In sports, it’s usually the high-flying hard-bodies with the gazillion-dollar contracts who whine about “loyalty” and “respect” when they don’t get their way.
And when they complain, everybody who’s not holding a gazillion-dollar contract sneers about how spoiled and out of touch they are.
But now it’s friendly, frumpy Ray Meyer, the icon of DePaul University, who is complaining about loyalty and respect because things didn’t go his way, and the rest of Chicago has let out a collective sigh on his behalf.
Ray Meyer believes that DePaul University has not shown him the loyalty and respect he deserves because it fired his son Joey as basketball coach in abrupt fashion. So Ray’s going home. Meyer announced this week that he was ending his relationship with DePaul after 55 years.
The sports sections have been filled with details of the perceived slights the mean, cold Vincentian fathers have inflicted on the first family of DePaul basketball.
With all due respect for the Meyers, that’s nonsense.
If DePaul University made a mistake, the mistake was in 1971, when it allowed its basketball coach to give his son, the star of the worst team he ever had, a job as a coach before the ink was dry on the kid’s diploma.
That’s not loyalty, that’s nepotism.
When Richard J. Daley did what Ray Meyer did, use his power to boost his kids, the newspapers skewered him for showing favoritism. Daley shot back, “If you can’t help your family, who can you help?” And the newspapers skewered him some more for that.
Many companies don’t allow the kids of their employees to be hired, and there are good reasons for that. One good reason is that if the boss’ kid doesn’t work out, no one wants to do something about it. Sometimes tough decisions have to be made. When it’s family, it’s messy.
When Ray Meyer hired his son, he guaranteed that the ending, whenever it came, would be messy. There was a chance that Joey Meyer would be head coach for 30 years and retire as an icon in his own right, but it was an awfully slim chance. Coaches have a short shelf life.
Joey was an assistant basketball coach for 13 years, until his dad retired. When his dad retired, DePaul was coming off a 27-3 season and could have had its pick of hotshot young basketball coaches in the country, coaches who had shown somewhere else they knew how to lead a basketball team.
But DePaul picked Joey, who had always been the boss’s son but had never been the boss. Maybe DePaul was happy to pick Joey because his father was a winner, but DePaul also had no choice. Years earlier, the icon had threatened to retire if Joey left DePaul, and Joey was promised the head job would be his.
If DePaul had passed on Joey Meyer for head coach in 1984, then all the Meyers’ bitter words and feelings would have happened then. It wasn’t a question of whether it would be messy. It was a question of when it would be messy.
That wasn’t particularly fair to DePaul, and it wasn’t particularly fair to Joey, either. Now Joey Meyer’s resume says that he worked for his dad for 13 years and then he took over the company and ran it into the ground.
DePaul went 27-3 before Joey stepped in and was 3-23 before Joey stepped out. He’s respected by many people, but his difficulties weren’t just in wins and losses. He had kids who couldn’t play because of bad grades, kids who couldn’t get into school because of bad grades. His team spent a year on NCAA probation.
Now the boss’ kid is out of coaching, for the time being. There’s a job in coaching for him somewhere. If there was a job in coaching for Gerry Faust, then surely there’s one for Joey Meyer.
He just might have to swallow some pride, like Faust did when he moved from Notre Dame to Akron. That’s the price when you are a coach and you lose a lot. You swallow your pride to stay in coaching, or you go sell insurance.
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But the Meyers, they have a lot of pride. Ray, through his emissaries, is letting it be known that he’s cutting his ties to DePaul because DePaul has given him and Joey shabby treatment.
The Meyers complain that DePaul took too long to do the dirty deed, that he should have been fired earlier so he could have been out looking when the jobs were available. This is the first time I’ve heard somebody get fired and say, “Why didn’t you do it sooner?”
As firings go, Joey’s was gentle. DePaul didn’t announce his firing a week before Christmas, like Zenith did last year to 1,200 workers in Chicago. DePaul didn’t shove him out the door with two weeks’ severance pay, like a lot of companies do. DePaul didn’t have a bad word to say about Joey.
DePaul just wanted a new basketball coach, and the old one wouldn’t quit.
It’s disheartening to see your child suffer a setback, and it must be embarrassing to see it in full view of an entire city. So of course Ray Meyer wants to leave DePaul. How could he stay?
He couldn’t. He had a great run, except he all but guaranteed a bitter ending to it with a decision he made in 1971. There’s a lesson about Ray Meyer’s departure, but it’s not about loyalty or respect.
So he’s moving on. He’s said to be thinking about getting more involved with the Notre Dame Alumni Club in Chicago. Notre Dame gave Meyer his diploma and his first coaching job. He left Notre Dame after two years to take the head job at DePaul.
Yes, it ought to be interesting at those Notre Dame alumni meetings, listening to the teachings of the coach.
Listening to him talk about respect.
And about loyalty.
And about the 28 times he whipped his alma mater.