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By Christopher Witflee
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Losing a bundle on tech stocks? Blame Mike Brown. If you weren't seeing red over the Bengals, maybe you'd take a cooler head to the stock market.
Tough times on the romantic front? It's Mike Brown's fault. If the Bengals weren't so terrible, you'd be in a better mood.
Bad weather? Mike Brown must be responsible, even if no one knows how.
So thoroughly and persistently have the Bengals botched everything they've touched that Brown is shoulder to shoulder with the anti-Christ in the imaginations of Cincinnati sports fans. The record speaks for itself. One can blame Mike Brown for almost anything and it would make a certain amount of sense.
But the Reds really stretched that dollar when they blamed Brown for Barry Larkin's finger injury suffered April 21 with the Los Angeles Dodgers in town. Larkin dived trying to stop a single by the Dodgers' Mark Grudzielanek and tore the sheath that holds the tendon in place in his left middle finger.
Immediately, the Reds held Mike Brown responsible, though without saying so directly. General Manager Jim Bowden said, rightly, that the Reds should be playing on grass right now. Outfielder Dmitri Young put it on the owner of a Cincinnati sports team. The injury, it was supposed, wouldn't have occurred on a grass surface.
Larkin went so far last season as to suggest that he would pay for a natural surface at Cinergy Field and the Reds certainly would have made the switch, except Brown exercised his prerogative to keep the rug on the field just in case the Bengals would need to play there for a couple of exhibition games.
As is so often the case, Brown acted in no one's interests except his own, and it's not even clear how the Bengals benefit from playing exhibitions on turf rather than grass. Surely, the benefit isn't inferred from the laughable argument that baseball would beat up a grass field, making it unsuitable for football. It wouldn't be surprising to discover that Brown vetoed grass simply because he could.
But it's wholly disingenuous to blame Brown for the fact the Reds aren't playing on grass today. The Reds have no one to blame except themselves. When the 1996 vote on a sales tax to fund two stadiums passed, the Reds and Bengals both were in the same position. If Hamilton County prioritized the Bengals, the Reds didn't press the matter, nor did they move quickly when it was their turn.
Evidently, the Reds' strategy was to let the Bengals make a deal, then demand whatever the Bengals got. Well, it didn't work.
Indeed, were it not for Brown's threats to move the Bengals and his willingness to hold back until Hamilton County voters were allowed to vote on the stadium tax, the Reds might still be a very long way from playing in a new park. Before Brown raised the issue, the Reds never uttered a peep about needing a new stadium. And the Reds were notably absent from the debate leading to the vote, principally because the local power structure worried that Marge Schott's involvement would screw it up.
In other words, the Reds are riding piggyback atop Brown on their way to a grass field.
In fairness, the Reds were under different ownership as stadium negotiations took place. It's safe to say that if Carl Lindner would have been in charge from the beginning, the Reds would have received exactly what they wanted and quickly.
Mike Brown, more than anyone, is the cause and source of the Bengals' competitive weakness and is at the root of a scandalous burden on Hamilton County consumers. It's comically tempting to blame him for everything else that goes wrong in town. But that doesn't make it credible.
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In light of the ongoing Bobby Knight fiasco, the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati last week relieved 63-year-old Jerry Doerger as the basketball coach at McNicholas High School. Doerger tore into some referees after McNicholas' state tournament loss this past spring, conduct deemed unbecoming of a high school coach.
Doerger's McNicholas teams were among the most interesting in town. Always outsized by the bigger teams in the Greater Catholic League, the Rockets would struggle during the regular season. Then, toughened by GCL competition, they'd beat the smaller schools in the playoffs. In 25 years at McNick, Doerger went to the state tournament five times, three of those in the 1990s.
The firing of Doerger at 63 is harsh and rather surprising. Anyone who has seen him coach knows he's a wild man and he's never been known for withholding his criticisms. He's been that way for more than 30 years as a coach, so why can him now? The Archdiocese could have taken a number of actions short of firing, such as public reprimand. It's not as if he has a long history of outrageous and destructive behavior -- he just gets a little emotional sometimes.
Meanwhile, a two-man panel is conducting an investigation of Knight on behalf of Indiana University. Few observers believe the investigation will turn up anything other than lavish praise for Knight's methods and tactics.
There is this matter of a video tape, however, that shows Knight in confrontation with a player, probably Neil Reid, at a 1997 Indiana University practice. Unless the film is the prank of an IU theater troupe, the tape, at the very least, shows Knight putting a hand on a player's neck and walking him backward a few steps.
Knight has spent a fair amount of time away from IU in the midst of this latest furor, allowing his friends in the media and the coaching fraternity to speak for him. And if you're a Knight fan, you have to be pretty disturbed by the thin arguments made on his behalf.
On an ESPN show, for example, Temple coach John Chaney went after IU professor Murray Sperber, another guest on the program. Chaney's argument was the usual dim-witted ad hominem upon which people in sports rely when they have nothing smart to say. Of course Sperber doesn't know the ins and outs of coaching. So what? The issue isn't whether it's appropriate for a coach to put his hand on a player's neck in practice. The issue is whether it's appropriate for anyone to put his hand on anyone's neck anywhere.
Certain postures aren't acceptable in civil society. When one person has another's hands on his neck, he is taking a life-threatening risk if he doesn't quickly ascertain that he's being choked. We groan at the Justice Department for pointing out that the federal agent who put a submachine gun in Elian Gonzalez' face didn't have his finger on the trigger, as if the child shouldn't have been frightened.
True, Knight isn't preparing his players for canasta. But neither is he preparing them for sado-masochism or gunfire. He's preparing them for athletic competition, at which men of better ilk have succeeded without Knight's bully nonsense. If Knight can't do the job without the violence, then he isn't, by today's standards, a very good coach. And he's not, at this point, an elite coach by competitive standards, as IU's recent NCAA Tournament history attests.
Another argument of dubious merit is an effort to discredit Reed. One prominent sportswriter, well known as a Knight advocate, reasoned that Reed lacks credibility because the tape clearly shows that assistant coach Dan Dakich didn't separate them, as Reed had described. Indeed, it appears Reed fibbed on that count. But one bends over backward and forward if he wants to argue that any other detail from a tape showing Knight with his hand on Reed's neck is evidence that Knight wasn't choking Reed.
Even the good arguments for Knight are watery at this point. Knight graduates his players and makes sure they do well in school -- but isn't that what college basketball coaches are supposed to do? It has long been a sign of college basketball's inherent lack of integrity that a fellow who instantiates the virtues advertised as its ordinary virtues would be characterized as a man of extraordinary virtue.
It says a lot about the range of opinion regarding acceptable coaching behavior that the Archdiocese would fire Jerry Doerger while IU would retain Bob Knight. One wonders why IU would hold on so tight. The days in which Knight brought greatness to Indiana are long past, and now he brings Indiana only ridicule.
The comparisons between Knight and Woody Hayes are apt. The case for Knight is degenerating fast. IU could easily find a better man, not to mention a better coach, for the job.
