This column appears in the Monday May 10, 2010 edition of the Business Mirror.
The Blind Side & the Brink
by rick olivares
The Blind Side
After 13 seasons with the New York Giants in the National Football League, Lawrence Taylor retired with 1,088 tackles, 132.5 sacks, 9 interceptions, 134 return yards, 2 touchdowns, 33 forced fumbles, 11 fumble recoveries, 34 fumble return yards, 10 Pro Bowl selections, 9 First-Team All-Pro Selections, and 2 Super Bowl titles.
But the most telling statistic by one of American Football’s greatest stars are the nine infractions that run the gamut of drug use to filing false tax returns to non-payment of child support. Because of these, he’s been pushed back into his own ten-yard line with time running out on his game clock.
Now there’s this latest bit of disturbing news that one of the most fearsome men ever to step on the gridiron has been accused of raping a minor. And just like that, he’s been taken down for a safety in his own end zone.
The man who changed the game of American Football with his infamous hits of opposing quarterbacks had blind sided us once more and I for one am left shaking my head in bewilderment.
Taylor hunted quarterbacks and chased wide receivers with ease yet the one thing he could not sack are his personal demons. A rape charge on a 16-year old – how do you wrangle out of this? I’m still shaking my head, LT.
The Brink
Former Marquette coach Al Maguire wrote in the introduction of John Feinstein’s 1986 masterpiece A Season On the Brink: “I don’t want to see someone with a $2 Saturday night special knock him off the coaching pedestal he deserves. What I mean is this: suppose some referee decides that the way to make a name for himself is to draw him into some kind of fight or battle. Suppose some fan decides to pick a fight with him. Or suppose some administrator comes to Indiana and decides he’s the guy to prove once and for all that he’s the boss. If anything like that happens, Bob (Knight) is going to be judged wrong no matter what he does because of the past. He deserves better than that.”
That book was the first ever sports book that I purchased and I recall that I got it for about 25 bucks from that used bookstore in Greenhills called The Rastro. I was an Indiana Hoosiers fan (this was before I shifted allegiances to the University of North Carolina), hence, a Bobby Knight fan. There was much mystique then. Joe Lipa, who just led the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons to the UAAP title went to a Knight coaching school. Da Nose’s temperament was also said to Knightesque. And there was the Detroit Pistons’ wondrous 6’1” guard Isaiah Thomas who declared that there were days when if he had a gun, he would have shot Knight, and there were days when he wanted to put his arm around him and tell the old man that he loved him like his pop.
So I bought the book that had been mentioned in the pages of Sports Illustrated. It was the first ever one that I read that chronicled a team’s entire season. It was so affecting that it served as a precursor for later books like Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules and Jack McCallum’s Unfinished Business.
I read it. Not just once, but maybe three times in the intervening years. After having read it, there was no doubt in my mind that Knight was a gifted basketball coach. But I also came away feeling that I wouldn’t like this man who had anger management problems.
That paragraph from the introduction embedded itself in my mind because I too believed that it was only a matter of time before Bobby Knight fell from grace. There was this fear that he would end up like the late Woody Hayes, the Ohio State football coach who slugged an opposing player for intercepting a pass from his quarterback that ended their game. Hayes never lived down that ignominy.
As for Knight, it took almost two decades but it did happen. In 2000, a humiliating zero tolerance policy was laid down on the old coach by IU President Myles Brand (not that it wasn’t warranted) after he was seen on videotape choking one of his players. A few months later, a student greeted the coach with a flippant and disrespectful, “Hey, Knight. What’s up?” The coach grabbed the student by the arm and sternly lectured him. Brand promptly fired Knight setting off a firestorm of events that culminated in Knight filing a lawsuit against the university.
As brilliant a coach he is, I always thought that Knight personally was always on the brink of madness with his inability to let go of loses and mistakes by his players. It got to a point where even a winning program wasn’t enough to save him.
The Bummer
All these athletes falling from grace – Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Antoine Walker, and now Lawrence Taylor – Charles Barkley (who also had his Driving Under the Influence charge last year) was right. To paraphrase Sir Charles, “Just because I play sports for a living it doesn’t mean I should idolize him.”
Well, he’s right. And I’ve always looked up to family instead. Nevertheless, whenever I read about these incidents, it leaves me feeling a tad diminished. Not everyone gets that chance for fame and fortune then to see it all go to waste. It’s a waste!
Hindsight is “what was I thinking of?”
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