The Sports Curmudgeon

The most important thing that you have to keep in mind here is that a young man, Patrick Dennehy, is dead. Since the official autopsy says he was shot twice in the head, it is reasonable to assume that he did not die of natural causes or some horrible accident. Whether Patrick Dennehy was a saint or a demon is unimportant at this time; he was a young man, and he is dead, and his death almost assuredly came at the hands of some other person. All of that is tragic; we can and ought to be sorry it happened. Now as for the rest of the hominids who are involved in this situation, I’m looking for a hero and I can’t find one. I suspect that all of them are about to reveal themselves as sorry excuses for bipeds.

I’ll withhold final judgment on Carleton Dodson – Dennehy’s teammate who is the prime suspect as the murderer at the moment – and Dodson’s estranged girlfriend/wife/significant other/insignificant other. It appears at this time as though the judicial system in the US will expose for us the fundamental goodness or absence of goodness in these folks; we can make the final judgment then. But at the moment, I will say confidently that neither of them would be high on my list of babysitters to phone if my children were still of the age where they needed babysitters.

I’ll withhold final judgment on Dennehy’s former girlfriend. In a trial situation, she too will probably be held up for sufficient examination for us to make a final decision. At the moment, I’m predisposed not to like her a lot because of her comments after the autopsy. There were no drugs found in Dennehy’s body at the time of his death; and when that was revealed, the girlfriend felt that it was vitally important for her to issue a statement saying that she was not surprised by this result. Excuse me, but your boyfriend is dead – probably murdered – and no one asked you if you were surprised or not. In fact, I’ll wager that all but a handful of the entirety of the human population on the planet do not give a damn about whether or not you were surprised. Until you are required to say something about all of this – and that will likely be under oath – please spare us the need to hear any words from your font of wisdom. By the way, if you’re so damned smart and omniscient, how come you did not warn him away from this tragic situation?

I’m no longer withholding judgment on Dennehy’s stepfather. Sir, I understand that you are shaken by this loss and that you bear a huge burden of grief. That’s why I’ll not choose to skewer you for your words – or even for your motives. But I do not think that it is critical for you to be holding press conferences or going on ESPN’s Outside the Lines or giving interviews to anyone at this point. This is about the death of your stepson and not about you or what you think about anything. Now if you can produce incontrovertible proof as to the identity or identities of the killer(s) of your stepson, by all means take it to the authorities and tell the world about it. [By the way, if you can do that, you might want to call up OJ Simpson and offer him your services; he’s out trying to do the same thing, you know.] Until and unless you have something of that magnitude to tell the world, please go and grieve privately. We’ve heard your expressions of feelings and emotions and your perceptions of what happened. We don’t need to hear anymore. You are unlikely to garner any lasting fame or notoriety from all of this – unless you are the killer…

I will not reserve any judgment on Dave Bliss. I have to admit that I never thought that I would be alive long enough to say that Jerry Tarkanian needs to haul his ass out of the bull’s eye that is reserved for the lightening bolt that I want to hit the all of the sleazy coaches in collegiate athletics. Until last weekend, Tark had been in that spot so long that I thought his feet would have taken root in the bull’s eye. Tark is antediluvian pond slime; Dave Bliss would need about a billion years to evolve up the biological ladder to reach that lofty status.

I said in one of my daily rants that Bliss had been skating on the edge of NCAA rules and regulations in previous stops – particularly at SMU. In the aftermath of this tragedy as questions are raised about NCAA violations in his program, Dave Bliss sets a course to defame the memory of the kid he recruited with the sole purpose of covering up his witting accession to a scheme to get Patrick Dennehy on scholarship at Baylor in a “less than traditional way.” He was willing not only to speak evil of the dead but also to speak falsely of the dead; his motive was to save his sorry ass. For that he was fired. For that, I think he got off easy. I think he ought to be made to serve the rest of his days as a live model in a proctology school. And just to assure that he might not come to enjoy it too much, students should have the option at all times to use a cattle prod instead of the “silver stallion” that is routinely stored in the freezer.

