On April 4, Mike Alden, the athletic director at the University of Missouri, introduced Frank Haith as the school’s new men’s basketball coach. The hire came as a surprise to expectant Missouri fans; Haith had just finished another mediocre year at the University of Miami, where in seven seasons he compiled a record of 129 wins and 101 losses.
More important to many pundits than Haith’s overall record with the Hurricanes was his record in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) – an unimpressive 43-69, good for a 38% winning percentage.
I watched in bemusement as the Internet (Midwestern Division) imploded in search of a legitimate reason that Frank Haith had been hired to coach the basketball team at the University of Missouri. No one could come up with an answer that was satisfying. So I set out on my own quest: I had to know why a program as venerated as Missouri’s could hire someone with a history of such mediocrity.
My conclusion might surprise you.
Those who swarmed to Haith’s defense note that the University of Miami plays in the venerable ACC, once considered the most powerful conference in college basketball. But over the last seven years, the ACC hasn’t exactly been the ACC of the 1990s and early 2000s. Duke has been its usual maddeningly-good self, but the only thing consistent about North Carolina has been Roy Williams’s fake drawl. Wake Forest wishes it could return to the halcyon days of Darious Songaila and/or Randolph Childress. The only time you’ll see North Carolina State’s name in lights is when Jim Valvano is running around looking for someone to hug around the time of the Jimmy V Classic. And if you told me that they no longer play basketball at Virginia, Clemson, and Boston College, I’d probably believe you.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say we allow that the ACC has remained a tough conference. And anyway, Haith is known not for his skill in the timeout huddle, but rather, for his ability as a recruiter. While an assistant at the University of Texas (from 2001-2004), Haith convinced future stars LaMarcus Aldridge and Daniel Gibson to play for the Longhorns. It could stand to reason that Missouri wants to plumb the depths of Haith’s recruiting pipeline.
There is one problem with the recruiter explanation, besides the disgusting connotations that could be drawn from my previous sentence. As previously mentioned, Haith spent the last seven years at the University of Miami which, the reader will note, is in MIAMI. Call me a crazy person, but it doesn’t seem like it would be impossible to convince 18-year-old basketball prospects to live in MIAMI. And anyway, if Haith were such a great recruiter, it is logical to assume that he would have applied his recruiting skills toward securing for Miami players who could help him win basketball games. That is, one might say, the point of recruiting: to find players who help you win games. And, as we established in the previous two paragraphs, if the statement were “The coach wins basketball games,” the most popular answer would be “I neither agree nor disagree.”
Fine. Perhaps Haith was an up-and-comer who was beloved in Miami and is someone who the U, as they call it, will miss desperately. Perhaps Haith inherited a program riddled with holes and was on a fifteen-year plan.
That hypothesis, too, seems far-fetched. The overriding sentiment in Miami seems to be that Haith was lucky to get out when he did; if he didn’t win big next year, the story goes, he was probably going to be looking for a new job in 2012. After Haith’s hiring at Missouri, the Miami Herald’s Greg Cote wrote an article entitled, “Frank Haith Was OK, But Change Was Needed At Miami”. Keep in mind that this was after Haith was lured away, not after he was fired or after he died in a crocodile attack.
Okay, maybe Missouri was just happy to get a coach from a big-name school, whether he was successful or not, because someone good enough to coach at Miami would obviously be good enough to coach at lowly Missouri.
A fine explanation, if this were the eighties and we were talking about football.
Missouri is a venerated program with tradition, history, and a rabid fan base. Miami didn’t even have a basketball team from 1970 to 1985. This wasn’t exactly the University of California-Santa Cruz convincing Bill Self to coach the Banana Slugs. (Note to less athletics-savvy readers: this has never happened. But the mascot at UC-SC is a banana slug.)
Alright, alright, maybe Haith is blackmailing Mike Alden. Maybe he has something on Alden’s wife, or he knows a sordid secret from Alden’s past, or he once saw Alden naked and Alden is actually a hermaphrodite and doesn’t want anyone to know…
Okay, I can’t prove any that one of those circumstances isn’t the truth. However, they do seem unlikely.
There seems to be only one possible explanation left. And it’s a squirmy one, because it has to do with that thing no one likes to talk about. And it’s not Voldemort. It’s race.
Frank Haith is black.
So maybe Haith is just a regular old, politically-correct, We Haven’t Had A Black Coach Before So We’d Better Get One Now hire. In today’s sporting culture, in which each spring the Black Coaches Association lambasts the NFL for failing to interview a black candidate for every job opening from head coach to sprinkler-operator, it is not implausible to think that the athletic director at a large Division I school might cave to institutional and/or political pressure to hire a black guy.
There is one significant problem with that hypothesis. Namely that Missouri’s previous coach, Mike Anderson, was black. Unless Missouri’s president is the ghost of Malcolm X, it is unlikely that Mike Alden was under pressure to right any racial wrongs.
But the race thing, it seems important…
Eureka! I’ve got it!
Mike Alden hired Frank Haith because he is black, but in a completely post-modern way.
Alden knew that a large segment of Missourians would, when presented with Haith’s middling record and shaky resume, assume that Haith had been hired because of the color of his skin. (Missouri was a slave state, after all.) Alden also knew that Haith – by all accounts, an intelligent man – would be aware enough to know that this reaction was being provoked in many Missouri fans. Alden knew that Haith knew this and that Haith would draw strength from the prejudice of his future fan base. Eventually, Alden surmised, the chip on Haith’s shoulder would cause Haith to work that much harder than his peers, resulting in restored glory in the University of Missouri’s basketball program.
As far as I can tell, mine is the only possible solution. There’s no way Haith was hired because of his coaching ability, or because he’s a hot commodity, or because of political correctness or, really, for any reason that matches up with normal, human tests of logic.
Frank Haith was hired because Mike Alden knows more about human psychology than anyone watching the University of Missouri. And when Frank Haith threatens to leave after five years – five years that, I have to assume, will include four NCAA berths (including two trips to the Sweet Sixteen) and seven wins against Kansas – boosters shouldn’t worry about keeping Haith. They should worry about keeping the real star of April 4, 2011: Mike Alden.
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