Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tommy's Tirade Reconsidered
Posted by Frank Murtaugh on Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 10:00 AM
• Consider this ironic twist on the last decade of Tiger football. National footage of any of the 6,000 yards DeAngelo Williams rushed for with Memphis was a gold nugget — and just as rare — for Tiger fans. But when his former coach unleashed a five-minute rant on what is needed to improve the program . . . SportsCenter! Now!
- Tommy West
Those five minutes will live a long time in reflections of West’s time atop the U of M program. What’s regrettable is that his message — a sound one — gets lost in the volume and emotion with which it was delivered. Consider the words minus that volume and emotion (like, say, reading them): “History will repeat itself, folks, if [the administration doesn’t] do something about it. But our fans have to demand that the new guy be given a level playing field. Stobart stood here and he was a bad coach . . . but good enough to beat Southern Cal. Rip became a bad coach . . . but he beat Peyton Manning and Tennessee. At some point, we have to do the things necessary to make this program what we want, or do away with it. It’s too painful, for coaches, players, and people. Every day I’ve been here has been a fist fight.”
Had West chosen to deliver this precise message in an interview format, perhaps sitting down, the content would have been just as powerful for the Memphis community, particularly for its football boosters. And it would not have been picked up by national TV producers aiming to titillate, aggravate, and agitate. A great lesson for parents (and office managers) to pass along: It’s not so much what you say, but how you say it.
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Yeah, but hasn't it been delivered in polite sit-down interviews with the press...conversations between fans.... 10 second sound bites by tv sportscasters and radio sport-talk announcers who definitely contradict the decades old stereotype of the good-looking yet stupid former jock by, alternately, not being remotely good-looking but are, true to the stereotype, dumb as a fence post.... slams by idiots who like to volunteer their derogatory opinion of everything negative about Memphis (both the university and the city)....and untold jillions of times in the words of supposedly humorous Yankee carptbagging sports writer whose mama obviously thought that if her son was so influenced by his name that, by the time he was old enough to yale his opinion all over the neighborhood, he would, at the very least, think that he drank his milk from a chaucer.
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