If you read these rants, you have to realize that I think Dr. Myles Brand is as useful as a glass hammer. But everything is relative and I will be happy to testify that Dr. Brand is saint walking among us compared to Dave Bliss. I am now calling on Dr. Brand to use this event as a wedge to create an NCAA rule – consistent with US laws of course – that will bar Dave Bliss from ever working with any school of higher learning in any capacity related to coaching or athletics. And that rule should be expanded to cover other coaching offenses that are necessarily far less egregious than Bliss’. If anything good is to come of this barbarous behavior, maybe it will in the realm where coaches will be accountable with their careers for outrageous behaviors. Come on, Dr. Brand. You said that it was time for the university presidents [You were one, remember!] to take control of these rogue athletic programs. Here is something that makes a normal run-of-the-mill rogue athletic program look like a complaint against someone for not curbing their dog. Do something – anything!

However, I think there is a special ring of Hell reserved for the assistant coach at Baylor who surreptitiously recorded all of the meetings and comments of Dave Bliss and then found a way to get them to at least one major Texas newspaper. Now hear this!!! Nothing that follows here is intended to exonerate Dave Bliss; he is a monstrous example of a coach and mentor of young men; he deserves the painful and longstanding punishment I suggested above. But this assistant coach – who is sufficiently unknown that I will not add to his “fame” by calling his name here – is a truly contemptible life form. Don’t be surprised if other media outlets try to lionize him and make him out to be the hero in this; they tend not to think beyond the first level of any incident.

Assistant Coach Whomever is credited with having these tape recorded records of Bliss’ meetings with his staff where Bliss suggests that they paint Dennehy as a drug dealer so that the NCAA won’t find out that Dennehy was having his tuition paid for in a “less than orthodox manner”. And then there was to be stonewalling and deflection of the investigation on other fronts. Interviews with the authorities were to be “scripted” for coaches and players. This is all horrible. I don’t recall anything done or said by Richard Nixon that was as crass as this; granted the stakes were higher and the standards ought to have been higher for Nixon, but Bliss’ remarks are off the charts. To try to conjure up something so far off base, I can only imagine what would be on the tape recordings if we had them from Adolf Hitler’s staff meetings.

But before you give Assistant Coach Whomever a pass, please ask yourself why he thought it necessary to covertly record all of these meetings of the coaching staff. [Please note that I am assuming that they are genuine and not something forged after the fact.] I can think of three reasons and none of them make Assistant Coach Whomever into a person worthy of protection under the umbrella of “human rights”.

He was out to cover his ass for his involvement in a series of less than honorable and clearly improper actions that led to the death of Patrick Dennehy. Translation: He was ready to demonstrate his concept of teamwork by having the goods on anyone and everyone else in the room so that he could save his ass if this ever came to a head.

He knew that all of this would blow up and he wanted to look like the good guy in the bunch so that he could get another job in a Division 1 basketball program. Translation: I’ll get mine; everyone else can worry about getting theirs after I get mine.

He was out to “get” Dave Bliss. Translation: For better or worse, Dave Bliss is the guy who hired him and instead of resigning and leaving the program to fend for itself, Assistant Coach Whomever wanted a way to get the goods on his boss.

It is unlikely that Assistant Coach Whomever will be banned from coaching in the NCAA ever again; in fact, he might actually be able to pull off his grandstand play to try to make himself out to be the hero in all of this. But tell the truth, would you hire this guy to work for you and to hold a position of trust and responsibility in an organization for which you are ultimately responsible. Hell, I would not trust him to sell lemonade at a roadside stand for 15 cents a glass.

Let me reiterate. Feel remorse for the death of a young man. Defer judgment on his friends and associates until we learn from sworn testimony what kind of people they are. Ignore the stepfather who looks all too eager to stay far too long in the limelight generated by his stepson’s death. Urge Myles Brand to make something good and lasting to come of all of this. Heap scorn and abuse upon Dave Bliss. And do not be fooled into believing that Assistant Coach Whomever is a good and noble man whose actions saved the day. Assistant Coach Whomever is as dependable as the French Army on the eve of battle.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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If you have been reading these rants for any period of time, you must realize by now that I think Pete Rose should have been in the MLB Hall of Fame a long time ago. The number of reasons for that opinion is in excess of 4,250. And I believe that the Hall of Fame is an institution that honors/glorifies/preserves the athletic accomplishments of the best players of the game.

