Texas Tech must be seen to be believed. In this earlier post, UD surveyed the school’s long list of sadistic coaches – not to mention its bringing on board and giving all its money to luminaries like Alberto Gonzales and Tommy Tuberville – and concluded that something way kinky was going on there. It’s as if the place seeks after twisted people to hurt its students and its reputation.

Incredibly, this idea – that TTU actually recruits the sadistic as a kind of school policy – seems not so wild. For with all that sadomasochism behind it, TTU went and hired another one … or another two…

Twelve of the 21 women who played for Texas Tech since [Marlene] Stollings took over the program in 2018 have left, [citing player abuse]…. [Also, players accused] former strength and conditioning coach Ralph Petrella of berating and sexually harassing them … [Stollings has now also been fired.]

Luckily, assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins is still there!

[One player reports she was] told by assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins to snap a rubber band on her wrist when she had a negative thought.

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Plus you don’t have to be selected for a varsity team to get the shit beat out of you in Lubbock. Lubbock is one of America’s most violent cities. Just walk outside.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”

… Spend any time reading about big-time university football and basketball and it’s like a thesaurus full of adjectives for morally vile. Some schools are so disgusting they’ve been given whole new names: not the U of L (for the University of Louisville, with its pimpy basketball coach) but the U of Smell. Almost all the Texas football schools exhaust the efforts of sports writers to come up with new ways to say absolutely rock bottom gagworthy – rape-besotted, self-righteous Baylor; Southern “Slush Fund” Methodist; Texas “Pain Slut” Tech… You’d think a university, rather than say a fleabag hotel, would aim for a modicum of dignity, a veneer of seriousness, a hint of higher things…

Every now and then a derelict university tosses into the scrimmage a gridiron hero who’s so flagrantly mentally disturbed that any location other than a football school or the NFL would pass on him. Norman Bates turns out to have one hell of a throwing arm, so you hush up his – teehee – little indiscretions; the university’s president is wheeled out to say he’s a fine lad with the waywardness of youth, and the students sell t-shirts representing him as Jesus the Christ.

Norman typically implodes after his short stint (it’s not as though he’s attending school) at Football U, and, if he’s Mister Texas A&M Johnny Manziel, he’s in the professional leagues for the full onset of dementia. Who knows why he waits for the professional leagues, where tens of millions of dollars are at stake, to wig out? Maybe he holds it a little bit together in order to be able to go pro; but maybe the pressure of going pro is too much or something.

Anyway every now and then the conspiracy of silence at these sorts of schools suffers a security breach. Seems things were so bad at Manziel’s Texas A&M that some of his fellow players transferred out in disgust. One of them gave an interview and everyone’s talking about it. So let’s see what the guy said…

Former A&M quarterback Kyle Allen says he transferred to Houston last month largely because he disliked the culture of the A&M football program — a culture that Allen says goes back to Manziel thinking the rules didn’t apply to him.

“I think the culture was a big part of it, and I think that stems from Johnny’s era there — the way that they let Johnny and [others] act there,” Allen told CBS. “They [could] do that and still win games because they had Johnny . . . and five offensive linemen playing in the NFL right now…

A lot of people were riding off that, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and win on Saturday,'”…

UD sympathizes. It’s a delicate balancing act for coaches. On the one hand, you want the guys to act like insane fucking assholes, because that way they feel strong and invincible and able to win games. On the other hand, you don’t want their rapes and batterings to exceed a certain manageable number. Say one or two a semester. The difficulty of this subtle calculus is reflected in the coach’s sky-high salary.

I mean, it’s easy for a student journalist to say this:

I defended Manziel to the end of the Earth as a fun-loving, work hard-play hard future franchise quarterback and therefore I was part of the problem. He seemed fun and loving, but he was really just sick.

It’s far harder for the multimillionaire coach whose salary depended on keeping Johnny on the field to say this. And anyway the coach has a time-honored option: I did everything I could for Johnny. I loved him like a son. I think the discipline of the team and the games and the university family kept it together for Johnny; I think we were the best thing that could have happened to him.

… that classic mode of American letters, the apologia for the depraved university football program.

Local Minnesota booster/journalist Chip Scoggins shows you how it’s done for that state’s benighted school. Let us do a close reading.

Tone-wise, the big sustained thing, the ground tone, is a variant of Coacha Inconsolata (put the phrase in my search engine if you’re not yet familiar with it), in which shock, heartbreak, and an indomitable will to be shocked and heartbroken again rule. Have at me! says the bankrupt befouled and humiliated campus…

Oh my men I love them so
They’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When they take me in their arms
The world is bright – all right!
What’s the difference if I say
I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back on my knees someday…

Texas Tech is the nation’s sluttiest pain slut, hands down. Penn State assumes the crown if for any reason the current titleholder cannot fulfill her reign. The University of Minnesota is one of the five semi-finalists.

