Back In My Day, by Mick Shaffer (Part I)

As tired as Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character eventually became on early ‘90’s Saturday Night Live, it was pretty spot on.

“In my day we didn’t have latex condoms.  We took a rabbit’s skin, wrapped it around our privates and tied it off with a bungee cord.  And we liked it.”

Maybe a bit embellished, but the mentality was spot on.

“And ya couldn’t feel nothin’.  Half the time ya didn’t even know if your partner was there.”

All right, I think you get the picture.  We’ve all come across an elder figure or 14 who takes the utmost pleasure in informing the generations labeled with a letter just how tougher they and the times were “back in the day.”

Never is that urge to recount tales of hardship greater than when old-timers genuflect about sports, particularly football.

“Back in my day, we didn’t have water breaks in practice.  Water was for pussies.  If we got thirsty, we’d drink our own urine.  And we liked it.”

Thanks, dad.  And thank you, Past, for being so inhumane that I now have to endure these stories.  However, as excruciating as the anecdotes are now, I’m afraid the current state of college football will only add fuel—and hyperbole—to the old-timers’ fire.

You may or may not have been paying attention.  But since the close of the 2009 regular season, three high-profile college coaches have been fired by their high-profile schools for a common, yet uncommon, reason.  They weren’t “canned” for the normal excuses in college football: poor record, poor graduation rate with a poor record, sleeping with a booster’s daughter with a poor record, DUI with a poor record, embezzling money with a poor record, being black with any record.

No, the firings of Mark Mangino, Mike Leach and Jim Leavitt were all a result of their mistreatment of players.  Now, at one point, “mistreatment of players” in college football could’ve meant “forcing them to go to class after a covered-up date-rape arrest.” After all…

“Back in my day, if we got caught drinkin’, coach would punch us in the gut until we threw up all that alcohol right there on the 50-yard-line.  And we liked it.”

But these cases of mistreatment were more in line with physical, verbal and psychological abuse.  Or, in the case of Mark Mangino, all of the above.

I won’t bog down this story with too many details, but until December Mangino was employed as the head football coach at the University of Kansas.  Sadly, despite overseeing maybe the best eight-year stretch ever at Kansas, Mangino was known more for his rotund size than his football acumen.  At the Orange Bowl in 2008, he posed with Obie—the game’s round orange mascot—and you had check for birthmarks to see which one was which.

Mangino’s ousting stemmed from an internal investigation into a player’s allegation that Mangino poked him in the chest.  That complaint snowballed into a series of claims from former players citing physical and verbal abuse.  One player provided photos of second-degree burns on his hand suffered after Mangino forced him to bear-crawl on the searing, summer AstroTurf field for punishment.  The player—backed by other former players—says Mangino ignored his claims of burning flesh, made him immediately return to practice after his hospital stay and later threatened to burn his other hand if he missed another tackle.

Multiple players stated that Mangino would use private conversations and material against them in practice and games.  “Do you want to become an alcoholic like your dad?” and, “Shut up, or I’ll send you back to St. Louis to get shot with your homies”—after a player’s younger brother had just been shot—were a couple of the more contemptible claims.  One of the players claimed he didn’t speak up at the time because Mangino said he would deliberately lie to NFL scouts to hurt the player’s draft status.

The chest-poking was largely ignored, as most people chose to focus on the mountain of verbal abuse evidence.  Now, you might argue that “verbal abuse” is one of those fancifully mythical terms like unicorn, global warming and G-spot.  And you might be right.

And, trust me, if you want to engage in an argument about the “wussification” of America’s youth, I’ll step in and guide your sleigh.  Scoreboards are replaced with trophies in Little League.  Kids would rather quit than be benched.  It seems like there’s a sliding scale between 40-time and disciplinary issues.  Stereotypes do exist for a reason, as there are more than a few popcorn kernels of truth in the old-timer’s tales.

“Back in my day, we did whatever the coach said.  If he said, ‘Throw it to the partially blind and fully disabled team manager,’ then that’s what we did!  And we liked it.”

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a line that can’t be crossed.  Whether you’re “pampered” or “tough,” everyone has their limit of suffering they’ll put up with.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve never heard any old-timer story start with “Back in my day,” end with “And we liked it,” and in between include “the coaches would plow our moms on the track during calisthenics.”

As a coach, you can go over the line, and it doesn’t seem controversial to argue that when you freely deride someone’s family member—who had just absorbed a bullet—for the sake of motivation, you’re doing the electric slide right across that line.  If you are responsible for grilling a human’s body part and threaten to do it again, then the line is the Armistice Line and you’re in Pyongyang you’re so far past it (obscurest reference ever).

You may argue otherwise.  You may think these kids need thicker skin (and not just for hot AstroTurf), because back in your day, your entire family got mowed down by gunfire and the whole team had a good laugh about it.  Heck, you may argue the other way.  You may wonder why these coaches need to yell so much at these poor kids.

The point is everybody has his or her line.  We can debate all day as to where that line should be placed.  To me, though, whether it’s abuse or not, it’s simply bad strategy.

Really?  This is how you get your kids to play for you?  As a big-time head football coach at a BCS school, obviously the bottom line is winning.  Achieving wins necessitates recruiting good players and then coaching them up to play the right way—to play hard.

And this is your motivation?

Something tells me there are other avenues toward finding a kid’s effort than mocking his alcoholic father.  Who would want to play for a coach like that?  Not the players suiting up for the Jayhawks.  Most of them hated Mangino after leaving the program.

Every team at every level has the handful of guys who will bitch about every line drill.  The players who will phone Mommy & Daddy every time the coach tells him to “grow a pair” and then ask them what “grow a pair” means.

But this was a disproportionate amount of players exiting the woodwork, with nothing to gain, turning in their accounts of Mangino’s over-the-top behavior.  Very few voiced their support.  Now, either the entire 85-man roster at KU is filled with wimps (which would be Mangino’s fault, too, since he recruited them) or Mangino just may, in fact, have something of a Taft complex (like Napoleon’s, only with a more suitable size comparison).

Look, you can be a jerk as a head coach.  You can be “abusive.”  You can run your program in whatever a-hole style you wish.  You don’t have to give a damn about anyone but you.  But simply for the sake of self-preservation, it had better work.

It didn’t.  After starting the season 5-0, Kansas lost its final seven games and finished last in the Big 12 North division.  If you think it was all about the wins and losses, know that the Jayhawks were less than two years removed from that Orange Bowl season when they went a school-record 12-1.

Ultimately, the athletic department—Mangino’s bosses—decided where this line was placed.  Turns out, it was right at the corner of Pissing Off Everybody and Losing Football Games.

Bad strategy.

For the conclusion of this article, go back several words and click on the blue one.

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