So, coaches cuss, use expletives? That’s news? Wasn’t news to me and I doubt it was news to you, regardless of whether your schooling (at every level, save perhaps Teeny League) was public or parochial. Indeed a distant relative once was basketball coach at Presbyterian-affiliated Arkansas College, now Lyon University, at Batesville. I wandered into the corridor outside the locker room one February evening after the Scotties had lost a tournament game and found coach Dick Winningham in a, well, reflective mood.
He was sandblasting the paint from the cinderblock walls with such adverbs and adjectives as would compel even a country club Calvinist to cancel his Sunday morning tee time and exchange his fairway togs for a pinstriped suit and the Doxology. By the time Bobby Petrino had unloaded on Les Miles, and been captured doing it by a CBS Sports camera, in the closing minutes of the Arkansas game with LSU, I had long given up on a Biblically-proportioned Razorback resurrection and had retreated to the kitchen of my daughter’s family, there to continue in earnest the grazing in which I had indulged through the first three quarters.
Why pass up platters of chips and cookies and other treats in hopes of so many consecutive successful forward passes? Thus, disappointed in the by-then inevitable outcome but contentedly stuffing my overstuffed gut, I missed not only Petrino’s shouted bile but CBS’s subsequent slow-motion replay, a mini-second by mini-second reprise that made his F-bombs (first as adverb, then as adjective) as recognizable as if they had been audible. A doctorate in lip-reading was not required.
Petrino, or so we gather, was upset with Miles for giving the go-ahead to his Tigers to score a fourth-quarter touchdown, or try; as it happened, the drive fizzled a bit and LSU was able only to kick for an additional three points. Petrino, it is said, had thought 38-17 should have satisfied Miles. After all, Petrino’s advocates contend, he cut LSU some slack a year earlier, ordering his squad, on the Tigers’ one and 39 seconds remaining in the fourth, to hold their winning margin to 31-23. Other students of the game argue Petrino was fearful of a potentially game-tying turnover. I don’t claim to know which.
I did, however, come across a sports Website run by one Larry Brown, evidently a well-regarded and oft-read commentator on college football, who noted that Petrino, while head coach at the University of Louisville, had shown no reluctance to pull the varsity and send in the third-stringers when racking up wins such as 70-7, 59-7, 55-7, 61-10, and 69-14. “If Petrino indeed was upset with Miles for running up the score, it would be pretty hypocritical,” Brown wrote. “The dude practically invented the concept of running up the score. I really hope that wasn’t his issue.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Then perhaps there was another issue, an added, and profound, emotional factor: the death, only days earlier, of Razorback tight end Garrett Uekman, from an undiagnosed heart condition. Why Petrino got crimson didn’t really matter, not to me, not then nor now, which is not to necessarily convey approval; but even before hearing “Uncle Dick” go cobalt lo those several decades ago I had heard similar, in fact identical, dialogue from other adults, among them more than one coach. By the time I first saw Petrino’s outburst, in yet another slow-mo replay later that night, I was cursing myself, foully lamenting my caloric overindulgence and swallowing my second glass of Alka-Seltzer. To me Petrino’s bile (verbal) was as forgettable as mine (gastric) was formidable.
Then, a day or so later, I learned that Jeff Long, the U of A’s athletic director, did not consider the indiscretion (Petrino’s, not mine) forgettable, that his ire was formidable, that he was “disappointed” — not so much (if very much) with Petrino, whose numerous, yeasty sideline ripostes have been lip-readable for years, but with CBS, for replaying the coach’s insult. Why, Long even complained to the Southeast Conference. In fairness, it was CBS’s use of the slo-mo that seemed to anger Long, who may have a point. Petrino’s merry greeting to Miles seems to me entirely newsworthy and plainly the network’s editorial prerogative, its replay not unjustified. The slo-mo was unnecessary, though, as salacious as the syllables it visually amplified.
What will be the SEC’s take, if any? And CBS’s, and the other networks? A complicated relationship, television and college sports. It also is a troubling relationship, for reasons other than a coach’s choice of adverbs and adjectives, which are the least reason.
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Stevee Barnes is host of Arkansas Week on AETN.