Maybe, just maybe we don’t have to be dicks when talking about Steve Sarkisian’s addiction problems.
Regarding behavioral issues and coverage of the USC firing
There is a middle step in the maturity of a major news story where there is development in lieu of developments. Reporters accumulate background that, absent recent events, might not have caught one of those foreboding headlines where that information’s origination point is followed by a colon.
“Sources: Woman liked to use hair product”
“Reports: Man frequently did things with taffy, ‘un-taffy-like things’ ”
“Sources, documents: Person with possible substance-abuse issues liked to drink before noon. You know, like you might do at brunch, but in a really aggressive way”
During a stop at a rib joint in Nashville in January 2013, for example, [then Washington coach Steve] Sarkisian and three assistants ordered four shots of Patron Silver, four shots of an unspecified liquor and five beers. The coach cashed out at 11:53 a.m.
There was nothing conceptually wrong with this reporting as it texturized Steve Sarkisian’s eventual firing. The USC football coach checked into a rehabilitation center on Monday, a day after the school forced him into an open-ended sabbatical because of an incident at a practice, and the same day USC fired him despite his taking that sabbatical. Research done by the Los Angeles Times suggests Sarkisian had a streak of heavy drinking that spilled into his professional life at his previous head coach job at Washington, where sources told the Times he ran up large bar receipts on work trips and arrived to practices seemingly post-bender. Reports from other publications, including the Los Angeles Daily News, suggest those issues trailed him to USC, and the fear of more unflattering information leaking may have played a role in the school’s decision to make Sarkisian’s leave of absence permanent.
As done in the Sarkisian situation, this reporting raised questions about how Washington, a public university, could trust the direction of a costly athletic program that risks serious injury to young people to someone with enough moments of overenjoyment to wonder if he had a problem.
It interjected befuddlement at how the stewards of one of college football’s capstone programs could not have spotted that a prospective leader might drink a tad much — not that such things haven’t happened before.
It also was ghastly as fuck.
Shelton tweeted a sarcastic #shocked hashtag in reference to the incident. Thompson responded with an emoji laughing and shedding tears.
“I would’ve made him run the stadium carrying a 6 pack since he wanna drink so much lol,” Shelton tweeted.
I do not know Steve Sarkisian. I do not know the family issues that reportedly swallowed him the Saturday night before he was asked to leave a morning practice. I do not know if his firing at USC streamed from things that haven’t yet dribbled into the press. I do not know if he is anyone I would approximate as a good person.
What I can suppose is that he looks to have problems that a lot of people have but don’t quite know how to attack — problems sometimes made more indecipherable by the possibility that how one interacts with people can be both cause and solution. Accordingly, these problems may require a degree more care in discussion than, say, a funny story about a fired coach bragging to his players about being rich.
I don’t believe in trigger warnings, but I do believe in not being a dick. Stacking someone’s low moments together as if they are the same grist underpinning other coach firings leans in the direction of penisness — and a type that might shove people in similar situations deeper into a lonely place where they cannot be helped. Especially when this information is peppered with crack diagnoses of problems that are awfully individualized.
College football is not everyone’s life. Boosters do not shamble out from oil derricks and dog tracks to tell you their dollar-backed opinions on who should oversee the rejuvenation of accounts receivable, or lead that Taco Bell into its bold new era of having a breakfast menu.
Like many big and clumsy things, though, what happens in college football often finds a way spill into littler lives. It would be lovely if those reporting on Sarkisan’s troubles asked more why those around Sarkisian didn’t do anything more helpful than let players take embarassing photos and say “Get your act together” before they issued that statement saying, “Hey bud, it’s no longer worth it to us to accommodate your shit. Hope you get better soon.”
And in handling a behavioral issue that has dropped into college football’s mass conscientiousness, it also would be decent of those reporters to handle the situation with something other than told-you-so cruelty.
But that probably won’t happen.
