Jon Gruden really has been a hell of a football coach, per se.
If you ever watched him with new pro quarterbacks right out of college on his show "Jon Gruden's QB Camp," which aired on ESPN a few years ago, you knew he had a special connection with them. He established it by watching them, one at a time in the room, on film and praising their great plays--of which they made many, otherwise they wouldn't be there.
But just to listen to him give kudos in his tone of voice brought with it an authoritative tone of someone who's been there and watched it all. After all, the show ran after Gruden had won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Great coaches are great teachers, and great teachers are called great by great and not-so-great students. It doesn't take long for them to hang on their every word. They find a way to say things that have been said before but in a new way, to paint mental pictures that get across the needed message. They have that gift, but like other gifts, they have transformed it from natural to workable to often brilliant with endless polishing and effort. In terms of the basic skill that it takes, I'll put Jon Gruden up against anyone.
There's a decisiveness and success ratio about it all that often, perhaps too often, spills into other areas. That's partly because of the perhaps overemphasized, but evident, importance we place upon sports, which are normally supposed to be connected to physical fitness or a temporary pastime.
It's not for nothing that ex- recruited football coach Lou Holtz and basketball coach Bob Knight to shill for his campaigns. Note, too, that to the best of my knowledge, neither of them ever campaigned for any other presidential candidate.
Nobody needs to analyze that much to know that great coaching and political endorsements are very, very distantly related, if at all. But if you know your audience, it also might count for something. Why else are they also featured on business ads? Why are they invited to speak at business conferences?
Because they seem so sure of themselves and after all, they've been successes (notice that people with sub-.500 records never seem to get top billing, even though they might be excellent teachers). It's when they drift outside of their realms, though, that cognitive dissonance takes over. Sometimes it's intentional.
Sometimes, kind of like Jon Gruden, it really isn't, but you can get taken there when so much winning makes you so full of yourself and your ego starts believing what others do not. You think you can control what you can't. From the outside, from the periphery, it looks far easier.
So no one knows, normally, where a great coach's influence ends. But Gruden's ended with a crash just the other day, when e-mails he sent to the Washington Football Club's president, e-mails with racist and homophobic epithets, suddenly emerged.
No one knows, either, where anyone's electronic transmissions end. They might as well be carved on walls, waiting to be harvested when someone's stream runs dry. Like Bill Clinton's bimbo eruptions, they can emerge anywhere if someone becomes unpopular or someone else wants to take credit for outing perpetrators, whether presently or long ago. Never mind that the subjects might have cleaned up their act; they must now prove their newfound purity, if there is any, to a jaundiced public.
But it's pretty difficult to prove that something's not there anymore, that absence of ill will is intentional. If the accused hasn't gone out of his way to bring witnesses to the fore, or simply let the comments go regardless of how long ago he made them, the stain can't be bleached. One thing's for sure: You can't use e-mails to make snarky comments and then count on others to help you hide them. Better to just do it over the phone. Better deniability.
Note, too, that the racist comments came out first, and Gruden apologized for them and explained their context to anyone who cared. Then the homophobia erupted, those comments seemed even worse, and the simple fact that a defensive end on his very football team had come out not three weeks beforehand left Gruden naked.
The timing of all that revelation feels calculated. Maybe it wasn't. That context, too, needs to be explained to get the complete story. Maybe it's circumstantial but sincere.
Regardless, the e-mails are there, as they will be until the end of time, as are all e-mails. Source explanation might diminish, but not diffuse, the basic acts. Gruden resigned, and was right to do so.
Money won't be Gruden's problem; he has far more than enough of it. He won't starve. When people are embarrassed or feel embarrassed, they normally lay low for a while and start again slowly. Sometimes that time is needed for more mitigating facts to emerge.
In the meantime, a great teacher of the game has been grounded. His removal is the price he must pay for a culture that has caught up with comments that he made a decade ago. There's something vaguely vindictive about that, but something about justice that rings true, too. That, too, reflects the toughness of the game he entered, tougher in a sense than the one he coached.
Be well. Be careful. Get a booster. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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