Somewhere Woody Hayes must have been saying "Don't do it, son" for the umpteenth time the other day, and again it was in vain. That's what I'm thinking this morning.
I'm thinking it because some fool assistant football coach at Benjamin Mays High School in Atlanta pulled a Woody the other day, punching one of his players in the stomach during a game Mays High was winning. Which, if you recall, is how Woody bid sayonara to his decorated career at Ohio State years and years ago.
Punched a Clemson linebacker in the Gator Bowl, is what Woody did. Lost his job very shortly thereafter.
This fool in Atlanta?
He wasn't even a teacher at the school, just some goober the head coach put on his staff. He's not on the staff any longer, of course. This will happen when you slug a kid and then get hauled off in handcuffs by the cops.
Here's the clip, if you're interested. What interests me about it is the player's reaction, and the volumes it speaks about the power of coaches to inflict whatever lunacy they like without retaliation from their players.
What happens is, the player doubles up and staggers away. He doesn't catch his breath and go after the coach who assaulted him. He doesn't instinctively throw hands back at the man. He does what players always do, because Coach is Coach and players are players and the relationship inherent in that is ingrained from peewee football.
And so if you ever wonder why players don't -- or rarely -- fight back even under even the most extreme provocation, that's why. The power structure in organized sports is grossly unbalanced and absolutely inviolable, and thus has it ever been. And it fairly invites abuse.
The best coaches know that, and are careful not to exploit that imbalance. There are limits to the power they wield over their charges, and the best coaches know where those limits are. There's a self-imposed line of demarcation, and, although sometimes they bump right up against it, they rarely cross it.
Sometimes they do, however. And the more successful they are as coaches, the more they get away with it. it's why they're never going to be picking their teeth off floor or field, no matter what they do.
No one was ever going to take a poke at Bob Knight, for instance, because his college career would have been over as soon as he did. Same with Woody or Bo or even the elfin Lou Holtz, who at 5-9 could berate some 300-pound offensive lineman at Notre Dame from pillar to post and know he wouldn't get any backtalk.
Coaches are absolute czars, in their proscribed world. Which makes what happened in Atlanta last week so heinous, and what happened at a fake high school in Columbus, Ohio, even more so.
The fake high school was called Bishop Sycamore, and it was the brainchild of an absolute sociopath named Leroy Johnson. A skilled con artist with a con artist's slick line of patter, he lured football players from all over the country to his fake school and all-but-fake football program with the promise they'd be joining an elite football academy.
Needless to say, it wasn't. The players were housed in a cheap hotel and often had to scrounge for food. Their "classes" involved one visit to the public library. The football team received virtually no coaching -- and yet Johnson managed to con ESPN into pitting Bishop Sycamore against national power IMG Academy on national TV because he put together what was regarded as a powerhouse national schedule.
On Aug. 29, 2021, IMG crushed "Bishop Sycamore" 58-0. The game was such an utter farce -- and so potentially dangerous for Johnson's grossly unprepared team -- the Ohio high school athletic association finally got off its hump and investigated.
There's an HBO doc about the whole affair running now, and watching Johnson blithely laugh about never paying bills and destroying a bunch of young men's dreams is absolutely chilling. And another example of how easy it is for the unscrupulous and degenerate to abuse the power they have as coaches, because the players barely questioned what seems now such an obvious scam.
"Geez, how could they not have?" you're asking now.
Believe I've already answered that.
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