General Patton, Sit Down and Shut Up!

By John Skow

O.K., let's get this sorry mess sorted out before the Final Four. First thing, coaches. College basketball coaches are braying asses. They are, in addition, paunchy, hairy-eared gasbags. They are nearly as loathsome as George Steinbrenner, the swollen ego sac recently reinstated as New York Yankees owner. (How about a trade, Steinbrenner for Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott and a psychiatrist to be named?) But you can watch an entire Yankees baseball game at the ball park or on the tube without having to see Steinbrenner.

If you like basketball, however, you need the reflexes of a snake to turn your eyes from the tube fast enough to avoid television's favorite stomach churner. This, of course, is the coach-reaction shot. Whenever something happens or fails to happen on the court, the camera flicks to a close-up of an aggrieved coach chewing his necktie, swelling up like a bullfrog and calling down spittle-flecked abominations on his team and the uncaring refs. Then you get a shot of the other coach, regarding the action with a jowly sneer.

These are not pretty sights. Television, of course, is mindless and thus not really to blame. It was sportswriters, drones with the notebooks and pencils, who came up with the bizarre notion that coaches were somehow interesting and admirable and even -- ah, why not? -- the stuff of legend. It is not hard to understand how this happened. If, like most sportswriters, you were a middle- aged, overweight guy, it was a lot easier to talk to another out-of-shape 50-year-old in a suit than to try to get a bored teenager to explain how he ran or hit or shot the ball so well. Coaches could always give you a couple of quotes for an easy story, and the kid athletes mostly couldn't. Writers cranked out flattering stuff about these flabby fellows with thinning hair, using words like hard and nose.

Legendmongering started with college football, way back before basketball walked tall. Amos Alonzo Stagg, Fielding Yost and Knute Rockne built character like honest stonemasons, or so sportswriters wrote through eyes misted by manly tears and sometimes a little bourbon and ginger ale. Maybe Rockne and the others really did build character. But by the '50s, football coaches all behaved like George C. Scott playing General George Patton, and basketball coaches were getting into the act too. These days round-ball philosophers, who are nearer to the cameras, are the greater public pestilence. Their nervous breakdowns are photographed in extreme close-up. TV crews are so fond of showing coaches with their eyes bugging out that they miss whole minutes of what a naive observer might think is the point of bringing the cameras to the gym: namely, the action on the floor.

The coaches, of course, know they are performing for ESPN's or CBS's entire congregation. Sir Laurence Olivier could not have played a coach with subtlety under these conditions. A curled lip or a raised eyebrow will adequately express dismay for the first minutes of the first quarter, but if the coach's team is falling behind, and, of course, one team or the other almost always is, the camera keeps coming back, begging for real scenery chewing. So we get pacing, towel throwing and screams of rage, and a lot of other naughtiness that two-year-olds get sent to bed for, all in rising spirals of boorishness.

This is excusable because the coaches are geniuses, and thus fragile. And, of course, because they are paid as much at a typical university as the entire chemistry department. They are great personages, feudal barons only nominally under the control of college presidents. Cal Berkeley astounded the civilized world by firing a coach named Lou Campanelli for yelling at his players in a manner deemed insensitive. Much agitated discussion followed. Had the university lost its sense of values or, worse, its hope of national television? Were its ballplayers men or New Age mollycoddles?

Or are we paying too much attention to functionaries whose most important job is to show up and unlock the basketballs every day? Fortunately, there is a solution. In professional tennis, a sport not otherwise known for wisdom and moderation, coaches are forbidden to communicate with their players during matches. No yelling, no signals, no meaningful throwing of chairs, or a penalty is imposed.

Thus: college basketball coaches are to be banished to seats at least 14 rows up in the stands. Their pants are to be nailed to these seats, so that they can't stand up. One-way glass is to be installed in front of their pens, so that the cameras can't see them. It's true that with this plan, we won't be able to see Bobby Knight emit steam from his ears. (Knight, the glowering genius who cut Charles Barkley from the '84 Olympic tryouts, is the coach whose Indiana University team is right up there in the all-important tantrums- endured statistical category.) But as cartoon figures like Knight cease to be visible, their need to overact will diminish. So will their salaries, as they cease to be celebrities, and chemistry departments across the nation will be able to afford new test tubes.

Now, quickly, a couple of minor reforms: tell players to get rid of the moldy "gym rat" fad of wearing T shirts under their uniform shirts. This is intended to signify dedication, because if you keep practicing three pointers long after the heat has been turned off, you need a T shirt. But the pros don't dress this way, do they? Also lose the dreary possession arrow and reinstate the jump after a held ball. Little squirts love to try to outjump the big droids, and audiences love to see them do it. Right. And, coach, you up there in the 14th row with the seat torn out of your pants, that will be a two-shot foul.