why.
Engaged in such research, Hogue discovered several facts and
patterns. The majority of Princeton students were upper or upper-middle
class, and about a fifth were “legacies” whose parent
or parents had gone to Princeton and who often had lower SATs
than non-legacy applicants. Sharing the lower end of SAT scores
in the applicant pool were athletes, whose talents compensated
for other relative shortcomings. Applicants from rural and sparsely
populated states, such as Nevada, had better chances than students
from highly competitive areas like New York. Hogue used this
information to mold Alexi Santana and begin work on his application.
But, as captivating as his story was, it wasn’t necessarily
enough to secure him a spot. So Hogue, who was living in a storage
locker and trafficking stolen bicycles for a living at the time,
began to compete in several road races as 18-year-old Alexi
Santana. As he shattered the competition, accumulating victories
and times that were extremely impressive for an “18-year-old,”
Hogue collected newspaper clippings that reported his performance
and saw to it that they were seen by Larry Ellis, Princeton’s
then head track coach. Santana was hoping to get recruited.
And recruited he was. Ellis was impressed both by the runner’s
times and the conditions in which he trained, showing tremendous
talent and potential. He flew Santana out to visit, and the
recruit demonstrated his ability as a runner while remaining
reserved yet inquisitive. That April, Santana received an acceptance
letter from Princeton; unfortunately for him, though, he was
being sentenced to 12 months in jail after the stolen bicycles
were found in his storage locker home. He managed to defer his
admission one year under the story that he had to care for his
dying mother in Switzerland.
Upon arriving in Princeton late in the summer of 1989, Santana
established himself as one of the most interesting, intelligent,
and talented students on campus. He took a heavy course load
and earned top grades, hosted small private parties with wine,
cheese, and a select group of freshmen girls in his Holder Hall
dorm room, told stories of his exploits in the canyons while
shying away from revealing to much about his parents or time
in Europe, and ran consistently well in practice while performing
only moderately well in meets. Many of his teammates would later
realize that Santana was holding back in races to avoid the
spotlight. But simply holding back in races wasn’t enough
to prevent discovery.
During the indoor track season of his sophomore year, Alexi
was running at the HYP (Harvard Yale Princeton) meet, when he
was recognized by Renee Pacheco, a Yale senior who came to watch
a friend compete. The senior had attended Palo Alto high school,
where Hogue had previously ran high school track while masquerading
as a 16 year-old orphan in an apparent attempt to impress Stanford’s
track coaches and gain admission to the prestigious west coast
school. That plan had fallen apart when he was discovered by
a suspicious local reporter, and Hogue—or “Jay Huntman”
as he had been known—mysteriously disappeared. But when
Pacheco saw that he had resurfaced again at Princeton, she was
a bit shocked and notified officials.
A week later, two men in suits appeared at Santana’s
Geology course, read him his rights and took him away for questioning.
With his self-invented life collapsing around him, Hogue readily
answered all the interviewing detective’s questions with
a surprisingly calm demeanor. Alexi Santana was dead, and Hogue
was forced to live as himself once again, which included a sentence
of two hundred and seventy days in jail, a hundred hours of
community service, and five years probation in addition to a
$21,124 restitution to Princeton for theft by deception. Hogue
now works various jobs and has acquired a patch of land in a
vast, open stretch of Colorado where he hopes to someday build
a house.
From “Alexi Indris Santana,” we can draw a few
lessons on the college admissions process about both what to
do and what not to do (as well as deeper lessons on hope, dreams,
deception, ambition, and life in general—but we won’t
get into those in this article). First of all, the athletic
recruitment process can help talented applicants leap over admissions
hurdles that may otherwise block their acceptance. Factors such
as geographic location and ethnic background also play a role
in the admissions process. More importantly, selective colleges
aren’t looking for just the smartest students in high
school—they are looking for the open-minded and inquisitive
students of life who can enrich the campus and contribute to
the school’s reputation as a cradle of extraordinary men
and women of sundry (and in Alexi’s case sun-dried) backgrounds.
Overcoming obstacles is far worthier than being spoon-fed opportunities.
However, falsifying an application bears substantially more
risk than potential rewards. Students who take great liberties
with their application will most likely find themselves scrutinized
and booted out. And if the liberties they take are great enough,
they may even find themselves temporarily deprived of their
own liberty as they serve time. Anyone with such aptitude for
creativity and deception would find their genius much better
suited to sincere purposes. After all, Hogue did run those races,
take those SATs, earn those grades, achieve social success,
and earn the good will of an esteemed faculty himself. He just
did it at the wrong time under the wrong pretenses.
