When it comes to the sort of writing people do about university sports, she is often at a loss. Here’s what she means. Here’s a post in Forbes – respectable magazine – about noisily pious Jim Tressel, the compleat coach-hypocrite. (Search my Tressel posts here. ) Tressel, as UD predicted, is now a university president. Let’s take it nice and slow through this piece about Tressel, written just before he took the presidency of Youngstown State.

What does it mean when arguably the most successful coach in the history at one of the most historically ideal football colleges would rather not ever coach again? It’s not like Jim Tressel has no tread on the coaching tire. His football engine has plenty of horsepower. Before being derailed by tattoo-gate at OSU, Tressel’s accomplishments were the envy of every one of the 100+ D-1 coaches in America, save maybe a few.

Okay so the writer’s going to explain to us why despite plentiful coaching opportunities Tressel’s not going to coach anymore. The writer’s going to tell us it’s because the conditions of university football coaching are so horrible these days. And that Tressel’s rejection of the position is… representative of a trend? And so we should… worry that we’re making university football coaching so horrible that we’re in danger of … running out of coaches?

Or wait. Is there any sign at all that coaching jobs are going begging? Why, no. That salaries are tanking? Or even doing anything other than escalating a mile a minute? No. Salaries are insane, and jobs are hotly contested. In fact, coaching is so high-profile and admired that a football coach – Jim Tressel – has just been given the presidency of an entire university.

True, he was “derailed” by a very bad scandal under his watch recently. But note the “derailed by.” This certainly wasn’t about (to pursue the author’s train metaphor) Tressel being asleep at the wheel… Or, even worse, looking the other way… No… It simply happened. To him.

The writer reviews Tressel’s many games won record and then wonders why he’s left coaching for administration.

It’s really no mystery. Because of the scandal that happened to him, he’s banned from coaching.

He probably would not have been in academic administration at all if the NCAA had not forced him out. He was officially and publicly banned from athletic-related positions as part of the OSU punishment, or as many allege, the over-punishment. Despite the lack of a lifetime ban, Tressel reportedly just said he has no plans to ever coach again.

The evil NCAA which despite a thing just having descended upon Tressel without his being at all involved has “forced” the man out – an “over-punishment,” many allege. But anyway it wasn’t a big deal at all because Tressel didn’t get a lifetime ban…

He could probably make millions annually as a head coach. He will likely make hundreds of thousands less if he becomes president at YSU. He probably loves football and the youth who play it far more than herding pompous professors and administrators.

Right, so he began by saying coaching is really shitty now; his headline calls present-day coaching “unattractive.” Yet Tressel’s salary as a coach would be in the millions, so that doesn’t sound unattractive. And the wonderful “youth” who populate bigtime university football (we’ve followed this splendid crew on this blog for years) are ever so much more attractive than “pompous” professors… Yet despite the great kids and the great money, Tressel isn’t coaching. Why, why, why? What’s wrong with present-day coaching?

You see why SOS has such trouble with this sort of writing? The reason Tressel’s not coaching is because he can’t. It’s like asking why oh why has Steven Cohen stopped managing investments the way he used to? He could make millions (billions) at it. There must be something really unpleasant about being a fund manager…

But the reason Cohen isn’t investing is that the SEC has banned him from managing outside money. Tressel’s not coaching because he can’t, and Cohen’s not investing because he can’t. What Tressel is doing right now is what we call slumming, pulling down a few hundred thou making speeches at a school until his ban ends. Tressel’s story tells us absolutely nothing about coaching, so one wonders what this writer thinks he is arguing.

Okay, so here’s the guy’s concluding paragraphs. This is where he nails his argument.

So why would he do something he loves less for far less money? Could it be the administration of big time college football takes all the fun out of the pure coaching of the athletes? Could it be that the media, alumni, and crazed fan pressures is so unsettling to his lifestyle that he would rather forfeit more money just to avoid it? Could it be heading a relatively small obscure school where he once coached, and is still loved, worth more than one of the premier coaching jobs in the country? Is part of the fallout from the NCAA’s decreasing stability and integrity and the increasingly sophisticated athlete pool make coaching less attractive?