Why, just four days ago, before UM’s Athletic Director, via text, volunteered his muffdiving services to some random woman, Chip was burbling about how the program had finally begun to regain its respectability (church groups were mentioned). Now it’s back to the post-oral-sex-offer, pre-alcohol-rehab-stint status quo, and Chip’s got some familiar heavy lifting to do.

Headline: Teague Scandal Rocks Gophers Athletics Amid Recent Gains

Always give them some shred to hold onto – allude to vaguely defined gains.

Opinion piece summary: The accumulation of disappointment over the years — NCAA violations, misdeeds, awful hires, heartbreaking defeats — has created this perception that the U can’t get out of its own way.

A couple of points here. Note how the random expected fact of lost games gets included in this list of self-inflicted misfortunes. All teams lose games, but at masochistic schools it’s always one heartbreaking loss after another, and what’s a girl to do?

Note further: The “U can’t get out of its own way.” What does this particular formulation mean? It means that the stupid stubborn fact of a university, of all things, having to run a football program is once again the stumbling block. Where the hell does a university get off running a football program? You want to run a football program, be like Alabama and Clemson and get rid of the university!

The Gophers athletic department suffered another black eye that brought the kind of negative, unwanted attention that has become all too familiar.

No one felt surprised. That’s the sad part.

Again, always keep it more in sorrow than in anger. Sad. Sad.

Oh, we’re all shocked by the lewd details, the fact that a person in Norwood Teague’s position would act like such a Neanderthal. But not shocked that something like this happened to the Gophers, another deep dive into a pile of dung.

… Within hours of Teague’s resignation as athletic director, three people sent me text messages. A former university employee, a die-hard fan and a booster. All shared a similar theme in their words.

Here we go again.

It’s fair to guess that employees inside the department shared that same deflation of morale, which is too bad because a lot of earnest, hardworking, passionate folks work in the Bierman complex. They deserve better.

Shocked? Really? But as SOS points out above, it’s crucial for schools like Minnesota to keep an ever-refreshed stock of shock alongside heartbreak. A man coming on like that to a woman? What a shockingly lewd Neanderthal! In Minnesota, stuff like this is just so unfunny and shocking…

University President Eric Kaler tried hard to create a clear divide between Teague’s conduct and his school’s image, saying one man’s deplorable actions shouldn’t define an entire operation.

Please. UM doesn’t belong to its president any more than Joe Paterno’s Penn State belonged to whoever that dude was who made the public service announcements.

Instability at key positions in college sports — AD, football and basketball coaches — stunts momentum and forces athletic departments to continually hit the reset button. The Gophers know that too well. They need normalcy for once.

But constant administrative turnover, hugely expensive buyouts and lawsuits, relentlessly criminalized teams, and of course indifferent students who fail to fill up the brand new hugely expensive stadium is normalcy at jockshops like Minnesota. There are no earnest prudes in Bierman; there are only suckers. Everybody else is studying or whatever.

Teague ultimately proved to be a bad hire by Kaler, and the president can’t swing and miss on such an important position again. The Gophers carry a $105 million athletic budget. This is not a mom-and-pop operation.

See SOS‘s point above. You hire some goddamn academic to run a football program and this is the kind of dumbass hiring decision that gets made. Lose the president. Get Jim Tressel on the phone!

Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other sport, but that’s the reality now.

Sing it sister. But take it a teeny step further and tell the whole truth.

Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other activity on the UM campus, but that’s the reality now.

See? That was easy. That didn’t hurt.

… often exhibit spectacular sleaze synergy.

Take assistant-coach-assaulting Tommy Tuberville, late of pain slut Texas Tech, now bringing his expensive brand of physical violence (plus Ponzi schemes!) to University of Cincinnati football. When this person has to deal with violent players on the Cincinnati team… Well, who’s gonna make the … Shall we call it the Roger Goodell sermon? About how violence is bad bad bad and we have really high standards of personal conduct here…

There’s nobody to make the sermon but the coach, and at Cincinnati the coach is a dumbfuck who smacks his staff on camera… So when gunplay breaks out among team members and some of them try to run away from the police, etc., etc., there’s stinky ol’ Tuberville instructing America on moral purity…

“This kind of behavior is not acceptable and not indicative of the UC football program,” Tuberville said. “Moving forward, we will continue to educate our players on making good decisions and being great representatives of the University.”

Amen Brother Tommy. Tell us how we can be more like you.

… a tragic saga of violence, fraud, loss, and birtherism, now draws to a close.

Having been abandoned by its dark lover, who now for America’s pain slut university? Who will not only coach the imminent Meineke Car Care Bowl, but keep Texas Tech University in the golden shackles it loves so well? The school has gone through Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie (the last two in basketball) and Tommy Tuberville. Who’s left?

