BUSINESS AS USUAL

                I’d say that for people about my (advanced) age the old picture of a college coach was one not of a real coach but of an actor, Pat O’Brien. He starred in the 1940s movie “Knute Rockne, All-American,” about the Notre Dame football mentor who was legendary even then. It was a typical Hollywood biopic of the era, sketchy and idealized, but memorable nonetheless.

O’Brien often played Catholic priests so his characters inevitably had that tinge. His Rockne also was part Army drill sergeant, but in a benevolent sort of way.  Usually wearing a plain, gray sweatshirt, with a whistle hung around his neck, he was gruff but approachable and took an individual interest in his players. His wife, played by the sweet-faced Gail Page, sometimes had the boys over for milk and cookies after practice.

Cut now to the present, where a quite-different picture predominates. If a movie exemplifies today’s big-time coachly breed it’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” about the hell-bent pursuit of success and profit. Today’s top practitioners are more CEOs than Mr. Chips, pulling down seven-figure salaries, flying around in private planes and holding forth in regal offices behind a half-dozen secretaries and a dozen assistants. Rules are bent or broken when convenient, violations are deep-sixed. Occasionally, there are bodies to be stepped over.  You’d entrust your children to Paul Manafort before one of them.

If that rhetoric sounds excessive, you haven’t been reading the sports pages lately, or in recent years. The words “college sports” and “scandal” have become inseparable as universities pull out all stops in attempts to enhance their entertainment enterprises, and their education missions be damned. One much-admired state school (the University of North Carolina) for almost 20 years maintained an academic shell department whose purpose was to keep its athletes eligible without the bother of having to learn anything. Another (Penn State) turned a blind eye to a serial sexual predator on its football staff to avoid rocking a winning boat.  Still another (Louisville) employed strippers and prostitutes to entertain basketball recruits and kept on the coach (Rick Pitino) under whose regime the practice went on, at least until it came out that his team was buying players in the underground market where many other schools also shop. That last business still is playing out in a continuing FBI investigation.

The current poster boy for college-sports depravity is one D.J. Durkin, the third-year head football coach at the University of Maryland. He’s been suspended since an ESPN investigation revealed that he and some assistants routinely mocked and intimidated players whose body weights or practice performances didn’t please them. The piece followed the death of a 19-year-old Maryland lineman who died of an apparent heatstroke after running ten 110-yard sprints in very hot weather at a team practice in late May. The boy’s family lawyer says the team didn’t call emergency services for almost an hour after the player collapsed.

It’s interesting, I think, that in 2016, at age 37, Durkin was given a five-year, $12.5 million contract at Maryland despite having no previous head-coaching experience. A New York Times story about his suspension said he was hired in part because of a recommendation from Jim Harbaugh, the highly regarded U. of Michigan head coach for whom Durkin worked as an assistant. “I always get a smile when I think of D.J. because I think of the foam coming out of the side of his mouth, snot bubbles percolating when he’s really intense,” the paper quoted Harbaugh as saying. “He’s a great competitor.”

Durkin also had worked for Urban Meyer, Ohio State’s exalted football coach who’s also sidelined for his belated firing of an assistant coach who was accused by his wife of spousal abuse over a several-year period, and lying at a press conference when asked about his knowledge of the episodes. After being suspended for the first three games of this season (owie!), Meyer issued a classic nonapology apology: “I’m sorry we’re in this situation,” said he. Only the next day, after he was widely criticized, did he express sympathy for the victimized wife.

The coverup culture extends to the so-called minor sports whose success or failure have little bottom-line impact on their institutions. Kathy Klages, a former Michigan State U. gymnastics coach, last week was accused by police of not reporting what she knew about the horrendous predations of Dr. Larry Nasser, the MSU team physician who is serving a long prison sentence for sexually molesting numerous female gymnasts under the guise of treatment. Showing that male athletes aren’t immune to such things, more than 100 former Ohio State wrestlers now say they were groped by Richard Strauss, their team doctor for 20 years before his 2005 suicide.

That situation has received heightened attention because Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, an OSU wrestling assistant coach from 1986 through 1994, has denied any knowledge of what went on, despite direct challenges from several wrestlers he coached. You’ll recall that the former Congressman Dennis Hastert, speaker of the U.S. House from 1999 to 2007, was imprisoned in 2015 from charges related to his molestation of boys while he was a high-school wrestling coach decades earlier.

The possibilities of abuse in college sports stem from the power coaches wield. The athletes involved mostly are aged 18 to 23 and living away from home for the first time. They owe their special (scholarship) status on campus to their coach-overseers, with their parents often absent, no union or agents to protect them and school administrators looking the other way, at best.  Even the option to transfer is encumbered by rules not affecting other students. And it’s on their performance that the jobs and sometimes very high incomes of their coaches hinge.

The Washington Post recently ran an article reporting that since 2000 40 college athletes have died doing “conditioning” for their sports, a period in which the National Football League, known for its physical rigor, had no such fatalities. Dozens more have been seriously injured; in 2011 13 U. of Iowa football players were hospitalized for up to a week, some with temporary paralysis, for tissue breakdowns caused by an over-the-top, off-season workout session.

                The university investigated the case and issued a long report but found no reason to fault any of its coaches or trainers. Much the same thing happened after three U. of Oregon footballers suffered the same fate in 2017, or two more at the U. of Nebraska earlier this year.

 Nothing to see here folks, move on, the schools said. Just business as usual in college sports.