The Hall of Fame is not a place where people go to learn about and soak in the quintessential goodness of Nobel Peace Prize recipients. The Hall of Fame has lots of people in there who are folks you would prefer not to serve as role models for your children. In the current time where obesity is about to become the newest social faux pas that must be shunned, even the venerable Bambino will soon come under criticism from an overzealous social activist. Nonetheless, Babe Ruth belongs in the Hall of Fame because he was a great baseball player. The criteria should begin and end there.

Just a short aside here. Please notice that I said that the criterion should be “great baseball player” and should never have been diluted over the years to include “very good player who was a nice guy and did not ever punch out a sportswriter.” Sadly, we have a couple of those kinds of folks in the Hall of Fame. Never fear, I am not going to propose defrocking those imposters – they know who they are and you should too.

The story about the possible deal between Pete Rose and Bud Selig to get Rose reinstated into baseball has come up again. Have you noticed how this issue always comes up during time of the year when there is not much else happening in the world of sports and how serendipitously it provides for “column material” for journalists all over the country? That will have to go down as one of the great-unexplained mysteries of the Cosmos until some physicist shows how that too was predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

The “problem” that has to be “overcome” is one of MLB’s making. Former commissioner, A Bartlett Giamatti, banned Pete Rose from baseball for life for gambling on games. Then his successor, Faye Vincent, arranged to be sure that Rose’s name could not be included on any Hall of Fame ballots lest those pesky sportswriters who do the voting might put him in the Hall of Fame for whatever reasons. [Remember, there are over 4,250 of those “reasons”.] If you are a reader of these rants, you know already that I consider Giamatti and Vincent to have been feckless posers as Commissioners of Baseball. This situation is really the only lasting legacy of their tenure in office. Everything else – to include Giamatti’s ultra-lame poems about the game – is memorable only by its trivial nature.

Baseball faces a dilemma that will not be easy to solve in a PR/face-saving way if there is to be any logic associated with the process or the outcome. Rose has been banned from baseball for more than a decade based on a report given to Giamatti by a former Federal prosecutor that asserts and concludes that Rose bet on baseball. Importantly, this is a prosecutorial document. Remember that. I may not have spent even an hour in law school, but legal briefs and reports prepared by prosecutors are not – and should not be – fair and balanced views of all the evidence. They are documents that assert and conclude in no uncertain terms that the subject of the report is undoubtedly guilty of whatever transgression is on the table at the moment. And if these documents leave open the possibility – or give you the opinion – that the subject of the report might just be a molester of household pets, well that is possibly the case.

So, there has yet to be a fair and impartial adjudication of the evidence. And on that basis this contretemps has gone on for a long time. So how does everyone back out of this and move to a different place?

If baseball would take my simple advice – which I have suggested to them in letters on two previous occasions – they would separate eligibility for the Hall of Fame from eligibility to participate in baseball games or management activities. In that way, they can put Pete Rose’s name on the ballot for the Hall of Fame and he can be inducted and that would end all of this.

The way that Giamatti and Vincent did this is that they banned him from baseball for life for gambling AND said that banned players cannot be in the Hall of Fame or on the ballot. So baseball has to change its stance and that is the face-saving obstacle.

If they readmit him to baseball, he may manage the Reds again. Even though he was no great shakes as a manager, the Reds’ owner reportedly wants to hire Rose back into that position. No, I don’t know why. Allowing that would mean that the baseball Poobahs would have to say that Giamatti and Vincent were dead flat wrong about the evidence in that report and that it cannot possibly be so that Rose bet on baseball. Otherwise, how can they allow him in the dugout again?

Or, baseball can find a way to get an impartial person/group to review the evidence and judge if Rose did bet on baseball. Good luck with that since the debate over the standards of proof and the person(s) who would be “impartial” should take until the Twelfth of Never.

