Rutger’s basketball coach, Mike Rice, was a genuine hothead. After the ESPN story below broke, Rutgers athletic officials decided to terminate him. Earlier this season, before the damaging video was widely released, they had thought that a three-game suspension, a $50,000 fine and some anger management courses were adequate punishment. They also fired Eric Murdock, the whistle-blower who had inconveniently brought the matter to their attention in the first place. The assistants who passed him another basketball after he threw one at a miscreant player all still have jobs. The ESPN story is unbelievable. Listen to this gibbering idiot’s “apology.” Don’t you feel so sorry for his poor children?
I don’t know what is the matter with schools in America. Rutgers is a respected, public university with a proud academic history, not a flea-bitten mid-western degree mill supported by a gigantic stadium and arena. University officials managed to let a sports program, run by someone hired from the sports media world lead them around by the nose. “Ohhh! We can be part of March Madness! Think of the prestige!” Somehow, they also thought that a coach whose idea of coaching was physical abuse and encouraging epithets like "f----ts," "m-----f-----s," "p-----s," "sissy b-----s," 'soft-ass Lithuanian b----,' 'soft-ass Lithuanian p----.' and "c---s" was just what they needed to break into the big time.
This story breaks the same week as the New Yorker published an equally sickening story about decades of abuse at Horace Mann school in the Bronx. Horace Mann students competed to get into the school. That’s sad. The basketball players at Rutgers actually trump the gifted ones who lined up to get into Horace Mann; the Rutgers player of Lithuanian extraction and others just transferred to other schools. That’s actually smart.
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