Win some, lose some -- without lawyers

Things did not go well for athletic coaches last week. The new

Alabama football coach was fired for publicly exposing an excessive

amount of interest in lap dancing and the ladies who perform it, and

the Iowa State basketball coach awaits a similar fate for partying

too enthusiastically with coeds.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the baseball coach at Corona del Mar

High School and the father of one of his former student-athletes are

exchanging lawsuits -- a story the Daily Pilot has covered and a

trend that was picked up on in a front page story in the Los Angeles

Times on Monday.

According to the Times, some 20 lawsuits in which parents or

students claim that coaches screwed up a potential athletic career

have been filed in the U.S. in the past year, so the Corona del Mar

flap is not an isolated example.

I have no knowledge of the merits of the local case, in which the

father of a baseball pitcher, in filing suit, said, “I didn’t think I

had any other choice.”

That suit was thrown out of court by a Superior Court judge in

September of 2002. The father, Marc Martinez, then filed another suit

against the coach, John Emme, and the Daily Pilot, which ran a story

on the original lawsuit, alleging he and his son, J.D. Martinez, were

libeled.

The libel suit against Emme was also dismissed, and Martinez was

ordered to pay Emme’s legal fees. The suit against the Daily Pilot is

pending, but attorneys for the paper have filed a motion to strike it

as well.

Meanwhile, the coach responded with a $1-million countersuit that

claimed the father had “grandiose ambitions” for his son as a

professional. The courts will sort that one out.

What concerns me is the spilling over of a growingly litigious

society into the field of allegedly amateur sports, where risk is

simply built into the system.

Millions of young men and women have learned their first survival

lessons in the world of competitive sports. Somebody wins -- and it

isn’t always the good guys.

Authority figures are subject to the same human frailties as the

rest of us, leading sometimes to unfair choices and bad decisions,

complicated by the vicarious needs of parents. Winning is too often

held in higher regard than character building. And the sporting life

sometimes seems full of injustice -- just like regular life.

Exposure to these lessons can, at one extreme, warp a young

person’s psyche and ability to cope and thus breed cynicism, or at

the other extreme, provide a tolerance for the complexities and

shortcomings of the competitive system and human behavior that

prevents overreaction to setbacks and suggests -- if not solutions --

at least perspective and means of coping.

Either way, there’s no feeling quite so exhilarating as edging up

to a bulletin board outside the coach’s office to look at the final

cut for a high school team -- or as devastating as not finding your

name there, even though in justice you think it should be.

It may be missing for a variety of reasons. You may not be as good

as you -- or your father -- think you are, and the better players

were chosen. The coach might not like you for reasons that have

little to do with your athletic skills. Or the coach might prefer

someone else for other equally unjust reasons.

All possible. All risks you take on when you try out for any sort

of team. All risks that put your success or failure temporarily in

the hands of a coach. And not, it seems to me, risks that should end

up in a courtroom. You win some, and you lose some.

Coaches, by the nature of their work, are authoritarian figures.

I’ve had a fair amount of contact with them -- good and bad -- at

various stages in my life.

But I don’t recall my father ever interfering in the bad patches

-- or wanting him to. Maybe that was because I knew I was a mediocre

player, good enough to make the high school team, but marginal, at

best, for any athletic scholarship. And also because this took place

many years ago, when fathers let the coaches coach.

I can think of a few instances when my father could have called a

foul on the coach, had I chosen to clue him in.

There was, for example, the most bizarre punishment ever inflicted

on me by a coach that happened on a weekend trip of my Miami High

School basketball team to play high schools in St. Petersburg and

Tampa, Fla. As was the practice in those days, we were put up in the

homes of local volunteers, where the coach would drop us off and tuck

us in.

It turned out the player I was rooming with had once lived in this

area and had made plans I knew nothing about. As soon as the coach

was out of sight, my roommate told me to get dressed, and we slipped

out a window to a waiting car that included two unattached girls.

Local cheerleaders, if I recall properly.

Our evening ended at a hamburger joint about 2:30 a.m., when our

coach also decided to end his evening there.

Instead of sending us home, he made us give him our athletic

supporters and sweat pants, so we had to warm up and then sit on the

bench through both games in an agony of humiliation. A lot of

character was built those two nights.

My greatest concentration of coaches came about during three

months at the Navy Pre-Flight School in Iowa City, Iowa, early in

1942. Former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney had been given

the task of turning soft 20-year-old college kids into supermen in 12

weeks, and he surrounded himself with the nation’s highest-powered

coaches to bring this off.

They not only had the normal authoritarian power of coaches, they

outranked us as well.

The ultimate punishment was being sent to boxing, which was

presided over by several noted professional fighters who built

character by beating up on us if we dogged it. And then there was the

Minnesota football coach who once -- for what he deemed an effort to

beat his system -- ordered me to do 10 laps around a quarter-mile

track in full football gear in Iowa in July. Character almost lost

out to dehydration.

Compassion isn’t the leading edge of most coaching styles. I’ve

had cinder burns from knee to hip from falling over a hurdle and was

once laid out on a football field with a possible concussion from

trying to tackle a guy twice my weight.

In both instances, the coach didn’t bother to come out and have a

look, since I was no longer of use to him. But a lawsuit never

occurred to me. Or my father.

I didn’t make it past the freshman basketball team at the

University of Missouri. That’s where my civilian athletic career

ended. But I sure learned a lot.

And if any of my coaches ever got into lap dancing, I never heard

about it. We just won some and lost some -- without the help of a

lawyer.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.