Coaches are taking a beating in this Latrell Sprewell affair, not that most of them don’t deserve a good choke and slap once in a while.
Hard people, coaches. Bullies. Insensitive louts. Overbearing tyrants.
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Sure. Now, may we see the rest of your resume, Mr. Riley?
It apparently comes as a surprise to social scientists and opportunistic litigators that this is the way coaches are. This is the way coaches always have been.
I bet it did not come as a surprise to Latrell Sprewell.
Fundamentally this was a dispute between a player and a coach. That’s all.
P.J. Carlesimo is a hundred coaches. Sprewell is a thousand players. This happens all the time.
Uh, Mr. Horry, if you were really trying to hurt coach Ainge, you wouldn’t have thrown a soft towel at him, now would you?
Now, Mr. Hardaway, you weren’t leading a mutiny against coach Hill, were you? You just called that team meeting to trade recipes.
And Mr. Webber, Mr. Kemp, Mr. Barkley, Mr. Strickland, Mr. Chambers, Mr. Rider, Mr. Laettner, Mr. Ewing, you weren’t trying to cost any of your coaches their jobs with your rebellions. You just wanted a little understanding, right?
Michael Jordan may be the only athlete in history who ever tied himself and his clout to his coach. And even Jordan once stormed out of a practice over something as petty as thinking Doug Collins had cheated his side on the score of a scrimmage game.
Now, Mr. Coleman, let me get this straight. Because you could not keep up with the frequency and amounts your coach fines you, you handed him a blank check?
Now, that’s funny.
This whole thing should be funny. Funnier than it is. Funnier than leading the evening news. Here’s a coaching story about control. The old Ohio State autocrat, Woody Hayes, told it to me.
“I wanted to teach one of my players an object lesson in the evils of drink,” Hayes said. “I drove him to a brewery one evening and I said, `Son, there is no use drinking. As you can see, they can make it faster than you can drink it.’
” `Yeah,’ he said, `but I got ’em working nights.’ “
To paraphrase another modern victim, can’t we all just laugh along?
No, what we have to do is infect an incident beyond an internal team dispute into something we can all share. Like, oh, like rape.
New Jersey coach John Calipari compared the criticism of Carlesimo to attitudes about rape. Because it happened Carlesimo must have been asking for it.
Rape? Race? Because a basketball player did not run a drill fast enough to suit his coach?
In successive issues, one of our weekly flip cards on sports agonized over the disappearance of white athletes and then suggested not too obliquely that the NBA might be using Sprewell as an example to show a predominantly white audience that a predominantly black game was still under the control of safe, white men.
Who is the editor at Sports Illustrated these days, Jimmy the Greek or Al Campanis? Johnnie Cochran?
The mayor of San Francisco suggests race as a motive because a white coach and a black player had a problem. This is the same mayor, a black man, who called the quarterback of the 49ers, a white man, the lowest form of humanity on earth because he threw a couple of interceptions.
Sports is all about exaggeration. And completely innocuous. Sports needs to be taken much less seriously, not more.
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What we all should do, and what the NBA should have done before hip-shooting this thing into a some sort of ominous cultural setback, is take a breath.
If Sprewell gets away with choking and punching his boss, wishing him dead out loud, let’s not see it as evidence that suddenly we’re the former Yugoslavia.
A guy who chokes his boss and gets away with it, I say he ought to have his own holiday. Or a folk song, at least.