Three Misbehaviors Today?

Syracuse University announced yesterday that Jim Boeheim is out as head basketball coach there and will be replaced by longtime assistant Adrian Autry in the job.  Boeheim played for Syracuse in the 1960s; and after brief career in the now-defunct Eastern Basketball League, he was hired as an assistant coach at Syracuse in 1969.  He took over as head coach there in 1976 and has been the head coach there ever since.  Boeheim won a national championship for Syracuse and made the Final Four on 5 other occasions; he has won a snootful of coaching awards at the conference level and at the national level; he has been involved with the US National Team at a variety of international competitions.  His coaching record at Syracuse was a gaudy 1015 – 441 for a winning percentage of 69.8%.

This turn of events does not shine a favorable light on Syracuse University.  The announcement of the coaching change does not say that Jim Boeheim retired nor did it make clear that this was a mutual parting of the ways.  I would have expected that Jim Boeheim’s departure from Syracuse would have been handled with a lot more grace and aplomb than was evidenced yesterday.  John Wooden was not nudged out the door at UCLA; Mike Krzyzewski was not replaced as the head coach at Duke; Jim Boeheim should not have had his career ended that way.

Enough about that …  Former Cowboys’ WR, Michael Irvin is suing Marriot International and an as  yet unidentified woman for $100M in a defamation of character action.  The brief background here is that during the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the woman accused Irvin of some sort of “inappropriate conduct” in a hotel lobby and that accusation caused both NFL Network and ESPN to remove Irvin from continued coverage of the Super Bowl festivities.  Irvin says nothing inappropriate happened.

A judge ruled that Marriot International had to turn over security tapes to Irvin’s lawyers; Irvin contends that the tapes will show he did nothing inappropriate.  Yesterday, that footage went to Irvin’s representatives.  And then, Michael Irvin did what Michael Irvin routinely does when he is commenting on professional football:

• He went full bore into Hyperbole Land.

Regardless of what the tape shows or does not show, consider this statement by Irvin at a news conference yesterday:

“This sickens me.  This sickens me because, in this great country, this takes me back to a time where a White woman would accuse a Black man of something and they would take a bunch of guys that were above the law, run in the barn, throw a rope around his foot and drag him through the mud and hang him by the tree.”

Let me be clear here; if Irvin is correct that he did nothing wrong, then I hope the court awards him whatever the court decides is right and proper to make the situation whole.  And it is exactly because that is my position in this case that any reference – – direct or oblique – – to lynching is beyond inappropriate, which interestingly is the way Irvin has been accused of behaving.

• Irvin talks about a “bunch of guys that were above the law” in his statement.  Really?  The occasion of the news conference was to announce that his opponent in the lawsuit had complied with a court ruling and had turned over evidence to Irvin and his team.  So, in the matter at hand, who are the “bunch of guys that were above the law”?
• Speaking of “the law” … in the days where lynching was far more commonplace than it is now, the victims of a lynch mob had no recourse to a court for “a redress of grievances”.  Michael Irvin sat in a news conference with legal representation progressing to a day in court where he would have the opportunity to seek “redress of his grievances”.
• Michael Irvin is not and was not in a situation analogous to being lynched.  He may or may not have been wronged and a court will make that decision – – unless he and his attorneys find a way to resolve the matter with their antagonists before the court is called in to do so.

Moving on …  I was chatting with a neighbor yesterday and he asked me what I thought of the situation involving Memphis Grizzlies’ star, Ja Morant, and his “gun incident” at a strip club in Colorado.  This is not the first anti-social incident Morant has been involved in and even in the worst possible interpretation of what happened, there was no use of any gun in any activity other than as a “prop” in one of Morant’s attempts at singing/dancing/rapping.  I said yesterday afternoon:

“This is probably a tempest in a teapot.  Unless Morant grows up quickly, he will go down in history as a full-blown meathead.”

Today, the police in Colorado who had been investigating the matter announced that there would be no charges place against Morant for the happening.  According to police reports:

“No disturbances were reported.”

And …

“No one was threatened or menaced with the firearm.”

The first part of my assessment – – tempest in a teapot – – seems to be on target.  As to any sort of rapid maturation for Ja Morant, let’s call that a work in progress.  As of this morning, he continues to carry the label of meathead.

Finally, let me close today with three quotes from George Carlin.  The first seems to have relevance to the allegations made in the Michael Irvin situation:

“Here’s all you have to know about men and women.  Women are crazy and men are stupid.  And the main reason that women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

The second one offers some advice for Ja Morant:

“Although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized that the state had a legal right to execute me.”

The third one is just for fun:

“’Bipartisan’ usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”

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