Or, they could convince Pete Rose to admit he bet on baseball and then they can forgive him.

Good luck on that last one working out in any simple manner. First of all, Pete Rose has yet to admit that he bet on baseball after about 13 years of backing and forthing on this issue. So if he changes his story now, that means he has been a liar and a scoundrel all that time. When you then allow him in the Hall of Fame and or the dugout on the basis of his being a demonstrated liar and scoundrel and scam artist over the past decade, it becomes a PR nightmare.

Secondly, if Pete Rose says he bet on baseball, that is precisely the time at which Bud Selig should ban him from the game and not allow him near any ballpark without registering as a “baseball offender”. That is when he needs to invoke the game’s equivalent of Megan’s Law. Yet, there are some who say that this is the way to get Rose reinstated. I’m sure some of the deep thinkers of the world might explain that to me; but unfortunately, Mike Tyson has had all his cell phones re-possessed and I won’t be able to contact him for a consultation on this matter.

Thirdly, if Rose admits he bet on baseball and is then readmitted to the game and allowed into the Hall of Fame, what does that do to the situation of one Shoeless Joe Jackson who certainly has Hall of Fame credentials and who was proclaimed innocent of fixing the 1919 World Series. It would be impossible to have the admitted Rose in the Hall and the exonerated Jackson out of the Hall. I would be necessary for Selig to throw out the decision of the venerated Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis in order to let Jackson back in the game sufficiently to be in the Hall of Fame and such an action might give significant credence to longstanding charges that former White Sox owner Charles Comiskey framed Jackson and at least some of the other players accused of throwing the Series. The Commissioner of Baseball is hired by the owners – and in this case Bud Selig is an owner – and there is a long-standing tradition among these owners and commissioners that they may have their spats and disagreements; but they do not rat each other out.

Actually, the Shoeless Joe Jackson case is a bit less complicated than the Pete Rose case because Selig can readmit Jackson to baseball without any subtleties or nuances. Jackson won’t be in line for a managerial position since he is – still – dead. He is not merely brain-dead in the sense that some managers are “stupid”; Jackson is no longer exchanging oxygen in the biosphere.

This is a mess of entanglements – sort of like a plate of spaghetti. The simple way to solve this is to put the names of Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson on the ballot for the Hall of Fame as if they both just became eligible in the year 2004 and to let the voters know that on-field accomplishments should not be diminished by off-field behaviors unless the off-field behaviors are sufficiently egregious – and proven! – to render the person unredeemable by society.

Charles Manson is unredeemable; the Unabomber is unredeemable.

Shoeless Joe Jackson is guilty only of being an illiterate man who had no idea what some other teammates were up to.

Pete Rose is a convicted tax evader; if that is unredeemable, then far too many people are unredeemable. Oh yeah, and Pete Rose has had a record number of consecutive bad hair days. That can be redeemed with a trip to a stylist whose repertoire includes something besides putting a bowl on his head…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Instead of trying to turn the Detroit Lions’ hiring of Steve Mariucci into some kind of monumental historical decision that may be a fulcrum for societal change in the US – which it is not – allow me to look coldly at what transpired. Let’s look at the fine levied against Matt Millen for what it is.

In order to avoid a lawsuit claiming racial prejudice and discrimination in hiring head coaches, the NFL adopted a rule that says that any team with a head-coaching opening has to consider minority candidates and that “consideration” has to include an interview. The idea here is that with more interviews comes more exposure for minority coaching candidates to the people who make the hiring decisions and with more exposure will come more minority coaches because some will “blow the owners away” during the interviews. Sounds great. In fact, it sounds so perfect that I get that uneasy feeling that it is just like all the other great sounding “process defining answers” to problems. All of them sound great and in the end most of them don’t amount to a pinch of pigeon poopie.

