What could have possessed 73-year-old John Chaney to do what he did? To send a student into a basketball game with instructions to give students from another school a lesson in how to act like a bully, a strong-arm enforcer, a thug.
“I’m sending a message,” Temple’s coach said after a game last Tuesday night against St. Joseph’s, a rival Philadelphia university. “I’m going to send in what we used to do years ago . . . send in the goon.”
Put yourself in the place of Nehemiah Ingram, a 22-year-old Temple senior. His own coach not only turned him into a goon but had the bad taste to call him one.
Put yourself in the place of young Dwayne Jones, a center for St. Joe’s, who took a sharp elbow from Ingram on the chin.
Put yourself in the place of John Bryant, a player for the Hawks who was so brutalized by Ingram he ended up with a broken arm.
Bryant later said, “I grew up watching coach Chaney. I still admire him. But I don’t really understand the situation fully. It was just weird. I was up all night. I couldn’t sleep.”
He shouldn’t feel alone in this. No one really can understand Chaney’s actions fully. Certainly not his school’s president, David Adamany, who has suspended the Hall of Fame coach for the remainder of the regular season.
Certainly not his athletic director, Bill Bradshaw, who during his 16 years at DePaul prided himself on student-athletes’ behavior. Bradshaw won a “Sports Ethics Fellows of the Year” award a few years ago for dedication to fair play in sport and society.
Not even a peer and nemesis of Chaney knows what to make of all this.
John Calipari was coaching Massachusetts in 1994 when an enraged Chaney came after him during a news conference, threatening to kill him. Chaney had to be restrained.
Calipari, now coaching at Memphis, was a guest on Chet Coppock’s radio show Friday on the Sporting News network. His first reaction was a surprising one, saying he was really disappointed . . . not in Chaney, but “in the school.”
It seemed astonishing Calipari–or any coach of scholastic athletes–could excuse such an act and fault the university for making the punishment too harsh. But it turned out Calipari’s point was Chaney had used similar tactics for many years.
“If you’re telling me that’s the first time he stuck in what he calls `goons,’ you’re crazy,” Calipari said. “I coached against him. He hasn’t changed. He’s the same guy.
“All of a sudden, it’s no good?”
Calipari’s viewpoint is that coaches such as Bob Knight or Chaney who were disciplined for certain behavior would not have been dealt with so strongly when their basketball programs were more successful.
“If he was 30-1, would they be suspending him for the year? That’s what makes me so angry,” he said. “Did Bobby Knight ever change? Was he the same at the end at Indiana as he was in the beginning? Yes, he was.
“When he started losing and didn’t win Big Ten championships, all of a sudden there’s no tolerance. It’s the same with this.”
Bluntly candid or bizarrely unrealistic, Calipari discounts the number of times a coach might have pushed his authority boundaries to the limit.
Or the times he never was caught in public misbehaving. Or the times he got away with it without a student being harmed.
The end for Woody Hayes, the great Ohio State football coach, came when the whole world saw him manhandle a student-athlete. Not only in person but on countless TV replays. No alibi could excuse it.
Temple’s official biography for its esteemed coach reads, in part: “Chaney has proven to be a dedicated and strong-willed teacher who can mold the character of his players with the positive values of discipline, teamwork and common decency.”
Those last two words jump right up: Common decency.
Temple’s students were so imbued with Chaney’s values, they cursed and spat at St. Joe’s players–so much so that Adamany kept the first three rows clear of them for Saturday’s game with UMass.
The victim most damaged, broken limbs aside, could be Ingram. He is being described as a “seldom-used” kid whose only role was that of goon. Fact is, Ingram played in all 29 of Temple’s games last season, starting several. He was a highly recruited player out of Georgia and more than just some punk.
In fiction and literature, we have seen a father in “The Great Santini” order his son to lay a kid out on a basketball court, seen a coach in “Hoosiers” lose face for having once punched a boy. Woody Hayes enacted these scenes in real life.
And now this from John Chaney. Why is it the best coaches we have are the ones who do the worst things?
