MUSICAL CHAIRS

 

               There are, it’s said, three things most men think they can do better than anyone else: start a fire, run a restaurant and coach a football team. By that standard I’m not typical; while I can start a fire with the best of them I have no desire to either run a restaurant or coach any sort of team.

My sole venture into coaching was a disaster. When daughter Jessica was a fifth grader she talked me into joining a neighbor dad in guiding her school’s basketball team. In the weeks that followed he and I issued many instructions to the young hoopsters but few were followed, and on top of that we had to endure verbal pummeling from fellow parents whose kids weren’t getting the playing time they thought they deserved. At season’s end we both retreated to our dens, never again to emerge in that capacity.

Coaching is in the news as the National Basketball Association season grinds to an end, as it is at the conclusion of the seasons of any of our big-time spectator sports. Five of the league’s 30 teams jettisoned head coaches, and while the number was small by recent measures its composition was remarkable. Three of the now-ex coaches—Glenn “Doc” Rivers of the Philadelphia 76ers, Nick Nurse of the Toronto Raptors and Mike Budenholzer of the Milwaukee Bucks—have NBA titles in their resumes, and a fourth—Monty Williams of the Phoenix Suns—led the league in regular-season victories over the last three campaigns.  Success, it seems, is no guarantee of job security.

I suppose that many of you now are saying “What’s the big deal?” Any fan older than age eight can tell you that when a season doesn’t go as planned – or hoped—it’s the coach who gets the blame, for the simple reasons that it’s cheaper and easier to fire him (or her) than it is to fire the players. Further, players at the highest level have genius-level skills while many people are qualified to coach, and the gesture satisfies the universal popular desire for scapegoating. If volcanoes were handy everywhere the exes would be in bigger trouble than they are. 

In view of the above one might reasonably ask who would want to be a major-league head coach or manager in this day and age.   Besides having to command a locker room full of prima dons, a few of whom probably eat dinner with the team’s owner more often than he, a manager or coach must obey a list of unwritten rules that would frustrate a saint. The main one of those is to never “show up” a player, making taboo any public word or gesture that might imply criticism. Thus, when a relief pitcher comes into a close game in the late innings and walks the first batter he faces, the manager must stand by stoically, avoiding the eyes-rolling or s***-mouthing going on in the stands.

The time when Casey Stengel (allegedly) could say “I managed good but they played bad” is gone. Today, and if he can, a coach must revert to humor to make that point. The classic in that regard came from the football coach John McKay who, when asked after a loss what he thought of his team’s “execution,” said “I’m in favor of it.”

Yes, there’s the money, but while head-coaching remuneration might be impressive by average-person standards it pales in comparison with what players are being paid. At the top of the pro-coaches pay list are a couple of men who’ve been around seemingly forever and have won numerous championships--the football coach Bill Belichick (a reported $20 million a year) and the basketball mentor Gregg Popovich ($11.5 million)—but after those the figures drop sharply. According to online sources the average annual salary for the position in the National Football League is about $6.5 million. The comparable figure for the NBA is about $3.5 million, and in the National Hockey League it’s about $2.5 million.

 

Baseball managers bring up the rear at the pay window. The L.A. Dodgers’ Dave Roberts leads that list at a reported $6.5 million, but most men in the position fall into the $2 million-to-$4 million-a-year range and several are said to earn less than $1 million. That’s hardly enough to keep them in Tums and Excedrin, and it’s all chump change compared with the $30 million-to-$50 million-a-year range of the top stars of our team sports.

Of job security there is little, three to five years being the usual range for a head coach. Anyone needing to move to accept a new job is better off renting a home than buying.

On the good-news side, coaching is a fraternity and once someone establishes himself as competent fall-back jobs are readily available. This is especially true in football and basketball, where there is easy movement between the college and professional ranks. Rare is the out-of-work head coach in those sports who doesn’t have a buddy to hand him an assistant’s job, there to sit out his banishment until a new head post develops. Coaches in their 50s with a dozen or more jobs in their histories aren’t atypical. If you don’t mind moving and taking occasional salary cuts, it’s not a bad profession.

And one person’s trash is another’s treasure, so a quick move to another top job often is available. Of the above-mentioned recent NBA fires, Nurse and Williams already have found new posts—Nurse with the 76ers and Williams with the Detroit Pistons-- and Rivers is said to be in the running to fill other vacancies.  The musical-chairs analogy is apt, and the music is playing.