Missner’s Manifesto: A Leader Of Men?

(Debby Wong-USA TODAY Sports)
 

A common thing that sportswriters do is to try to put their feet in an athlete’s shoes. Perhaps many sportswriters are failed athletes, who didn’t have the physicality to play. I think a great deal of the media’s frustration with athletes comes from this kind of transference, and I am not sure I understand it. You will see a lot of people writing this week that if they were in Marcus Smart’s shoes, they would have left Oklahoma State for the NBA. I might be one of them because when I was making my mock draft last week, I had Smart going number one so I had to redo the entire thing.  Needless to say, Smart’s decision is his own, but his draft stock won’t get better with another year of school (and a fine class of recruits joining the college ranks). If it were me, I’d take the money. If Sports Illustrated comes a-calling, then sorry, Mr. Fox, I am out of here. You have been fairly warned! (Unless SI’s offer is an unpaid internship, then I am sticking with the Manifesto.)

Another common sportswriter trope is “if I had a son who was going to play college basketball, I’d want him to play for this coach.” Perhaps I can’t put myself in this headspace because I don’t have a son (my daughter doesn’t seem interested in sports … at all – to her credit) and if I did, he’d likely be limited by gene pool. Perhaps if my wife were Brittney Griner, he’d have a chance, but she doesn’t seem that interested. Needless to say, if my mythical son were a great high school basketball player and could pick his college based on coach, I don’t know what advice I’d give him. If he were good enough to some day be a professional, I’d say he should go to Europe and get paid for his internship. I’d go with him (and be able to tell Sports Illustrated to get lost).

It’s easy to paint a group with a broad brush, but college basketball coaches seem at best unpleasant and at worse completely corrupt to me. The profession consists of inducing high school kids to play for you by promising them everything short of money (and under-the-table money sometimes). Coaches are then forced to scream and yell at the kids at practice in order to “make them men.” Now, I know Mike Rice might seem like an extreme example (and I have admit that when I watched the videos of him and his assistant coach screaming and threatening the players, it made me snicker), but my guess is that sort of dressing down and intimidation is more common than we in polite society (or just society) would think. It’s part of the unpleasant hazing of college sports. Perhaps some bosses at your place of business may think that this type of intimidation is the way to produce, but it would seem to me that having a happy workplace would reap bigger benefits. A coach’s responsibility is also to deal with the press, but many of them believe they are above this. While I agree that the media can be annoying, they provide some of the paint strokes on which public perception of a coach is based. It is in a coach’s best interest to be nice to them. If they are successful, maybe then Athlon will name the coach “best interview” in the conference. (An aside – do fans really care which coach is the best interview in a college basketball conference? I know I don’t.)

The one thing that confuses me about college basketball coaches (and perhaps the coaching professional in general) is that they are supposed to be molding and leading men, but they are constantly whining to the officials about calls. As I’ve noted before, one of the nice things about college basketball is that this complaining role is almost entirely on the coach and players (unlike the pros) don’t often go directly to refs. As I wrote earlier this year, I don’t complain about the refs anymore. They have an exceedingly hard job and I think, in general, they are highly successful.  It may seem to give a psychological edge to coaches in that if they complain enough, maybe a ref will make a call their way. However, as a leader of men, wouldn’t you think coaches would allow other men (i.e. the refs) to do their job without all of the incessant complaining? Wouldn’t that teach young people respect for authority, which seems to be one of the pillars of knowledge that a basketball coach can impart? Perhaps sportsmanship takes a pale second where winning is king. Actually, no perhaps about it.

Perry Missner is a college basketball enthusiast who writes for RotoWire along with several other outlets. He welcomes your comments on Twitter at @PerryMissner or via email at [email protected]