xtcian

4/3/03 Chapel Hill, NC Well,

4/3/03 Chapel Hill, NC

Well, it's spring in Chapel Hill, and that used to mean one thing: the NCAA basketball tournament. But if you've been following sports news at all, you'll know this week has been especially painful in North Carolina, and I'm amazed I was down here to witness it. Yes, yes, there's a war going on in Iraq. But basketball is a religion in this state, and to me as well, so it's a necessary sabbatical before putting the world back together.

In a nutshell, our coach of three years Matt Doherty – "resigned" on Tuesday to avoid being fired outright by our chancellor and athletic director, who had met with the players and their families.

The fallout has been immense. A couple of people in the media responded with an "it's about time" article, but everyone else has been dragging Carolina through the mud (I won't link the articles here, but they're easy to find). The general consensus among the fat, bearded national sports writers is that Doherty got shafted, and that UNC has once again plunged into a soap opera far removed from the cool, consistent world of champions Dean Smith once cultivated. To which I say: eat me.

Matt Doherty went on ESPN tonight for a hotseat interview with Jay Bilas, and acted as though he had been blindsided by the turn of events. I don't pretend to think for the man, but if the last three years didn't quite sink in, maybe that's problem enough. I'm on two email lists one of them, due to Carolina family connections, tends to dither in careful, constructive criticism. The other is a flaming, unadulterated rumor mill containing the kind of incendiary hearsay that I prayed would not be true. Together, they paint a picture that is not terribly flattering of Doherty's bedside manner with his players, and in fact, seem to indicate that the guy needs help. I'll say this: if even 10% of what I read this year was true, this is not somebody that should be following in Dean Smith's footsteps. He'd be great at another program, but not this one.

Instead of doing any kind of real research, the nations' top sportswriters salivated at the chance to take another swing at Carolina, most likely because we've been the poster children for All Things Good in the NCAA since 1961. Some of their criticism is rooted in the old-fashioned "coach as God" crap that Bobby Knight could get away with when he was winning, and Mike Krzyzewski gets away with now because he is winning. You know, the old "Hoosiers" mentality, where the players come to realize that Coach Knows Best Even Though He Humiliates Us Daily. Old timey sports writers love that shit.

The recurring thread among all these pundits (who are all white, as Chip pointed out) is that "the inmates took over the asylum," and now we have a bunch of macked-out bling-bling brats who got their coach fired. To me, this is not much different than the "uppity Negro" comments you'd hear until the 1960s, and is utterly shameful. I think Carolina could air a laundry list of transgressions that would shut these morons up in an instant, but will not do so even at their own peril – to make sure Doherty has a shot at another job somewhere else. For their part, the players all swear they never conspired to get Doherty canned, and only met with the administration because they were asked to.

But here's the thing that makes me furious: even if the players DID get their coach fired, SO WHAT? Dean Smith said many things I take to heart, among them: "you go to college to get a job." This was why he was maddeningly gracious about telling his kids to go to the NBA early they had a job waiting. Now, if Doherty was in the way of our players getting a job in the NBA, it was not only a good idea to find a solution, it was incumbent upon them. This basketball program is not for the "sports world," the administration, nor is it even for me, one of its biggest fans. It is for the student athletes, and if they're miserable, THEN FIX IT. If we can get our 8th grade symphony conductor in Iowa fired (which we did), then our boys in blue should be able to do the same.

All told, I feel terrible for Matt. I know he bleeds Carolina blue, and nobody wanted us to win more than he did. His issues and his demeanor, look and mannerisms – remind me of someone else very close to me, and I have enormous reserves of pity for him as his family packs up and leaves town.

But you can't treat kids today the same way they did in 1950. My shrink once told me that the greatest thing to happen in the 20th century was not antibiotics nor the polio vaccine, nor women's rights: it was the end of countrywide, institutionalized child abuse. Young adults respond to negative criticism differently now. They don't live in fear, they know they have options, and this week, it showed what a few of them were able to do, and it is something to be celebrated.

me and Tessa five weeks ago in Chapel Hill

us today in the same spot