Okay, big breath. One thing at a time. The concept here is “the pure coaching of the athletes.” The idea here is that something, again, happened to Tressel and the other purists – the guys who are doing it for the love of the game and seven million dollars a year plus free cars and country club memberships. The forces of evil – beyond the NCAA – are the media, alumni, and students. They happen to the purists, who are trying to protect their quietude from the masses.

Do coaches basically run the NCAA? Shh. Don’t tell the Forbes guy.

Do coaches and their staffs do everything but attach electric cattle prods to students to get them crazed about games? (Even Saban at Alabama has to do it.)

Is the increasingly sophisticated athlete pool a function of increasingly sophisticated coaches creating a system indistinguishable from the professional leagues?

So here’s the Forbes writer’s conclusion:

If all the answers to the above questions are “Yes”, then there is more than a canary in the coal mine. There may be more career college coaches leaving earlier. Perhaps current and prospective coaches alike view big-time football coaching as less desirable. No business or industry likes trending instability and insecurity, and resultant insomnia. Increasing comparisons between high coach salaries and low waged or no-waged players they exploit has a consequence, even if only raised in polite debate.

Yes, Tressel is representative. Tressel is telling us that something is terribly wrong with coaching and if we’re not careful coaches will become university presidents. He warns us that other coaches will leave coaching early. But again, Tressel’s early departure was involuntary. He. Was. Banned. “Perhaps current and prospective coaches alike view big-time football coaching as less desirable.” Than what? Evidence for this? “Increasing comparisons between high coach salaries and low waged or no-waged players they exploit has a consequence, even if only raised in polite debate.” He basically ends with this. And what the fuck does it mean? Coaching is unattractive and coaches are leaving in droves because… they make so much relative to players? No. Because people are increasingly noting the disparity between their millions (there’s that moral purity again… the pure coaching of the athletes…) and the players’ nothings? And only raised in polite debate? SOS is sorry. She just doesn’t get it. She does not get what that means. Only raised in polite debate… What is that? What’s he saying? What’s his whole post saying??

Yawn. Donnan not high profile enough? Try Tommy Tuberville. Rich Rodriguez. Just one of many ways in which big-time sports bring good things to the American university.

… Her students were at play
I heard the shatter of the glass
Along each broad highway…

Yes, the University of Rhode Island student body is rioting again. The furrow-browed administrator who tells the local journalist it’s an intolerable but at the same time very complex and difficult problem overlooks the fact that URI has for years specialized in admitting huge numbers of drunks and bullies. It shouldn’t really be that difficult to review its admissions and other policies (do they admit everyone who applies, for instance? have they created a campus ethos particularly attractive to drunks and bullies?) and begin to change them. The fact of your being a state school doesn’t mean you have a mandate to harbor every college-age shithead born in Rhode Island.

Thanks to a Scottish kid named Jake, she has been able to identify these bones. (Read more Jake here.)

UD was just now clearing the winding paths she’s created through her woods, and from her first glance at the bones she thought deer (given that vast herds of them live atop her back hill), but she also ghoulishly played with the idea of human child for a moment.

This is exactly what the lower bone looks like. And who knew you needed it for – uh – boning your boots?

So where’s the rest of it? Jake always seems to score the whole skeleton. UD poked around, but has found nothing. She thinks maybe these bones washed forward in the recent very big rains.

… and at the University of Oregon… well… let’s see what it looks like on that ol’ gilded entry at the moment:

The mess in Eugene continues to dogpile …

The mess in Eugene? The mess in Eugene? What shit’s piling up on that shiny front porch?

And I mean shiny. The University of Nike, with a brand new $78 million football palace complete with slogans like EAT YOUR ENEMIES on every wall! It was all looking so good, so front porchy, and now… Has the University of Oregon crapped its pants?