Who’s left to slap the coaching staff, concuss players, force the team into illegal practice hours? You can get trash-talking coaches – trash-talking coaches are a dime a dozen – but TTU’s standard of torture is higher than that. TTU never forgets that

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

TTU doesn’t recoil. They go for it, man!

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UD proposes Rocco Siffredi. Has any Texas Tech coach forced a player’s head down a toilet while sodomizing him? It’s time.

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UD thanks John.

… — by far —” has really hit the ground running.

But then when you hire Mike Leach you should expect your money to be paying for more than coaching. When you take on at vast expense a person just fired – because of allegations of player abuse – by Texas Tech, pain slut … Texas Tech, a school that never saw a sadist it didn’t like… You should probably expect a little roughing up in exchange for all that cash.

You should also expect Leach to sue your ass and everybody else’s. Even though he always loses. After costing you millions of dollars in legal fees.

Yes, Mike Leach was quite the hot prospect when Washington State eagerly took him on board and gave him all its money. How utterly unexpected that just after he’s begun coaching there a prominent player has left the school, charging abuse by Leach’s staff. How totally shocked Washington State will be when Leach’s lawsuits against it start coming in.

UD long ago failed to be amazed by the criminal stupidity of certain American football factories. She does continue to be amazed that no responsible adults – faculty, trustees – exist at those schools.

Really? UD spends quite a bit of time chronicling university coaches who hit people – players, staff – when they get angry. Those of us who follow campus football and basketball can easily reel off five or so names of coaches who keep getting fired because they’re verbally and/or physically abusive to students.

And hell, most of them come from the same school!

That would be good ol’ Texas Tech, a school so masochistic UD calls it America’s university as pain slut. The latest thing is that cameras have caught good ol’ Tommy Tuberville hitting one of his coaches. Like right out there sose everybody can see!

For John Ashbery’s ninetieth birthday, the Guardian’s poetry critic reproduces and discusses this late-career poem of his:

Life is a Dream

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

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In her telling, it’s bristling with homophobia, Auschwitz, coming of age, and love; UD on the other hand reads it as a mildly anxious gloss on Yeats’s similar late-career poem, Circus Animal’s Desertion.

Both poems, IMHO, feature old poets reflecting on the process of aesthetic creation, on the way some people – people like them – are sort of both blessed and cursed with the ability to take the random broken stuff of the world and transform it into art. In Yeats, the poet mucks around in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Ashbery’s in the same trash- and lumber-yard:

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard

Same point, no? A capacity for transforming the vague fallen dross of the world into meaningful formal beauty is only a capacity – all your poetic life you must try to get farther than the vacant lot (note the nice internal contradiction of that phrase, the word “lot” meaning not only enclosed place, but many – so again the rag and bone shop, the lumber yard, is full of things; there’s a lot in or near that lot; but since nothing has been done to transform any of its objects and make it meaningful, it is vacant, expressionless). The vacant lot is the abundant object-nothingness, the object-silence, of the world that confronts the poet again and again as he attempts to write a poem and give the world words. At this late stage in their poetic lives, both Yeats and Ashbery are feeling some degree of panic, let’s say, as their imaginative powers wane (What can I but enumerate old themes) and their profoundest images begin to look old.

Letters, being “read off,” the beginning of the line: The rest of Ashbery’s first stanza expresses – in his typical oblique vague dreamy way – the difficulty of beginning a poem — beginning an Ashbery poem, with a capital A. This poem self-reflexively elaborates upon the perennial gnawing anxiety of the poetic vocation, the creative imperative; and the surrealistic introduction of the nasty urging rodent-like man in the next stanza would, in this account of the poem, be the poet’s own anxious impatient self-punishing insistence on a life of continued artistic productivity: Don’t just muck around inside this dream, you fool – you’ve learned how to make anything “real” – that is, you’ve learned how to give anything persuasive aesthetic shape and life – and your vocation is to continue to do so. Take whatever you like from the lumber yard/rag and bone shop. Take

The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time.

And fashion it into poetic form.

Or maybe Ashbery’s poem/poetic dream is the temporal inverse of Yeats’s – maybe this is the old Ashbery remembering himself as a young poet, a poet just beginning to be “schooled” in poetry. If so, his last stanza is the old poet reflecting on his subsequent decades of education in world-transformation:

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

What is life, and what is a dream? Both dream and life are dream, and if you are a poet “It was the dream itself enchanted me.” Dream is anything, but sly life slips in things that boast of solid empirical real life, like the sudden feeling in your hand of a gentle, guiding, and loving gloved hand that slips so easily into yours and seems destined to stay by you permanently — that’s a certain thing that definitely is not life. That is the poet’s writing hand gloved into a false comfort and ease which amounts to an evasion of the artistic imperative. Think of the complex invitations and evasions of the painterly hand that dominates Ashbery’s most famous poem; “Life is a Dream” is yet another enumeration of the theme of poetic consciousness and poetic procedure:

Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed […]
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.