Changing of the guard

9-18-89

Perspective: Changing of the guard

As the fall sports season gets into high gear, the Sports Information Offices around the country are stepping up their blizzard of hype, stats and reportage of outstanding feats by the home team. But, almost hidden in this blizzard, one also finds the quiet announcements about the impending retirement of some cherished coaching figure in the country who, though no longer a head coach, has remained with the department to the end. "A banquet to honor his long years of service to the school will be held at..."

An Old Guard is moving on, pushed out by a younger, more technically trained, clearly less "colorful", generation of coaches who inherit the sports world which that Old Guard built. The current sports world, with its megabuck marketing, nationwide recruiting and scheduling, and high tech sports-medicine must seem like a foreign land to much of the Old Guard. But the Old Guard clearly laid its foundation.

It is tempting to wax eloquent as these people pass from the scene, remembering the "good old days" when sport was sport and men were men and coaching was not cluttered by litigation and NCAA investigations and endless urine testing.

Surely many of these men are deserving of the high regard in which they are now held. Most are envied, in a fashion, by the new generation of coaches for their vast network of friends and admirers, their dedication to the profession of coaching and as a treasure trove of athletic folk lore. And a lot of these young coaches are being paid very well to carry on the traditions which the Old Guard imprinted on our collective consciousness.

But, as we extend our appropriate appreciation to this passing generation of coaches, let's remember the other side of life in which these "colorful" men thrived.

Theirs was a world that was exclusively white and almost exclusively male. And a discouraging percentage of that Old Guard has never come to terms with the folly, let alone the immorality, of that exclusiveness.

To be sure, many changed with the times and many, no doubt, have experienced heart-felt conversions on matters of racism and sexism.

But a disturbing number of these members of the Old Guard never realized the barbarity of their ideas. And many have hung around athletic departments too long, waiting for retirement, all the while spitting out their venomous bigotry in desperate, and pitiful, attempts to find assurance that they were justified in their sin.

Their racist jokes no longer bring laughter. Their insults of women must now be whispered for fear that a "fellow" female coach will overhear. Yet they persist.

Their continued presence on a staff, though seldom causing a public embarrassment, frequently serves to poison the atmosphere for younger coaches who try to transcend such thinking through recruitment of minority players or the building of a women's program. Out of respect, the younger coaches bite their tongue, counting the days when they will not have to worry about a recruit or player overhearing the resident member of the Old Guard spew his lingering hatred.

Most of our nation's young coaches had the benefit of playing their college ball on integrated teams. And, if not cleansed of racism and related idiotic bigotries, they are at least capable of some sensitivity on these issues. That is a giant step forward from the "good old days" when men were men, as long as they were white.

Yes, the new breed of coaches are vulnerable to a host of legitimate criticisms: too much focus on winning, too much specialization at a young age, too little concern for graduation rates, too little interest in recruiting model citizens...etc. You know the list. Have at'em.

But, as you do, let's also not forget that a lot of these "legends" of the Old Guard also coached their share of games with players who possessed "iffy" eligibility and were less than wholesome in their personal lives. And inducements to a recruit which would get a coach canned in a minute in 1989 were looked on as merely "doing a kid a favor" in 1949.

Whether these kinds of things occurred in 1989 or 1949 matters little. They are breaches of agreed-upon rules and should be regarded as such. But things like eligibility or the drinking habits of players are simply on a different moral plane than racism and sexism.

Perhaps we should overlook the exclusiveness which pervaded the thinking of the Old Guard. They were a product of their times and all that. But we are not living in those times anymore. The cruelty of that thinking has been exposed for anyone with half a mind to see.

It is one thing for the Old Guard to stubbornly cling to such thinking in the privacy of their own thoughts. It is another when they seek to foist it upon a generation that is trying to undo the damage such thinking has caused.

Give the guy a nice watch at his retirement party and give him credit where credit is due. And then wish him good luck in explaining his racism and sexism when he meets his Maker.

These pages are maintained by Jerry Pyle pyle@cord.edu. These articles are copyrighted © and may not be published or reproduced without the express permission of Jerry Pyle.

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