Well, as is the case at most big-time sports factories (what’s that smell behind the fine old lacebark elms of Chapel Hill?), UO recruits student athletes in a rather cavalier fashion. Among the three basketball players who seem to have gang raped a woman the other night is a player thrown out of his last college because of a suspected rape; but the UO basketball coach called that rape investigation “not of a serious nature” and recruited the guy, and now – heck – he’s part of the purported rape threesome… Career rapist? Well, when the world makes it easy for you…

As always, the job of stating the absolutely precise opposite of the truth goes to this distinguished university’s president:

[T]he university takes allegations of misconduct very seriously.

If that were true, you wouldn’t recruit the people you do. You take allegations of physical prowess seriously.

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UD thanks a reader.

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PS: Couldn’t be better timed, too, what with the federal government looking into sexual assaults on university campuses and all…

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Update: That old front porch again. The New York Times, opening paragraph:

The University of Oregon has come under intense scrutiny this week after three men’s basketball players — including one who transferred from Providence after being accused of sexual assault there — were investigated by the Eugene police in connection with rape allegations by an Oregon student.

… than a morally sick school just sitting there getting sicker and sicker.

Each line of this bland account of FAMU’s violent, deficit-ridden sports program should be read carefully. Note first that the reporter fails to mention the murderous FAMU band, a number of whose members will go to jail for hazing manslaughter.

While wondering why

Interim athletic director Michael Smith … detailed a deficit of $4.2 million in 2008 growing to a $7.8 million accumulated loss through this year.

the Tallahassee Democrat reporter doesn’t ask whether people might be so disgusted to be associated with a sick sports program that they won’t go to their games. He simply quotes the budget guy at FAMU saying the deficit must be because they’re losing games or something… Then he quotes some trustees.

Trustees noted that the vast majority of college athletics programs operate in the red…

Lala everybody’s doing it. Of course, at FAMU, the red is literal… Profusely flowing in fact…

It continues. Here’s one of the trustees, touting athletics less than three years after FAMU marching band hazers beat a fellow student to death.

“Athletics do a lot more for your school than just athletics. It creates an environment that energizes the community,” he said.

And here’s the new president:

“Athletics, I agree, is an integral part of an education. Its impact on the economic growth and economic development in this town and in Florida is extremely important,” she said. “We have to understand the level of commitment the institution has to athletics.”

You can’t have an education without sports, you see. And after all our sports program helps local businesses.

Delusional University of North Carolina kicks out the only truth-teller on campus. Big sigh of relief from the president on down. Who cares if the A section of the New York Times notes how

In April 2013, [Mary Willingham] received an integrity award from the Drake Group, which advocates for reform in college athletics. Two months later, she received her first negative performance review and was relocated to a basement office where she was given primarily clerical duties.

Big deal. Liberal media elites. If they understood the money at stake in our sports program, they’d shut their trap. When it becomes too expensive to continue to be a university, you shut down, hire Julius Nyang’oro, and fire Mary Willingham. Simple calculation, apparently over the heads of the folks at the New York Times.

As for Willingham’s desire (see this post’s title) that professors take back their universities… Well, I’ll just refer you – yet again – to this.

The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.

Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.

“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.

How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.

American political seasons are always rife with plagiarism, and it’s almost always the same thing: Campaigns poach each others’ boilerplate (hideously mixed metaphor, but UD will go with it). That is, in what UD would call a “party-lateral” move, a democrat running in Iowa will steal a paragraph describing a candidate’s position on, say, immigration, from another democrat running for office, typically in some other state. You want to stay out of your own state, since greater geographical distance tends to mean less chance of detection. (So, by the way, does greater temporal distance. UD has covered tons of plagiarism cases where the plagiarist found a dusty tome appearing in 1950 …)

Nothing special, then, about an Iowa democrat having plagiarized website material from the website material of an Illinois democrat. But UD likes her campaign manager’s defense: Plagiarized writing is a placeholder. When you’re writing, you distribute plagiarized paragraphs here and there as a temporary measure. While you pull your own prose together. Even if that material gets published, it’s not really plagiarism, because you were always intending to discard it for something more permanent.

