OUT OF BOUNDS: Coaches' indiscretions scrutinized more than ever
Good luck to any of you out there who have coaching aspirations. It used to be enough to win championships. Now, you also have to be devoid of normal human foibles and practically a candidate for beatification. Since when do we feel it is acceptable to hold coaches to standards that we wouldn't dream of holding ourselves to? I wonder what would become of Bear Bryant and Bud Wilkinson today?
Let's cut directly to the chase on this Monday morning: Was Mike Price fired as head football coach at Alabama, and will Larry Eustachy likely be fired in a few days as head basketball coach at Iowa State for behavior that was substantially different than that of Paul "Bear" Bryant or Charles "Bud" Wilkinson on any number of nights on the town?
Consider the question. But before you don your Texas A&M, Oklahoma or Alabama regalia and come charging furiously in our direction, we will acknowledge that the latest Coaches Gone Wild managed some unique variations that never befell Bryant, Wilkinson or any of their more flamboyant brethren of the 1950s and '60s.
In this first decade of the Internet generation, for example, there is no other known instance of a coach being foolish enough, as was Eustachy, to attend a party at an opposing team's campus and pose with comely coeds, beer in hand, for photographs that were posted on the Net for all to see within 24 hours.
And there are no documented instances of a coach being irresponsible enough, as was Price, to leave his room service charging privileges in the hands of a woman not his wife and of such prodigious appetite that she attempted to order the left- and right-hand side of the menu -- to go, at that.
But when stripped to its essence, isn't bad behavior bad behavior?
"It's a fair question," said Mickey Herskowitz, author of the book The Legend of Bear Bryant and one of Bryant's confidants for more than a quarter-century. "Coach Bryant admitted that he had a drinking problem, and he took care of it. And he certainly was attracted to the ladies, and they to him. But it was a different era.
"Of the private behavior that might have been under suspicion or called into question, very little became public, and none of it got written when he was coaching. There were any number of coaches into the 1960s who were legendary drinkers and some who were pretty stout carousers, but nobody reported it, the players didn't resent it, and the schools shut their eyes to it."
Indeed, it wasn't until after Bryant's death that Herskowitz, now a Chronicle columnist, wrote about a conversation late in Bryant's career in which Herskowitz noted with some amazement that Bryant was three years younger than President Reagan. He also recalled a colleague's response: "Yeah, but Reagan ain't drunk near as much whiskey or run around near as much as coach Bryant."
And Wilkinson had been dead for a decade when Jim Dent, in his book The Undefeated, wrote of the coach's proclivities toward late-night rendezvous with stewardesses during OU road trips.
I am not intending to condone this sort of behavior, but I am wondering why it is now cause to fire a coach. Most coaches are simply a reflection of the society that produced them. This means that some drink, some sleep around, some gamble- as do some of us. Does this reality make anyone less qualified to coach? If it does, it should also disqualify some of us from holding the jobs that we do.
In the same way we hate behaviors in others that we most fear seeing in ourselves, coaches are being fired for indiscretions that any of us could easily indulge in. Interesting that we are willing to hold coaches to standards most of us wouldn't be able to live up to, isn't it?
I can understand demanding the firing of a coach for not winning. That reality is as old as sports. Demanding an unreasonably high degree of moral and ethical purity is a fairly recent and disturbing phenomena. How many of us would still have our jobs if we had to pass this sort of moral litmus test?
Given increased media and fan scrutiny, coaching is quickly becoming a zero-tolerance profession. Yes, winning has always been part of the job requirement. Now, you must also be a saint. I wonder how many of us would qualify?
He who live in gas tank should not throw stones....