By the way, let’s cut through one of the ever so correct veils surrounding this rule and say directly that “minority candidate” in this case equals “African-American candidate”. I promise you that if a GM has an opening next year and interviews a guy from Afghanistan who used to be a rugby coach, that will not qualify as a “minority interview”. This putative GM might be able to dodge a bullet temporarily if he interviewed Sonny Sixkiller for the job, but that loophole would get closed quickly. This rule is not about inclusion for all people; this rule is about hiring Black head coaches in the NFL. I find this type of procedural rule very ironic in light of Martin Luther King’s dream where a man would someday be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. This procedural rule has nothing to do with the character – or competence – of the people to be interviewed; it has only to do with the color of their skin.

Matt Millen violated the rule because he did not interview any minority coaches before he hired Steve Mariucci. According to reports, he tried to interview more than a few minority candidates but they turned him down. Why?

What Matt Millen is guilty of – more than anything else – is having the integrity to say truthfully what was on his mind. He wanted to hire Steve Mariucci for the Lions’ job; in fact, he had wanted to hire Steve Mariucci for the Lions’ job a couple of years ago when Millen was named the GM for the Lions. When Mariucci was canned in San Francisco, Millen needed a new coach to replace the underwhelming incumbent coach, Marty Mornhinweg. At that point, Millen made his error and let it be known that he was going to offer Mariucci the job.

Then he called around to the minority coaching candidates who had been on the interview circuit and asked them to come and talk to him. They declined. He hired Mariucci and he is now out $200K. And to show his commitment to this process, Paul Tagliabue has let it be known that any future violations of this rule will bring larger fines.

There is no question that Matt Millen broke this rule. There is also no question that he and Lions’ owner William Ford can hire whomever they want to coach their football team. The problem here was that because he was honest in saying what he really wanted to do, Matt Millen created a situation where no minority candidates would talk to him in what amounted to a sham interview setting. And you really can’t blame them for that either.

So what is the lesson to be learned here? If you have a coaching opening and you really want to hire someone who is available and that person happens to be a white male, you have to keep your mouth shut and lie to the press and everyone else about how you haven’t made up your mind about who your next coach ought to be. That’s right; it is in your own personal best interest to lie. That way, when you call up some minority candidates for interviews, they will not realize that they are heading into a sham interview setting; and therefore, you will have fulfilled your obligation to interview minority candidates and so you will not get fined when you hire the white guy you had in mind all along.

When I got back to the US from vacation and had a 6-hour layover to kill in Miami International Airport, I went out to buy a New York Times to try to begin to catch up on what had been going on. What I found was a column on this subject by William C. Rhoden and I knew where he was going to come out on the subject about two lines into the column. Rhoden uses Dennis Green as his example of someone who should have been interviewed and considered for the Lions’ job. Rhoden says:

“The Lions – a franchise that has not won a championship in more than four decades – owe it to themselves and their fans to hear what Green has to say.”

Excuse me, but no they do not. It is true that the Lions have not won a championship in more than four decades; it is equally true that Dennis Green has not won a championship in - - ever. It is true that the Lions have not had a coach in the last twenty years that has ever coached another NFL game after the Lions fired them; they have been spared a lot of scorn as a franchise only because of the even greater ineptitude of the Cincinnati Bengals. However, Dennis Green’s NFL résumé includes a threat to sue his former owner, charges of sexual harassment in the team front office, the death of a player in training camp and a marked lack of team discipline. Oh, and Green never won anything either – did I mention that?

In fact, Dennis Green’s most obvious qualification for the Lions’ job is that like all their coaches for the past 20 years, he too has never coached an NFL game since he was fired. But then again, if the Lions hired him, he would lose that qualification. Hmmm…

Let me be clear here. I have no idea if all of those “problem areas” are directly and uniquely the responsibility of Dennis Green. But if Mr. Rhoden is going to dismiss Matt Millen’s honesty as a bad excuse for not interviewing Dennis Green and other minorities, you might expect Mr. Rhoden to be a bit more honest about his poster child interview candidate, no? It’s about character content and not skin color, remember?

I understand why the fine had to be levied. I understand why there has to be a threat of larger fines in the future. I understand why this procedural rule has to be couched in terms of universal inclusion. I understand that the underlying objective behind this procedural rule is a worthy objective to pursue. Having said all of that, I also understand that this is a triumph of form over substance – as is the case with the vast majority of process solutions to real problems.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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