Ah, the life of an American university professor… After robbing his graduate students of thousands of dollars, Georgia Tech Environmental Engineering prof Jochem Teizer was not only allowed to resign (rather than be dismissed, a black mark on his record that might put a crimp on future thefts), but will, it seems, walk off without anyone filing criminal charges.

UD loves the detail about little Jochem’s train collection. Students must have delighted in watching this adorable eccentric make his teeny cars go vroomvroom … Watch the choochoo, kiddies! [Slips hand in students’ back pockets.]

Yes, yes, he’s been made to pay back the money.

A trustee subpoenaing his university’s students is kind of bad form; it kind of undermines the whole “university family” meme of which publicists are fond.

Of course we know a university is not a family, strictly speaking; but on the other hand there’s this idea that a university is a community, there’s a certain united feeling and history and commitment there… And that, as in families, certain things aren’t done. It’s a news story when children sue their parents; and it’s totally a news story when, angered by students calling for an investigation of a trustee’s rumored unfair labor practices, the trustee subpoenas their emails, journals, shopping lists…

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There are eight million stories in the Naked City, as they say, and the Daniel Straus saga is only one of them; but in its small way – in a way that interests University Diaries – it’s paradigmatic. Now that Straus is, uh, off the NYU law school board of trustees, it’s worth reviewing the plot elements.

The intriguing problem in regard to choosing trustees is the following:

You’re after the most staggeringly bohemoth moneybag in the world. You’re after the Mothra of money.

Some of America’s most wealthy have acccumulated their wealth in morally and legally questionable ways.

Some of these same people have rather aggressive and even imperious personalities. They were already that way when somewhat unscrupulously, perhaps, accumulating their wealth. Now that everyone treats them like Louis Seizième (pre-guillotine) they are far worse.

If you’re this kind of guy (Platonic ideal: Donald Trump) you customarily sue the shit out of anyone who dares to get in your way, and lookee here. Now it’s two of your charges, two of the law students whose welfare you’ve agreed to oversee, and they’re making noise in various ways about your labor law violations. They seem to think you’re a little soiled to be a trustee.

Unfortunately for you, you are not a Yeshiva University trustee, where being Zygmunt Wilf is not a problem. You do your subpoena, and NYU immediately decides to represent – at no cost – the students. So now you’re in the awkward position of being at very serious odds not just with the students whose welfare you oversee, but with the university that appointed you.

Something’s got to give, and that’s you.

NYU gets bad publicity; you get ridiculed (‘Mr. Straus’s lawyers accuse the union of conspiring with students to “embarrass,” “shame” and “publicly denigrate” him. You might argue that Mr. Straus has done a good job of this on his own.’).

So to repeat: The problem with recruiting trustees (people pay much more attention to the problem with recruiting the best football players, but I’d argue that they’re equally interesting problems) is that… Well, let me quote Fran Lebowitz (UD interviewed her not long ago): “You don’t earn a billion dollars. You steal it.” This is not always an accurate statement, but you get the idea. You can’t be too careful when choosing trustees.

… is Havre de Grace. (It’s Number 12 on Smithsonian Magazine‘s list of best small towns.) UD remembers Sadie Rapoport telling her that she left Port Deposit for – she pronounced it Have Er Dee Grayce – on the occasional Saturday to play Bingo.

Today’s the Decoy Festival at Havre De Grace, so Les UDs are expecting some excitement.

… Breakfast. Elk Forge is one of those names that tells you in a small way about how the mind works. From the moment we reserved the Baltimore Suite here, I’ve had trouble remembering the name Elk Forge, while Longwood Gardens or Red Fox Inn or Seven Gables or Green Gables are all easy, though they’re a bit more complicated. Elk Forge’s two simple monosyllabic words have tended to elude me, and I think it’s because my mind fails to find a connection between an elk and a forge. Foxes come in red, and gardens may feature long woods, but what an elk and a forge are doing together I have no idea.

