Monday, March 15, 2010
In the Words of Buddy Holly, Rave On
Like many, if not most, coaches I’ve known, Dave Odom said he didn’t read the paper. So after about the third or fourth time he brought up something we’d written in the Winston-Salem Journal, Lenox observed that “For a man who doesn’t read the paper, you sure seem to read the paper a lot.”
Odom was taken aback, but only for a moment.
“No I don’t,’’ he insisted. “Other people read it and tell me about it.’‘
Dave, looking back on it, had it easy in one regard. When he was coaching Wake from 1989 through 2001, the heaviest barrage of incoming fire was launched from local papers, and/or maybe a few hardy souls brazen or just absolutely fed up (usually both) enough to try to pin him down on his radio show. Now the traditional fourth estate is the least of a coach’s worries, what with the cyber proliferation of a vast and ear-rattling array of national internet sites, message boards and comments by the readers of blogs such as this one you’re reading now. Anything anybody has to say these days can—and will—be heard by far more people than read, let along buy, the daily newspaper. And those voices are so often raised voices, railing at you for the color of your socks. Today’s coach has to please a far more connected and mobilized constituency packing post-modern bullhorns capable of being heard in Timbuktu.
In that I was socked in over at Greensboro covering the Friday and Saturday sessions of the ACC Tournament (I did indeed take today off, and didn’t have one second thought), today was the first opportunity I had to talk with Coach Dino Gaudio since Thursday’s 83-62 loss to No. 12 seed Miami in the first round of the ACC Tournament. Mostly we talked about the Deacons’ No. 9 seed in the NCAA Tournament and the prospects for Thursday’s first-round game against Texas in the Birthplace of Jazz, the eagerly anticipated New Orleans. But I couldn’t help but wonder about his reaction to the firestorm of criticism that has raged these last three days.
“Honest to God, with my right hand on Skip, I never look at any of that,’’ Dino said, referring to his mentor and former boss at Wake, Skip Prosser. “It has no factor in my life. It has no bearing on me whatsoever. And I never look at that. And that’s the honest-to-goodness truth. I can look you in the eye and tell you, those things don’t matter. They don’t matter.
“So you know what, there are a lot of coaches who have coached in the ACC that in two of their first three years haven’t gone to NCAA Tournament. And there were four schools that had multiple guys go in the first round in the NBA draft—Wake Forest, UCLA, North Carolina and Louisville. Two of those teams are in the Tournament, Wake Forest and Louisville.’‘
Being a democratic kind of guy by background and inclination, there is much about this brave new age of the cyber soap box that I love. If a person has something to say, they should, at least within the often smudged bounds of propriety, be able to say it. It’s good to see the marketplace of ideas a’ booming. If you’re convinced that Dino Gaudio is not the right man for the job at Wake Forest, that’s your opinion and, in the words of Briscoe Darling of the Andy Griffith Show, more power to you. Personally, I don’t like to draw conclusions that I have to revise later and I never felt the need to be the first to have the last say. So I’m more measured in my opinions than many of you that I’ve heard from over the weekend, not to say that makes either of us right. But I’ve also never been in the business of hiring and firing coaches for performance-based reasons. I can and will opine whether I think a coach is doing a good or bad job, but I just can’t take myself seriously enough to tell Ron Wellman how to do his job.
What has bothered me has been the smattering instances of incivility or disrespect. Just because a person has disappointed you, that’s really no reason to call them names or question their character. I have to hope we’re all better than that.