Guest Commentaries by Herb Strentz and Douglas Burns
Lessons on leaving: Bowden, Rupp and Bentham — Bentham?
By Herb Strentz
Graceful exits are scarce in big-time college sports. Witness how Iowa got rid of basketball coaches Tom Davis and Steve Alford. Or Iowa State and its travails with Larry Eustachy, Dan McCarney and Gene Chizik.
Even Bobby Bowden’s storied coaching career at Florida State ended on a bittersweet note as his Seminoles upset No. 16 West Virginia in the Gator Bowl, a second-tier bowl that drew much attention because it was Bowden’s last game. The victory gave Bowden his 33rd consecutive winning season, but 7-6 is not acceptable in ’Nole land.
Bowden, who is 80, did not leave FSU “on his own terms,” as many college football fans and sportswriters had decreed he should. Rather he rejected a university offer to stick around one more year as an ambassador for the university and the Seminoles. However, during that time, he would have nothing to do with what happened on Bowden Field at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee.
So the sports talking heads lamented that Bowden should have been allowed to leave on “his own terms” in another year or two, because, after all, he had done what he was hired to do — build a football program and win games. That he did: Bowden won national titles with Florida State, in 1993 and 1999; his teams were ranked in the top five in the nation for 14 straight seasons, 1987-2000.
The fuss about Bowden brought back memories of a year at the University of Kentucky, when an even greater coaching legend was determined to leave on his own terms; it was not pleasant. That was in 1968-69 and the coach was Adolph Rupp, who was basketball guru at UK from 1930 to 1972, eight more years than Bowden’s 34 at FSU.
To Kentuckians, calling Rupp a demigod would be an understatement. To an outsider, he was a tired old man, who should have retired a year or two before — leaving the program in the capable hands of Joe B. Hall, his assistant. Hall succeeded Rupp when “the Baron” was forced to retire when reaching the age of 70. In Rupp’s decline, it seemed sort of an open secret that Hall was the coach in fact. It was painful to listen to Rupp stammer through post-game shows and having trouble adding up the number of Wildcat turnovers, usually in the single digits for each half.
For a long-time, I had thought Rupp was suffering from dementia, but his ills were later reported as cancer and diabetes — his ill health could not be hidden a year later when he was near an invalid as he sat courtside. But he demanded to stick around, even protesting the age-induced mandatory retirement.
Better to get out while the getting out is good; leave a year too early instead of a year too late. Rupp, Bowden and others who insist on leaving on their own terms — as though they hadn’t already been rewarded enough — would do well to ponder the poem, “To an athlete dying young” by A.E. Housman. The poem speaks of the honors and the tragedy of a town athletic hero who died too early, and yet:
Now you will not swell the rout/
Of lads that wore their honours out/
Runners whom renown outran/
And the name died before the man.
What’s wrong with leaving the field to capable assistants who will carry on your tradition? None of Bowden’s three coaching sons managed to build a record to warrant succeeding him. So the new coach will be Jimbo Fisher, 44, the offense coordinator. He promptly provided some insight to the need for change in the program by dropping four Bowden assistants and wasting no time in reviving recruiting efforts that had dissipated because of the uncertainty of Bowden’s future.
Nevertheless, there is something to leaving on one’s own terms. My favorite in that regard is the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832. Bentham decreed in his will that he be stuffed — really! — and carted out from time to time to be present at various occasions at University College, London. Even 150 years after his death, the minutes of a college meeting recorded Bentham as “present, but not voting.”
Bowden refused to opt for the “present, but not voting” status, so in that regard he did leave “on his own terms.”
(p.s. A funny afterthought about Rupp. He taught a class in basketball theory, mostly for athletes. Word on campus was that everyone got an A in the class. The unassailable logic: What other grade could you possibly give someone who had studied basketball theory under Adolph Rupp?) CV
Herb Strentz is a retired administrator and professor in the Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication and writes occasional columns for Cityview.
PoliticalMercury
By Douglas Burns
Gay marriage: No 1 Iowa story of 2009?
If you put the question out there on gay marriage, the majority of Iowans will come back against it.
But the question remains: Is the Iowa Supreme Court’s April 3 decision allowing gay marriage a matter of day-to-day frustration or anger or even a passing thought for most Iowans?
According to a Des Moines Register poll in September, a sweeping number of Iowans — 92 percent — say gay marriage has brought “no real change” to their lives.
That said, Iowa gay marriage topped The Associated Press and Sioux City Journal’s lists for top Hawkeye State news stories of 2009.
On a recent edition of Iowa Public Radio’s “The Exchange” with Ben Kiefer, I had the opportunity to represent western Iowa in a discussion with John Carlson of The Des Moines Register and Todd Dorman of The Cedar Rapids Gazette about the top news stories of 2009.
When Kiefer asked if any of us would challenge the ranking of the Court’s decision as the No. 1 Iowa story of 2009, none us did, even though there is little if any actual impact in our state outside of Republican primary politics.
In terms of placing Iowa in a national context as one of the first states to legalize gay marriage — and the only one in the Midwest to do so — the story possessed all the elements for chart-topping status.
The court’s decision didn’t come out of nowhere.
It builds on a legal legacy and culture that elevated the rights of the individual with a foresight lost on much of the rest of the nation.
In 1839, in the first reported case of the Supreme Court of Iowa, judges refused to treat a human being as property to enforce a contract for slavery and held that Iowa’s laws must extend to people of all skin colors.
That Iowa decision was 17 years before the U.S. Supreme Court decided in one of the most infamous cases in American history that the slave Dred Scott was just that — and had no standing to sue.
“They (Iowa territorial judges) were ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Mark Kende, the James Madison professor in constitutional law at Drake University in Des Moines.
It is clear to legal scholars like Kende and other observers of Hawkeye State life and law that the 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage didn’t just happen by accident or at the ideological whim of the seven jurists on the high court.
“No matter who the judges are, they would have had to look at that history in Iowa,” Kende said.
Iowa was the first state in the nation to admit a woman to practice law, and two decisions, in 1868 and 1873, challenged the concept of segregation.
Paul Lasley, chairman of both the sociology and anthropology departments at Iowa State University, said these decisions clearly informed the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage. (In fact they are referenced in some detail in the 69-page decision.)
“It is my interpretation that this is a continuation of Iowa’s historic tradition of extending equal rights to groups and individuals that are unlike the majority,” Lasley told me in an interview.
Opponents of gay marriage see Iowa history in a very different light. They see strong family units, led by a married couple, one man, one woman, as being central to all that Iowa is.
A redefinition of that unit, that foundation of life, pays no homage to history but rather perverts it, detractors of gay marriage argue.
Many of these opponents waged a public-relations campaign in which they predicted a sort of family-values Armageddon in the aftermath of gay marriage. We were led to believe that homosexual teachers would seek to recruit kids to their way of life and decadent gay rights parades, full of sexually provocative clothing and gestures, would snake through our Main Streets. Worse yet, we would all be invited to many gay weddings where we would have to sit uncomfortably and watch as two men kissed to publicly seal a union.
Instead, crickets.
Gay couples showed up at courthouses, wearing jeans and sweat pants or looking very ordinary, to get their papers and find a Justice of the Peace. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