Plus I think I’m registering my uncertainty about the nature of those words as they’re put together. Two nouns (though forge also can be a verb). Is elk an adjective of some sort here? Are they two self-standing nouns? Nor have I ever before encountered those words together. So novelty, muddy usage, and lack of relationship, UD figures, are all scheming here to throw her off…

There’s a mild chill in the air, and a certain drippiness left over from last night’s storm, but the Elk Forge balcony is a pleasant place to watch the sun come up. There’s good tea in the “too Victorian” (Mr UD’s description) tearoom behind me (white woods and rattans, with ferny potted plants and – UD will agree – tchotchkes a mile a minute), but no one’s refilled the hot water canister yet, so UD will be patient… There’s a none too healthy oak center stage here. At its feet pond water purls over goldfish, and beside it three sort of pointless trellis arches lean toward the creek walk.

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Sun went in and it got a bit too cold out there, so I’m now in the tearoom, where naturally Pachelbel’s Canon in D is being piped in… It’s version 12,491, with recurrent piano “in imbecile symbiosis” with a violin. Water falls from an interior lovebird fountain directly to UD’s left and… You get the picture… Calming to the point of valium… And who’s complaining? Not I.

… today. For ten years it’s been an upscale seafood restaurant, Backfin Blues. They were closed when we walked by this afternoon, but UD noticed people in there, preparing for the dinner crowd, and asked if she could look around. They were glad to oblige. The manager said he knew that the place, fifty years ago, was a department store, but didn’t know it was called Rapoport’s.

This YouTube includes a shot of the front of the building – unchanged since my grandfather’s day.

UD instantly recalled the place – long, dark, narrow, with low ceilings… It hadn’t changed. Hadn’t been allowed (Historic Register) to change. An outside seating area with views of the train tracks and the river had been added, but that was the only truly new thing. The first floor balcony on which wee UD sat chatting with her grandfather was exactly the same, but with outdoor seating.

We had lunch outside at a place directly across the street from my grandfather’s old store, so I was able to gaze at the place at my leisure, recalling its massive sunny kitchen and dining room on the third floor. The manager said the floors above the place remain private apartments.

The broad beautiful Susquehanna shimmered in the background of all of this.

Loud obnoxious bikers stormed through town in groups of five and six every few minutes, reminding me what misery they brought to Key West when I lived there.

We had encounters with old-timers and new. I pushed open the door of an old Methodist church and was greeted by its groundskeeper, who showed us its unusual windows. He gave me the phone number of his aunt Audrey for more history of the town. A well-heeled character who recently bought one of the pricey riverside condos in town told me about his amazing views, but also about the frustration of living in a town that “should be like Ellicott City, but is just going nowhere.” It’s true that the endless nothingness of the Tome School/Bainbridge Naval Training Center ruins, plus the bad condition of many of the town’s historic buildings (lots of them empty and long on the market), gives Port Deposit a town that time forgot air. But the sheer trippiness of its location – one long architecturally distinguished street with massive cliffs instead of backyards on one side, and the Susquehanna River on the other – makes you excited to be there. Mr UD loved it.

… eaten at a sunny table overlooking a koi pond in Elk Mills Maryland. Over breakfast, UD tried to remember as much as she could about her grandfather’s store in Port Deposit, her visits there… She knows more about her mother’s side of the family, the Wassermans and Kirsons, than she does the Rapoports and Snyders. She knows that her father had a Dickensian childhood, his parents’ marriage a disaster, his mother eventually institutionalized with depression (she died institutionalized), no money. After her death, Joe Rapoport married Sadie Glass, a down to earth hard-working woman, and they ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit together. The store thrived because of the naval training base established in town soon after they moved in. (They lived above the store.)

It must have been in the early ‘sixties that they sold the store and moved back to Baltimore, where they retired to an apartment in a part of town full of people just like them – old observant Jews. I remember visiting them there and always leaving the apartment with pickled lettuce and tomatoes that my grandfather made. He died in 1974, in his eighties.

Off to Port Deposit.